Discussion

‘Your Frustration Is the Product’

righthand: This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article.> “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.I don't entirely agree. I think these people entirely understand the web. This comes from publications trying to steer you towards their app so you can't block their tracking/profiling requests. The screens are cluttered because we've defined acceptable metrics as more clicks and views. The easiest way to generate more clicks to put a few popups on your site. Who cares what the clicks are actually for, no one is tracking user flows and user retention anymore, it's all "get them caught in the swamp" and maybe the slow page loading, janky ui, and increased clicks will land them on one of the advertisements.This stuff comes from "here is the latest pattern people are using to get people to click on stuff" then the team implements the pattern 100 more times as a bandaid/movement of the way to get people to click on things. Those people rotate out and it's only another 5 years before some dev says "hey can you clean up your Google Tag Manager script tags?" to whoever is in charge then.

rcarr: > The reader is not respected enough by the software.The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a product is digital then it should be free which is maybe fine if we are going to live in a world with Universal Basic Income but in our existing system is absolutely ludicrous.We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay. Outside of governments who have failed to take the necessary action against corporations and promote a power balance between investors, business and workers, the main cause of this is the lack of courage in middle management.The executive suite have not tolerated this degradation and their salaries have risen accordingly. In contrast, middle management attain a level of safety/comfort and then coast - they don't want the hassle of looking for another job so they don't risk pushing for a pay rise. They just accept whatever meagre rise is offered because they think "well at least I'm still better off than the guys lower down the chain". This then filters down as the ceiling for the lower ranks can never be higher than the management. Over time this becomes a gigantic issue, particularly in countries with a strong minimum wage that rises every year as the gap between the worker and management closes every year. Management then start blaming the government rather than actually looking at themselves and the fact that they are not pushing for bigger wages out of fear of rocking the boat.I literally saw this play out at a billion dollar revenue international non-tech company where I used to work a few years back. Directors were on £125k. Department heads on £75k. Tech leads on £55-65k. Seniors on £40-50k. Intermediates £27-35k. Juniors £25k. Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.

huitzitziltzin: Newspapers have an extremely expensive product. They have to pay for it somehow! You can’t give away an expensive product for free forever!No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech.Is that so hard to understand?Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the comments to a paywall-evading site!The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality, highly focused on costs and with no attention at all paid to benefits.

llm_nerd: >The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low qualityThis is kind of an ironic comment given that this whole discussion is about visiting the sites as a paying subscriber.I pay for the NYT. If I visit without adblockers, the site is absolutely stuffed with obnoxious amounts of advertising. I mean, of course I use adblockers normally, and it's basically a requirement no matter how much you're willing to pay for every product you use.Because everyone wants to double dip. It's like buy a $2000 TV and discovering ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc. They figured "why not?" because someone will always rationalize it.

weedhopper: Exactly, paying for quality content should be normalised. Even a trivial amount - 10-50c. And the reality is that it is unheard of.

intrasight: I would gladly pay a few cents to read an article. Isn't the problem that no one figured out the business or technical model to accomplish that? I think I remember reading, 10 years ago, that bitcoin would solve that problem.

digitalsushi: after 30 years of waiting for standard micropayments, I have stopped wondering if it's solvable. I perfectly believe we could have had it working 20 years ago but there's a reason someone doesn't desire it to be.i also dont know how economics work so maybe paying 2/3 of a cent for a page view is not helpful. Maybe that's why it doesnt work. Maybe I'm in the 1% of people who would pay for ad-free content on a non-subscription model.I'd rather everything have a price, nothing has a subscription, and everything is a decision to purchase per view instead of funneling into walled garden access per month

rivetfasten: "... the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions ... Almost no one would watch such a channel."QVC exists. That channel is ONLY ads.Not to detract from the point, which seems to be "yes what this other guy said."

red_admiral: Teleshopping channels are a thing, and they have more of an audience than one might guess.

everdrive: "I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data."Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not truly relevant to the story)News sites are almost like lyric sites or recipe sites in this regard. The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.

red_admiral: For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.

kace91: Press is a difficult one.I grew up in a household where several newspapers were bought daily (dad was a journalist himself). I would struggle doing the same though, even if I can very much afford it, because it is very clear to current press that even paying, I'm the product.There's all sorts of articles that are actually ads, attempts to move me in an ideological direction, information that is in the owner's interest to spread.Press double dips. If the interest is on distributing ideology, have the parties/lobbies pay.

someguyorother: The mental transaction cost is the hard part. The effort required to decide whether to pay at all is significant enough that payments don't scale down to the micro- level.

donohoe: Here is the most frustrating part:Publishers could create efficient fast-loading web pages if they prioritized it (and a rare few do) but its just not a priority for most even though its in their best interest.You can have ads loading on a web page, even with header bidders, if you structure it correctly. In fact you can implement an ad solution that allows for fast loading pages and better optimize your ad revenue - whether you're doing pragmatic or direct.I know this because I've done this before. At a past employer we cleaned up their mobile version (they used the "m.example.com" format, so we could push this as a separate rogue experiment) and saw ad revenue grow by over 30% while giving readers a better, faster overall UX.I actively monitor top publisher article pages and you can see how bad (and good) it is:https://webperf.xyz/TL;DR Keep using an ad blocker

golfer: This is very cool, nicely done.One note: the Property link, that links to the actual news source, is broken.Also, the test link you're using for Nautilus (the top scoring site) is 404 (https://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-multiverse-as-muse)

renegat0x0: Reminds me of "Website obesity crisis"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U- https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htmSome say that you should not use ad blocker, because that kills ad revenue, but I did not forced anybody to rely with their lives on ad revenue. Many of things were 'free' because we were all just using ad blocks, and then it all became commodified, simplified, so simpletons without ad blocks became a thing. Now they shame people for using ad blocks, even though it stops spreading malware and viruses.I plan to use ad block, and use as many extensions that protect me. If there is some form of goods, be it streaming movies, audio, books I will happily pay for it. I will not accept a web with ads. I prefer touch grass. There is a clear line for me.Also there is no line ad publisher will not cross. The goal posts are shifted, so you will never satisfy shareholder greed. The only pushback is trough ads and probably sometimes piracy. Not that I advocate it, but in reality if companies push too hard, there are consequences.

Sander_Marechal: > It's like buy a $2000 TV and discovering ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc.Have you bought a TV recently? This is exactly what is happening already. I had to pi-hole my entire network to get rid of the ads in my "switch source" menu on my Samsung TV that did not have ads when I bought it and for the first 3 years after that.

StilesCrisis: I only hooked up my Samsung TV to the internet to install one update when I first acquired it, then kept it disconnected. Thanks for the tip--I'll make sure to keep it offline forever now!Can you roll back to an older firmware?

AlienRobot: People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.

mattw2121: Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing.If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.

georgeecollins: It kills programmatic advertising, not sponsorships or subscriptions. I always subscribe to the four or five sites I use most and use a blocker. If HN had a subscription tier I would pay it to support them.

VorpalWay: HN doesn't need your money, it is run by YCombinator, a venture capital firm. As far as I can determine HN is a way to raise brand awareness for them. Sure, there are probably some people passionate about the concept at the company, but it wouldn't stick around if it they didn't also determine that it has more value to them than the operating costs of the site.

GraemeMeyer: Wow, it’s really interesting to see the sudden unchanged nautil.us made around the 4th of March!

sailorganymede: News sites are going irrelevant anyways. I'd imagine they are pushing hard for this because traffic has died cause AI overviews have hit direct traffic to websites and independent writing platforms like Substack / Medium mean I can read a quality opinion on a matter I care about.

john_strinlai: if news sites go away, i wonder where are the ai overviews going to steal their information from

kogasa240p: The problem is that both Medium and Substack are bloated as hell but ultimately I think it's a positive move overall.

The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.

pembrook: > The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.Yes because they don't give the print editions away for free.You go to these sites as a free user, you get exactly what you paid for.The only reason you're confronted with articles from these legacy publications in the first place is because they've lobbied governments to get google to force them into their carousels and recommendations.

malfist: Paying for them absolutely does not mean you won't be treated the same way. Paying removes the paywall, not the insanity.

mikestew: You go to these sites as a free user, you get exactly what you paid for.Yeah? How about when I go to the site as a paid subscriber and get the exact same experience? Did the number or obnoxiousness of ads go down when I gave NYT money? Nope.

Xenoamorphous: Some news sites do have ad-free or at least ad-lite versions if you're a subscriber.