I believe one of the reasons I keep coming back to hackernews is the absence of ads and the near complete focus on content. Shout out to those who work in the background to keep it like this. It would be interesting to hear from dang or other insiders how evident it is that this website is adfree. At some point there must have been someone who probably raised the idea that money could be made by injecting an ad or a tracker here or there. The article uses the example of the print version of the New Yorker, as a way of how things can be. From interviews with David Remnick, the editor, I learned that it has been mostly his vision to decrease the ads in the print and making up the lost revenue by increasing the subscription fees. It’s these people we need to save the media landscape.
“Your frustration is the product”
291–300 of 352 posts
Re: “Your frustration is the product”
#292I still in 2026 do not understand the absolute manic drive websites have to push me to the app. I've administered services that have both a web client and an app client and the metrics just really weren't better, certainly not enough to spend energy actively pushing people to the app.
so much easier to collect your data and having their app on your screen is extremely valuable
Re: “Your frustration is the product”
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I may, what was your vision? What were you aiming to replace the ads with?
I have been waiting for "Netflix for news or magazines". Pay $20 a month and get access to multiple publishers.
I'd love that, but then I see things like this:
Which is a great idea and a great site, but why is it even necessary. The sheer dumb that means there are 12312 Netflix 'class' stream services is beyond ridiculous. I used to love one-stop shopping, now it's so fragmented I just went back to piracy. I don't have time to monkey with 10 sub services.
My point? As soon as such a service existed, there'd actually be 50 of them, and the stuff you wanted would be on 8 separate services.
Re: “Your frustration is the product”
#294"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…
>Bose writes:
>The reader is not respected enough by the software.
In case people don't remember, things were a lot better when a web page contained only information, not actual software.
Re: “Your frustration is the product”
#295I believe one of the reasons I keep coming back to hackernews is the absence of ads and the near complete focus on content. Shout out to those who work in the background to keep it like this. It would be interesting to hear from dang or other insiders how evident it is that this website is adfree. At some point there must have been someone who probably raised the idea that money could be made by injecting an ad or a…
Pedantic point: YC has ads, they are just blend in much better and are delivered in the same medium.
Hiring posts (definitively) and tech posts (maybe) by YC companies. The whole product is one big ad for a venture fund. Its generally well done and unobtrusive. So kudos to them for that it goes relatively unnoticed.
Re: “Your frustration is the product”
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone who thinks that some kind of subscription service will replace ads, needs to take a look at history. Cable TV, satellite TV, etc., might have started ad free, but they soon adopted ads. So you ended up paying for a subscription in addition to high numbers of ads.
I think that cable represents a lot of failures that don't need to repeated. If someone were serious about starting an ad-free subscription service there are things they can do to help ensure it stays ad-free. An easy one would be contract provisions that would require the company to make massive payouts to customers if ads are ever introduced to the service. That kind of provision doesn't cost an ad-free company any…
> contract provisions that would require the company to
IANAL but I suspect bankruptcy law is a subtle and chronic bad influence here.
If a well-behaved company has financial trouble, formerly-binding promises around privacy or ethics may get voided in the name of somehow turning the whole mess into money for creditors. Then the new ownership may be able to do whatever they want with the data.
If the prior management deleted everything before the sale, they could get into legal trouble for destroying "valuable assets" and wrongly prioritizing customers over creditors.
Re: “Your frustration is the product”
#297I 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…
I had a site with some traffic and a popular, class-leading ad plugin for the platform. At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription. I got an email from the developer, which was kind enough, asking me why I was cancelling and if there was any feedback I wanted to share. I mentioned how complicated ad inventory, ad placement, and online ordering for hands-off customer sel…
Why didn't you tell him what you told us?
"At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription."
Re: “Your frustration is the product”
#298> No print publication on the planet does this. 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.
In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville noted that American publications (unlike those from Europe) packed their pages with ads
Re: “Your frustration is the product”
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been waiting for "Netflix for news or magazines". Pay $20 a month and get access to multiple publishers.
What frustrates me to no end, is that Youtube makes about $2 per user per month from ads. Yet if i want to go ad free, they expect me to pay $14 per month. Why in the hell would they not just sell it to me at cost for $2. Heck, I'll even say I'll be a customer for the REST OF TIME if they did that. I understand why Netflix and other vendors charge $12 - $20 because it has to pay for the copyright. But Youtube does NO…
There is a comment somewhere on HN where a person described implementing ads for a small, hobby website.
Users complaied about the price to go ad-free (something like $25 per year).
The commenter revealed that the actual revenue from ads was much more than $25 per year. Every person who purchased the ad-free option actually cost them money.
----- The lesson I took away is that ads pay more than we expect, though i didn't know the specifics of YouTube.
By providing an ad-free option, they are really allowing the user to out-bid the advertiser.
I think for most people, they would not be willing to pay more to avoid the ad than the ad seller is willing to pay to show it. It's a weird conundrum--but people are very cheap.
Re: “Your frustration is the product”
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Chrome?
I do web development, it makes no sense for me to use a browser most of the public doesn't use. Also I have a ton of extensions that help with development. Firefox is painful.
> Firefox is painful.
What exactly is painful about Firefox? It's so painful that you'd rather go without an adblocker?