“Your frustration is the product” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#131

Post by nicbou » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 3:44 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…

> The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.

They operate a bit like restaurants in tourist areas

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#132

Post by cjpearson » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #62

> 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.

Unfortunately, this does not save you. The NYT has a paywall and still has this terrible experience, which caused me to unsubscribe. I remain subscribed to The Atlantic because while it still relies on advertising, the print version is at least readable.

The March 2026 issue has 12 ads across 109 pages including the back cover. Ads do not appear within an article. I even sometimes read the ads, because many are about new book releases. I opened the cover story (just one article!) of this issue within the mobile app and encountered 38 advertisements. The ads take up nearly half the screen and there is almost always one visible. These 38 instances were just the same four ads repeated many, many times.

This is just one issue of one publication, but it's representative of the broader problem the author discusses. I want to support good journalism and am willing to pay for good writers and articles but strategies that are so frustrating and disrespectful to the reader make it difficult.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#133

Post by dspillett » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

AlienRobot wrote: post #33

red_admiral wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

There is a huge difference between providing a service with adverts to pay for it, and what almost all lyric sites are. They don't just put up ads and the related opportunities for adtech to stalk us in order to pay for the server and bandwidth: they spend time and money (SEO, sometimes more active advertising themselves) seeking out more and more visits to extract more revenue from that stalking and advertising relationship. And the have few standards on the sort of 3rd parties they deal with: last time I found myself on such a site and some things got through my blocking, the ads shown wouldn't have looked out of place on a porn site.

Selling ad impressions and stalking opportunities is the point of those sites, offering lyrics is just a way to do that.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#134

Post by kukkeliskuu » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 3:51 PM UTC

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 built my own platform for what I call ethical ads that is serving ads for my own site. No profiling of users allowed, but I allow very specific targeting for content.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#135

Post by glenstein » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 3:51 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #49

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…

>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. Unfortunately, music lyrics are protected by copyrights so your site of King Crimson lyrics would not be authorized unless you paid for a licen…

I think if there's any negative phrasing in your first three words, those reading from the Philosophers Chair (bathroom) are primed to take what immediately follows as Bad Vibes and downvote accordingly. They're not in this for accuracy.

My hypothesis at least.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#136

Post by 9rx » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 3:56 PM UTC

rivetfasten wrote: post #18

"... 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."

Especially now that we can render TV ads in realtime on top of real-world objects, but even before, the 7 minutes of actual TV content and 53 minutes of paid commercials exists too. Better known as professional sports. Unlike QVC, a break from the ads is occasionally given when an athlete is interviewed or things like that. Although, granted, one could argue even an interview is trying to advertise the athlete's brand. Still, potentially a reprieve from having to look at advertising in the form of things like slogans and logos.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#137

Post by jdp » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

I'm doing my small part by paying for websites that respect me in the way TFA describes. I have annual subscriptions to Defector, Brand New, and DIELINE, and I'll add more as other websites follow their lead. Maybe it'll become too much to manage one day, but it might be for other readers too, and then maybe that will pressure our card companies and banks to start providing some more useful consumer services. We need enough people to actually subscribe to these websites to make that future happen though.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#138

Post by ripptydes » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

mystraline wrote: post #4

> No print publication on the planet does this. No, "No print publication on the planet can do this" But looking back on magazines, newspapers, etc; they have ALWAYS used a tremendous amount of advertisements. Newspapers sold classified space to sell stuff. It was always passive, and no way to have the newspaper or magazine to watch the user back to track eyeballs. Now with tech, we can do precisely this, or with clo…

(reads:) People making the decisions do not understand they want to look good in front of their sources. They want to bring something nice and they want to be up to date to do what marketing demands,

...but how are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?

If everyone looks equal, sites ('to pick') are going irrelevant it seems.... but OT: about 14y ago there was a request for ads that may be liked. and yes...in the meantime, even you would've said, 'yes ther were some ads, i liked (maybe the music, the product or something other about).' But that it wasn't originally about. 10y ago the pendulum swinged to: "we lose the web", some saying that books (typewriters for example^^) were replaced by video (TV) and that the internet eaten the book- and video-stuff. so one asked: "what is next? do we become an internet of the internet (if any may use this as a description of todays so called 'AI') ?"

And i looked on the HN frontpage which shows exactly that 'exagerated' (generated support) each of you is just echoing another... but who the heck, i am even not a native english speaker, so wayne ...

Comic (in german): https://iili.io/qwVP7R9.md.png (diddn't know if the hoster likes direct linking)... regards...

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#139

Post by bombcar » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:04 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #78

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…

You can block ads on a system level with NextDNS. Much easier to use for non-tech users then any browser plugin.

I find a multi-layered method is best - things like NextDNS + browser based blocking (especially as I like to use it to block annoyances that aren't ads).

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#140

Post by bombcar » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

netsharc wrote: post #39

mhitza wrote: post #10

I was surprised at the claim that The Guardian leaves very little room for the article. Sure enough, I loaded it up in a private window with adblocks disabled and the above the fold was very obnoxious. Which is very surprising to me. I only read The Guardian within the Tor browser, and when the website is loaded over their onion urls I do not see the same large obnoxious ads. A rare Tor win? Maybe adnetworks block To…

Maybe someone with some brain on The Guardian realized if you're browsing through Tor, no way you're going to create a login and link your browsing to a name/email address... That makes it sound like no one of The Guardian has a brain, it's not the intention, it's my most trusted news source, but maybe someone on the IT department thought a little bit further.

More likely Tor was set up years ago and receives no attention unless it horribly breaks; and so nobody notices nor cares that ads aren't working there (and if they were they'd probably not get paid for them anyway).