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.

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b112 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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mrguyorama 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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OhMeadhbh 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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

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throwawayq3423 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.