“Your frustration is the product” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#61

Post by RGamma » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

mattw2121 wrote: post #41

AlienRobot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Yes, and yet we would do well to distinguish hobbies from necessities, like quality journalism. Not saying there's an easy fix, but there better be one.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#62

Post by Xenoamorphous » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

> No print publication on the planet does this.

Because you have to pay for the print version. They have plenty of ads, too, but they're not the sole revenue stream.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#63

Post by Phemist » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #23

weedhopper wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Well, the largest ad tech company on the planet owning the largest platform to view content on (Chrome) certainly may or may not have something to do with the viability of alternative payment models.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#64

Post by kogasa240p » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

sailorganymede wrote: post #55

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.

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

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#65

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

sailorganymede wrote: post #55

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.

[deleted]

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#66

Post by Xenoamorphous » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

malfist wrote: post #9

pembrook wrote: post #5

> 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…

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

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

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#67

Post by HexPhantom » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

rcarr wrote: post #8

> 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 pr…

Yep paying for content is part of the solution, but it doesn't fully explain why the experience has become so aggressively bad

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#68

Post by tagami » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #56

mattw2121 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So exactly when was this? Even Geocities was full of punch the monkey ads and the web was inundated with X10 pop under ads. Right before the web became a thing, Usenet was starting to become inundated with spam

Pre-1995

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#69

Post by lapcat » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

righthand wrote: post #2

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 w…

> This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article.

It's a link blog.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#70

Post by wat10000 » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #11

"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…

I'd say that very much ties into the point of the article. The fact that turning off a major component of your browser significantly improves the experience is damning. That means they put tremendous effort (i.e. money) into deliberately making their readers' experience worse.