[anc84]

We suffer that garbage not because people like you and me did not think of _money_ as reward for other people's projects but because of advertising, tracking and click counts.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with publishing things for free, doing things for free and consuming things for free. The best content on the web is done by people from their own interest in sharing. Personal contacts, exchange of information, feedback and community are so much more worth than money when it comes to motivating the production of good things.

[XorNot]

Also paying for things has a low success rate in reducing advertising - a customer who will pay for something is a good target to advertise more too.

[jdofaz]

Agreed, see basic cable tv

[asdff]

Paywalls are a great alternative to intrusive ads for a larger publisher. NYT has been doing very well the last couple of years on their digital subscription model.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/business/media/new-york-t...

[runako]

Your point may be valid, but the NYT is a poor example of paywalls as an alternative to intrusive ads.

I'm a paying subscriber to the NYT. When I open their homepage now, the page is split horizontally with an ad taking up about 40%-50% of the entire screen. The "The New York Times" header is about halfway down the page, and the first actual content probably starts at 85% or even below that.

Anecdotally, the NYT runs even more intrusive ads than this to paid subscribers. Off the top of my head, I would say their modal popup video ad is the worst.

[inapis]

For the past few days I’ve also been unable to read articles on the NYT app without the page jumping around to load ads as I scroll. And I’m a subscriber to boot. I’ve a Pihole on the network and it still isn’t a tolerable experience.

[bryan2]

I've been thinking about subscribing. Do ad blockers take care of this?

[bad_user]

When consuming, it's never for free, unless it's a hobby.

Look at the Hacker News homepage right now and count the websites and projects created and maintained as hobbies. If it's not a hobby and it's not paid, then the content you're viewing is an advertisement.

From an economic point of view, the problem with free content is that it's killing the paid alternatives. This is capitalism and in terms of price it's a race to the bottom. And you can't beat a zero price tag.

Just an example, how many visitors of Hacker News still use a @gmail.com email address or a free Dropbox account? By my estimation it's the vast majority, judging by the comments I've been reading. So we are talking about a demographic that earns well (compared with the average) and that doesn't blink when paying for lattes, but that is unable to pay for services that keep their email or data safe. And then you see people outraged whenever new limits are imposed on the free accounts, which is quite unbelievable.

Not trying to shame anyone in particular here and I understand that this is simply how the market works, my rant is basically about human nature. We consume, but we never learned to give back unless we are forced and you can see this in everything we do, like for example in our relationship with nature. In my mind the problems with the environment that we've created are the same problem.

[zulgan]

this was exactly my thought when I made https://scrambled-eggs.xyz/ , now I pay for gmail, google calendar, photos and etc way more than money

[ramses0]

It’s like visual zModem...

[everdrive]

Part of this is just the plethora of content. There's too much content, too much to savor and focus on. There's always something new, but there's too much to retain. If you were starved for content, you'd pay for it more often, and you'd enjoy it more often.