> You can demand your attention back, but are you willing to pay for the content you consume?

Yes, I do.

In fact, I want to consume a lot less than the media corporations want me to consume (especially 'news'). So paying for Netflix/Spotify/Prime/Steam is no problem for me and I probably would pay for news if I would find it of any value. Today, every news corporation seems to have its own agenda and you have to do your own research anyway.

I am just wondering how much I would have to pay to get the other stuff without that DRM garbage... I mean for games we have GOG, but for movies and music, I haven't found a legal DRM-free source yet that offers the main-stream products :-/

> We had great content in newspapers and magazines... and the world decide that cheap ( with instance access ) was better.

I do not remember a time that newspapers and magazines had no ads, despite being paid. If anything many of them were almost half ads, half content.

I was reading magazines since the 90s though, i do not know if things were better before.

With magazines with a narrow focus, such as magazines about a particular hobby or activity, readers usually wanted the ads.

I used to regularly read "Astronomy" and "Sky & Telescope", for example, and would have been disappointed if the ads went away. Ads in those magazines were the primary way most amateur astronomers back in, say, the '70s would find good equipment.

Other magazines I would have been disappointed to lose ads from were "Popular Electronics", "Chess Life" and "Byte".

For more general interest magazines, like "Time" or "Newsweek", I don't recall looking forward to the ads like I did for the above mentioned magazines, so wouldn't have minded if they went away. On the other hand, print ads generally weren't intrusive, though, so if they would have had to raise the price of the magazine to get rid of them I would rather keep them.

Although newspapers were general interest, their ads were often useful because they were usually for local things. Remember, back in the day we bought almost everything in person at local stores, so these ads often alerted us to sales and deals that we were interested in.

My memory agrees. Hell, I work with a gaming magazine preservation project and those things are 90%+ ads when you get down to it.

I think my point is that the "bombardment" of ads is partly in due to the lack of monetization. There's a bit of a difference between print ads, and intrusive online ads. For example, you could turn the page... there was not redirect to "wow iphone user, you've won this prize!!!"

I'm actually ok with facebook/ig/google adwords ads. I'm not ok with intrusive, redirecting, in your face, ads. I could be alone in this opinion.

Those ads are relevant, because they are context-specific and purchased directly from the publisher. If I pick up The Economist, I will expect to see ads for some luxury watch brand, as well as highly specialized job postings for executives somewhere.

If I go to the Economists' website, I will see ads for:

- a university website I went to that dropped a remarketing cookie into my browser

- the shitty dating app full of bots and escorts, that would never have passed a QC review at a publication. Yet they are common on FB and TW (maybe Google Ads is different).

- the tshirt website that displays some machine-generated text based on what it thinks my interests are.

These are what I consider intrusive ads. When I see one, I don't want to have to think about what trail I left that led to these particular ads being shown to me.

This is not even true. I just went to the Economist website and I got exactly the same ads you claim for the print version: - Louis Vuitton watch ad - Accenture strategy ad about company purpose (served by Google DoubleClick)

Hmm, I just checked again and you are right, I was wrong. Perhaps they changed their digital ads strategy, as the last time I visited on a non-adblocked browser, it was showing those low-grade ads that really cheapened the experience of being on the site.

Maybe not all news, but you can pay for ad-free youtube, hulu, spotify, and arstechnica these days.

Google used to allow you to pay pennies to websites to hide display ads their site, or replace them entirely with cat pictures. It wasn't complete coverage since Google doesn't own all ad networks, but it was something like 55% of the ads on sites.

Then they changed the whole program to only have 100% coverage on very specific sites, which kind of makes it useless unless you frequent those specific domains: https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/7324995

Well, the other side would be: how about stop throwing free stuff at me that I don't need anyways? But since it's already there, sure, I'll consume it? The market tought people to be like this. I never click on adds, and I never buy what's advertized in an add, what's the market value of that?

For a while, I tried what everyone else tried: "like and subscribe, like and comment!" but 1. it didn't work and 2. I felt more and more disgusted with myself. 3. I had a friend, who did this, stuck with it and became very weird, always hunting for agreement, couldn't take any feedback at all (unless it was positive and stroking her ego).

All this stuff is reshaping human behaviour, and nobody knows what it's doing.

4. All adds are telling you that something is missing and that you need it. Be it software or hardware, creams and food. Essentially the message in a lot of these things is: you're inefficient, ugly, slow, unproductive, uncreative, too thick, too thin... Who wants to listen to that kind of message all the time?

Yes. I pay 50bucks to a youtuber per video who does not advertise, and disables them wherever possible (sometimes its forced by yt/twitch). Lots of people do not support him on patreon, but he says that the few people who pay make him more money than he would get with ads.

I would rather pay those 10$ per month or so that websites get through ads (per user), rather than getting tracked and stalked everywhere I go.

I disagree. This is sort of like saying it’s fine to build a restaurant with two large rooms, one that has cigarette smoke piped into it, and one with fresh, clean air. You can sit in the smoke filled room for no additional charge, but you have to sign up for a subscription plan with that restaurant to be allowed in the clean air room.

Now imagine that every restaurant does this. And your grocery store, doctor’s office, airplane seat and place of worship too. To escape it, you’d literally have to become an alienating, dysfunctional hermit disavowed of all kinds of modern standards of living, hypervigilant with every place you visit.

So it is with ads. Nine times out of ten, there is not even any option you can pay for that is truly ad free. Even full paying subscribers are subjected to ads and have their data and consumption habits tracked to build better ad bidding techniques or demographic profiles.

Ads are essentially always a toxic psychological substance, and especially so when their injection into your life is nearly impossible to fully comprehend and relies on personal data about you that is sprawling, with huge companies and teams of engineers designing ways to defeat any expected privacy you might have believed you’re entitled to. Tracking pixels, cookies, browser fingerprinting, data bartering, location tracking SDKs, etc.

There’s an aspect of this where we simply need to legislate away hyper-targeted and constant, pervasive advertising, just like we would have a public health outcry if a restaurant tried to create a room artificially filled with cigarette smoke.

Ads are truly not different. They are a psychological carcinogen and people should have a natural right to avoid being subjected to them while conducting everyday modern life activities. We should disallow the possibility that the only way to avoid an ad is to avoid the content / pay a rent-seeking additional fee for ad-free access, etc. It’s not acceptable to inject a harmful substance into a product and then argue customers are free to not consume it or pay extra for the harmful substance to be removed.

Ads should not be viewed as a logically possible monetization instrument for reasons of sheer public health.

If this means many types of businesses fold because they were only sustainable if they monetized the injection of harmful substances into their customers’ lives, then let them fold. It means they do not provide compelling enough products or services to be justified by the marketplace, and are propped up by a philistine ethical abyss in our modern economy that tries to convince people it’s above board to make money from injecting harmful substances into customers’ lives or charging a premium to avoid the harmful substance.

We wouldn’t allow businesses to monetize based on injecting cigarette smoke into customers’ lives (not even if the mostly uninformed customers claimed to be OK with it). It’s frankly no different with ads.

Nobody is going to read that wall of text, but the first and last paragraphs give me the gist if what you're trying to say.

Do you have any better models for providing expensive-to-run services to everybody, and not just the select few who are willing/able to pony up the cash directly?

Every single wall-of-text criticism of ad based monetization on HN contributes nothing new, is full of thinly-stretched analogies (like your "cigarette smoke"), and rarely suggests an alternative, and even more rare a workable one.

> “Nobody is going to read that wall of text”

If you’re not going to read things you dismiss, please don’t reply. It just adds unhelpful noise.

> “Do you have any better models for providing expensive-to-run services to everybody, and not just the select few who are willing/able to pony up the cash directly?”

The whole point is that if these services cannot be self-sustaining without monetization of ad injection, then the service is thereby demonstrably harmful to the people it delivers the service to.

Whatever value proposition the service is claiming, whether it’s news delivery, a communication feed with friends, whatever, if it cannot be self-sustaining without ads then it is a non-business thing; it is not a business at that point, because predicating the financial viability of a thing on the activity of injecting a harmful substance into customers’ lives instantly renders it a non-business... a thing that the market has demonstrated to be unwanted and worthy of losing money unto the point of shutting down as a side-effect of it not being viable outside the scope of hurting people.

We can definitely debate about degrees of the problem, as long as such debates are based on measuring and quantifying the harmful effects of ads and associated privacy intrusion, and are not disingenuously framed in terms of a customers purported self willingness to endure ads for the service. It’s not a thing a person can in principle be informed enough about to give that consent; it’s a vehicle of psychological harm where the perpetrators have a huge asymmetric information advantage and a huge lobbying advantage.

In all earnesty and seriousness, it is exactly like the kind of harm perpetrated by cigarette companies, with asymmetric knowledge of bodily harm and limitless marketing budgets and a supply of die-hard customers ready to say how willing they are to make that harm trade off to consume the product.

> If you’re not going to read things you dismiss, please don’t reply. It just adds unhelpful noise.

I skimmed your post, and read the first, last, and a few in-between paragraphs. It's incredibly verbose, repetitive, and wordy, and repetitive to the point of not helping you make your point. I'm not dismissing your point without reading it, though.

> The whole point is that if these services cannot be self-sustaining without monetization of ad injection, then the service is thereby demonstrably harmful to the people it delivers the service to.

You make this assertion, which is a huge one, then fail to really support it at all. You leave no room for nuance, and ignore the value that people do derive from free services like Facebook or Google. Your initial assumption is "ads are bad", and anything that has ads is therefore bad, and that's where your train of thought ends. It’s adding nothing to the discussion.

> “I skimmed your post, and read the first, last, and a few in-between paragraphs. It's incredibly verbose, repetitive, and wordy, and repetitive to the point of not helping you make your point. I'm not dismissing your point without reading it, though.”

This appears to precisely be a statement that you are dismissing it without reading it.

> “You leave no room for nuance”

Again, had you read the post, you’d have seen you’re wrong on this, as I granted that it would be possible to debate about the degrees of harm that different kinds of ads and associated data tracking can cause, as long as that debate is not based on any notion of self willingness of consumers to claim they are OK with the ad-harm-for-free-service trade off, since it is not possible for anyone on the consumer side of that equation to have enough of the information to make such a claim.

If instead it is based on actual quantified measures of harm, then you could ask whether there’s a way to make thresholds and classify some ad-based services as “safe enough for consumption” likely through clear regulation.

Also, without resorting to let-me-google-that-for-you link spam about all that has been written about ads causing harm, I also think there is a philosophical divide here that your mind seems entirely closed to.

It is totally fair to simply say “all ads are bad” or perhaps a slightly more qualified version “all ads based on personalized targeting criteria or narrow behavior-defined audience segmentation are bad.” For example, someone may just hold that targeted, personalized ads violate an intrinsic right to privacy, or that they come with unacceptably high risks that such behavioral data will be misused or stolen, and that a person should, morally, have a right to control the spread of that information or know the extent to which it was used to possibly manipulate them.

These things can just be statements of universal rights, and not necessarily rooted in any other observable outcome. Many people consider being targeted by behavior for an ad to be the harm, intrinsically.

This could in fact be a moral stance akin to saying “things that cause diseases are bad” in the smoking debate.

Pushing back and replying by saying “things that cause diseases are bad” is but a mere assertion is a pretty self-evidently vapid and useless reply. It’s basically table stakes of even entering the discussion at all to take as a premise that causing diseases is bad enough that unless the offsetting value was gigantic, such causes should be controlled and prevented.

It’s no different with ads. Lazy claims of oh but the value people get to stay connected or watch TV for free just don’t cut it. That approach doesn’t need rebuked, it’s just wrong. Baldly asserting that it’s wrong is perfectly fine.