Why don't I get paid for my HN posts? Do I owe you for your reply? Do you owe me for this reply?

You work out how we commoditize every interaction into tiny micropayments so MBAs are happy with our time allocations and let me know. Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.

> Why don't I get paid for my HN posts?

That's between you and HN and has nothing to do with my consumption of your comment.

> Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.

No one likes ads, but expecting free content is silly.

Who is saying they expect free content?

I'd pay a monthly fee for unmolested search results. I pay for Youtube Premium. I only watch ad-free content that I pay for.

I don't want the content for free - the free stuff is usually worse in quality anyway. I just want to be left alone by advertisers. I don't need what they are selling and the reduce my ability to think. The sheer amount of noise they add to the world makes them a problem.

> Who is saying they expect free content?

Anyone using an adblocker is expecting free content.

Do I also must feel obliged to read every ad page on a magazine? Can't change to another tv channel during the half time? Was I stealing when in the nineties I recorded movies on VHS skipping commercials?

I would say no, and I think websites are not different from media I listed above. If they make or don't make enough money it's not my business. I am free to consume their freely distributed products as I like.

I would totally run an ad blocker that showed me static text or image-based ads. No JavaScript, no animations or video, and I'll happily view ads.

I disagree. I use an adblocker because I refuse to be monetized via freemium tactics. I pay to support some sites that are of interest to me, on most other sites I'm never even given the option.

Advertisements directly lower the quality of any content I'm consuming and I am expecting high quality content.

I both pay for my ISP to connect to the web. I also pay to host web sites that I own which are low cost to me. I also want people to see them and don't run any sort of advertising or data collection on them. It's worth it to me to have my work and information available on the web for other people to use, and even has resulted in me profiting indirectly from it.

If someone wants to turn a profit on their site, that's fine. Do I need to accept whatever they want to serve me when I visit their page? No. Do I need to buy a product from their store if it's not something I'm interested in, even though the payment may go to helping their hosting costs? No.

Remember when the internet was just a bunch of weirdos dialing in and communicating with each other / creating documents about subjects of mutual interest? Who should have been getting paid back then?

I feel like there are some IRC channels that owe me some dividends.

The funny thing is that the content published for free by the weirdos from the past was 100x better that the ad-driven SEO crap we have today.

Also, a lot of that content still exists but it is hidden behind the SEO garbage.

This is just not true and is particularly obtuse. I am not expecting free content using an adblocker, there is often just no way to avoid ads with some products.

I pay for plenty of subscription streaming services “ad free tier”. I buy in app purchases to remove ads. Back when I use to buy Windows PCs, I either bought from the MS store or business laptops to avoid adware.

If I were to ever buy an Android phone (I wouldn’t because Google). It would be a Google device.

I also pay more for an AppleTV than a Roku because half of the Roku screen and the hard coded buttons on the remote are ads.

> No one likes ads, but expecting free content is silly.

It's not always possible to buy out of advertising. One of my fave sites anandtech.com has (I guess relatively reasonable) ads, and I can't subscribe or whatever to get rid of them.

I'm also generally OK with Adwords v1.0 ads, which had virtually no chance of autoplaying a super loud video, running malware on my machine, breaking the layout of a page as I'm trying to click on something, or masquerading as genuine content.

Ad blockers respond to the fact that users have very little ability to control their ad experiences, even in ways we probably think are appropriate like buying out of them. What you're implying here (ads vs. free content) is a false dichotomy.

it also doesn't matter whether a business offers subscriptions, because ads can (and will) always inevitably be layered on top as an additional revenue source. see newspapers, radio, tv, and even real estate for prior art in this regard, and cars, appliances, and other internet-connected goods as ongoing evolutions.

ads vs. free content is indeed a very false dichotomy.

> That's between you and HN and has nothing to do with my consumption of your comment.

Oh the irony! Likewise, the agreement between the content company and the ad company has nothing to do with my consumption of the content. The content company agrees to show ads for the ad company. The ad company agrees to make ads for the content company to show and pay them to show the ads. I make no agreement with either. I download the content and choose not to download the ad. It’s my bandwidth.

Why, life is full of free content. I sit on a park bench and talk to a friend we are providing free content to each other; when my son plays with our kids in the playground it is free content. When 22 strangers pay ball in the park they are providing free content to each other. Life is full of examples of people providing free contents to people around them, so why the internet should be the exception? This frame of mind that everything needs to be a transaction is rotten.

I don't mind ads on broadcast TV or radio because they fund the content and don't insist on tracking me.

The privacy invasion that accompanies web ads leads me to treat them as malware and prevent their execution on my devices. I don't care about non-personalized ads (e.g. the 1P-hosted display ads on Ravelry).

I don’t expect free content, I expect that if your business can’t survive without ads it should disappear from the face of the earth.

Going without is better than ad funded. The goal of me running ad blockers is not just to make my life nicer but to make ad funded shit (i.e. most of the current internet) unviable.

Paywall away! If it’s good enough for the money, I’ll always pay for it.

This is maybe the one thing where Bitcoin or another blockchain-based payment network could have been a net benefit in theory (both as a measure to prevent spam and to reward content creators)... but in practice it turned out to be nothing more than a giant planetary heating system.

To my surprise, I discovered proof-of-work was originally an anti-spam solution for email! [0] Pretty interesting stuff.

[0]: http://www.hashcash.org/

or any open micropaymemts type platform. I always expected the journalists to make such a thing-pay whatever $50 bucks a month and it is split between the content publishers you visit. Better than a few people like me subscribing to as many papers as i can and most people being the prey of the asveetisers and having terrible roadblocks to just learning the news.

I have complicated feelings on this — content creators need to be paid for their work but the ad networks have done a ton of collateral damage, too: I've had major sites like nytimes.com or youtube.com send me malware via Google's ad network, and ads make the web significantly slower and less reliable. I avoided using an ad blocker for years but installed Firefox Focus everywhere a while back after getting tired of ads breaking things or using half of my data plan and 45 seconds to deliver a crappy 32kb JPEG along with 8MB of JavaScript.

The big thing we need is some kind of action against Google: they currently are the best positioned to penalize operators of sites slowed by ads but the search team isn't going to cut into their ad business and Chrome is going to continue slow-walking attempts to make browsers restrict ad networks. It'd also be nice if there was liability for malware delivered by ads — something like they have to pay a fine up front and try to recover it from their advertiser, forcing them to actually vet people first.

What I'd like would be publishers self-hosting ads — forcing them to take more responsibility for the security risks — and more effort into alternative payment mechanisms. I liked the idea of Google Contributor but one big challenge for that is that even a less half-hearted version probably wouldn't generate enough money to be viable because most people consider ads a reasonable cost for free content.

I'm not sure content creators need to be paid for their work. At least, not all. What internet surveillance does is motivate people to create awful content that nobody in the market would pay for in order to skim dollars from what is largely a privacy invading, fraudulent vacuum of an industry.

People will pay for good content, they did for a long time before there was an internet or a surveillance industry. There were books, films, subscription TV services, paid for audio. There were also steady streams of novel manuscripts, demo tapes and screenplays that went straight into the bin because they were rubbish. Now the rubbish hangs around on a webpage surrounded by trackers, luring people in with clickbait titles and lies, and multiplying beyond the ability of even google to sort out.

That sounds like an argument for better payment mechanisms but people still need to be paid.

Yes, people paid for content prior to the internet but there were also problems — many good things went unnoticed because not enough discovered them while plenty of garbage got tons of attention because the creator had some personal connection to publishers, reviewers, DJs, etc. One of the things I loved about the rise of the web was that it provided so many opportunities to find things which weren't going to run in my local newspaper, be stocked by the local book or music shops (if you weren't lucky enough to have good indie options), or the pile of mud a lot of the big radio stations were often playing (this got a lot worse in the 90s when Clear Channel started buying all of the radio stations so questions about what got mainstream coverage in many markets came down to what one guy in Texas wanted).

I don't want to lose that — whether it's counterpressure to the huge race-to-the-bottom advertising market for more selective sponsorship, something like Apple/Stripe Pay to make it super easy for people to get paid for their work, etc.

> That sounds like an argument for better payment mechanisms but people still need to be paid.

Paying people for good content doesn't fix the problem. The internet is still cluttered with awful content drowning out the useful stuff. Not because people are trying hard and learning or just plain love their awful guitar playing even if nobody is watching, but because they're getting paid by surveillance. What we need is the absence of that incentive.

This is one of those cases where the free market would actually fix the problem if there was some sensible regulation applied. Sadly it'll never be quick enough to catch up with the technology.

Particularly since the prestigious sites like NYTimes are having their valuable users be tracked and monetized by otherpeople via the ad nwtworks. And the people paying for ads are paying for a lot of fraud. It is another industry where they got rid of scruples and now have bad actors up and down the whole ecosystem. fortunately/hopefully the whole experience is so unpleasant it is ripe for disruption.

I can't speak for the GP, but here's my answer:

I don't feel I'm owed anything. I just refuse to consume ads. Sometimes that means I pay a subscription fee. Sometimes I read it with my blocker on and the creator goes without revenue to get their message out. And sometimes the creator won't serve up their content unless I disable my blocker, so I shrug and turn my attention elsewhere.

The problem for creators is that there's a glut of content online. It's just way more than anyone needs. The best creators can afford monetize directly, the good ones can do custom ads integrated into their content, and the rest have to churn out clickbait, top 11 lists, and ludicrously "optimized" content laden with ad-network garbage. It sucks to be mediocre, but I don't feel I owe anyone that revenue stream.

I'm not owed free content. What I am owed is the right to determine for myself what code runs on my computer. Ads are visually oppressive, violate privacy, and are frequently vectors for malware. I am in no way obligated to allow any website to run them on my computer.

When a website wants to make viewing their ads mandatory for viewing their content, that is their prerogative. Most don't, and I'm not obligated to volunteer my CPU for their ads.

On a similar sentiment to the GP's, I'm owed nothing.

I will take the content as long as they don't bother blocking me, and will try to get more people to do the same. Their business model does not work if they start blocking everybody, it also doesn't work if too many people take the content without the ads. That means I'm helping them fail, what is absolutely good. The sooner they all go away, the better.

Ad-funded businesses are mostly bad for society anyway, hopefully if enough people get ad blockers their business models will become non-viable. So, those of us running ad blockers are actually providing a public service for free, it is quite generous!

It's not a question of being owed free content, it's a question of being able to access the content without being inundated with ads blocking the content from every direction. I give money to the content creators that matter to me (e.g., the very local newspaper, NPR, a few podcasts), but I remember the shock of seeing what life was like with a vanilla IE install on Windows with a work computer. After going to the website of the auto dealership to make a service appointment, I got continual ads for Chrysler automobiles (which means that for all the tracking the advertisers got negative value because I wasn't looking to buy).

Reading some of your other content, it feels like you're presenting this false dichotomy between "free content" and "content supported by the most disgusting and shitty ads possible".

There's a world of a difference between a Linus Tech Tips style sponsored segment and some jarring ad that constantly interrupts your YouTube video to scream at you about KFC.

Same for text content where they'll insert outright scams that use disgusting or offensive images to farm clicks throughout the article.

If advertising wasn't so obnoxious, people wouldn't go to such lengths to block it.

He's not owed free content, he's given it.

There is, I think, a valid argument that we got here today because in the early days of the web:

1. People wanted content without paying for it.

2. Creators wanted/needed financial support to make and host their work.

Advertising filled the void between those two things. You can think of it as sort of a natural, emergent property. No one wanted advertising, but the way the individual actors behaved—web users preferring sites that didn't charge them, creators that didn't advertise going out of business—led to the rise of advertising.

I think that is part of why some people don't think of advertising as morally bad. No one deliberately nefariously foisted it onto the world, it just arose from the behavior of individuals. That behavior created an environment, and the environment evolved the dominance of ads.

You can use that exact same argument justify the use of ad-blockers now.

People using ad blockers are not actively trying to harm creators. They are just using the web and tools available in the way that makes the most sense for them. This is exactly the same as when they chose to prefer non-paid ad-supported content before. The system gave them options, and they chose the ones that they prefer.

Creators will in turn make the choices that make the most sense for them. If ad blockers mean that they no longer make money from ads, they'll find other ways to be sustainably creative. Markets aren't magic solutions to all problems, but in this case I think the market is working pretty damn efficiently.

People are using ad blockers because ads are bad for them. If consumers improving the quality of their own life is a problem for the system, the system should change. And in order to change, it needs systemic incentives to do so. Ad blockers create that incentive.

An argument against ad blockers is essentially an argument for forcing users to consume something toxic. Imagine if McDonald's stopped selling burgers in isolation, required you to buy combos, and then forced you to drink your entire soda. When people who wanted to cut back on unhealthy sugar complained, they were told that they're the problem because McDonald's makes most of its profit from drinks. If they don't drink the soda then McDonald's won't be as profitable and then they won't be in business. That's basically the argument against ad blockers.

But... a burger joint that forced you to chug soda should be out of business, or should at least have to change its pricing in a way that lets people eat in a healthier manner. Ad blockers enable consumers to "stop drinking the soda" in the attention combo offered by sites.

I'm not owed content, I simply don't believe in copyright because it's impossible to actually restrict it practice. I base my morality on my conscience, not the law. I don't feel wrong at all to get information without paying to it.

"Information wants to be free" used to be part of the hacker ethos.

To me it's not about getting free content, it's about not paying with my information and being unable to pay any other way. If a site wants to use ad networks that track me across the web, too bad for them. And also too bad if they don't offer a subscription model that disables ads AND tracking.

Also, ads can be served in ways that makes blocking much more difficult. It's just harder to do, and harder to track users across sites. (and therefore, probably less lucrative to the site owners).

What happened to serving ads based on site content? How is using poor algorithms that require a lot of tracking and then make bad guesses about your interests any better?

If they don't want me to have it for free, they should charge for it. And if no one would pay for it, it's not valuable content. Their poor business model isn't my problem.

Insert Cathy Newman "So what you're saying is..." meme.

Actually, I don't. But what the ad companies do is worse than freeloading, so I'm still in the positive. And I do pay for services that I use a lot.

I don't. I subscribe to the publications that I regularly read, but their websites are still mostly unusable without an ad blocker.

I would gladly visit other sites but with SEO exploitation they are staying in the way. So maybe they owe us.