That huge, complex social construct is called advertising and it is something HN users should know about seeing how most of their jobs is serving as much of it to as many Internet users as possible. You wouldn't think HN users would get into a job that involves shaping the minds of literal millions of people without being aware of the consequences that would entail, would you?
Yeah as I alluded to in this thread I believe most gamers have been female for some time, but somehow for many people (read: many men) they don't 'count' because they're mobile games, or casual games, or not real games. At least that's the responses I've got every time the subject came up in previous discussions.
My experience as well. People on this site tend to think everything goes back to hunter gatherer societies and genes (a field they generally know little about) when the most plausible explanation (advertising) is something they know a lot more about. Kinda puzzling, or maybe a coping mechanism.
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN?
Also, going on about getting downvoted breaks the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Make plain, no funny-business HTTP GET, server responds 200 and sends some text. Guess they wanted me to have it. I'll decide what I do with it, thanks.
The same argument applies to DVR ad skipping and previews on movies. If your profit model depends on people not blocking advertisements, your profit model is broken.
I much prefer the way movies and podcasts so it, as in, having the advertisement as part of the content itself. Instead of plugging in ads on the side, podcasts have a small segment where the host mentions a product and gives their personal experience with it. Moves place products in the shot, which is also a kind of approval from the studio. Webpages, however, just throw in ads with no context, and it's completely jarring.
Part of the problem is that placing ads is much easier than working ad placement into an article, and another part is that paying for things online is a painful experience. I don't mind paying to remove ads, but I'm not going to sign up for a subscription service just to read an article without ads. I really hope something like GNU Taler becomes popular to make these types of microtransactions easier to manage. Even better, I would like something like Netflix, but for quality journalism where I pay a subscription for a variety of content.
I want content producers to get paid, I just don't like advertisements and juggling subscriptions.
Technicality? Huh? I asked for a document and you sent it so now I'd better make sure I only read it with software that also requests every link in it and runs any code it finds? LOL no. No technicality about it.
People tend to forget that websites are just documents. Especially those who are not deeply familiar with the web technology. So, to those who are not aware, I'd like to add: web is nothing more than a protocol in which a user requests a document, and a server generates and returns a text response. It is up to the user what they will do with this text response. For example, they may open it in a browser which parses special tags and turns it into a nice visual page. They also can choose to open it in a browser which cherry-picks which tags to parse and which tags not to parse. They can also just read it as an unparsed text. This is simply how web was designed.
What's unethical about reading the parts of a webpage that you want to read? It's like getting a free newspaper and then covering up the ads inside before you read it.
Well not quite. It's more like having someone else remove the ads so you're never exposed to them. Which I would say is a little unethical considering the newspaper is free for a reason.
If your server sends bits back to my computer when I request them, it is perfectly within my right to decide which of those bits I do and do not want to see.
This is like the people who say they can say what they want because of free speech.
If you're able to justify something because of a technicality and are intentionally ignoring the ethics of the situation and what is clearly right/wrong... well, that's not a good look.
If ad networks would behave ethically, I would agree with you. But they don't, so I don't.
It's not all black and white. If you want to charge me for content, charge me for content. If I think it's worth it, I'll pay. Don't force an unusable, emotionally-manipulative, probably malware-filled experience on me from the get-go because you don't otherwise have a sustainable business model.
You’re getting something you value (video, article, etc.) in exchange for looking at ads instead of paying money. If you don’t want to look at ads, don’t look at the content. Don’t hide behind server requests and technicalities.
It would be fine in the 1995 version of the internet where a page served up content plus a banner ad. I might click, I might not. But now we're faced with privacy invasion, tracking, data-collection, TVs that output tones during ads that our phones pick up and report back to advertisers, pages that are slow and unreadable because the ads have taken over more real estate than the content. The list goes on, and it's not a trade we agreed to.
Anti-patterns designed to trick us into clicking, signing up, giving up more data, view another few seconds of ads. It never ends! So yeah, we block it. I don't feel sorry. If you don't think it's ethical then you're not paying attention to what's really going on. I used to go around installing Firefox for people before it was called that. Then adblockers, and now I go to people's houses and help them with a raspberry pi loaded with pi-hole. Fuck ads. Fuck that entire industry. And fuck everyone that works in that industry enabling them.
Yes, it’s fine to skip ads in magazines or change the channel during commercials.
It’s not OK to get a robot that changes the channel for you or to have your magazines sent to a service who cuts the ads out and forwards them on to you.
You're setting arbitrary restrictions based on some feel-good criterion you've developed for yourself.
The implication of your ethical argument was that avoiding ads causes the content creator to fail to get paid, and that's wrong.
There's no material difference between whether I avoid ads manually, or have software do it for me automatically. The end result is the same; the creator misses out on ad revenue. You can't cherry-pick the ad avoidance methods and say some are ethical and some are not when the supposed unethical act is depriving creators of payment.
'What about my business model' is not a valid argument. You are not in fact entitled to one. Personally I'd rather see 95% less 'content' on the Internet if it meant it were ad free. I'd rather have no Facebook than one that serves you personalized ads. I'd rather have no online news media than news websites that serve ads. I'd rather have no television programs than watch programs with commercials. 'Content creators' often overestimate how much people care about their 'content' and they think we couldn't do without them. Well, most of us can. And most of us hate ads.
I'm sure, in an ad-free world, that content creators who really care would find a way to make it work. Maybe there'd be less content this way, but so be it. Quality isn't quantity.
You do, and that's fine for you. But I rather have a reasonable amount of ads to support content, than have no content at all. I do use Facebook as a means to communicate with a lot of people and catch up with friends and family. I consume content form sites that do have ads. I agree the situation is not balanced at the moment, but cutting out 95% of the internet is not a solution. There has to be a balanced middle ground.
You're conflating 'no content at all' and 'cutting 95% of the Internet'. Honestly there's so much stuff out there that you wouldn't even notice even if 99.9% of the Internet content were removed overnight. There are always people somewhere willing to create content without serving you ads. This much content, however little (in proportion to the rest) should be enough to satiate anyone's needs. Who needs the rest.
Pretty good odds that the content you care about is in that 99.9%, so people would certainly notice except for those with such broad/pop tastes that they are easily satisfied with anything, which seems to be the only people you're talking about.
Maybe 10% or less of Facebook's current per-user ad viewing time would be enough to sustain a service that allows to keep in touch with people (thanks to economies of scale) but the problem is, once you introduce ads, greed comes along for a ride and that's why we can't have nice things. Since "being reasonable" isn't a thing that ad people understand, I'm happy for their entire shitty industry to die and burn in hell.
Not that I'm opposed to it going the way of the dodo, ad free Facebook just isn't viable. The product is shit and nobody would pay for it just like how the majority* would never pay for email. And why should they? They're already paying for their internet bill.
Ad-free Facebook would not be viable at its current (extreme) valuation. A honest business providing Facebook-like features would be viable if they don't have to pay back billions to investors.
Note that the product is shit because it's designed to waste your time ("engagement" and "growth" and all these bullshit words). The product would improve significantly if it was paid because then the incentive would be to deliver value to their users so they keep using the product & paying for it.
> They're already paying for their internet bill.
Why can't it just be included in your internet bill? If Facebook (or whatever paid alternative replaces it) becomes mainstream I can see ISPs just including it in their packages.
`content creators who really care would find a way to make it work` is a terrible way to think.
All that means is the barrier to entry increases from anyone, from any background and means to people who can afford to produce content already. You lose the young kids starting out, you loose those from poorer backgrounds, you loose the creatives working on their side projects while working a 9 to 5 because they can no longer afford to make content.
If _you_ don't want ads don't consume the content, you're not entitled to it. Quality might not be quantity but quantity (being able to continue to produce content without a huge financial burden) develops quality.
People are already making content without monetizing it, and have been for decades. As alien a way of thinking as it may seem to some, many human beings do not need a bizarre system of 'market-based incentives' to get anything done at all. They just do it, out of passion, boredom, to learn, or to share with friends. Are you seriously implying the 'young kid starting out' has Youtube monetization all setup in order, or has sponsors knocking on their door?
Your posts actually seem like the sort of perversion that ads have inflicted on our relationship with content and how they've trained us to value content at $0.
I don't really understand how waiting around and hoping for someone to make something out of hobby or charity is a reasonable stance when content brings me a non-zero amount of value and entertainment, when I can pay for it and get better results. Life is too short to sit and pray that someone else will feel like doing something for free that will happen to benefit me.
The idea seems a bit juvenile. Or as if we're all such simpletons that anything will please us all the same, it doesn't matter, so just wait for the next free shit.
I don't even understand how this idea survives concrete examples. If I happen to enjoy someone's free hobby content, then I directly benefit from their ability to make a living producing that content.
> Your posts actually seem like the sort of perversion that ads have inflicted on our relationship with content and how they've trained us to value content at $0.
Bingo. He's unwittingly the poster child for the devaluation of human capital.
I think the concept you're missing is called a "gift economy". It's actually more fundamental to humans than the market economy, it underpins society, and it lets the market economy exist in the first place.
> when I can pay for it and get better results
That's called "commissioning a work of art". Or, iterated, can be turned into patronage. Unlike advertising, this is a honest and correct way of rewarding creation of art using market means.
People will make content as a hobby, but you won't see people doing it on the level (frequency or quality) they have been today. Internet likes and shares are nice but if they won't pay the bills, and a lot of creators will prioritize their time accordingly.
I have a hard time believing that someone on HN, a crowd whose primary job involves using free software and whose primary hobby is reading Wikipedia articles, would just idly speculate about things against the most blatant contrary evidence.
But then, this being HN, this sort of speculation is to be expected, heh.
Wikipedia is a great example. They have to go begging the world every few months to keep the greatest website in the world operating. HN (and dang's job) is funded by the excess of YCombinator, and the rest of us just show up to chat whenever.
1) Extraordinary value can indeed be created for free, simply because people want to contribute something. You'll note that all the money pays for in both cases is hosting.
2) Both sites can exist without involving the advertising industry and all its corruption.
Young video creators have been around but not at this scale because youtube or instagram props them up and makes them influencers. They have no life experience and yet are influencing millions of other young people. The sad part is that everything is shocking content to get their visitors up. This is broken imo and can’t lead to anything good. Of course, few of them become millionares
Youtube itself had lots of young creators before they started the monetizing game and they were creating content for free and a lot of it was good, honest and creative. Along with the monetization and aggressive promotion everything went into a shocking craze to increase the number of followers, the number of views and the volume of content. A lot of it is just crap.
> If _you_ don't want ads don't consume the content, you're not entitled to it.
The vast majority of on-line marketing is outright hostile towards the people it targets; it's a constant battle for attention, PII, and bandwidth and it comes with side effects like actual malware spreading through ad networks. Until that changes, ads should be considered as threats, and they should be blocked at the door regardless of what the content creator thinks about it.
Not that long ago. When I was in university in 1996 there were almost no ads. When I left university in 1999 there were a lot more. The quality of content didn't really increase in that time.
Right now there are youtube channels that don't monetize, and have good content. There are soundcloud profiles, blogs and short stories that have no ads.
Most of the advertised internet is garbage, but it's also by far the most popular, due to the ads.
Advertising skews people's views of worthiness, and makes a mockery of honest recommendations. That's literally what it was invented to do!
My life? Not at all. I don't really use the product except for managing event invites. But I don't run a business that generates most of their leads through Facebook. Nor do I organize any volunteering or community events that would benefit from reaching a large amount of people.
This is a strange hill to die on, because I really don't agree with most of the company's actions. Yet every time I'm outside of the U.S, I see how important Facebook is to a lot of communities. I could be wrong, but I've just seen large social graphs like Facebook's create value. Hence my surprise to the author insinuating it's made the world a worse place.
Ironically enough the people that benefit the most from the product aren't the primary source of income, as I'm sure first world users are valued higher per ad dollar.
I used to have a lot of respect for rms. Sure he was quirky but at least he was principled. Sure his last actual free software contribution was in 1995 but he did a lot of advocacy afterwards. Sure he was very annoyingly intransigeant but he said things that were true but inconvenient to hear (regarding Facebook, Google, Amazon et al.). All in all, I thought that for all his flaws, the world needed someone like him.
But now, it seems everyone's coming out of the woodwork with one damning story after another that I didn't know of. I don't know if the spider plant thing is true, but the pleasure cards thing is ludicrous. Looking back, one can't help but wonder if in hindsight he was more of a hindrance to the cause.
If anything, the disgrace of rms should be the final nail to the coffin of the so-called hacker spirit as enshrined by the likes of him and esr, and which I've always kind of perceived as 'you can be as much of an obtuse dick as you like as long as you're technically correct'. Maybe such 'hackers' were necessary in 1970 when computing was niche and restricted to certain demographics for various historical/sociological reasons. Now that the pool of available talent has largely increased, we should ask ourselves: for one brillant but obtuse dick, how many brillant and chill people are out there? Is it worth latching on the former at the risk of missing out on potential scores of the latter?
