Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself.

Even HN itself is a massive ad. We are lured here with tech links so YC companies can fish in curated waters for workers. That is explicitly why this board is hosted.

The real fix is paying money for everything, but as evidenced by the many attempts at this, no one actually wants to pay. People overwhelmingly want to block ads and backdoor subscriptions.

For example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free.

The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".

> Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself.

The idea that the internet couldn't exist without ads is a myth that needs to die. The internet existed, thrived, and was awesome long before it became infested with ads. An ad free internet would be different in some ways, but it'd still be great and filled with endless amounts of content. Your example of youtube kind of proves the point. It was so much more fun before youtube became all about profit and people just posted videos for fun, or out of genuine passion. Not having obnoxious youtube ads doesn't even stop creators from getting paid since they can still take donations or sell merch.

>> That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.

> Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself.

So be it.

It's like someone realizing that their crack dealer is an untrustworthy scumbag who is destroying everything the care about and they need to totally cut ties with him, and a friend objecting "Unfortunately, the 'scumbag' is your crack supplier himself."

Yeah, we know that. If starving the beast means we have to give up our unhealthy addictions, it's probably a side benefit rather than a counter argument.

Things need to be paid for but not everything needs to be paid for by everyone and most things are far cheaper than you'd expect. I played a MUD (and met my partner there!) for several years in college and afterwards. Initially I offered no financial support (since I was a starving college student) but when I had a job I sent in 10 bucks a month. That was a quarter of the cost to run a server, website and forum for about 120 people, we were generally overfunded but that was the cost of a wow subscription at the time and this was worth more to me.

Usually a few enthusiasts can just bear the lion's share of the cost to create the infrastructure for a community, excess can go to long term contingency funding and, in the unfortunate case that a community completely runs out of funds then it'll stop existing until people care enough to create a new one.

Video hosting and the like are dramatically more expensive but they can be reasonably subscription based (see Nebula and Dropout[2] neither of which have the VC backing to light piles of money on fire just to sustain a user base) but not everything needs such a high level of technology.

Heck, back in the day the majority of traffic that a website that was ad-driven needed to host was the ads - if you were half-decent at writing asset caching rules images became a non-issue that were usually handled by proxies/other intermediaries.

Everything costs money - but it's important to remember that a lot of services charge a lot more money than they cost to run and that ad money is a lot less money than most people realize[1].

1. A big exception to this being things like newspapers which really are in a hard place. Their expense isn't in hosting or other technical doodads (e.g. the NYT Crossword puzzle) - the subscription you're paying is to afford the huge team of reporters and editors that are needed to produce the information gathering and presentation.

2. Edited to add - Dropout is probably a terrible example here since it's a lot more like a newspaper, only a sliver of the cost is technical, most of it goes to the production team and talent they're retaining. But I'll leave it in there unedited.

> HN itself is a massive ad

I don't think it is the same. There is no manipulation involved here and many people seem to be looking for jobs actively.

> no one actually wants to pay

Two things

1. Most content is actually pretty worthless. It's subsidized by the ad-surveillance industrial complex. Even in the pre-LLM times there is so much blogspam, content farm articles, and slop videos because of this.

2. Payment monopolies have made microtransactions uneconomical through fees, which contributes to the friction of paying. I imagine in an alternate world with a crypto or fiat based digital currency with low enough fees, there would be much more direct payments. Seriously, if you just pay one cent per Youtube video, it'd dwarf the ad income for most channels. Your attention is hilariously worthless.

> The real fix is paying money for everything, but as evidenced by the many attempts at this, no one actually wants to pay.

I mean, want is a strong word, but I'm very much okay with paying creators I follow. I have a patreon account with about 22 subscriptions from 1-50 dollars, because what they create enhances my life.

> For example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free.

First sentence is correct, the second is patently ridiculous. I don't block ads because I think people should work for free: I block ads because every virus I've ever gotten has been delivered to me via an ad network that's not properly vetting what's being pushed to it, and to save incredible amounts of mobile data, and to prevent my phone from getting (as) hot in my hand.

The creator who's page I'm looking at is not even a factor in this calculus. I don't care. If you put up your stuff and are monetizing via ads only and I bounce off that and you earn nothing, oh well. Put it behind a proper paywall then, just, not my problem boss.

> The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".

The Internet, collectively, has been in an abusive relationship with this beast since it's inception. And yeah we got a bunch of free-at-point-of-use services out of it. Okay? I didn't ask Facebook to exist. I didn't request Twitter, I wasn't simply dying of lack of Linked-In. In fact my life would be better if many of these things closed up shop tomorrow and fucked right off.

In time immemorial, it was normal to host VBulletin forums, your own static website, run a BBS, an ICQ server or TeamSpeak server, or whatever for literally nobody. We had no idea if any damn one was reading what we wrote back then, but we wrote anyway because as most people do in one way or another, we felt the drive to create and to share, and then as the internet evolved and the tools became more successful, we built communities, we built forums, we built email lists, all kinds of decentralized, albiet limited, ways to remain in contact with likeminded people.

It was the monoliths who came onto the scene, stuffed to the gills with VC money, who suddenly gave us Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, all the rest of the websites of which there are like 6 now that everything is on. They showed up, and provided free services in exchange for our data. We didn't ask for that, they gave it freely. And now a couple decades on-ish they're finding out that monetizing user data, which has been the go-to excuse for all that time, doesn't really pay the bills and most of them are either losing money or are selling their souls to anyone who will purchase ad space, which is why ads are basically all scams now.

Ad companies have spent the better part of my life digging their own graves and I'm very excited to watch them lay down in them. Rest in piss. The Internet lived before the Platforms, and it will survive them.

[dead]