As a data point I, a technical person who tweaks his computer a lot, was against adblocking for moral reasons (as a part of perceived social contract, where internet is free because of ads). Only later I changed mi mind on this because I became more privacy aware.
But ads are all of those things now, so I feel no obligation. I only got an ad blocker around the time ads were becoming excessively irritating.
When I first started out on the internet, ads were banners. Literally just images and a link that you could click on to go see some product. That was just fine.
However, that wasn't good enough for advertisers. They needed animations, they needed sounds, they needed popups, they needed some way to stop the user from just skimming past and ignoring the ad. They wanted an assurance that the user was staring at their ad for a minimum amount of time.
And, to get all those awful annoying capabilities, they needed the ability to run code in the browser. And that is what has opened the floodgate of malware in advertisement.
Take away the ability for ads to be bundled with some executable and they become fine again. Turn them back into just images, even gifs, and all the sudden I'd be much more amenable to leaving my ad blocker off.
Most people, including folks on here, think cookie banners are a problem, but they are just an annoying attempt to phish your agreement. As long as these privacy loopholes exist, we will keep hearing such stories even from large corporations with much to loose, which means the current privacy regulations do not go far enough.
Even back in the 1990s the internet was awash with popups, popunders and animated punch-the-monkey banner ads. And with the speed of dial up, hefty images slows down page loads too.
You must be a true Internet veteran if you remember a time ads weren’t annoying!
I'm not trying to be mean I'm just trying to historically parse your sentence/belief.
Because for me this is a simplified analogy of what happened on the internet:
a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs
b) a few years later a new guy called commercial business turned up and started using our club house and fucking around with our stuff
c) commercial business started going around our club house rearranging the furniture and putting graffiti everywhere saying the internet is here and free because of it. We're pretty sure it might have even pissed in the hallway rather than use the toilet and the whole place is smelling awful.
d) the rest of us started breaking out the scrubbing brushes and mops (ad blockers, extensions, VPNs, etc) trying to clean up after it
e) some of its friends turned up and started repeating something about social contracts and how business and ads built this internet place
f) the rest of us keep crying into our hands just trying to meet up, break out the slop buckets to clean up the vomit in the kitchen and some of us now have to wear gloves and condoms just to share things with our friends and stop the whole place collapsing
Quantity is a quality in itself. Your BBS was never going to support a million users. Once people figured out the network effect it was over for the masses. They went where the people are, and we've all suffered since.
"we" is doing a lot of work here. No clubhouse got optical switching working and all that fiber in the ground for example. Beyond POC, the Internet was all commercial interests.
This is sort of like arguing cutlery is a military enterprise. Like yes, that’s where knives came from. But that’s disconnected enough from modern design, governance and other fundamental concerns as to be irrelevant. The internet —and less ambiguously, the World Wide Web—are more commercial than military.
Source? Not doubting. But I have a friend who was buying airline tickets through CompuServe in the late 80s/early 90s.
Such as news and magazine sites, many of which are actively dying due to a lack of revenue.
I personally wish these sites could all switch to paid models, because I also don’t like ads.
But absent that, I’d like to support the sites I use so that they don’t go out of business.
Most publishers of content online are ad supported and struggling, and I want to make sure I’m contributing to their revenue somehow.
I don’t feel bad about blocking ads on sites I pay for though.
PayPal, Spotify, Stripe, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Facebook, ResearchGate, Flexport, Nubank, Rippling, Asana, Luft, Tesla, Microsoft, Apple, SpaceX
You can’t trust anything these days!
Being the VC to a company’s round B, C, and D (adding up to maybe 40% ownership/control) is VERY different from simply throwing some money at a trillion dollar company to see some returns.
If all Android users did this, something would change.
Firefox runs great 99.99% of the time. It’s easy to add extensions. So we should be pushing people to adopt it.
If you're on Android, Firefox supports many full desktop extensions, including uBlock Origin.
Last time I tried firefox on the iphone it was rubbish compared with safari. Same with some ad blocking app I had back in the day
There's also been other adblock apps for a long while, though (adguard comes to mind).
I think people think ads give way, way more money than they actually do. If you're visiting a website with mostly static ads then you're generating fractions of a cent in revenue for that website. Even on YouTube, you're generating mere cents of revenue across all your watch time for the month.
Why does YouTube premium cost, like, 19 dollars a month then? I don't know, your guess is as good as mine.
Point is, you wouldn't be paying 5.99. You could probably pay a dollar or two across ALL the websites you visit and you'd actually be giving them more money than you do today.
I don't want to defend ads, but whatever replaces them is going to be very disruptive. Maybe better, but very different.
- do these people understand the principles of making good products?
- is anyone clearly working towards a microtransaction system that could replace advertising and subscription models?
After attending two conferences, hundreds of conversations and hours spent researching, my conclusion to both questions was no. The community felt more like an ouroboros. It was disappointing.
I don't want to pay NYT a subscription fee, I want to pay them some fraction of a cent per paragraph of article that I load in. Same goes for seconds of video on YouTube, etc.
Apparently I'm alone in this vision, or at least very rare...
I looked at crypto currency because it seems like the obvious naive solution. it doesnt work. the cost of the transaction itself far outweighs the value of the transaction when dealing with fractions of a cent. you want an entire network to be updating ledgers with ~millions of records per ~$1000 moved. the fundamental tech of crypto leans towards slower, higher value transactions than high volume, small transactions. Lots of efforts have been made with some coins to bring down the bar of "high value, low volume" to meet everyday consumer usage rates and values - but a transaction history at the scale of every ad impression for every person is a tough ask and would perpetually be in an uphill battle against energy costs.
Ultimately, the conclusion I came to is that the service would need to be centralized, and likely treated as cash by not keeping track of history. Centralized company creates "web credits", user spends $5 for 10,000 credits, these credits are consumed when they visit websites. Websites collect a few credits from each user, and cash out with the centralized company. The issue is that since it would cost more to track and store all the transactions than the value of the transactions themselves, you have to fully trust the company to properly manage the balances.
I started building it and since I would be handling, exchanging, and storing real currency - it seemed subject to a lot of regulations. It is like a combination bank and casino.
i've thought about finishing the project and using disclaimers that buying credits legally owes the user nothing, and collecting credits legally owes the websites nothing, and operating on a trust system - but any smart person would see the potential for a rug pull on that and i figured there would not be much interest.
The alternative route of adhering to all the banking regulations to get the proper insurances needed to make the commitments necessary to users and websites to guarantee exchange between credits and $ seemed like too much for 1 person to take on as a side project for free
A typical credit is getting paid in, transacted once, and cashed out. And a transaction with a user ID, destination ID, and timestamp only needs 16 bytes to store. So if you want to track every hundredth of a penny individually, then processing a million dollars generates 0.16 terabytes of data. You want to keep that around for five years? Okay, that's around $100 in cost. If you're taking a 1% fee then the storage cost is 1% of your fee.
If your credits are worth 1/20th of a penny, and you store history for 18 months, then that drops the amount of data 17x.
(And any criticisms of these numbers based on database overhead get countered by the fact that you would not store a 10 credit transaction as 10 separate database entries.)
I wasn't fully envisioning credits only being transacted once before cashout either. I was thinking more along the lines of being able to create something that goes viral, a lot of people use it and you rack up a bunch of credits, and then you can sit on those credits and spend them as you use the internet without ever having to connect to a bank yourself. So people who are contributing more than they are consuming would rack up credits. they could use those credits to enrich their contributions, maybe pay for cloud services, etc.
the credits could form its own mini web economy if it got popular enough. As cool as this would all be if done honestly, I know that if i saw a company telling me to buy web credits to use anywhere on the internet and the websites get to decide how much to charge and they charge it automatically when i visit the website, and if the company i buy the credits from goes out of business then i may not be able to cash out or get my money back, then I likely wouldnt be buying those credits... so idk
Ads were the path of least resistance, and once entrenched, they effectively prevented any alternative from emerging. Now that we've seen how advertising scales, and how it's ruined our mediascape, we're finally looking at alternatives. Not dissimilar to how we reacted to pollution, once we saw it at scale.
And has roughly 2.7 billion monthly active users. This means the average YouTube user brings in around $1.23 per month. When you consider that CPM's can easily swing by 20X based on how wealthy the user demographic is, and willingness to pay a subscription is a strong signal for purchasing power, I would not be at all subscribed if a YouTube premium subscription was revenue-neutral for Google.
There would need to be a way for ISPs to know which websites are getting my traffic in order to know who to distribute the money to, which I'm not a fan of. But I think something along those lines, with anonymized traffic data, would work a treat.
> distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking
But I kinda see it like TV. Cable providers know what channels and shows people are watching. Obviously web browsing data is more personal and intimate so it's not the same thing, but it's a good starting point for a thought experiment.
You would have to either self-host your own VPN server somewhere (maybe on a public cloud provider) or if you are truly paranoid, use something like Tor.
The problem is that both the ISP and the websites would then go "Cool, we're getting $10 a month from them!" for about a minute before they started trying to come up with ways to start showing you ads anyways. With the level of customer appreciation ISPs tend to show, I'm sure they'd have no problem ignoring your complaints and would happily revoke your service if you stopped paying the now $10-higher price per month.
people with something to share, people with something to say, who share and say it because they want to
that's how pamphleteers worked, that's how the Internet worked
at scale, static (CMS-managed) information sites cost effectively nothing even for arbitrary amounts of traffic, and smoothed across a range of people sharing stuff, it approaches zero per person
publishing used to be free with your ISP, and edge CDN used to be (and still is) free to a point (an incredibly high volume point) as well
having people pay something nominal to say things instead of pay far too much in attention-distraction or money to consume things, would put this all back the right way round
Also, I agree that the platforms and paradigms we have are fucked up, but do believe that people who put work into making something deserve to charge for it if there are folks who’d pay.
The closest we've come is something like Apple News, which allows me to pay for a selected (by them, not me) subset of features on a selected (by them, not me) subset of news sites. Can't somebody do this right?
Apple News remained fantastic until renewal of agreements when publishers demanded rights to insert additional ads.
Apple can't not have premium sources in there, so...
If websites could charge 5.99/month, they would.
If a website was charging 5.99/month, they would not stop spying on you.
Ads are a weird game. People say you're ripping off the website if you adblock, but aren't you ripping off the advertiser if you don't buy the product? If I leave YouTube music playing on a muted PC, someone is losing.
Ads won't go away. They'll just move from infesting websites to infesting AI chatbots.
Something Awful is a one time fee of ten bucks (a few bucks more to get rid of ads).
I wouldn’t really mind a one-time fee for a lot of sites if it meant that they didn’t have to do a bunch of advertising bullshit,
Still, I would be willing to pay a bit more for a website that I actually like if it's a one-time fee; I actually paid for the "Platinum" membership for Something Awful so that I would have access to search, and a custom icon, so I think the total damage was around $30.
Dunno, I guess I just feel like people will pay for things if those things don't suck. I think the fact that the only way that companies can really compete for people's time is giving it away for free [1] is a testament that most stuff on the internet is actually kind of shit.
[1] yeah I know something something you are the product something something.
ETA: I hate self-promotion but a friend of mine told me I should mention that I did write a blog post talking about this very specific example: https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/2026/02-February/Peo...
Please explain this term. Google was not useful.
But the gist of it is, companies do free to play systems that support themselves by a very small portion of their user base spending a very large amount of money. The free/low paying users find themselves with poor/no service as the companies do anything to attract more whales.
K based economies are somewhat related as you see a very small portion of the participants in an economy make a huge amount of money while everyone else gets poor.
This is highly debateable. I wouldn't mind paying a bit for the websites I am using as there are just a few platforms and some blogs that I would be happy to pay a small amount for.
Not sure on that. It was far, far better before what drives ads today. I've gotten more value from random people's static HTML pages in 1999, than I ever have from something in the last 25 years.
This just led me to think of news sites, and how they've turned mostly into click-bait farms in the last decade to 15.
Gives me pause. Didn't the king of "doing it online" buy a newspaper, but the end result wasn't an improvement on its fate? If there is any way to make cash from news, shouldn't Bezos have been able to do it??
I would pay money for that.
Such content would also suck with flashy ads too.
It's pretty easy tech I think, it's just never hit a flash point. But it could.
We literally had all of this. We had regular, affordable, high quality printed media for every hobby and interest and industry, that you could get delivered to your home address and collect in your own archive if you want, and your local library could do the same.
Those pieces of paper could not track anything about you. They tried, selling their subscriber lists, but that was the best tracking they could provide! You could easily ignore ads, and in return they had to make ads interesting enough in various ways that you might look at them anyway, or they had to make their ads directed at people who went looking for whatever you were selling.
It was an objectively better system in every way.
The Sears catalog was worlds better than Amazon. You weren't going to buy a fraudulent item for one.
Tech is a failure. It has made so much worse. It has only served to allow businesses to cut costs while extracting money from every single local community that used to allow such cash to circulate locally.
We should ban all internet advertising.
What if we limited advertising to images which don't set tracking cookies, so you would get something sort of like banner headlines. Maybe say the image had to be served from the same place as the rest of the content so you don't get to track readers with image trackers
News only made money when the newspapers could leverage their circulation numbers to run their own ads network. The classifieds section was a money machine. I remember full-page ads in the Washington Post from local car dealerships showing every model they were selling. They likely ran different ads for distribution in other regions, probably 10Xing their money. Google and Facebook killed that.
What Bezos bought was a corpse of a business, but one with strong journalistic credibility known for historic investigative analyses such as the Watergate cover-up that earned public goodwill. He was buying that goodwill and slowly asphyxiating it to align with his own interests.
There is a story of this PlentyOfFish founder (who exited to Match.com for 500m cash) that in the beginning he got 3-4 USD per click
Ads are a symptom of the problem that people want human generated content for free; they either do not value the content enough to pay for it, or cannot afford it. Ads do not solve for those problems.
No disagreement there, except the early web was not about scale. The sites you visited may have been created by someone as a hobby, a university professor outlining their courses or research, a government funded organization opening up their resources to the public, a non-profit organization providing information to the public or other professionals, or companies providing information and support for their products (in the way they rarely do today).
> people need to eat, pay for rent
Those people were either creating small sites in their spare time, or were paid to work on larger sites by their employer.
There were undoubtedly gaps in the non-commercial web. On the other hand, I'm not sure that commercializing the web filled those gaps. If anything, it is so "loud" that the web of today feels smaller and less diverse than the web of the 1990's.
How does HN exist? Wealthy benefactors. Do I appreciate it any less? I do not, I am very grateful. But solutions are needed where a wealthy benefactor has not stepped in or does not exist, a commercial business model is untenable, the government does not or will not fund it, and the scale is beyond a single person spending a few hours a week on it for free.
In the 19th century, economist William Stanley Jevons found that, as coal became more readily and easily available, demand for it went up. This was counter to the theories of others, and the principle became known as Jevons Paradox.
Jevons Paradox (a concept that is widely misunderstood, especially when it comes to tech and finance bros talking about AI) demonstrates that, a resource becomes more abundant and easily accessible, demand for that resource rises. As the web took off, people hungered more and more for digital content -- especially as internet accessibility became faster and cheaper.
To keep up -- and to pay for being able to keep up -- increasingly sophisticated monetization models were introduced.
In any case, ad models are one thing. But it's the data brokering that's even more insidious.
The irony is that if internet content were harder to access, the population on the whole wouldn't want it as much.
Now, the culmination of Jevons Paradox has spun itself around a bit in this case. We now live in a world where those profiting off of ad models and data brokering actively try to get people to demand internet content more. (Look no further than the recent social-media-addiction lawsuits.)
I do not think that this is a workable model. Firstly, because it leads inevitably to monopolization, because you don't want to pay 50,000 people for content, you want to pay 10 people for content. Secondly, because most content is bad and a waste of time and you don't find out until after you've bought it. Thirdly, and most importantly, is that there's no actual, clear separation between "news" and "advertising."
Content is generated because people who want that content generated sponsor it beforehand, and dictate the conditions under which the delivery of that content will be accepted as a fulfillment of that sponsorship. The people sponsoring that content can have any number of reasons for doing it; it can make them money directly (i.e. I have articles about cats, people who like cats subscribe to my cat website), which if you're a linear thinker you think is the only way, or it can make them money indirectly, maybe by leading consumers to particular products or political stances that they have a stake in.
This is simply the truth. Your preferences don't matter, and it's not a moral question. If you pay for content, you're more valuable to advertise to, not less. A lot of work is put into producing trash that you regret having read or watched, and was really intended to make you support Uganda's intervention in a Zambian election (or whatever.) If you "value" reading it, you've failed an intelligence test. Its value is elsewhere for the people to paid for it to be written.
What's recently shown itself to scale is small groups of people sponsoring journalists and outlets who put out tons of content for free. The motivation of those sponsors is usually to spread the points of view of the journalists they sponsor widely, because they believe them to be good.
There was never a pay model that supported things that people didn't feel passionate about or entertained by. Newspapers cost less than the paper they were written on. Television news was always a huge money loser that was invested in to raise the social status and respectability of the network. If you feel passionately about anything, you're far better off paying people to listen, to give you a chance, than to lock away content. Journalism as a luxury good can work, but only for Bloomberg terminals and Stratfor, when it is used to make other lucrative decisions by its buyers.
> orgs like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others who have an endowment behind them
This is simply sponsorships by governments and billionaires. Never ever been any significant shortage of that (the patron saint of this is King Alfonso X.*) All of those people have wide interests that can often be served by paying for media to be produced or distributed. It's where we got our first public libraries from.
For me, the fact that Substack and Patreon almost work is more important, and is something that wouldn't have been as easy without the benefits that the internet brings for the collaboration of distant strangers.
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[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_X_of_Castile#Court_cul...
I'm not signing up for a subscription for that journal, but paying a small amount for access to that one article is a no brainer. I don't subscribe to a newspaper either, but I'll happily buy one.
The New European did this a decade ago using "agate" (named after the smallest font you'd get in a newspaper), top up with a few quid, then pay for each article.
Sadly didn't catch on. TNE dropped it in 2019[0]. Agate still exists, having been renamed to "axate", but consumers aren't willing to pay with anything other than their time.
[0] https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/new-european-drops-micro-pay...
> Sadly you are atypical and the vast majority are freeloaders
Citation needed.
> who even without ads or tracking will try and find another way not to pay
Why is this relevant? People try to get free stuff all over the place and I don't find it makes my life difficult.
> Citation needed.
I think we need to agree upon a definition of freeloader before citing sources to support the claim. I've found that many people who use the word have a much more transactional view of the world than I do.
No, I won't. I'll just stop using them. So will almost everyone. I don't think there's a single ad-supported product that would survive by converting to a paid subscription, because they're all so profoundly unnecessary.
Sure we had that in the print times, but we had a lot more "slow" content that you could sit with and contemplate over a day, week or month.
One of my favorite uses of AI is to ask it, "what are today's headlines?" You completely bypass all of the sensational nonsense.
We used to have "static" banners on sites, that would just loop through a predefined list on every refresh, same for every user, and it worked. Not for millions of revenue, but enough to pay for that phpbb hosting.
The advertisers started with intrusive tracking, and the sites started with putting 50 ads around a maybe paragraph of usable text. They started with the enshittification, and now they have to deal with the consequences.
There was a time when Boing Boing was a decent little print magazine. And the web site went a decade before turning into... whatever the heck it is now.
And Reality Hackers and Mondo 2000 were "guaranteed unreadable," but they were on the bleeding edge of desktop publishing style and technology.
I'm old enough to remember typing BASIC games from COMPUTE! into my C64 and reading about the latest Star Trek film in Starlog.
I sing the praises of Omni, even though it was clear they were probably snorting a lot of cocaine in their offices.
I can't be the only one who remembers Computer Shopper, but I have to admit it was years before I realized they had a bit of content and were more than just an ad sheet for Micro Center.
PC World wasn't my jam, but I respected the role it played. UnixWorld and Info World were more my thing.
And I even read the stories and articles in Playboy in the 70s. Believe it or not, they had some amazing authors publish stories there.
Hands-up... it was still pretty sexy.
This isn’t Nielsen ratings informing cable networks where to throw up which commercials in certain regions. This is far more dangerous and intense. So the conversation needs to be framed differently than the implied bar of “intrusive/annoying/incessant ads.”
I get why Chrome doesn't, and that's why you should not use it. But Netscape? Edge? What is stopping them?
Browsing the web without an ad blocker is a miserable experience. Users who have never tried or don't know how to set one up would be delighted.
That is your experience. Mine is the opposite.
>Users who have never tried or don't know how to set one up would be delighted.
Perhaps.
"I would prefer not to." — Bartleby, The Scrivener
And I don't think Google would lightly give up being the default search engine on the dominant mobile platform in the USA, and significantly more dominant among upper-income users.
The real reason is that the average person neither suffers with ads nor finds ads invasive, despite what a vocal online minority would have you believe. We just ignore them and get on with life. ::shrug::
The suffering isn't acute, it's death by a thousand cuts as your mind erodes into a twitchy mess. Look at the comment section of a nice youtube video and see people outraged at getting blasted with an ad at the wrong moment.
Most people don't like ads, but we love the stimulation of the screen more so we suffer them, regardless of the damage done.
The average person has never heard of HN. It isn't the case that the average person's experience with today's internet ads is that of having their "... mind erode[s] into a twitchy mess."
The average person doesn't look at the comment section of a nice YouTube video.
>Most [HN] people don't like ads....
Most people don't suffer — at least not consciously — as a result of ads.
Would it really? It seems to me that most normal users spend most of their time and attention on apps, not in browsers.
They need to be protected by the state because they can't think for themselves.
The problem is in most countries and especially America the state is a corrupt cesspool.
Exactly because no one in his right mind is going to work in "state". So the "state" is more like 95% "fucking idiots" as you put it, and that is self-reinforcing.
“uBlock Origin (uBO) is a CPU and memory-efficient wide-spectrum content blocker for Chromium and Firefox. It blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, popups, annoying anti-blockers, malware sites, etc., by default using EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe's Blocklist, Online Malicious URL Blocklist, and uBO filter lists. There are many other lists available to block even more [...]
Ads, "unintrusive" or not, are just the visible portion of the privacy-invading means entering your browser when you visit most sites. uBO's primary goal is to help users neutralize these privacy-invading methods in a way that welcomes those users who do not wish to use more technical means.”
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock?tab=readme-ov-file#ublock-...
What a silly complaint. How is an ad blocker supposed to work if it can't read and change the data on a website?
You might as well complain that your Camera app wants access to your camera.
> I currently use no extensions to keep my security posture high.
Ironically, skipping uBlock Origin because of the security concern is lessening your security posture. Are you familiar with the term "malvertising"?
Ublock is great, but I am finding fingerprinting that gets past it and that's what I'm referring to.
But turning on privacy.resistfingerprinting in about:config (or was it fingerprintingProtection?) would break things randomly (like 3D maps on google for me. maybe it's related to canvas API stuff?) and made it hard to remember why things weren't working.
Not really sure how to strike a balance of broad convenience vs effectiveness these days. Every additional hoop is more attrition.
I thought uBlock Origin was now dead in Chrome?
I remember a few hacks to keep it going but have now migrated to Firefox (or sometimes Edge…) to keep using it.
--disable-features=ExtensionManifestV2UnsupportedWhich is concerning. Until you realise I do the same thing a few days later and I'm still unique.
It is not telling you that the test site has never seen you before, because the eff isn't storing your fingerprint for later analysis and tracking
It could actually tell you about which real tracking vendors are showing you as "Seen and tracked" so it's pretty annoying they don't do that.
If that site shows you as having a unique fingerprint, I guarantee you are being tracked across the web. I've seen the actual systems in usage, not the sales pitch. I've seen how effective these tools are, and I haven't even gotten a look at what Google or Facebook have internally. Even no name vendors that don't own the internet can easily track you across any site that integrates with them.
The fingerprint is just a set of signals that tracking providers are using to follow you across the internet. It's per machine for the most part, but if you have ever purchased something on the internet, some of the providers involved will have information like your name.
Here is what Google asks ecommerce platforms to send them as part of a Fraud Prevention integration using Recaptcha:
https://docs.cloud.google.com/recaptcha/docs/reference/rest/...
If it doesn't store the fingerprints then how does it tell the difference between
5 identical looking browsers connecting from 5 different IPs
1 browser connecting 5 times from 5 different IPs