[paulcole]

Ads aren’t bad. They’re a way to get content without needing to exchange money for it.

The user suffer more when the content goes away.

[arrosenberg]

Exchanging money for goods and services is the entire basis of the economy. Ads force people to pay with their attention span, which seems to have serious consequences - the user is suffering from attention deficit far more than an imagined lack of content.

[paulcole]

Well if money isn’t exchanged for the service of content (in some way), the content eventually goes away. The lack of content stops being imaginary.

[immibis]

Cool. Let me pay $20/month for an ad-free Internet (not just one site). I already have Youtube Premium.

[paulcole]

This is like saying "Cool. Let me pay $10,000 for a Ferrari. I already have a tricycle."

[immibis]

I suspect YouTube alone makes up the majority of my casual browsing data volume.

You could even make it $100/month if you wanted.

[account42]

That content is only ever produced out of monetary motivations is the biggest lie capitalism has sold us.

[nkozyra]

> Exchanging money for goods and services is the entire basis of the economy.

Sounds like advertising meets that description.

It's a transaction of value - potential future customers via the service of advertising.

[diffeomorphism]

Sounds like it doesn't and you missed the point. There are two parties that matter: the reader and the website.

Instead of addressing that you introduced a third party, which works for the website as a service. Correct, but irrelevant.

[arrosenberg]

It does not. Attention is a limited good, not capital. Capital is capital.

[nkozyra]

You've changed your definition.

Advertising is a service, it is fundamentally no different than any other service. We may find it annoying or distasteful, but it is a natural good from natural actors in a capitalist system.

[arrosenberg]

Subsidizing products with your attention span is not a natural thing in a capitalist system. What a ridiculous idea. Advertising is a service, it should be paid for with capital, not used as a subsidy or alternate form of payment.

[nkozyra]

> Subsidizing products with your attention span is not a natural thing in a capitalist system

You're looking at the wrong thing as capital and the wrong thing as the service.

The service is customer sourcing and the capital is literally capital.

It is a very natural capitalist creation, self-evidently so.

[UberFly]

You are correct overall that they are a legitimate way to trade for something with your attention but their application is so abused now. The push-back is worthwhile.

[itronitron]

Ads don't have to be bad, but most are for a variety of reasons... jarring graphics, animation, unrelated to the content. If a news organization is showing a lot of junky ads then I'm going to assume it is a failing news organization.

[tacker2000]

I get your argument, but more ads mean more intrusive JS and longer load times, which make the user experience worse. But yes, of course one needs to weigh these two sides. Free content needs to be monetized.

And AMP is a downside for everyone, i think we can agree on that. Seems like content creators didnt even get any of the promised benefits out of it.

[jonas21]

> And AMP is a downside for everyone, i think we can agree on that.

Wait, what? At the time it was introduced, it was literally the only counterbalance to the incentives of adding as many ads to your site as possible. Google has better ways of penalizing bad practices now, but that wasn't the case 7 years ago.

[Sakos]

There's a German news site (I think Zeit?) that has an interesting approach. When you try to access the site, it gives you an explicit choice (between two buttons) between the site with ads or subscribing to the site.

[dijksterhuis]

I respect being given a conscious choice up front.

NPR used to do something similar for GDPR — either accept their cookies or view the site content in plain text.

(edit: probably not in line with GDPR but heyho)

[immibis]

NPR's plaintext site is one of the best news sites ever.

Obviously, if you visit a news article and select to be redirected to plaintext, they don't redirect you to that article on the plaintext page for that article, but to the homepage, which makes it inconvenient in the hopes you won't select that option again. But once you see where to insert the article ID, it's good.

[jjulius]

Ads aren't, generally. Targeted advertising, however, is trash and needs to go away.