[theg2]

What a magical world you live in where everything is free and no one needs to be paid for their work.

Ads have been abused by companies over the years but whitelisting sites that whose content and services you value and don't abuse you with those ads are the only reason they can afford to exist.

Edit: I get it, you don't want ads. People have abused them over the years and that's bad. My only point is that whitelisting (or donating/subscribing to where possible) the sites you value keeps those sites running. It's nice that some sites don't need financial support to pay for reporters, editors, producers, and photographers but that's not the case for many sites that do great journalism.

[coldpie]

I host a half-dozen websites out of my own pocket with no ads. I pay for an Ars Technica subscription and don't view ads. Hacker News doesn't have ads, yet here we are. Wikipedia doesn't have ads.

I guess the world we live in is pretty magical!

[theg2]

Those are all subscription or donation (wikipedia) based examples. A lot of sites could never survive on those models or obtain the resources to manage them.

I'm all for blocking sites that abuse their users.

[Karunamon]

They all abuse their users in one way or another. Tracking me across the web? How about no?

What about distraction? Is time free now?

And that's before we get into the malware vector problems. The few tenths of a penny you got for me seeing your ad is much less than my hourly rate for cleaning up a network infected with the latest 0day du jour.

Is your (the collective your) company going to compensate me when one of your ads destroys my machine? No? Then I'm forced to conclude that you want the benefit with none of the responsibility.

The blockers stay on.

*ed I realize this comment sounds mighty dickish but I'm quite tired of advertising apologists demanding that I sacrifice my privacy, security, and time to access their all-important text. I decide if and how my computer renders a given piece of markup - if your business can't survive that, welp, not my problem. Fix your broken business model.

[wutbrodo]

I don't personally block ads, but I of course find all the arguments against tracking, malware, etc to be rather compelling, since they don't really fit any reasonable definition of consent, given many users' lack of awareness of tracking and the intentional failure of ad companies to be explicit about it.

> They all abuse their users in one way or another. Tracking me across the web? How about no? What about distraction? Is time free now?

But your comment reaches new heights of absurdity. Taking your attention is "abuse"? When you go to the store and they force you to pay for goods, is that theft and abuse? You're consuming a service for free, and the cost of that service is a modicum of attention. When we're not talking about the terms of the transaction being hidden from users, pretending that paying for services is "abuse" is frankly just pathetic. Grow up.

[Karunamon]

When I go to the store and pay for one of their goods and am injured in the store, the store is usually liable if the conditions were unsafe.

People who plaster ads up on their site and trust Google/Facebook/whoever to vet the ads for not being malware vectors are being irresponsible. Again, this respect is a two-way transaction, and the people who slap ads up on their site have demonstrated none for me.

[manigandham]

1) Tracking is not as bad as it's made out to be.

2) You have to pay something for the content: a passive ad is far more efficient and actually more private than direct payment.

3) Malware/scams/etc are an entirely different problem. That doesn't mean the model is broken, it just means that there are bad actors that need to be effectively dealt with. Otherwise we could point to any industry and say it all sucks because a few bad guys did some bad stuff.

[Karunamon]

1) We disagree.

2) No, I really don't. I didn't pay anything to access HN, or Reddit, or any of the other sites I browsed today, including ads. Somehow, the system is still working, the incessant crocodile tears of the advertising companies be damned.

3) The model is broken because this is a systemic problem, and that problem is a complete lack of vetting from the big ad networks and the sites that use them. It's entirely too easy for a random webmaster to log into Adsense/etc, get some random javascript code, slap it up on their site, and call it a day, without understanding the implications to them or their users.

With a lack of understanding comes a lack of care and/or responsibility - and without that care and responsibility, why should I hurt my privacy, attention, and security just so you can get a few pennies?

[manigandham]

Just because a single entity decides to run a forum for free (and reddit/hn are all user generated content) doesn't mean content businesses are all the same.

Again you're pointing to a model when the issue is the bad actors and the poor processes. Advertising is fine, it's the industry that needs to get better at technology and enforcing rules. Part of the problem is that this is a global industry and there's little regulation.

Publishers are getting a few pennies so they can produce content and run the site which you can visit at anytime and consume. You can choose not to go to that site - but you are still going there so there MUST be value you find there and that is what the publisher is working to be compensated for.

[coldpie]

To say nothing of the harm advertising does in general: convincing people to spend money they don't have on products they don't need, or worse, are actively harmful. Like junk food, soda, cigarettes. And then you get into the shady shit like payday loans, scam products, fake products, the list goes on...

[coldpie]

> Those are all subscription or donation (wikipedia) based examples.

That was precisely my point: there are other viable models than ad-supported.

> A lot of sites could never survive on those models or obtain the resources to manage them.

Tough shit.

[manigandham]

> Tough shit.

Not really, it might hurt in the short term but it only gets worse for users to have paywalled/closed access, which will actually lead to more ads and tracking.

[anc84]

The good old "there can not be free-of-cost content unless money is involved" fallacy.

I am a member of many communities whose hosting costs are paid by the communities, the administrative tasks are shared by members of the communities, I "consume" many sites which only exist because their authors want to express themselves, I use sites that exist because people feel the need to share their knowledge and collections of bytes. They all exist without a single ad. They exist because someone wants them to exist.

This comment was written and shared for free on the web without restrictions because I felt the urge to write it.

[manigandham]

How is this a fallacy?

It seems like you just cherry picked a few small sites and claim that if they can do it, everyone can.

Sure hosting costs are ridiculous cheap and now anyone can publish for next to nothing. But do you get all your content from your friends posts on Facebook? There's a reason why real original and valuable content requires dedicated staff to do it and that does cost money.

You don't look at movies and think "well that could just be done for free if they really cared about it" so why attribute that to good content that just happens to be in another medium?

[anc84]

I buy physical good newspapers and magazines with cash. They don't track me, they can't DRM paper, I prefer that.

[manigandham]

Your first comment was how content can/should be free but now you're saying you paid cash for newspapers - how is that related?

The whole point is content does cost money, regardless of medium. Just because it's an article online doesn't mean it's free.

If you prefer a certain type of medium that's fine, but that doesn't mean other types aren't valid or hold value.

[theg2]

Not all news and content creation can be done as a side job or hobby. The people who do journalism, create content, or support that goal of quality journalism need to make a living somehow.

[Touche]

It's entirely plausible that those things are not profitable enterprises any more. A user doesn't have to surrender his/her privacy to prop up a dying industry.

It's possible that journalism becomes supported by patronage the way art once was.

[anc84]

Absolutely. And I wholeheartedly think that enough people support high quality journalism. See the 1 million online subscribers to the NY Times.

The majority of online journalism seems to be regurgitated news agency reports and stuff that no one needs (or can get free from communities elsewhere).

lots of forums, blogs and aggregators perfected clickbait and cat picture distributions a decade ago.

[wutbrodo]

You picked a particularly terrible example, since the Times hasn't stopped struggling since introducing an online subscription, and most depressingly, is starting to experiment with the same clickbait bullshit that Buzzfeed popularized (things like increasingly questionably labeled "sponsored stories").

[Touche]

Bytes are distributed over the public internet. He/she has a right to ignore the bytes he/she doesn't care about.

[davidgerard]

about: Newsroom developer

Ads from newspapers are one of the biggest vectors for malwared ads, because they have so many viewers. You're a very efficacious channel for the malicious. Because newspapers have proven incompetent at not endangering their readers.

If you have an exciting new method of not malwaring your readers, that hasn't occurred to every newspaper that's malwared their readers so far, we'd love to see it in action! Until then, you really can't expect readers to just assume your competence in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Possibly you need to explore business models that don't risk malwaring your readers.

[theg2]

I worked for public media, the only ads we have are VERY basic PNGs served by DoubleClick or house membership ads for donations. Newsroom != newspaper and your assumption of how all news sites operate based on a few examples is incorrect.