Why is it a “problem”? Outlawing ads seems hugely regressive for society as a whole.
Without ads there would be basically no free content online, and those who cannot afford content would simply go without. Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. To yank that away seems like bringing a dark age.
> Without ads there would be basically no free content online
Citation needed. I don't believe that for one moment. Already people are producing far more content for free each second than one person could ever consume in a lifetime on sites like Youtube and Instagram. The urge is there, even without any monetary reward.
> Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information.
Now consider how much worse the world has become due to the incentive to hide wanted information behind commercial information. Simple example: there was a time before adblockers when it was not a rare sight to have a page with 80% advertising and 20% actual content. Think unskippable ads before videos. Think of the mountains of useless content that SEO spam produces that hide the interesting pages in search engines.
Marketing does not give access to information. On the contrary, it takes it away.
Firstly, I honestly don’t believe citation is needed on “people don’t work for free”.
We’re seeing it already. Many if not most news sites are pay gating their once free content. Cite: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The New Yorker. All charge for access. All we’re free before the proliferation of ad blockers.
Yes there would be hobbyist information for free, but WebMD? News sites in general? Any sort of resource that takes money to pay people to maintain? It will all be pay gated.
As someone who does not use an adblocker, I have genuinely no problems finding the content I’m looking for.
> We’re seeing it already. Many if not most news sites are pay gating their once free content. Cite: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The New Yorker. All charge for access. All we’re free before the proliferation of ad blockers.
See? They found a way to put content online without relying on ads.
Most of the free content is generally crap outside of a few channels/sites. Almost all popular content on youtube/web is made with the intent to profit.
Yeah, what a weird example. Youtube and Instagram only gave bandwidth and storage away for free because they wanted to grow and be able to eventually monetize. They weren't charities one day that suddenly went "evil".
I meant to say that a lot of people are willing to do this "work" for free. That is not just content creators, but also system administrators e.d. I would be perfectly willing to run a forum for a group of like-minded people for free, but I'm not going to bother if there is already a subreddit for it.
Before Youtube, Facebook and the like, internet service providers included basic means of publication. Mail/mailing lists, homepages/blogs with RSS. They could do that again.
But, even if the barrier to publishing became higher and only 1/50th of the video's were put up on Youtube, it would still be far more than anyone could ever consume.
> Without ads there would be basically no free content online, and those who cannot afford content would simply go without.
There was plenty of free content online before ads, in fact I claim that the web was better before ads arrived, and it is getting worse by the day. Marketeers ruined it.
It happens over and over. YouTube had plenty of great content for free before monetization. Now it is becoming worse by the day, because everything is ad-related. "Influencers", etc.
> Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. To yank that away seems like bringing a dark age.
Easy access to information is a consequence of the Internet and then the Web, both technologies having been developed by government-funded programs, respectively in the US and in the EU.
Ads brought us re-centraliztion, targeting and erosion of democracy through extreme polarization and fake news.
I know this is hard to believe for a lot of people here, but human beings are motivated by many things other than monetary profit.
No there wasn't. The commercial internet is a trillion times bigger than anything that came before and services billions of users around the world, many for free, paid for by ads.
This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
Yes there was. Go to archive.org and check for yourself.
> The commercial internet is a trillion times bigger than anything that came before and services billions of users around the world, many for free, paid for by ads.
Bigger doesn't mean better. The web is now flooded with malicious and manipulative content. The ads pay for that content, while taxpayers and consumers pay for the infrastructure that actually makes the Internet possible. Ads pay to keep the web centralized, they don't pay for what makes the web possible.
> This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
There is indeed, but notice that I did not say that "everything was somehow better in the good old days". I made a very specific comment about a very specific topic. My comment: there was plenty of quality content on the web before ads arrived. Ads made the web worse. Argue against this if you like, but not about things I did not claim.
What does internet infrastructure have to do with ads? We're talking about content, and ads are the subsidy that lets billions consume for free.
That there's more content for more people across more channels is objectively true, and advertising pays for much of it. You seem to be conflating ad UX with economics.
> What does internet infrastructure have to do with ads?
It is the medium that makes the ads possible, and it is payed by you and me.
> We're talking about content, and ads are the subsidy that lets billions consume for free.
And I have been telling you every step of the way that there was good content before the ads arrived.
> That there's more content for more people across more channels is objectively true,
That is hardly surprising. There was no moment in the history of the web when the total amount of content available was not increasing. This was already the case before the ads.
Did it grown more than it would have without ads? Maybe. Is it better? I don't think so.
> and advertising pays for much of it.
And yet here you are, consuming content that someone created for free (me) in a platform without ads (Hacker News). So it doesn't pay for all of it, and even you, at least sometimes, seem to prefer the non-ad-funded corner.
Yes, there was. The Internet was most interesting from 1999-2005, there were plenty of good searchable websites from private individuals or universities.
Literally the only site that is better now than back then is YouTube with an ad-blocker.
Everything else has deteriorated: Google (search) is worse, Ebay is worse, Amazon is worse, banking sites are worse.
Heck, even Java stock tickers from 2000 were better than now.
The art of presenting information in a meaningful way has been lost entirely.
Exactly, but most people here are unwilling to listen to any of this, because their salaries are funded by the very thing that has ruined the web - advertisement.
I am given valuable content and did not give money. For all reasonalble intents and purposes it’s free. For as far as any person without means cares, it is free.
It might be free as in gratis (free beer), but it's not free at all. Your behaviour, your profile, your data: you are the one giving that away in exchange. That data of yours is valuable.
And IMHO even more importantly, with advertising the dynamic between content provider and user completely changes. The user no longer primarily is a customer, but rather becomes the product for the advertisers.
The content provider no longer only has to cater to the user, but also to the advertiser, with the conflicts of interest that can bring (e.g. unpopularity of critical product reviews).
Restricting the legality of advertisements in general might have the nice effect of leveling the playing field, by making it harder for content providers to benefit by-generally covertly-selling out their users (or their users' interests) to such third parties.
It isn't free as in speech without ads either. You give up your behavior, profile, data no matter the site showing ads or not. What you wrote sounds like a pro-ad argument when thought about for a second.
You either use that brain time to generate income at work and then hand over that money, or use it in real-time to pay for the content. Ads are much faster and easier in that regard.
Without ads there would be basically no free content online, and those who cannot afford content would simply go without. Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information. To yank that away seems like bringing a dark age.