It is hard to find content which is really worthwhile on the advertising supported web. The very nature of it is that valuable content is devalued relative to spam. Like Gresham's law, bad content drives out good.
but, your comment highlights a kind of surprising reality about ad dollars and Google. i mean, StackOverflow captures a significant quantity of ad money from Android related content because, in the early days of Android development, Google itself directed Android developers to StackOverflow.
1. It's not free. Advertising is a $600 billion industry annually, with online over a sixth of that. This is largely imposed on the wealthier billion global inhabitants, so figure roughly $600 overall or $100 for Internet, per person, per year, if you live in the EU, US, JP, CA, AU, NZ.
2. Good content goes wanting. Advertising seeks to maximise eyeballs, not content quality. Good sites go wanting: LWN, Linux Journal, Nautilus, just off the top of my head. Markets and information are a poor match.
Unless you omitted a sarcasm tag?
Doesn't mean advertising is unproblematic. It clearly isn't. But it's not completely one sided either, not even in terms of privacy.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...
Information is a pure public good. Finance it as such.
Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.
http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...
I didn't say there were no other options. I just criticised the one option we would very likely end up with by default if advertising were to be curbed somehow.
Allow me to gently disagree. The comment above is dismissive and makes assumptions, both of which the HN guidelines suggest avoiding. It also doesn't offer any supporting evidence.
If the comment had some supporting argument, if it made a strong case that ads are economically necessary, and if it contributed to the discussion in a positive way, it might be upvoted instead.
It's very easy to dismiss downvotes as cliquish disagreement or tribal behavior, but doing that won't help you learn. It's much better to assume votes are being cast for legitimate reasons and ask yourself when you see or get downvotes if the comment in question is really the best way the idea could have been presented. It's very easy in written text to say something in a way that comes off very different and much more negative than you intended.
I encourage you to share your thoughts rather than stay silent, but to also stay positive, and be conscious of assumption and conscious of style.
If you feel like giving a more nuanced opinion with some arguments (eg, free content via ad supported model is better than the others because blah), you might find the downvotes dont come as fast and furious.