The amount of effort being put into these lists as well as the success of your extension also speaks volume about how unbearable ads are nowadays. I hope we will never lose this battle, at least not on the Internet.
If not, would be interested on how you expect publishers to make money?
Still, there are a range of funding available that doesn't depend on advertising such as donations, subscribers, and or merchandising. What's at risk is really the lowest form of content that can't be supported with it's own merits and I really see the problem if it simply goes away.
Hacker News is a marketing expense for this investment institution.
I disagree with many of their decisions, but they’re largely irreplaceable.
There are also a lot of behind the scenes volunteers that do the work, too. But making the front page interesting on a daily basis is no small feat, and from an outside POV that seems almost entirely thanks to those two.
Those stories are promoted by staff because they are interesting and didn't get the limelight they deserved.
The reverse also happens. For example, many cryptocurrency stories are suppressed because they are neither interesting nor novel.
So in short, yes, votes play a role, but without curation, HN would be a cesspit of self promoting cryptoscams and repetitive content. (After all, how hard could it be to fake HN votes?)
There are a large number of award winning hyperlocal news websites run by hardworking and talented local news journalists who rely on advertising to survive. With out them though, there's be no one to report or investigate the shady things going on in local government.
This advertising is directly sold by them (which isn't easy to do in an Era of Google and FB), without networks.
For 99% of them, it's the most practical way to pay the bills. Subscribers are possible, but only if you're established and you have a wide enough audience. For a small town you'd need 1000 subscribers at 5k just to make a 60k pretax salary which support 1-2 staff members.
Advertising supports hard journalism, which supports a healthy democracy. Ask yourself if all publishers supported by advertising going away would truly be a good thing.
1000 subscribers @ 5k is 5 million dollars. You probably meant $5/month.
Hard journalism is corrupted by advertising. It leads to corporatocracy and an unhealthy democracy.
Independent media with public funding and a charter to support the public good (e.g. like the BBC used to be run) works better.
At a local level advertising generally does not corrupt the journalism. At the local level, it's community oriented where the journalists are genuinely interested in giving a voice to advertisers as well as informing citizens. It's a more positive ecosystem than what you see on the national level.
At a local level advertising probably doesn't corrupt the journalism simply because there isn't very much of it.
https://inn.org/members/ http://www.lionpublishers.com/members/list/
There are thousands more that are not members - simply professional and entrepreneurial journalists trying to make a living doing what they care about.
One of the businesses is an auto shop. If that auto shop is doing something like re-using old oil to save money on oil changes or some other shady tactic would the hyperlocal news go after them?
I’ve never seen investigative journalism out of my hyperlocal news, it is all just community news about upcoming events and the like.
I could be mistaken but your links don’t make it clear to me that any of these hyperlocal organizations are doing investigative journalism. My hyperlocal outlet certainly doesn’t.
The ones that do exist appear to be non-profits relying on donations (e.g. aspenjournalism.org / birminghamwatch.org) that don't run ads and give a strong impression of being run by one or two people.
I'm really unconvinced that this is a significant industry let alone one that is supported by ads.
I've regularly heard elected government representatives argue that their government should be smaller, less centralised and less intrusive.
What exactly made you think these situations were in any way analogous?
Pre-2003 BBC regularly used to hold the government to account because it was explicitly independent and it had a charter that emphasized its responsibility to the public. That kind of set up simply isn't possible if you are advertising funded - the conflict of interest is too great.
> What exactly made you think these situations
> were in any way analogous?
I'm also not terribly convinced by "holding things to account". I'm sure many news organizations have, and many more have been accused of, criticizing large corporations for specific misdeeds without necessarily questioning the overall capitalist systems that allows them to exist. Likewise, news organizations also can and have criticized specific governmental misdeeds without necessarily advocating that the government should not be involved in specific things at all, or that some specific things should be handled by a more local government versus a national-level one.
Most telling foreign news may seem left leaning when that country views them as right leaning. In other cases the reverse happens because large organizations pander to their audience and/or the government not what foreigners may think.
Or, to give you another example, consider the tremendous amount of opinion column space given to people like David Brooks who represent a tiny proportion of voters -- and then compare it to the total absence of, say, anyone aligned with Sanders (who I think we can pretty safely say is more popular than any of the world's Never-Trump Republicans).
Corbyn's enduring popularity in spite of initial hostility from every single media establishment would appear to contradict this narrative.
The agenda of each media outlet is clearly set by the owners albeit with market forces sometimes pushing them one way or the other.
In the reverse case everyone would ignore Corbyn as people do flat earthers. It's only because he exits within the audiences realm of acceptance that anyone is willing to pay attention.
Imagine if the internet didn’t exist. Do you think anyone would have payed attention to the German New Year’s Eve rapes? It’s not like anyone in the media class was going to do it before the cover up was a story in itself.
I was defining say Chinsease sensors as part of the audience rather than the news organization as the orignization does not have contowl over them. Much like in the US Fox News/CBS etc gets a list of words it can't say, they can add to that list but not remove from it.
Yes. Along with the model of paying people to access information. We should get used to the model of paying people to produce information that we support, even information that we don't consume ourselves. An overtly propagandistic model, rather than the covert propaganda by advertisers/political actors model that we use now.
Seriously: how much of a burden would it be for 500 people to cover a single journalist's salary, and the medium through which they publish? Patreon is a working example; there just need to be better tools, models, and expectations other than conning 2% of internet browsers with deceptive ads as the only thing holding our democracy together.
This is misleading. HN does have ads, in the form of job posts for the YC companies. The site itself also serves as a business development tool for a (now) huge investment fund.
Additionally, this site isn't so cheap to run anyone could do it without caring about the cost. The hardware and bandwidth isn't free [1], but more importantly, I believe multiple people work on HN part-time, and dang works on it full-time [2]. That's not cheap, at all.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889575
2. https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac...
Like Wikipedia the vast majority of value is from free content. That trend continues across my browsing habits. I need to use an ad blocker because I frankly don't see a lot of them.
I don't really agree with how you're defining portfolio company job links as ads.
AFAIK they do not charge portfolio companies for job links, so is it really an ad if they don't charge for it / it generates no revenue? The companies and tech mentioned in their descriptions are often just as interesting as other stories posted here. They are more in a gray area of content marketing or sponsored content than native advertising.
I suppose you could make an argument around it potentially increasing the value of their equity stake in a company by making that company more valuable. It seems a bit roundabout — I don't consider them ads any more so than a link to your blog post is an "ad" for your blog, or the comment posts in the monthly job threads are "ads".
Ryan’s link to his blog is 100% an ad, IMO. So are YC portfolio job postings.
If the motivation is "I might forget my blog address; better record it here", it's not an ad. If the motivation is, "I want people to be able to find out more about me/drive awareness of me or the blog," it's an ad.
Advertising is the fastest, easiest, most scalable, and most egalitarian method there is.
The actual issue people seem to have with is the modern online implementation that is slow, invasive and frustrating. There are companies doing a better job and things will get cleaned up but there's nothing wrong with the concept itself.
In the wider realm it's a mixed bag, but advertising really does not seem necessary.
Wikipedia is an outlier that goes through intense fundraising to survive. It also does not produce content.
NPR has lots of advertising: https://www.nationalpublicmedia.com/npr/platforms/npr-org/
Media publications are businesses and they need to make money to survive. Donations never work and if you tried to pitch that as the business model at even the hippiest startup convention, you'd be laughed off. Subscriptions do work but the public does not understand how to price the value and would rather go to starbucks instead, clearly seen in the endless comments and downvotes on HN when there is paywalled story or advertising talk. Subscription also bring up the issue of access for people without the means to buy.
20% of NPR's funding comes from corporations. Useful yes, required no.
It feels like advertising, but in practice it's virtue signaling. Much like giving to Habitat for humanity corporations want recognition for their donations, but as pure advertising it's not worth it. So, if they where not mentioned on air corporations would likely cut back, but not to zero.
Virtue signaling is still advertising, paying money for exposure. Otherwise it's a corporate donation and that does not scale at all. You can look at the continuous travails of open-source projects that deliver billions in value but get no funding as a perfect example.
The point is that NPR comes nowhere near the massive amount of content that people consume but don't pay for. Please don't just assume the entire industry is incompetent, there are millions of people working in these media companies and they are constantly trying new options. So far, outside of subscriptions for certain high-end brands like the Financial Times, advertising is the only sustainable model found.
Click bait is an outgrowth of payment in eyeballs.
As to virtue signaling, I bring that up because it can occur even if they are never mentioned on air. A company can say they are a corporate sponsor of X even if X only ever mentioned them on an obscure part of their website. In the world of virtue signaling simply accepting money creates vale. NPR is behaving rationally to accept as much money as possible and even to put effort into getting more because at effectively 90% the funding they would create less value, but clearly they could still create significant value with 90% of their current funds.
Anyways, if advertising went away, a massive amount of media you see today would also disappear. You would definitely notice that.
And that's before even getting to the even more massive impact it would make on the economy since every major company today relies on advertising for growth and sales. It's easy to look at few annoying banner ads and say that they suck, but this is a 12-figure global industry that plays a critical part in the economy. It's just not that simple.
Advertising is largely zero sum, it increases the cost of products while increasing individual product sales. People would buy almost exactly the same amount of food for example without any advertising so that's pure dead weight to society. Despite all those car ads people would still buy a car without them further without that massive cost those cars would be either cheaper or better, etc across a huge range of industries. Without ads people would still buy soap and other home goods, at worst they would pay less when doing so.
I personally have no interest in seeing any kind of ads and indiscriminately block all of them. I'm perfectly fine if that causes companies with ad-based revenue to go bankrupt, and there is not slightest legal or moral obligation for me to support these companies.
If you have a company and worry about ad-blockers, the first thing you need to do is to create a product that you can actually sell.
Of course, as long as they don't complain and stop whinning about ad-blockers, I have no problem with companies who base their revenue primarily on ads. I'm simply not one of their customers.
It's not about ad-based revenue. Every single company relies on marketing for success, and so the economy is tied to advertising. There's a reason that some of the largest companies in the world are advertising businesses. People are also bad at judging value and dont/wont pay for things like news. Like I said before, plenty of publications sell subscriptions but HN threads still whine incessantly about paywalls, while also ignoring how many people can't afford to pay but would still like access.
Also, adblockers are not really a big deal, there are plenty of ways around them, especially if you want the content, and you're at best blocking about 10% of the advertising that's reaching you anyway.
How does it work? You want to publish an ad, you go directly to the publisher. You design the ad for the paper or the magazine. It looks good and works for everyone involved.
Web ads, however, are a complete anti-pattern. I imagine that the advertisers and the publishers can save themselves a lot of money and goodwill if they directly work together like they do in print.
Failing that affiliate and ad networks and maybe microfinancing like patreon are the only things to get something out of micropublishing.
Doesn’t seem fair.
How would it actually solve it in a way that previous attempts at pay-per-read microtransactions haven’t?
What the fuck does Bitcoin have to do with it?
Keep in mind that the majority of browsers (Safari and Chrome) have built in payment mechanisms already.
Then there is "Bitcoin" the idea. You can see the start of it in the initial paper: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1] This is the techno-libertarian ideal of a perfect, stateless financial system that magically solves all financial problems
So Bitcoin-the-idea has everything to do with any money-related problem. Even though Bitcoin-the-reality is in fact not helpful for this. As the idea and the real thing diverge, it becomes more obvious that a large number of Bitcoin-the-idea adherents are essentially religious in their behaviors. (There's another, much smaller segment for whom the idea is something they are working toward. You can tell them because they will distinguish between present and (imagined) future.)
Unfortunately, the Church of Bitcoin attendees welcome questions like your about as much as parents welcome people saying that Santa doesn't exist. So thanks for speaking up and asking blunt questions like this despite the flack I'm sure you get.
Previous poster was using it as an example of a medium for exchange used with micropayments.
Also, bitcoin has been completely incapable of doing micropayments for a long time.
Most of internet media just isn't good enough.
However, you still do, so they have value. That value comes at a price, rather you think they are good or not good for the ego system. You’re actions speak in the camp of them being good.
I think we can all agree, some porn and content is not good. However, the value walks with out attention And not our moral desires.
Through out this thread I’ve seen people say they have no respect for Facebook or google and their ads, yet services they use daily. Unwilling to pay, the product is you.
Either pay with your money or lack of attention and this seems like it’s no longer a problem. M
The issue is, we want all this but want to provide them with little or not compensation for their value.
We use to speak with our attention, we didn’t like this store, so we never went there. Today, this extension is merely still going to the store, but ignoring what we dislike.
Thus is the debate.
I can possibly see how these issues might matter to you if you make a living at google or a large content company, but I, like the vast majority of people do not. It is not my concern. I don’t get why this is so hard to understand.
I wouldn't use Gmail, but I'd probably consider Fastmail if/when I don't want to host my own email anymore.
I might use Dropbox over Google drive (rather than store stuff on my server), and I might use Neocities.org to host a static Web site.
So there are many ad supported services that live next to "for pay" equivalent services.
As for content, I used to subscribe to lwn.net - but stopped when I realised I wasn't reading it closely enough to warrant the subscription. I might come back at a later date.
I'd love to see a site like like lwn that syndicated news; a clean look, perhaps with ads/delayed publishing to non-subscribers, the "subscription link"-system (i could share what I read with non-subscribers). And with proper compensation for conrmtributers (individuals and institutions).
Sorry I think you sometimes get too heavy handed around here.
I would pay for Youtube. Or rather, for good youtubers. In fact, I donate using Patreon on a monthly basis to a few youtubers who provide accurate news. QED...
No wonder they are dubbed as “Washington Compost” or “Confabulated News Network”. And same for any social network (Twitter, Facebook and Youtube) who censor right-wing informtion, not only I don’t care about their ad revenue, but if they disappeared because of this, it would be a net win for society. Neither newspapers nor social networks will disappear, unfortunately.
Print doesn't have easy adblocking, it's just you and a pair of scissors. Which is stronger, print or web publishing?
How many years of adblockers not destroying the internet should we see before it's reasonable to reevaluate our initial assumptions about their impact?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
Website owners could easily fix that problem by declaring some standard mandatory component of URL for every ad-supported page. I would happily write and use an extension that would erase all links that have e.g. string "/ads/" in them. That way I would never visit there part of the internet and wouldn't harm them in any way. However since they don't want to make this small step towards my needs they are welcome to go to hell.
Back when I bought magazines at news stands, the ads were a big part of the reason as they were targeted to my interests (without spying on me). I want to connect with relevant advertising. I just want to do it on my terms, with out spyware, malware, slow load times, autoplaying video and sound, distracting animation, etc.
These days, I can't remember the last time I've read a good article on technology someplace other than on a blog, a website of a group of enthusiasts. If I ever ended up on websites like Wired or The Verge in the last five years or so, it was definitely by mistake.
Many publishers make money through ads because most people wouldn't pay a dime for that stuff. Catchy is good enough to make people waste time, but not money.
Edit: oh -- it's not all black and white, either. I use an ad blocker, but I whitelist the pages where I think it's worthwile. It's not an all-or-nothing thing. Publishers who put out quality content and whose ads don't try to serve me malware (eh, Forbes?) get whitelisted. Everyone else, to quote the famous nihilistic philosopher B. B. Rodriguez, can bite my shiny metal ass.
Why is it our responsibility to find a way for all publishers to make money?
I'm a fan of the book Extreme Ownership, and reading your question got me thinking (a bit laterally, admittedly) about the book. I'm in a situation right now where I read and enjoy content made by professional publishers, and I also generally hate the direction Internet Advertising has gone. This puts me in a bit of a pickle... I can use an ad blocker, fully accepting that I'm cutting off the revenue stream from people whose content I enjoy, or I can not use an ad blocker and waste my battery, get tracked, and be generally annoyed.
But what can I do about this? I can sit and bitch about it, I can wait until someone else comes up with some solution (which may just be ad-blocker-pay-walls, urgh), or I can spend some of my brain cycles thinking about and sharing my thoughts on solutions that result in publishers still having revenue without the parts that annoy me.
Maybe you don't enjoy content that publishers put out, and that's totally fine. In that case, it's probably not worth thinking about; the publishing industry having terrible flash ads and video popups and things doesn't affect you, and if they go broke from not coming up with an alternative revenue model, that won't affect you either.
Would people be willing to shell say $5/mo towards their online news content consumption?
A browser plugin could then track time spend (keep all data local), at the end of the month, present a simple dialog that says, your top 5 destinations were these, uncheck any that you don't want to pay, and rest will get your $5 divided by time spent.
This way users would get to browse ad-free, thanks to the ad blocking solutions, while publishers would also get some revenue. Ideally the payment service could generate some revenue as well and pass some to further developement/maintenance of the ad blockers.
Time to pay the volunteers! :)
No more cat-and-mouse that you'd have with the blacklisting approach, at least.
This can't be said enough.
Large numbers of users still have no idea that their blocker works at all because of these lists.
The collective amount of work which goes into these free-to-use lists on a daily basis is impressive, especially considering it's done entirely on a voluntary basis.
To get an idea just glance at the commit rate:
EasyList/EasyPrivacy: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commits/master
uBlock Origin: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commits/master
Add to this all the regional lists, specific-purpose lists, the hosts files (Peter Lowe's, Dan Pollock, malware lists), etc.