this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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A lot of the VALUE of a news article on the internet is the ability to share it and discuss it with everyone else. Paywalls remove that value, or require all of the people you share it with to already have subscriptions to everything else.
News has been paid for via advertisements for a lot longer than the internet. The subscription fees for Newspapers really only covered the printing and distribution costs, while the reporters' salaries were paid for via advertising.
The problem is that the advertising has gotten TOO intrusive. It isn't just a banner ad anymore. It is a ton of banners speckled between every other paragraph on the page. As soon as advertising gets in the way, people will look to get around it.
I have found that I am overly sensitive to almost all forms of push-advertising (as opposed to pull-advertising where I am looking for marketing materials on something I want to research). I have browser ad blockers as well as DNS based ones on my wifi. I also watch very little broadcast TV. I have no problem waiting for a season of a TV show to be on DVD so I can watch it without breaks, or the annoying banners that pop up while watching.
I don't understand why so many people are making concessions towards advertisements. Yes, some aren't too bad, but at the end of the day all advertising is just brainwashing you to buy more things. If we're going to dream about an alternate universe where the internet was better, we don't need to compromise with our imaginations.
At the end of the day, running a server does cost money, and people's goodwill will only go so far. I don't want to have to pay directly for every service, website, or whatever I see, but don't mind doing it from time to time.
I buy a lot of DVD's, blurays, or 4K UHD movies and tv shows, and then immediately rip them onto my Jellyfin server so that I know I will be able to watch them when I want, how I want. I feel like that does my karma of supporting the creators of those shows.
Advertisements allow me to watch everything else. There are youtube channels I follow, that get sponsored by "NordVPN" or whatever, and even though I don't use Nord, and would probably go out of my way to NOT use them because of all of the sponsorship messages I see, I am glad they give money to the creators I like.
The real problem is when they become too intrusive. I use ad blockers to remove Youtube ads, because I don't want a video to be split up abruptly while watching it. If there was a simple, short, ad before the videos, I would have no problem with them, but they became intrusive, so I block them.