Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you

this is exactly the sort of idealistic post that appeals to HN and nobody else. i dont have a problem with that apart from when technologists try to take these "back to basics" stuff to shame the substacks and the company blogs out there that have to be more powered by economics than by personal passion.

its -obvious- things are mostly "better"/can be less "annoying" when money/resources are not a concern. i too would like to spend all my time in a world with no scarcity.

the engineering challenge is finding alignments where "better for reader" overlaps with "better for writer" - as google did with doubleclick back in the day.

The author isn't trying to profit from the reader's attention; it's just a personal blog. An ad-based business would. Neither is right or wrong, but the latter is distinctly annoying.

Ad-based businesses are indeed wrong and immoral.

Ad-based businesses exist because a lot of people (including many on this forum) refuse to pay for anything. During the late 1990s/early 2000s, people hated paying for anything and demanded that everything on the Internet should be free. Well, that led to the vast surveillance machine which powers Google, Facebook, and every ad-tech business out there. They need surveillance because it lets them serve more relevant ads and more relevant ads make more money.

The bottom line is if you hate ad-based businesses, start paying for things.

A personal take is that ad-based businesses exist because there’s no secure widespread reliable approach for micropayments (yet?).

The mean value of adverts on a page is in the order of a tiny fraction of a cent per reader, which is presumably enough for the businesses that continue to exist online. If it was possible to pay this amount directly instead, and have an ad-free experience, I suspect many would do so, as the cumulative amount would usually be negligible. Yet so far, no-one’s figured it out.

(I should mention, there are very strong reasons why it’s difficult to figure out currently, but AIUI these are rooted in the current setup of global payments and risk management by credit card companies.)

I reject that idea, simply because companies will then offer microservice access and STILL put ads on them. Sure, youtube and spotify will disable them for you. But for every one of those we have a netflix and its dark side cohort.