I really and truly do wish this wasn't true, but it is. Part of this is because we've built an expectation that the only thing one needs to pay for to use services connected on the Internet is access, and once access is paid for, the problem is solved.
But that's not the case. Products cost money, and we've established a pattern of free to play to freemium for much of the most popular services. This could change, but it would take the major players to flip the script, and they've invested so much into ad systems that they'd be hard pressed to abandon it.
Sadly, I think you are correct. The Internet of the last decade has ushered in the freemium model and people now expect it. I often tell people that if you are not a paying customer, you are the product. As you so bluntly stated, most people don't care. Sad, but true. All services that I value, I pay for, as none of them are freemium. I enjoy being a customer, not the product. Ads suck, anyway, and they are now the number one vector for malware. No thank you.
I agree, but it's an absolute fallacy that consumption is free. In fact, it is more much more expensive with ads:
1. The advertisers who pay for it all still get their money from us, but baked into prices of the things we buy from them. There is no free lunch.
2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too. Ad systems and data collection systems, ad engineers and people like the author. Ad agencies. Creative agencies. Ad tracking. Marketing departments.
3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want (what we want only indirectly and secondarily, if at all). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as well as design that optimizes advertising revenue. As has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers.
4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. To me this is the most expensive cost of all.
Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web content and services than if we could just straight up pay web sites for straight-up ad-free versions. A system to make that convenient is possible, but we're too hooked on ads to even try.
It’s sad that internet is all free but an average American is OK with spending $105/month on a cable package and STILL be targeted with ads.
What a world we live in. The problem is not that average person doesn’t have money, the problem is that these advertising giants have gotten people to expect that online services should be free (but in exchange for privacy).
There's a difference between wanting something to be free and expecting it to be free.
We'd all like a free coffee, but people glay pay $5 at Starbucks every morning because they know things cost money. Ask these same people for $5 to install an app on their phone – that was built over years by a team of hundreds – and they will flip out. People who used to buy a single $5 newspaper or magazine from the newsstand will not pay $5 for a monthly subscription to the same paper.
There's a fundamental disconnect in how people value digital assets, and that is why the internet is the way it is.
I don’t think this is really true. We’ve had the technological capability of micropayments for many years (since PayPal probably?), so it’s long been possible to charge for access to content on the web. If that were a model consumers preferred for text, it would be winning. Instead, most consumers will bounce from paywalled content if they can’t figure out a way in for free.
In areas like music and video streaming, paid services are actually popular, because they have a different cost structure and more consumers find it worthwhile to pay to access better content with no ads.
That's true. The problem is that even when you pay for service, the incentive is to suck your data away, data-mine the hell out of it and hold you at ransom.
It's like cable TV, originally one paid a premium to avoid advertisements. Today it's just the norm, and you get the advertisements anyway.
Maybe it works to have a free tier and yank the rug out from everyone, and maybe the solution is that we should just pay for what things cost?
The whole internet is like this, people often don't want to pay, they want it free, then the advertisers pay, we get pissy about advertising, and we become the product, and we flock to the next free thing after the free thing stops being free ...
I wish things weren't all free, I wish we paid easily, and the relationship really be between us and the provider, directly with enough money to actually make them profitable. But it isn't that way for a lot of things, and I feel like we as users are part of the problem too.
This is simply not true in my experience. Most prominent example is Youtube, where there is an option for an ad-free experience which is decently priced. And yet, the adoption is very low and you still see people complaining about ads on Youtube all the time.
I guess a vast majority of people simply don't want to pay if there is a somewhat acceptable free alternative.
That's just it. The internet was never free. There has pretty much always been some method that people have been making money off of creating content for it, in some format or another. Whether it be basic ads, affiliate links, sponsorship spots, or web stores; the internet has always been paid for somehow in some way. And that's before we discuss things like ISP's providing that connection to it in the first place.
People who think the internet is or should be free, are disconnected from reality. I grew up with what we called farmer vision, but others would know it as rabbit ear or aerial tv. You had 3 to maybe 5 basic channels in your area if you were lucky; and they were all paid for by ads... er... commercials. The idea was that the content was technically free, since you didn't really need to watch the commercials. (You could just go to the bathroom, make a snack, get a drink, etc.) But the paid advertisement was paying for that broadcast, and so you ultimately had to put up with your shows being interrupted.
YouTube does nothing different, really. Yet look at all the flak they get for their usage of the same methodology.
The internet was never free, has never been free, and never will be free. You will always be paying for it somehow; whether it be out of pocket, via attention, or your data. TV was no different, up to the data part; and set-top boxes changed that too. Once those could phone home and report usage, especially to thwart piracy; your data became another potential sales figure for even the tv stations.
I personally would much rather we have an internet culture where we don't mind paying for the things we like, and want to see continue to exist. This would essentially democratize the internet; though it may also induce a segregation of the unwealthy from being able to participate... but those people tend to be children and the poor. Children don't pay for anything, their parents do. And if the poor or their parents don't have enough money to pay for 1-10$ subscriptions on a monthly basis; then they have much more serious things to consider. Like getting a job, or a better paying one. Not their usage of the internet.
Besides, if they already are paying for a basic connection, they shouldn't have much trouble paying for the few things they enjoy to use. Alternatively, they could opt-in to be a data source for free access or something like that. Or see more ads per hour. Keep it more open for everyone.
But that still goes to prove the point. The net is not free. Never has been, never will be. So we would be wise to setup a good culture around it while we still can, before the greediest of us start to make it terrible for everyone, and not just the poor.
I like the concept that Brave browser uses for this reason. It's just too bad that with the way things are going with crypto right now, that it's going to get some bad rep from it likely. Also doesn't help that the devs behind it are... less than stellar. But that's another can of worms aside from this giant one.
Free is NOT the problem. Free is the “business model” of the internet. Just because some people want to monetize it doesn’t mean we need to give up and just let them do what they want. Selling ads is not the purpose of the internet. Content created to sell ads is most of the time garbage. No chicken, no egg no puzzle to resolve.
If people value it then at a certain point they’ll pay for it. What we might find out however is that a lot of these free services aren’t valued and no one will pay for it. And I think that just reinforces the point of the article: those services are cancers, literally no one values them, they’re just manipulated into using them.
Things like search engines will be able to survive because they’re necessary. They may look different (e.g. wrapped up in a subscription package with gmail and gdocs). We are used to paying $X per month for an internet connection, it’s absurd to believe people won’t add on $Y per month for the over the top services that make that internet connection useful.
There is a very large amount of free content of extremely high value. This predates the internet, but with the internet we are flooded with it. That's why this statement (at least made so generally) is definitely wrong:
> That's the issue here. You can't really have it both ways.
The fact that you can access it without paying for it doesn't mean it didn't involve substantial resources to create it. Acting like one should not have to pay anything to cover those costs is the essence of expecting slave labor.
In every single discussion I have seen on HN on this topic, that is what boils down to. Whatever time, education, experience, effort, and other resources it took to create quality content gets hand waved away with "well, I can get it for free now. So why would I pay?"
Never mind that these discussions are inevitably in relation to an article about advertising, how much people hate it, how evil it is and so on. Those ads are how free content and free services and free internet stuff came into being.
You ultimately can't have it both ways. People want ads to die. Those ads pay for all this stuff you take for granted will be available for free. Reiterating that you aren't willing to pay doesn't solve the problem under discussion here.
Ads are the mechanism that made stuff "free." If people want them to disappear, then they need to find another means to finance that content. Without that, ads are here to stay and their aggressive, manipulative approach just gets worse in the face of ad blockers etc.
The ad industry's biggest accomplishment is making most users believe that they can have access to state of the art search engine, video streaming, messenging etc... for "free". It means that it's incredibly hard to compete with a different business model.
opinion: The "free" model of services arose because there was no way to monetize services, and micropayments still don't exist decades later.
So, entrepreneurs plucked the low-hanging fruit of advertising, robbing old media. Advertising depends on large numbers (or targeting) so the "network effect" drove gigantic sites where you deal with vastly more than Dunbar's Number (150), which is the maximum number of relationships we can maintain at once. [1]
Along with this, came the idea of "targeted" ads, so there's a double whammy. You're exposed to more people than you can relate to, and being surveilled as well.
Then news feeds (who asked for news feeds?) led to echo chambers and psychological engagement tricks.
Three strikes.
"But that's the price of free", you say.
However, the internet is not free. Everyone pays to access it, and unlike a cable provider, you get zero "premium" content for the often outrageous prices that ISP's charge. Libraries? Governments pay for libraries and you pay governments.
Further, the effects above have turned the "network of networks" model of the internet inside out, so it's more like the old "There are Three TV networks" model than a lot of friendly and truly social networks.
And like cable, which was touted to be "ad-free", you got ads anyway, as do many sites that you pay good money to visit. Ad money is addictive, and we the users, get all the side effects.
I attribute the above to the enshittification of computers long ago, being overly complex, shipped with unstable software rushed out the door to compete in "feature wars" (This has been a big deal since the 80's) and beyond the average person's ability to maintain. Hence, more centralization via giant websites (which also crash and burn, but someone else gets to fix it)
Now that bots and AI are flooding the internet (and online bookstores) with the power of a million monkeys each with a supercomputer, a turning point has been reached. And I'll defer to other posts which quote people in the know who say that it's time to turn this mess around. How? Well, that's up to you and me, with the goal of quality of life for ourselves and billions of others ahead of fast bucks.
There were two articles posted here, and my replies.
We Need to re-wild the internet [2]
Why do negative topics dominate social media sites, even here? [3]
Wild is good as long as it's not wild as in battlefield. It's not like you get diverse opinions; no matter what you post, you get warring factions, vulgar insults, and sometimes, death threats. And bots.
Anil Dash argues [5] that things can be better in not so wide-open communities.
And then there’s someone like Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer and community organizer who has been patiently toiling away building tools that let others build healthy, constructive, human-scale online communities — the sort that are full of acts of kindness and genuine connection, instead of incessant fights about hate speech. There’s been a huge uptick in interest in Darius’ work as networks like Twitter have fallen apart, and a new generation discovers the joys of an internet that’s as intimate and connected as a friendly neighborhood. And this hearkens back to that surprising, and delightful, discovery that often underpinned the internet of a generation ago — sometimes the entire platform you were using to talk to others was just being run by one, passionate person. We’re seeing the biggest return to that human-run, personal-scale web that we’ve witnessed since the turn of the millennium, with enough momentum that it’s likely that 2024 is the first year since then that many people have the experience of making a new connection or seeing something go viral on a platform that’s being run by a regular person instead of a commercial entity. It’s going to make a lot of new things possible.
I have had ideas for a different internet -- a network of networks. Since Stewart Brand and Ted Nelson and Kevin Kelly, technology was meant to empower and liberate people. Only a handful actually do, as in Wikipedia. People have enormous computing power in their computers and mobile devices. It often just liberates cash from their pockets.
Time to reinvent. I'll share ideas later.
No need for the crap: [6]
Well, things changed a little bit in tech of late. Often, the power shifts in the tech world because of a dramatic new invention that solves an old problem a whole lot better. But in the current era, when most of what's getting funded and hyped up are just various attempts to undermine workers and control consumers, we're instead seeing lots of major players lose power because their signature offerings have gotten so much worse. Search engines are becoming far more useless as they attempt to chase AI hype and shoehorn in less reliable results, even as their legitimate search results get cluttered up with AI-generated crap. The most culturally influential social network has had its cultural relevance destroyed by its billionaire man-child owner's tantrum-based managemenet style. And the major mobile phone platforms overplayed their hand so badly in exerting power over their app ecosystems that regulators around the globe have responded by prying open these heretofore-closed markets.
Time for a network of networks, not a network of 4 or 5 castles surrounded by serfs.
A Psychologist Explains Four Reasons the Internet Feels So Broken [4]
Short:
Number one is that negativity drives engagement. Number two, extremism drives engagement online. Number three, out-group animosity drives engagement online. And number four, moral, emotional language drives engagement online.
Negativity "clicks", for mostly "old brain" reasons. You say things anonymously that you would never say real person to real person. Social media are a (mostly) no-consequence wide-open "mud" sling.
Anil Dash argues [5] that things can be better in not so wide-open communities.
I wish there was a service I could simply pay for using, enough so that the operator wouldn't have to use invasive advertising where I could connect with other people who would want my services or vice-versa. Why such a simple thing seems to be not possible? Everyone looks to be only motivated by $$$ and turning potential customers into product.
I also don't understand why should I value a network where the main selling point is zero-cost ad-free. If people on there don't want to pay for something that brings them value, are they going to want to pay me for my services?
This is so contradictory. What's the goal here?
I don't want to dunk on a single out-of-context quote, and I'm sure that Mr. Tetzchner fully understands what I'm about to type as he seems like a brilliant guy. But blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-sighted.
The reason why everything is ruined by advertising is because nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet. The money has to come from somewhere, so advertising it is.
Why does everybody want everything to be free? That's a more interesting question.
Is it because years of free broadcast television and radio conditioned us to expect everything to be ad-supported and "free?"
Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such?
But that's not the case. Products cost money, and we've established a pattern of free to play to freemium for much of the most popular services. This could change, but it would take the major players to flip the script, and they've invested so much into ad systems that they'd be hard pressed to abandon it.
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