[b112]

internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads

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??

[OhMeadhbh]

I would love to get something more akin to a monthly print issue of BYTE, Omni, Starlog, Reality Hackers, WIRED and Dr Dobbs Journal without blinky, shouty ads that cause the content to re-render every 10 seconds.

I would pay money for that.

[b112]

E-ink is getting cheaper and cheaper, there's a lot of 6" screen devices for $100. If it dropped to $100 for a 11" screen, that would be a respectable size for a magazine. I cite eink as most are distraction free, or can be, and are very easy on the eyes.

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.

[mrguyorama]

You miss the point.

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.

[OhMeadhbh]

I might recomment a middle ground before banning 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

[throwawayq3423]

You make the argument from the consumer side, it's hard to argue, but digital systems are far more profitable. So that's how we got the world we got.

[autoexec]

It turns out that "makes the most money for a small amount of people" is pretty much the same as "makes everything shitty for everyone else". It's time that we either stop accepting "most profitable" as an excuse for making things worse or start regulating/punishing bad behavior until it becomes so costly that it's no longer profitable.

[fl4regun]

Your response comes packaged with a pill that I believe many people would not swallow: If it makes more profit then we should do it.

[b112]

You miss the point.

Hardly. I'm the guy upthread, lamenting the current state of things.

But with e-ink, you can be detached. Knowing someone buys a newspaper is hardly a surprising thing. To put it in perspective, a large number of people subscribed to the paper, and it was delivered daily. The same was true of magazines subscriptions. As long as the media is offline (eg, PDF, epub, similar), and the reader OSS, then the tracking and ads aren't an issue still.

--

I don't disagree with how poor things are, but one issue is government moves slowly. Laws being passed today, are the result of trends 20 years ago. For example, in my legal jurisdiction, vendors (eg, Best Buy, big box stores) are responsible for the thing they sell. It's not just "ship it back to manufacturer", for obvious reasons.

Eventually the issues with e-trade will be dealt with, just as issues with shoddy sellers were deal with a century ago. Here's an example...

Back in the 50s people would send items through the mail, then demand people pay for them, or pay for return shipping. I'm not kidding. Even when it wasn't easily defensible in civil court, all the legal threats would scare some into paying.

So laws were passed. If you receive something in the mail you didn't order? It's yours. Period.

But this took a decade to happen, if not more.

This is the sort of thing which will happen in this new market.

And yes, Amazon sucks as it is now.

It's really quite fascinating to me how a lot of new markets aren't about novel, but instead about not having terrible behaviour regulated. For example, Amazon has the worst customer service in all existence. It used to be good, but they now take immense pains to hide all support channels, and where I live, it's a maze of incomprehensible clicks to even attempt to get a chat.

So... I have to call now. Every time. And now they have the same wall of "noise" on the phone, so it's harder to get through there. In the past, I've done chargebacks when I can never reach a company, and that will be the inevitable conclusion here too.

Which shows how incredibly stupid Amazon is, when this household buys $4k of stuff a month from them, and just has edge-case returns sometimes. I'm sure they'll cancel my account first time, and, well, who cares.

When companies get to this level of "screw the consumer", they're at the edge of all ability to improve profits. There's no where left to go. I expect Amazon to have issues due to things like this, and the squeeze on foreign imports, and crash and burn on its side.

But back to your point? Yes, we should. Or, we should just pass laws which make centralized advertising, that is, the collection of Pii impossible.

Ban all Pii? Ban all transactions of Pii? And you end advertising as it is.

[rchaud]

> If there is any way to make cash from news, shouldn't Bezos have been able to do it??

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.

[ConceptJunkie]

By the time Bezos bought the Post, most of that goodwill had evaporated, and since then, almost all of it has.