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“Your frustration is the product”

daringfireball.net

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Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#101

Post by deejaaymac »

andai wrote: post #89

Does anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer? On the one end we've got Google Ads, which spies on your users everywhere they go. (I think most ad networks are in the same category, unfortunately.) On the other end, you've got "someone emailed me to negotiate a sponsorship / affiliate thing and I added the banner/link manually, with no tracking code." I only really see those two options.…

I know of one but it's niche. OpenSubtitles allows people to pay for ads at the start/end of content when you download subtitles on the fly. I've seen countless NordVPN ads in subtitles.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#102

Post by jodrellblank »

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…

> "and 49 megabytes of data"

This can go into "Things Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than" https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3175629 - comments from 2011 when the Yahoo.com homepage was ~220Kb

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843140 - comments from 2020

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#103

Post by jwr »

I have seen from the other side how this can happen. The people making the decisions do not understand the technical costs. In fact, many of them pretend to understand the technical costs and say things like "Well, it's just a single line that we're adding to our website".

They want to look good in front of their bosses. They want to bring nice charts with nice performance metrics and they want to be up to date with the latest developments in the market of marketing tools, so they use every tool that is out there.

"IT" has no choice but to do what marketing demands, because IT is a cost center, while marketing is closer to revenues.

And so, over time, you end up with 49MB web pages with hundreds of trackers.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#104

Post by likium »

superjared wrote: post #90
jes5199 wrote: post #77

I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously) but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so complet…

> we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop this is batshit insane, yet I believe it

"Parable of the broken window", except instead of preventing the kid from throwing the rocks, they hired a someone to catch the rocks midair.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#105

Post by VorpalWay »

AlienRobot wrote: post #86
VorpalWay wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The interesting thing about this strategy is that there are many people on this very website who have no idea what YCombinator is and just call this website "Hacker News."

Most people (me included) are not really in the target audience for YC. I have no interest in starting a company, and even if I did I wouldn't want to do so in North America.

You also see some posts on here about some YC founded company or other with open positions, which is a wider audience (so that helps the equation I guess).

My guess is that these two target audiences together is enough for them. It is not like HN is a heavy site, nor does it change much over the years. So with smart coding (i.e. a compiled language) and hosting my guess is that moderation time is the bulk of the actual operating costs.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#106

Post by rafabulsing »

andai wrote: post #89

Does anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer? On the one end we've got Google Ads, which spies on your users everywhere they go. (I think most ad networks are in the same category, unfortunately.) On the other end, you've got "someone emailed me to negotiate a sponsorship / affiliate thing and I added the banner/link manually, with no tracking code." I only really see those two options.…

Yeah, I don't mind the static, manually selected ads too much. They tend to be much less annoying, and for better/more relevant services and products.

And as a bonus (for the website owner), they're also much harder to automatically block!

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#107

Post by lordleft »

I don't disagree that reading news articles online today is a deeply unenjoyable experience. At the same time, I think not enough people acknowledge that the decision to put so much content online for free is how we ended up in this hellscape. Even when a website has a paywall, the cost of the paywall often dwarfs what you would have paid for a print equivalent of the same paper or journal, which is what enabled the flourishing of journalism in the 20th century.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#108

Post by arcxi »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #91

Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff? I have Ublock Origin Lite on by default (RIP full Ublock Origin) and a lot of sites look clean . I'm often not even aware that if I send a link to an article via Whatsapp or whatever, it may reflect badly on me that I send such an ad-overloaded mess to them. I just don't know the mess is there except sometimes by accident. I watched someone g…

> RIP full Ublock Origin

it's alive and well

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#109

Post by genthree »

PaulHoule wrote: post #75

It was funny but when we switched from my failing Alienware laptop to a new M4 Mac Mini my wife was absolutely furious at the ad saturation until I switched her from Safari to Firefox and installed an ad blocker. I guess I could have installed one in Safari if she registered an Apple account but that's something she'd feel no need for at all. (e.g. as maligned as it is, the Microsoft account really is one account you…

> The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on

Depends how you use it, I guess? The close and zero-effort integration and syncing with iOS is pretty key to my desktop (well, laptop) still having enough utility-to-effort to be worth having around at all. Probably still won't save it when my M1 Air gets a bit dodgy in a year or two and I start thinking about an upgrade (I'll likely upgrade my aging, last-pre-M-series-model iPad Pro instead) but if not for that it'd already have become inconvenient enough that I'd likely have forgotten about it in a storage bin somewhere.

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