Let me put that another way: People currently try to monetize by putting ads on their sites. Other people use adblockers, denying them payment but benefitting from their labor. If you want the ads to stop but the labor to continue, you basically desire slave labor from people. I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of people in a manner that is essentially slave labor. People who use ads are not wanting to do this work for free, as "volunteers." They are looking to get paid. In the past, people who labored for the benefit of others without recompense were called slaves. Perhaps you would like to provide an alternate term? Does "Victims of theft" work better for you?
But websites don't ask for my consent before they show me ads, and I have no idea what they expect the "price" of an article to be before I click on it, nor what I'll be getting in return. Why does the author of an article have a unilateral right to decide the terms of exchange?
Websites are able to detect most ad-blockers these days. If they like, they're welcome to deny me access to their content if they see I've blocked the ads.
I am not suggesting they should have a unilateral right. I am asking for suggestions on how to solve this so that content producers can get paid without posting ads, something no one has yet to really respond to.
The Internet has created a situation that did not previously exist. It is natural that we don't automatically know what the solution is.
They can charge money, like people have been doing for thousands of years...
I post about this in every ad-block article. The reality that nobody wants to admit is that most web content isn't worth paying for. Web publishers know it, and they're scared of a web that isn't funded by advertisements, because they'll have to find new jobs.
A basic income is probably the only way writers survive writing; there just aren't enough people willing to pay enough for content for a majority of writers to survive off of it.
Writing (like music, acting, art, fashion, etc.) has always been a lottery economy. A very very tiny fraction (JK Rowling, Dan Brown, EL James) of writers will become staggeringly successful, spurring millions to dream of matching their success and working for free in the meantime.
It's the same reason that thousands of naive 20-somethings move to LA every year.
> And, yet, somehow, we don't argue that any startup should just give their product away for free.
Are you kidding me? It's practically heresy around here to suggest that a startup should charge money and sell a product. Try it and see yourself derided as a "lifestyle business" instead of a real startup.
HN (and VC-funded startups generally) worship at the Church of Growth above all else, and the easiest way to get that coveted "hockey stick graph" is to give everything away for free. Grow now, and worry about revenue later, so the mantra goes.
The internet has created a situation of millions of people writing text that nobody wants to read, yet you frequently stumble upon it when searching for real content.
In my experience, the contents that really matter are written either by people who are NOT trying to make money from their writing because they wish to share experiences from their day jobs or free time, or by people who are payed for writing by someone but not by their readers.
> Websites are able to detect most ad-blockers these days. If they like, they're welcome to deny me access to their content if they see I've blocked the ads.
The better option is to ask the user to turn off their adblocker and explain why (and say that the adverts are vetted for malware properly).
I don't see how I exploit them by reading their articles - more likely the opposite is true, and the authors actually hoped that many people would read their article and that their readers would get something out of it.
Maybe you are idealizing wage labour? The economy isn't fair, it's more like "winner takes all". There is a blurred line between work and joy. Some people just write for the recognition (which is not a synonym for pay), or because they really care about the topic. If only 0.01% of the internet population is motivated like that, then content will always be produced no matter what.
If they were full of existential fears, with no idea how to pay their bills, they wouldn't have the energy for writing at all. Or maybe they would be writing about their problems instead.
> If you want the ads to stop but the labor to continue, you basically desire slave labor from people.
No, I desire the business model to change.
> I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of people in a manner that is essentially slave labor.
My ancestors were literally kidnapped out of their homes and forced to do backbreaking work for little pay in intolerable conditions, often while being raped and beaten daily. You have a shitty business model and you want to compare your business failure due to incompetence to that? No, fuck that. Your comparison is outright offensive. Your failure to monetize your labor is not equivalent to slavery and it's disgusting for you to claim it is.
There is current!y a running battle between people using ads to try to monetize their work and people using ad blockers. Lots of formerly well monetized businesses are being hit hard by this. This is not one individual's personal incompetence. It is a widespread trend that is de facto denying people a "living wage" who previously had a very successful business model.
I am sorry you are offended. But, slavery is defined by ownership, not abuse. Not all slaves were also actively abused. But all did labor for the benefit of another without recompense, which is heinous enough without added abuse on top of it.
> But, slavery is defined by ownership, not abuse.
I disagree, slavery is about force against consent. I agree that abuse isn't necessary for slavery to be bad, but force is. Nobody is forcing content creators to create content without their consent.
> But all did labor for the benefit of another without recompense, which is heinous enough without added abuse on top of it.
I do plenty of labor for the benefit of others without recompense: I volunteer. Again, it's not about labor without recompense, it's about force. Slave labor and volunteerism are both labor without recompense: the difference is that slave labor is forced against the laborer's consent.
But let's go back to the ownership thing for a second: are you really claiming that people who use ad blockers are trying to take ownership of content creators and/or their content? Really? Even if I did agree with you that slavery is about ownership, your argument doesn't make sense.
EDIT: At a more fundamental level, it's completely arrogant and entitled to assume that just because you performed labor someone should pay for it. I've put a lot of labor into learning how to play guitar. I could probably post a bunch of recording of my guitar playing and get a bunch of people to listen to them and view ads. But I couldn't get anyone to pay for my recordings, because I still suck at guitar. Am I entitled to recompense for the many hours I've spent practicing?
This has nothing to do with assuming that anyone is automatically owed compensation, regardless of the value of what is produced.
As I said before: Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed. People doing things that are actually valued by others, where the site gets substantial traffic and ads previously paid for staff. This is not an argument that anyone who slaps something on the web deserves compensation. It is an argument that THIS model is failing when it once worked, so we need a new model to pay for the things we do value online. The expectation that all web content be provided for free is not a healthy or realistic expectation. And if this model fails and no other emerges, then either people work for free, whatever terminology you want to use for that, or things we value simply disappear, something I have already seen more than enough of over the years -- and compared to many here, I got online relatively recently.
> Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed.
This is true, but I posit that those businesses can easily move to a pay model. If they can't, they aren't legitimate businesses.
> It is an argument that THIS model is failing when it once worked, so we need a new model to pay for the things we do value online.
"Worked" is not what I would say about the current state of ads on the internet. It certainly doesn't work for me.
> And if this model fails and no other emerges, then either people work for free, whatever terminology you want to use for that,
Volunteering? Play? Definitely not slavery. If you don't want to labor for free, just don't do it. This isn't a complicated situation, you're smart enough to figure this out.
> or things we value simply disappear, something I have already seen more than enough of over the years -- and compared to many here, I got online relatively recently.
Well, I was on the internet in the 90s, and there was some great content back then. I'll actually posit that the signal-to-noise ratio was much higher then.
Also, funded content disappears all the time. If that's the effect you're concerned about, this isn't the cause you're looking for.
> Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed.
This is true, but I posit that those businesses can easily move to a pay model. If they can't, they aren't legitimate businesses.
One last comment: Not all businesses are conducive to a pay per use or pay per user model. For some things, that simply does not work. This is exactly why advertising has been used for decades by content providers, even before there was an Internet.
> One last comment: Not all businesses are conducive to a pay per use or pay per user model. For some things, that simply does not work. This is exactly why advertising has been used for decades by content providers, even before there was an Internet.
I'm not sure why anyone would care that these businesses don't work. Why are we expected to prop up businesses that don't work?
This is not accurate. Using an ad blocker makes no demand whatsoever of people producing content, who are completely free to stop displaying it in public.
Imagine the following:
In a busy shopping mall, a busker starts to play music. A crowd starts to form enjoying the music.
Then, a strange thing happens - people with clipboards and cameras start to walk through the crowd taking photos of the shoppers and their children, making notes of their genders, heights and weights, clothing, and the shopping bags they are carrying, plus whether or not the women are pregnant.
A minute or two into the performance, more people walk through the crowd, holding placards with brand and product names on them. They walk up to each person, holding the placard in front of them and blocking their view, using a stopwatch to make sure they do so for at least 30 seconds.
One of the women says - 'hey, that's not cool - stop being so creepy'.
The clipboard and placard people remain silent, but the busker shouts - "hey - that's how I get paid! If you don't like it you are a criminal, stealing my performance".
