I don't think good content necessarily needs to be paid for. Much of the best content on the web is created as a hobby, with no attempt to monetize, like dr-iguana.com (and countless others.) Other awesome ad-free content is created to promote retail within the same company, like sparkfun.com. It seems to me the ease of monetization with ad-networks drive ultra-low quality content like about.com, though even I must admit that there are also good sites out there that are supported by ads.

edit: I just discovered that dr-iguana.com does have ads. I stick by my assertion that there is a lot of great content out there made strictly as a hobby, though.

> I don't think good content necessarily needs to be paid for. Much of the best content on the web is created as a hobby, with no attempt to monetize, like dr-iguana.com (and countless others.)

I felt that way for a long time. I am basically living that philosophy. My blog[1] has always been free to read and free from ads. I wrote a book[2], and you can read the entire thing online for free, again with no ads. Almost all the code I write is open source.

I imagined a utopia where all kinds of creative people would have enough free time to pursue their hobbies and share the fruits of their labor. I am lucky enough to basically live that utopia now—I happen to love programming, which is a very lucrative field.

It's fine to dream of a world where my personal utopia is more widely available, but that world isn't here today. You can think of a culture or society as the aggregate sum of all of its shared creative works.

When creative works can only be done by those who can afford the leisure, it skews society towards the perspective of the rich. Think back to 19th century English literature and how few novels there are that show how regular working-class people lived. That's because regular working-class people back then were too busy working in the mines to write a book.

There are some counterexamples, sure, but even most of those were created by rich people observing the poor from a distance. As sympathetic as Dickens was towards the poor, the stories he tells are still different from what an actual poor person would tell.

You can see this happening in the US now. Over the past thirty years, the middle class has gradually gotten sucked dry. Here's a fun game: try to find a wide release Hollywood movie where the main characters are "middle class" and where the sets actually resemble a real middle-class life.

The most striking example I've seen was "This is 40". There, every single dramatic point of the film was about money problems, and yet the characters lived in a giant mansion, drove two late model high end cars, and threw an enormous outdoor catered birthday party, all without, apparently, any irony or self-awareness.

This is because many of the people producing creative works today are out of touch with how the increasingly large number of poor people live. And the poor people are too worked to the bone to contribute their own story.

The end result is increased ignorance about how the bottom half (hell, 90%) of the world lives, and that ignorance is what leads to many of the structural problems causing increased economic disparity.

If we're going to help the poor and increase equality, we need to hear their stories. And we won't do that if they can't afford the time to share them.

[1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/ [2]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

Wow, I hadn't considered it that way. Thank you for broadening my perspective on the matter. This puts services like Facebook in a much more positive light than the way I'd considered before.

I haven't seen "This is 40", but I personally know many poor people who drive very fancy new cars and spend on extravagant things, while simultaneously being overwhelmed by stress from lack of money. I haven't figured out how to understand that yet, but these are intelligent, rational people, who make monetary decisions that are impossible (so far) for me to understand.

First off, I agree with your comment. I think basic income will go a way toward solving the issues you brought up, but that's not why I commented.

I'm about to start my own Forever Project where I'm going to write a game(with no actual game programming experience) and http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com looks like an excellent book for me to read in order to try to not make some really stupid mistakes in basic architecture when starting out. Thanks!

Here's an idea: Send bitcoin addresses in the HTTP headers.

People could voluntarily install a browser plugin that watches for addresses and sends money. Perhaps the donation could vary by time spent on the page (monitoring for activity to accommodate leaving stuff open), or perhaps it could be a fixed sum per pageview (with a cooldown to discourage blogspam). In exchange, servers could withhold ads.

Being willing to pay is not a guarantee you can remain ad-free. Showing ads to paying users will still often be seen as a way to increase revenue further, unless the company has made a lifetime guarantee to the contrary. I pay for Netflix. I would even be willing to pay more for Netflix. But then they started showing ads before content they created.

Google Contributor is terrible. Not because it doesn't work, but because it still leaves big green gaps where the ads were saying, "Thank you for using contributor!"

Not even mentioning the fact that it only works on a minority of ads, the green boxes are even more annoying than the ads were.

You can configure it to render transparent images, so you see the site's background. Hit the 'gear' in the upper right of the Contributor site, and the options are neutral-grey, transparent, cats, and 'soft focus'.

I really want the "nonexistent" option (collapse)

Contributor is almost the correct model, but the wrong company. It directly cannibalises the revenue stream that Google totally relies on: advertising.

That's why they made it a sliding scale, instead of a fixed no-ads-ever package.

And I expect that the more "successful" it is, the more watered down it will become. Like cable TV: the promise was "no ads". Then there were ads.