How I Experience Web Today (2021)

What I always don't understand is: So you don't want to pay for online content, but you also want to use an ad blocker. In summary, you don't want the author or creator to get paid?

Personally, I hate ads, so I pay. I have digital subscriptions to the newspapers I read. I have YouTube Premium (because I spend an ungodly amount of time on that site).

But for people who want to do neither... what's your idea?

There is a whole lot more to this than just whether content creators or publishes should get paid, and whether there should be ad blockers (and whether they get paid).

There are people who have been fed up by this because they remembered how the web was like in the late 90s, before social media pushes became the dominant experience. People have formulated ideas around the Small Web (https://benhoyt.com/writings/the-small-web-is-beautiful/), or even opted out of the browser ecosystem entirely with Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/) or keep the torch burning for Gopher (https://hackaday.com/2021/09/28/gopher-the-competing-standar...)

From there, it is also a short hop and skip away to folks working on local-first (https://localfirstweb.dev/), decentralization, collapse computing (https://100r.co/site/philosophy.html and http://collapseos.org/)

I get that, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people whose job content is, and who may have had the same job in the 90s, e.g. newspaper journalists.

So I'm asking those who don't want to pay for a subscription, but want to use an ad blocker: How does it work?

As said, I opted for paying the creator directly, because I hate the ad ecosystem. Seems like a lot of people want to do neither, but still expect their content to magically exist.

So, what are my ideas?

- static banners (non blinking, no transitions, esp. no vertical transitions that are designed to force you to lose focus – I've come for the content, not the ads)

- no tracking that exceeds maybe, if you have seen the campaign already. Preferably hosted by the website (who is responsible?).

- also, no targeting. Ads once were supposed to be consumer information. Public information is meant to be public, so I would enjoy leaning about what is out there (in the big world). Not just being reminded of what I bought last month, over and over again. Consumer products are part of (ephemeral) culture and I'd like to be part of it. (Reminder: you can always select/target by content and context, not just per user profile. This is technically feasible, as demonstrated by earlier versions of the Web.)

(This is also valid for recommendation and content presentation algorithms of all kind: I generally feel like desperately gasping for air, while being strangled by algorithms that only allow for an ever narrower bandwidth of the ever same. – E.g., is it really true that there are just three videos uploaded to YouTube per week? How do they make a profit? So you say, there are millions? How I'm not going to see them? Even a text search is littered by out of context reminders of the ever same…)

– moreover, ads should be more expensive for the advertising party. There should be less in total and the revenue for content providers should be greater (remember the thriving blog scene, we once had, when bloggers could make a living?)

(In other words, role it back to the early 2000s and I'm fine with that. Essentially, before Google ads went on steroids.)

Many of my favourite blogs are ad-free. The people behindert it just do it with passion and don't expect anything in return. This is in contrast to nrwspapets and magazines, which just pump out clickbait shit while bring full of ads and tracking. Another option is the patreon/twitch model, where people Sonate money to creators.

Lots of us don’t want to pay a dime because it’s like negotiating with terrorists. Do you really expect the people that ruined the web to act nice after the first round of extortion goes well for them? Many paid services still have ads and dark patterns. Those that don’t are waiting for a position of strength (whether that is a market monopoly or just user sunk-cost fallacy to kick in) and then the enshittification will start.

My heart goes out to journalists, etc, but I can’t really help them by paying their bosses because the bosses are not interested in journalism. If you think that paying into rent-seeking protection rackets is any kind of permanent solution you’re probably going to be disappointed.

I'm personally fine with ad blocker blockers. They let me make an informed choice as to whether I want to accept ads with all the bad thing they entail (tracking, potential malware ad/or phishing) in exchange for getting whatever information the website offers. When YouTube Light was still a thing I did subscribe sometimes, but I don't feel as though I get my money's worth out of it with the current pricing so I don't really go there any more.

> ads should be more expensive for the advertising party.

Sorry, my reading comprehension is failing me. If Bob pays Google to put an ad on Alice's website, is Bob the advertising party? Because if so, that would disadvantage small companies and harm the market by making it harder for newcomers to be competitive. If in our hypothetical situation Google is the advertising party that's good and well, though I don't know how we'd get that done.

Yes, the irony I have seen with written content is, with the exception being books, most paid written content is still crap.

> Lots of us don’t want to pay a dime because it’s like negotiating with terrorists.

For a concrete example of the implacable amorality of advertising, consider how cable-TV once offered the promise of subscribing to end the ads, but still ended up showing you ads and demanding a subscription fee anyway. Then the same pattern happened again with online streaming services and Youtube: Every would-be savior keeps getting corrupted by the same darkness.

It's about the price of placing an advertisement. Ads becoming that cheap has eradicated significant portions of the Web, which is now flocking to the few big content platforms. I'd call this an anticompetitive development. Ad networks, like Google, are setting these prices. And they have turned the tables: you can't negotiate the worth of the service, as you the product is the ad tag, not the content, it's embedded in.

(Also, we – as a society – don't entertain second thoughts on housing prices or general cost of living, while this is a common and basic need. Why is this different? Is there a privilege? Also, who's interest is this about, the content creators, including news sites, or advertisers, who rely on this kind of contextual content provided by the creators? Quite obviously, the current arrangement isn't working out for creators, and news, including active journalism and research, are in a steep decline, after having peaked in revenue around 2008.)

The thing here is that many of us aren’t interested in paid content, but we keep getting shuttled to paid content due to googles goggles. There is so much free content on the web but we don’t get directed there because we are stuck in an advertising loop. Google intentionally directs us to a site with “paid content writers” to propagate their ruin the internet with advertising scheme, thereby “ruining the internet.”

Your business model is not my responsibility; you're giving away content for free by your own choice. It's cool that you've found "one cool hack" to earn some money while giving away your content for free, but the people who accept your free content do not owe you the author anything. The author is free to require upfront payment for access, and the audience is free to pay or leave. But the audience of free content doesn't owe you the author anything, as the author has no contract relationship with the audience. When we visit a blog post we do not sign some contract and never have (some sites have tried to move the goalposts with banners like "by clicking this link you owe us your souls and thus your eyeballs" but that's pretty transparently hogwash).

Saying "you want to use an adblocker, thus you're just a thief!" can validly be escalated with the exact same logic by saying "why don't you click on every ad you see, that's the only way the benevolent authors get paid you know, if you're not doing that then you're just a thief!" It's all nonsense fundamentally because the audience consuming your content for free doesn't owe the author anything (as much as authors in this scenario will wish otherwise).

To be clear, making content explicitly for-pay I think is amazing and is the clear future. As ads race to be as annoying as possible, users are going to run out of patience and seek alternative sources of information/entertainment, and some number of users will opt for sources that require payment. That's GREAT for the industry as it means users stop expecting everything for free and become selective with their dollar, allowing niche content much more money. This is happening with many small-time independent video publishing platforms (Dropout.tv, Nebula, Floatplane, CorridorDigital, countless creators on Patreon, independent movies published via VHX.tv, etc) to fantastic effect.

I choose to do both.

uBlock Origin everywhere. Steven Black host list on everything that can use /etc/hosts. Subscriptions to the things I value (but not to all the things I read).

I run an open source project called Ardour. One of our mottos is "It doesn't matter if everybody pays, it only matters than enough people pay". I wish more people could make some effort try to follow this idea in some way.

The only folks expecting the content to "magically continue to exist" are folks who lack information. But folks who do have information may also be totally fine with neither paying for content nor seeing ads; for a lot of us, the content that we watch is pretty transitive and if it went away tomorrow because no one watched any ads, we'd go do something else.

It’s not about having ads, it’s about how they are served, completely ruining the experience.

Or consider the commuter that is obliged to pay hundreds a week for gas, and is assaulted by ads at obnoxious volumes while they fill up. Or the jet passenger that endures ads on what should be the PA that is reserved for emergency communications, after they’ve been gouged on ticket prices, because hey, why not monetize a captive audience for all they are worth? Does a first class ticket buy the right to avoid harassment? Everything points to “not for long”..

The point is that "people whose job content is" should just get a regular job, where they actually contribute something valuable to society. All these "news" websites that are 90% ads can just die, to make room for valuable sites in the search results.

Joke’s on them, I just don’t listen to the PA.

At some point, you stop selling content, and you start selling an audience with a known demographic to advertisers.

In such a market, the business is disincentivized to produce thoughtful content, and need to churn the bait the draw in the audience. So it isn't as if creators are being compensated for creating, and instead content producers are compensated for producing words that will lure in readers.

There's this "legend" that, I assume, has some truth to it, that only about 1% of Reddit users post, and only about 10% comment. The other 90% lurk.

On the internet as a whole, I do mostly lurk, but I have my own website where I try to post meaningful, useful content. To me, that's enough to have paid my dues. If you never, ever post anything. Yeah, paying is fair, but so long as you contribute back, you've paid, IMHO.

This gets tricky only because the web isn't small anymore. Youtube, for hosting, should probably get a cut, yeah. But the majority? no. The ability to monetize something someone else made and wants to distribute for free? Also no. They, IMHO, abused their way to near monopoly on video distribution, so they shouldn't have that right.

Similarly, I won't pay for content when I'm creating my own and distributing it for free (Actually, to some cost to me) and without ads.

Saying "Well, then only consume other's free content" is a fair rebuttal, but there's a larger social/societal problem that incentives making paid content or using platforms like YouTube which will monetize content made by anyone even if the creator never sees a Penny: The dominance of those platforms has stifled innovation to the point of depriving them of a real choice. (Again, opinion. Don't sue me Google <3)

By using adblock, I'm willfully, intentionally hurting that perverse incentive system.

It's a similar vibe to the idea that piracy may be moral, if it disenticives overbearing DRM. I pay for things when the DRM is non-existant or non-invasive. I've chosen not to when it is. I've let companines know on their forums before that I'd love to buy their product, if only they didn't use iLok, or Denuvo, etc. I usually don't pirate though, I just find an alternative, even if I think they have the better product and would otherwise be willing to pay.

>Yeah, paying is fair, but so long as you contribute back, you've paid, IMHO.

I actually agree with this viewpoint, it makes me think of Peter Serafinowicz's why I steal movies article https://gizmodo.com/why-i-steal-movies-even-ones-im-in-55394...

however - I'm not sure if Serafinowicz would think that some guy on the internet writing articles is actually contributing back in the same way he might feel if you were distributing your own short comedic videos.

You may be contributing in a distribution channel, but are you contributing in a media?

The same goes for authors etc. They may think other authors should get a free pass on buying their books, because they're contributing, but not think that someone writing fan fiction on the web should get a pass.

The same with musicians, I'm sure you get the point. An artist in some field might think you are contributing if you are producing work in their field and should be given a pass on paying (I certainly would) but posting some meaningful to you on the web might not pass the bar of what they consider a contribution.