I feel old. This article begins by pining for the good, old-fashioned 'net of 2012. I know that I'm not the most attentive person on this topic, but honestly I don't feel like the big picture has changed much in years. Services like Twitter started up, grew wildly, and then looked for some way to make money for pretty much that whole time. Social networks sprout up; some make it, some don't. Big companies do some cool things and some cruddy ones. Lean new browsers burst onto the scene and then gradually bloat. Advertisers find new ways to intrude into formerly pristine conversations. (The rise of clickbait sites isn't even remotely as disruptive today as the rise of spam and sporge posts was to Usenet, just for instance.)
So I suppose my point is that I don't see any reason to think that the sky is falling today. Yes, some beloved sites and valuable modes of interaction are changing. But it's not the end of the internet: this has been going on since the beginning. We'll adapt, as we always have, especially if folks who care about creating vibrant communities and rich flows of information keep finding ways to innovate.
You're right, author has rose-colored glasses. I almost thought it was a joke at first—2012 as the good ol' days? The internet ruined in the last three years? Come on.
I think part of the problem is that services now start without a way to monetize themselves immediately - they rely on external money reserves to support growth. People get used to getting quality content for free. At some point said services finally need to make money, at which point they fuck up (from the user's point of view) their product, and so the users move to another party who has fresh investor money reserves.
Just reeks of being a whiny niche webfotainment consumer.
> I've really loved listening to SoundCloud over the past couple years since mainstream radio sucks, for the same reasons that mainstream TV used to (needing to target the lowest common denominator so as to not upset advertisers.)
Boohoo, now my favorite sites are going mainstream since I spend hours on their sites/consuming their bandwidth and they need to cover costs.
> There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish. There has to be a way to save the walled garden of bland banality that the internet is becoming.
But you're still going to these sites despite the banality.
It's just a combination of pessimism with a few random anecdotes. Reddit being "ruined" has so little to do with The Verge having a lot of ad tech in its pages they could really only be grouped together in the category of, "Things I don't like."
Constantly have to adapt and change or build services because commercial incentives will turn each and every successful service to shit feels like a problem to me.
It doesn't feel sustainable, and a backlash seems to me to only be a matter of time.
Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song
And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair
You're putting all the responsibility on the consumer, and none on us, the technologists, the so-called innovators. Where are our innovative powers to come up with alternate busniness models? Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick?
Because that is what the advertising business model is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that?
Only the truth is it isn't free. We all pay in the end. The lunch is not only not free, it's costing us more and its loaded with toxic crap.
The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden[1], and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast. You can already see it in the top comments to this post.
Admittedly I suck as a writer, but ever time I make my very strong case that advertising may be the primary evil of internet[2], I almost invariably receive a great number of silent downvotes. No one solidly counters my arguments, except to fall back on the utter bullshit that that advertising is great because it gives us the internet for free, which proves that they didn’t even read my argument.
Boykis is wrong in saying that things were fine in 2012. No, they were bad then, and the internet's original sin, relying on advertising, started long before that. It’s only that now it is accelerating toward a crescendo. It will get worse unless we do something about it.
Exactly. What I took away from this article is that, despite everyone being frustrated by the inoculation of ads into our beloved 'free' services, we are still not frustrated enough to actually pay the premium to eliminate these annoyances. It's the old cliche, "you can't have your cake and eat it too".
The part that stuck out to me was when the author talked about her desire to have a long-term archive of her favorite music, but wasn't willing to "wait for 2 days for a CD to ship". I can understand not wanting to deal with CDs or not wanting to spend money on less-favorite songs on the album, but focusing on the delay just doesn't click for me.
I wonder if people give thought to the length of time it takes to learn an instrument, play it well, learn the recording process, record it well, learn the mixing process, mix it well, learn the mastering process, master it well etc. if they are willing to dismiss $1.50 as expensive for a song.
In comparison, how much is a cup of coffee or a portion of chips (for us UK types)?
How much is a trip to the cinema?
It shouldn't be a race to the bottom. If you want bargain-barrel prices, you'll get bargain-barrel quality too.
I get what you're saying but that doesn't answer why a hybrid model isn't more common than it is.
Show me ads to monetize my free consumption of your service, but if I'm willing to pay (as many definitely are), allow me to subscribe to disable the ads. Why isn't this model more common? Is it because advertisers tend not to want to advertise on a platform where people can opt out of their ads?
Honestly, for a rant that detailed about how corporations are ruining the internet, I kinda expected OP to know how to save songs off SoundCloud.
The worst part about this "modern web" for me is that mobile browsers can't seem to download a file from a website using simple HTTP authentication, because someone thought it would be a great fucking idea to write a separate app to manage downloads, and they never thought that someone might still be using HTTP simple authentication in 2014. So no, sorry, you can't download that file because our developers needed to write yet another app and didn't consider your use case.
Everyone is chiming in on this point, so I don't think I wrote it clearly enough. I would be willing to pay $1.50 for a song if it were through a known party, like Amazon Payments or PayPal. I've bought lots of music through Amazon. I'm not going to risk $1.50 to an unknown website. Additionally, my expectations as a consumer have been set to pay 99 cents per track, so to me, in the current atmosphere, $1.50 seems like it's too much, even though to the artist it might not be. The other issue I didn't touch on is DRM. Do I get the MP3 to keep forever if I pay? Most times, no.
I clicked on one song that I loved. It took me to Amazon, but the song wasn't available on MP3, only on Audio CD or Vinyl.
I immediately clicked away. I would gladly buy it on MP3 for 99 cents. But not wait for 2 days for a CD to ship.
Seriously? TWO DAYS. You can't wait TWO DAYS for your beloved music to arrive? This must be the pinnacle of someone with a low attention span. Ironic considering they painstakingly searched out each artist to buy their music, only to stop when they learn it will take two days to get it?
I would not buy a $1.50 song on such a site. Here's why:
$1.50 is not worth the scale of mental investment required. I'm not going to give my credit card info to a site that I'm only going to use once. I'm not going to give my info to a site I don't trust. I will buy my music from the places I am already invested in.
And it is an investment: it takes time, attention, trust, and memory to use a website. The cost of that song is not $1.50 to me. (If it were, I would have no trouble paying it. I think that's a perfect price for a song.) The cost is an arbitrarily long commitment to managing the risk involved with using the site.
Which is only worthwhile when I know I will come back regularly. When I can say "I plan on buying a new song every other day, and that I'm ok with spending hundreds on music from this one site." Or when I can justify a larger purchase that is exclusive to the site.
I think the mean price per song is certainly less than $1.50 over my entire music collection.
That assumes an average $15 for CDs with an average of 10 songs on them. At that price, I get the original uncompressed audio, FLAC files for digital storage, and whatever lossy transcoded files I might like to put on my player devices. And all of them are free of DRM, or at least freed from it at the ripping step.
In that light, to pay $1.50 for a digital download of a lossy-encoded file is pure madness. Despite the cost requirements of manufacturing, transporting, and distributing a physical medium, I still think the best value for buying licensed music performances is to get the whole CD and process the digital files yourself.
And whenever I [rarely] buy digital downloads, I will only pay for lossless file formats. I might download a gratis MP3, but only as a means to determine whether I might like to buy the album, or if there is literally no better way to get that recording.
I simply don't trust the digital music distributors to defend my interests in this industry.
If it was Bandcamp, TopSpin, 7Digital, databeats or Bleep, these are hardly unknown players in the digital download industry. The price for escaping from iTunes is a bit of diversity and slightly higher prices.
Edited to remove whinge about the price, it's not relevant. The author has let me know that the shop was http://shop.coldbusted.org/music which happens to be a frontend to Bandcamp.
Users always talk that they would love to pay. The problem is, they never do. They blog and write on forums about what they would like to see, but the things they write are always very, very different from what they actually do, according to the data.
You remember how in this whole Reddit debacle Pao said that "most of users don't really care about this scandal" and got downvoted to hell? It could very well be true, but users who were constantly around subreddits that were involved in the drama couldn't believe it. They are sure that evil corporate suits are out of touch with reality because they "don't even use their own service" and consume the information in form of PowerPoint presentations. But those suits are very well in touch with reality — it is a couple of SQL queries away from them, actually. (And I see that "managers" are getting more and more literate in terms of analytics, by the way — SQL and R aren't really that hard, and often you have much more user-friendly analytic services at your hands).
I'm not saying that big websites don't do bullshit. Of course they do. But when they do something that users actually don't like, users punish them in the most harsh way possible: with their wallets. Don't you remember how internet used to be? The hundreds of popups, for example — turns out, users didn't like it enough to install Firefox, so these guys went out of business. I could recall more examples like this, but this comment is already too wordy; you get the picture.
If you want to stop Buzzfeed, don't click clickbait and shame (in a constructive way — without calling them idiots, but making them feel a little bit low-brow, basic manipulation isn't that hard) your facebook friends for reposting such bullshit. And if you won't succeed, you'll just have to face the reality of being one in several billions.
Really enjoyed this post, but I think some of her thoughts point to the root of the problem.
> I started by trying to buy each of them separately.
> $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song
So she wanted to compensate each artist for the songs she loved, but only at an amount of her choosing? I'm assuming she was expecting 99 cents, so we're essentially haggling over $0.50 here. This shows why the advertising model is so prevalent- people don't want to pay for content, even if it's a song that the person listens to 10 times a day.
That being said, the giving credit card info to an unknown domain is a real concern and I totally understand that. But it was mentioned second, after price, which feels more like justification for not being willing to pay $1.50 for a song.
The credit card situation is a completely separate concern, but a very big one. I still don't understand why there's no better international online payment method. There's a great Dutch online payment method, but that's only used by Dutch sites and a few really big ones (like Steam) that can afford to implement national payment systems.
Why that system hasn't been implemented on a larger scale, I still don't know.
For these kind of purchases, I have a credit card that allows me to credit virtual card numbers with a limit and expiration that I can set. I'll set the limit to the order amount. If they try to charge more, the transaction is declined.
That, along with the ability to contest charges (chargebacks), makes it a lot less risky.
That's not your internet. That soundcloud content isn't yours, and neither is Soundcloud. Reddit isn't yours. Tumblr isn't yours. Github, where that posting is hosted, isn't yours either. This site, where you linked to the discussion because you don't have a local comment facility, isn't yours. And it's not mine either, no matter how many comments I leave or votes I make or imaginary internet points I win or lose.
Your client, your internet connection, and a server you pay for, on a domain you own, with bandwidth you pay for. That's your internet. You can use that however you want.
Nobody's doing anything to your internet (well, notable exception for mobile carriers and anti-net-neutrality-campaigners). They're doing things to their own internet.
This article has made me realize that I'm about to start paying for sites to show me ads, and paying a lot. What do I mean?
We just bought a gorgeous 15+ acre property outside of Austin with all kinds of outdoorsy stuff that I like -- horse barn, stocked pond, creek, salt water pool, woods with bike trails, etc. I've convinced my wife, a city girl, that we should all (we have three small kids) move out there and just try it out. The big problem is that there is no wired internet service of any kind at that address.
Luckily, I have clear line of sight to a cluster of cell towers less than a mile away, so we get 5 bars of every carrier out there. I'll be starting out on ATT's ~$375/month plan which is capped at 50GB/month with $10 per GB(!!) overage charges.
This means that for the first time in my life, I'm actually considering installing ad blocking software on our machines, because I just don't want to pay for tons and tons of ads. There are so. many. freaking. ads., and the web is so slow now. Those of us who actually pay for our bandwidth are getting screwed.
I'm happy to pay for your content. I'm not happy to pay for your ads. There has to be a better way.
This timeline is a little skewed. Google+ started in 2011, way before Project Loom was announced. SOPA was introduced to the house in 2011 as well.
And none of this is new. Before SOPA and PIPA, the DMCA raised similar discussions. Ads have been degrading the experience at least since Tripod introduced popups. And the Tumblr arguments are almost the same as back when Geocities was bought - in fact, by the same company!
So it all starts with some guy having the genius idea to "rebrand" the internet. Now it is "The Cloud", a fancy term for 'server'. Then all the late millenials fall for it. "It's cool, it's in the cloud, I stream my <everything>". I thought it was fairly obvious that the cloud meant 'turn the internet into TV stations'. Which is a mostly completed process at this point.
Now it's the good ol' days of 2012 when there was still bait on the line. 2012? Companies have been trying to transform the internet for a long time, and users have been helping by refusing to:
a) pay for anything.
b) create sites/content the way we used to.
It wouldn't kill you to order an album, drop it in a CD drive and rip it. My apologies for implying hard labor.
We all are. It costs money to create, host, and distribute content. We've demonstrated our unwillingness to pay a proper amount for it. (For example: "I would gladly buy it on MP3 for 99 cents... $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song...") And so companies that do this stuff have to get creative about making money. And advertising does the job.
The solution is to pay much more money for the content that you now get for free.
Basically, the day will come when any single one of us will be able to serve our own content privately from our own machine without requiring a massive infrastructure investment, nor any kind of fancy participation in what is, essentially, branding on steroids (Internet of today), but rather all it will require to sell and control ones own art is to publish it yourself with cryptographic certainty that there simply is no middle man any more.
Its the third party that degrades all art - those who have to carry the stuff from place to place in order to pimp things for the artist. Get rid of this, and give the artist direct and completely control over where and when and to whom their art is delivered, and we produce the utopia that many of us artists wish we had. It is unbearable to have to go through a third party to get to the masses; to have direct contact is the ultimate goal..
You can already set up a website using a "website builder" which hosts it for a couple of bucks and doesn't force any branding on it. A site on Squarespace costs $8/m and gives you unlimited storage and bandwidth to distribute your music; for $18 more, you get to use the ecommerce part to sell your stuff.
If artists aren't doing this already, which is much less intrusive than Soundcloud/iTunes/etc, what makes you think they'll be hosting their own IPFS sites?
I think the author doesn't realize that what's changed about the Internet isn't the technology. It's the people that changed. Today folks expect to get things for free with adverts. But now people don't want the adverts either so they use uBlock (I know I do). So, what's left for content and technology/service creators to do?
I think micropayments would be a viable solution if a platform that's fairly secure and non-intrusive was created (I don't think Paypal or Bitcoin fit the bill). But the problem is that people today are rightly concerned about identity theft which can wind up draining their bank accounts or tanking their credit score. So, I'm not sure such a scheme would ever take off if companies like Sony can't secure their own infrastructure.
Anyways, the author should realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Either you pay in advertisements and data mining your personal info or you pay up front. Honestly, I prefer to pay up front and as directly to the creators as possible.
Except we tried micropayments about a bazillion times and they have universally failed. People don't want yet another monthly bill, which is what micropayments would be. You'd "subscribe" to various sites and services and it would eat at your bitcoin or whatever that you would need to replenish monthly.
Ads aren't as terrible as the average INTJ male makes them out to be. They're trivial to block as well. The OP's post is just one long angry rant. I'm not even sure what the take away here is other than how monetization works on the modern web (internet is not only the web!!). Everything about this screams, "The mainstream doesn't care about my marginalized interests and opinions!"
If anything, the mainstream has it pretty good. I pay something like 1/10th for Google Music what I spent at the record store annually. As a music lover, being able to tap into 30m songs trivially is pretty amazing. Geeks used to write love letters to a future with a "universal jukebox" and here we are, yet no one is happy! Old fashioned ideas of "collecting" albums and such are bizarre to me. The people into that always seemed to do it for some kinda of social gravitas so they could show off their "taste." I just like the music. I don't need to own it, I just need access to it.
Hell, it even makes radio stations based on my library or by artist, or even by song if I choose. This completely invalidates whatever questionable value radio stations provide today. What a waste of bandwidth all these FM/AM stations are. Retiring them and selling that spectrum off for better LTE makes sense to me. The old ways aren't always good, in fact, a lot of the old ways were shit. They're old compromises and dinosaur tech that's overstayed their welcome. Lets not pine too badly for the past. It was shit for the most part. As a person in his 40s, I think we have it better than ever.
So, to be clear, you are a self-described "music connoisseur" who is unwilling to support the artists you claim to love at any point while their content is freely available, yet you claim that you would be willing to pay for a subscription model. Yet when you feel that content is at risk you are also unwilling to pay if access to their music is not instant and the cost is marginally more than nothing.
You are a net-negative fan. Your support does nothing for the artists and, until recently, costs SoundCloud money. When SoundCloud adjusts their business to account for users like yourself, you complain publicly with a shakily-supported premise that I believe is actually more a complaint about digital things having a cost.
When I like a band or an artist, I buy their albums on CD or MP3. There's even an independent record store I like near my house, one of the last, and I frequently buy from there, because their existence enriches my life and the community. If an artist is on Bandcamp, I buy through Bandcamp and usually give more than the minimum because I know Bandcamp gets a cut and because I work in technology and have the money to do so.
If you don't like the ads, buy the music and listen whenever you want. Don't be a net-negative fan and then complain when you are treated as such.
There are many ways to support content creators who distribute via the web, such as Flattr ( https://flattr.com ) and Google Contributor (as nandhp mentioned). Patreon is becoming popular too ( https://www.patreon.com ).
As for music, my personal favourite site is Bandcamp, aside from having an interesting mix of music I believe it has a model that's good for artists and fans alike ( https://bandcamp.com ).
How can a web site survive without ads? You can charge a subscription fee, but many users who would tolerate ads will just leave when faced with a paywall. You can ask for donations. Or you can run the site as cheaply as possible and try to support it out of your own pocket.
Given these alternatives, it's easy to see why people support their site with ads. So how can we make these alternatives more attractive? Or is there some other way for web sites to survive?
Something that has always bothered me about advertisements isn't that companies are creating/using them it was that they actually work! The reason ads are everywhere is because they make money, LOTS of money. In 2010 it was estimated by "statista.com" (http://www.statista.com/statistics/237797/total-global-adver...) that the advertisement industry made 495 billion U.S. Dollars ranking it higher then Retail or Oil/Gas according to outdated "Wikipedia" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...). So my point is the crux of the problem is more to do with our (global) society then it does the evil plot of an industry. The best weapon against ads is to stop making them profitable. Bad flash or obnoxious java applets make money! Having a stupid mascot walk across the page offering to help makes money! Forcing people to watch and listen to ads just to see the cute kitten play with yarn makes money! Why wouldn't it be littered everywhere? Case in point: SPAM. That Viagra email poorly written and incorrectly translated actually makes the pharmaceutical companies money! Sad, real sad.
This article is interesting because there seems to be an assumption that there is some ideal the web should strive towards ("free exchange of information"), when actually everyone is optimising for their local maxima.
Google wanted to challenge Facebook and had a huge userbases on lots of different platforms...you can see the reasoning which would lead them to add everyone to an umbrella google social network. The Verge saw a way to make money with relatively little investment on their part - a seductive offer. Soundcloud (presumably) found a business plan with a clear path to profit and evaluated it to be the best option.
In the end, all of these companies exist to make money. Those that do stick around to be criticised, those that fail are irrelevant! Buzzfeed is a great example because it's so polarising - it's criticised for having low quality content, and yet it's extremely popular, a perfect example of something that people clearly do actively want to use. If you had an isolated choice reduce your userbase by 20% but increase profit by 10x, that's an easy business decision to make.
I just find it difficult to make sweeping criticisms of these companies and the internet as a whole - these are independent evolutions, each of which can be criticised on their own demerits. Of course the internet will evolve to consist mostly of what the majority wants - this isn't inherently good or bad.
You know how in the innovator's dilemma, the point at which the new innovator gets a foothold is also the point where the old firm has peak profits? I think there's a similar thing where the best time to user a particular service is when the service is least profitable.
That's what the 2012 nostalgia sounds like to me. Back when Twitter was hosting revolutions, but still having issues with uptime (not to mention revenue). And Project Loon was alive, but mostly getting mocked by both Wall Street and charities/nonprofits (With Bill Gates being the most visible).
I also suspect 2012-2014 was when SoundCloud had huge amounts of traffic and, without any way of making money, at its least profitable. I have no actual evidence of this.
Personally, Project Loon always sounded like some crazy way of getting more people to use Google than actual charity. Like some weird extrapolation from, "the more people that use the Internet, the more money Google makes" and "Google's reached market saturation in current markets, we need growth in developing countries"
Going off memory for all this. Sorry if I get some details wrong about Innovators Dilemma, Twitter in 2012, Project Loon and such.
This is somewhat tangental, but it's tangental on a couple of points so I'll bring it up anyway.
Would someone please fix "podcasting," and maybe even RSS?
The first tangent is 2012 (or maybe 2007, I dunno time is a blur). RSS and XML were one of the Web 2.0 buzz. Blogs were exploding and there was a lot of novel writing of a type we didn't have much of before. RSS, XML, semantic web and their friends were being brought up all the time (here too) in confusing contents. I didn't really get it but I assumed other people did.
I think there was something wrong with the conceptual design of it.
Podcasting though, that was a nice little bastard of RSS and ipod. She had weird hair in weirder places, but.. I'm going to abandon this metaphor ..podcast content has been getting better and better.
It's terrible to use though. It's hard to find or share content. It's hard to subscribe, even if you know the name of the show. All the podcatchers suck.
It has a lot os stuff going for it though. It's genuinely "web." Compared to youtube or any other centralized internet media. Anyone can host their own audio files and broadcast the feed. Apple, Sound cloud or whoever makes an app using podcast content can access all the content. They can filter, sensor and display it how they see fit. This could be great for competition, freedom of speech.
Why do all the apps suck? Why is it so hard to find content. If you're below median technically, just getting from the show's site to a feed in your app is a serious challenge. I suspect the protocol is partially to blame, but I don't know.
I used to be a really large fan of RSS because it fulfilled the dream of bringing hand-picked content to the user, in one place. Why go to all the separate websites? Why have an app for EACH new agency. I can search, sort, see when articles were published, all from the comfort of a single web page or desktop client! RSS even seemed to have pretty wide adoption. That orange button was everywhere! My non-techie friends even used Google Reader circa 2006-2008.
However, my love of RSS is really just a historic relic of becoming interested in computers between 2001 and 2005. Before that was Usenet and other technologies I'm probably unaware of. RSS has since been replaced by Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Google Plus, etc. Someone needs to pay the bills and it's a lot easier to monetize when you keep users in your walled gardens and control what they see. These newer technologies are also MUCH easier to use for the average consumer and have the net-benefit of being "social" which is likely beneficial for the ad conglomerates.
Companies who create (or curate or distribute) content are fundamentally at odds with their users. Users want relevant, high quality, add-free content, but most are not willing to pay for it. If they do, they expect a fine-tuned user experience or physical product (a magazine or Amazon Kindle for example). Even paid subscription magazines (NewScientist, Time, etc.) have ads to help keep their pricing competitive and increase quarterly profits for investors. Hell, even my Kindle (which I PAID for) came with ads. Granted, Amazon gave me the ability to remove them for $20. But, that gives you an idea of how valuable ads are. I never understood why more websites didn't just include ads in their RSS feeds. Easier to filter out? Less control since the user isn't visiting the site?
I'd be MORE than willing to pay for RSS or NNTP feeds of high quality content. To me, there is no better user experience than reading format-free text and images in Gnus, but I imagine I'm in the minority. Average consumers (my parents, non-tech friends, etc.) are more than willing to visit cnn.com in their browsers or dedicated phone app. Most people simply don't care enough. I feel like I'm constantly trying to chase the conversation of the topics I'm interested in by stringing together mostly-incompatible technologies and work flows.
I'd really just like the ability to read, annotate, comment on, share, and discuss media with people who are also interested.
"
There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish. "
There, in the last sentence is the relevant insight. But, sadly, here the post stops.
I must admit, for me the most relevant information was google using the computers mike through chrome. I am shocked how far companies can go and do go. I think this finally ends the discussion about google being evil or not.
[+] [-] Steuard|10 years ago|reply
So I suppose my point is that I don't see any reason to think that the sky is falling today. Yes, some beloved sites and valuable modes of interaction are changing. But it's not the end of the internet: this has been going on since the beginning. We'll adapt, as we always have, especially if folks who care about creating vibrant communities and rich flows of information keep finding ways to innovate.
[+] [-] binxbolling|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jolan|10 years ago|reply
> I've really loved listening to SoundCloud over the past couple years since mainstream radio sucks, for the same reasons that mainstream TV used to (needing to target the lowest common denominator so as to not upset advertisers.)
Boohoo, now my favorite sites are going mainstream since I spend hours on their sites/consuming their bandwidth and they need to cover costs.
Alexa time on site:
facebook: 21:23 reddit: 18:30 youtube: 17:52 tumblr: 12:46 twitter: 7:41 soundcloud: 4:24
That's an hour and a half of a person's day.
> There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish. There has to be a way to save the walled garden of bland banality that the internet is becoming.
But you're still going to these sites despite the banality.
> Who's doing this to my internet?
You are.
> But most importantly, who will solve it?
Consider nominating yourself.
[+] [-] austenallred|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitsuckless|10 years ago|reply
It doesn't feel sustainable, and a backlash seems to me to only be a matter of time.
[+] [-] icebraining|10 years ago|reply
And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.
[+] [-] eevilspock|10 years ago|reply
You're putting all the responsibility on the consumer, and none on us, the technologists, the so-called innovators. Where are our innovative powers to come up with alternate busniness models? Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick?
Because that is what the advertising business model is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that?
Only the truth is it isn't free. We all pay in the end. The lunch is not only not free, it's costing us more and its loaded with toxic crap.
The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden[1], and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast. You can already see it in the top comments to this post.
Admittedly I suck as a writer, but ever time I make my very strong case that advertising may be the primary evil of internet[2], I almost invariably receive a great number of silent downvotes. No one solidly counters my arguments, except to fall back on the utter bullshit that that advertising is great because it gives us the internet for free, which proves that they didn’t even read my argument.
Boykis is wrong in saying that things were fine in 2012. No, they were bad then, and the internet's original sin, relying on advertising, started long before that. It’s only that now it is accelerating toward a crescendo. It will get worse unless we do something about it.
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[1] Today on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961527
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237
[+] [-] DarkTree|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steuard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 72deluxe|10 years ago|reply
In comparison, how much is a cup of coffee or a portion of chips (for us UK types)?
How much is a trip to the cinema?
It shouldn't be a race to the bottom. If you want bargain-barrel prices, you'll get bargain-barrel quality too.
[+] [-] Aqueous|10 years ago|reply
Show me ads to monetize my free consumption of your service, but if I'm willing to pay (as many definitely are), allow me to subscribe to disable the ads. Why isn't this model more common? Is it because advertisers tend not to want to advertise on a platform where people can opt out of their ads?
[+] [-] deanCommie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kogepathic|10 years ago|reply
2. Open your browser's Developer Tools
3. Navigate to song page
4. Click on network tab in Developer Tools
5. Press the big play logo on the song
6. Look for the request for the MP3 file
7. Save link to computer
Honestly, for a rant that detailed about how corporations are ruining the internet, I kinda expected OP to know how to save songs off SoundCloud.
The worst part about this "modern web" for me is that mobile browsers can't seem to download a file from a website using simple HTTP authentication, because someone thought it would be a great fucking idea to write a separate app to manage downloads, and they never thought that someone might still be using HTTP simple authentication in 2014. So no, sorry, you can't download that file because our developers needed to write yet another app and didn't consider your use case.
[+] [-] woofyman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|10 years ago|reply
I clicked on one song that I loved. It took me to Amazon, but the song wasn't available on MP3, only on Audio CD or Vinyl.
I immediately clicked away. I would gladly buy it on MP3 for 99 cents. But not wait for 2 days for a CD to ship.
Seriously? TWO DAYS. You can't wait TWO DAYS for your beloved music to arrive? This must be the pinnacle of someone with a low attention span. Ironic considering they painstakingly searched out each artist to buy their music, only to stop when they learn it will take two days to get it?
I just don't get any more.
[+] [-] Retra|10 years ago|reply
$1.50 is not worth the scale of mental investment required. I'm not going to give my credit card info to a site that I'm only going to use once. I'm not going to give my info to a site I don't trust. I will buy my music from the places I am already invested in.
And it is an investment: it takes time, attention, trust, and memory to use a website. The cost of that song is not $1.50 to me. (If it were, I would have no trouble paying it. I think that's a perfect price for a song.) The cost is an arbitrarily long commitment to managing the risk involved with using the site.
Which is only worthwhile when I know I will come back regularly. When I can say "I plan on buying a new song every other day, and that I'm ok with spending hundreds on music from this one site." Or when I can justify a larger purchase that is exclusive to the site.
[+] [-] imauld|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logfromblammo|10 years ago|reply
That assumes an average $15 for CDs with an average of 10 songs on them. At that price, I get the original uncompressed audio, FLAC files for digital storage, and whatever lossy transcoded files I might like to put on my player devices. And all of them are free of DRM, or at least freed from it at the ripping step.
In that light, to pay $1.50 for a digital download of a lossy-encoded file is pure madness. Despite the cost requirements of manufacturing, transporting, and distributing a physical medium, I still think the best value for buying licensed music performances is to get the whole CD and process the digital files yourself.
And whenever I [rarely] buy digital downloads, I will only pay for lossless file formats. I might download a gratis MP3, but only as a means to determine whether I might like to buy the album, or if there is literally no better way to get that recording.
I simply don't trust the digital music distributors to defend my interests in this industry.
[+] [-] voltagex_|10 years ago|reply
If it was Bandcamp, TopSpin, 7Digital, databeats or Bleep, these are hardly unknown players in the digital download industry. The price for escaping from iTunes is a bit of diversity and slightly higher prices.
Edited to remove whinge about the price, it's not relevant. The author has let me know that the shop was http://shop.coldbusted.org/music which happens to be a frontend to Bandcamp.
[+] [-] romaniv|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imauld|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] reder_c|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|10 years ago|reply
Users always talk that they would love to pay. The problem is, they never do. They blog and write on forums about what they would like to see, but the things they write are always very, very different from what they actually do, according to the data.
You remember how in this whole Reddit debacle Pao said that "most of users don't really care about this scandal" and got downvoted to hell? It could very well be true, but users who were constantly around subreddits that were involved in the drama couldn't believe it. They are sure that evil corporate suits are out of touch with reality because they "don't even use their own service" and consume the information in form of PowerPoint presentations. But those suits are very well in touch with reality — it is a couple of SQL queries away from them, actually. (And I see that "managers" are getting more and more literate in terms of analytics, by the way — SQL and R aren't really that hard, and often you have much more user-friendly analytic services at your hands).
I'm not saying that big websites don't do bullshit. Of course they do. But when they do something that users actually don't like, users punish them in the most harsh way possible: with their wallets. Don't you remember how internet used to be? The hundreds of popups, for example — turns out, users didn't like it enough to install Firefox, so these guys went out of business. I could recall more examples like this, but this comment is already too wordy; you get the picture.
If you want to stop Buzzfeed, don't click clickbait and shame (in a constructive way — without calling them idiots, but making them feel a little bit low-brow, basic manipulation isn't that hard) your facebook friends for reposting such bullshit. And if you won't succeed, you'll just have to face the reality of being one in several billions.
[+] [-] ohitsdom|10 years ago|reply
> I started by trying to buy each of them separately.
> $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song
So she wanted to compensate each artist for the songs she loved, but only at an amount of her choosing? I'm assuming she was expecting 99 cents, so we're essentially haggling over $0.50 here. This shows why the advertising model is so prevalent- people don't want to pay for content, even if it's a song that the person listens to 10 times a day.
That being said, the giving credit card info to an unknown domain is a real concern and I totally understand that. But it was mentioned second, after price, which feels more like justification for not being willing to pay $1.50 for a song.
[+] [-] mcv|10 years ago|reply
Why that system hasn't been implemented on a larger scale, I still don't know.
[+] [-] ryandrake|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xirdstl|10 years ago|reply
That, along with the ability to contest charges (chargebacks), makes it a lot less risky.
[+] [-] jameshart|10 years ago|reply
Your client, your internet connection, and a server you pay for, on a domain you own, with bandwidth you pay for. That's your internet. You can use that however you want.
Nobody's doing anything to your internet (well, notable exception for mobile carriers and anti-net-neutrality-campaigners). They're doing things to their own internet.
[+] [-] jonstokes|10 years ago|reply
We just bought a gorgeous 15+ acre property outside of Austin with all kinds of outdoorsy stuff that I like -- horse barn, stocked pond, creek, salt water pool, woods with bike trails, etc. I've convinced my wife, a city girl, that we should all (we have three small kids) move out there and just try it out. The big problem is that there is no wired internet service of any kind at that address.
Luckily, I have clear line of sight to a cluster of cell towers less than a mile away, so we get 5 bars of every carrier out there. I'll be starting out on ATT's ~$375/month plan which is capped at 50GB/month with $10 per GB(!!) overage charges.
This means that for the first time in my life, I'm actually considering installing ad blocking software on our machines, because I just don't want to pay for tons and tons of ads. There are so. many. freaking. ads., and the web is so slow now. Those of us who actually pay for our bandwidth are getting screwed.
I'm happy to pay for your content. I'm not happy to pay for your ads. There has to be a better way.
[+] [-] icebraining|10 years ago|reply
And none of this is new. Before SOPA and PIPA, the DMCA raised similar discussions. Ads have been degrading the experience at least since Tripod introduced popups. And the Tumblr arguments are almost the same as back when Geocities was bought - in fact, by the same company!
[+] [-] georgefrick|10 years ago|reply
Now it's the good ol' days of 2012 when there was still bait on the line. 2012? Companies have been trying to transform the internet for a long time, and users have been helping by refusing to:
a) pay for anything. b) create sites/content the way we used to.
It wouldn't kill you to order an album, drop it in a CD drive and rip it. My apologies for implying hard labor.
You want your MTV.
[+] [-] chasing|10 years ago|reply
We all are. It costs money to create, host, and distribute content. We've demonstrated our unwillingness to pay a proper amount for it. (For example: "I would gladly buy it on MP3 for 99 cents... $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song...") And so companies that do this stuff have to get creative about making money. And advertising does the job.
The solution is to pay much more money for the content that you now get for free.
[+] [-] fit2rule|10 years ago|reply
http://ipfs.io/
(tl;dr: go get github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/cmd/ipfs)
Basically, the day will come when any single one of us will be able to serve our own content privately from our own machine without requiring a massive infrastructure investment, nor any kind of fancy participation in what is, essentially, branding on steroids (Internet of today), but rather all it will require to sell and control ones own art is to publish it yourself with cryptographic certainty that there simply is no middle man any more.
Its the third party that degrades all art - those who have to carry the stuff from place to place in order to pimp things for the artist. Get rid of this, and give the artist direct and completely control over where and when and to whom their art is delivered, and we produce the utopia that many of us artists wish we had. It is unbearable to have to go through a third party to get to the masses; to have direct contact is the ultimate goal..
[+] [-] icebraining|10 years ago|reply
If artists aren't doing this already, which is much less intrusive than Soundcloud/iTunes/etc, what makes you think they'll be hosting their own IPFS sites?
[+] [-] norea-armozel|10 years ago|reply
I think micropayments would be a viable solution if a platform that's fairly secure and non-intrusive was created (I don't think Paypal or Bitcoin fit the bill). But the problem is that people today are rightly concerned about identity theft which can wind up draining their bank accounts or tanking their credit score. So, I'm not sure such a scheme would ever take off if companies like Sony can't secure their own infrastructure.
Anyways, the author should realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Either you pay in advertisements and data mining your personal info or you pay up front. Honestly, I prefer to pay up front and as directly to the creators as possible.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|10 years ago|reply
Ads aren't as terrible as the average INTJ male makes them out to be. They're trivial to block as well. The OP's post is just one long angry rant. I'm not even sure what the take away here is other than how monetization works on the modern web (internet is not only the web!!). Everything about this screams, "The mainstream doesn't care about my marginalized interests and opinions!"
If anything, the mainstream has it pretty good. I pay something like 1/10th for Google Music what I spent at the record store annually. As a music lover, being able to tap into 30m songs trivially is pretty amazing. Geeks used to write love letters to a future with a "universal jukebox" and here we are, yet no one is happy! Old fashioned ideas of "collecting" albums and such are bizarre to me. The people into that always seemed to do it for some kinda of social gravitas so they could show off their "taste." I just like the music. I don't need to own it, I just need access to it.
Hell, it even makes radio stations based on my library or by artist, or even by song if I choose. This completely invalidates whatever questionable value radio stations provide today. What a waste of bandwidth all these FM/AM stations are. Retiring them and selling that spectrum off for better LTE makes sense to me. The old ways aren't always good, in fact, a lot of the old ways were shit. They're old compromises and dinosaur tech that's overstayed their welcome. Lets not pine too badly for the past. It was shit for the most part. As a person in his 40s, I think we have it better than ever.
[+] [-] mratzloff|10 years ago|reply
You are a net-negative fan. Your support does nothing for the artists and, until recently, costs SoundCloud money. When SoundCloud adjusts their business to account for users like yourself, you complain publicly with a shakily-supported premise that I believe is actually more a complaint about digital things having a cost.
When I like a band or an artist, I buy their albums on CD or MP3. There's even an independent record store I like near my house, one of the last, and I frequently buy from there, because their existence enriches my life and the community. If an artist is on Bandcamp, I buy through Bandcamp and usually give more than the minimum because I know Bandcamp gets a cut and because I work in technology and have the money to do so.
If you don't like the ads, buy the music and listen whenever you want. Don't be a net-negative fan and then complain when you are treated as such.
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|10 years ago|reply
As for music, my personal favourite site is Bandcamp, aside from having an interesting mix of music I believe it has a model that's good for artists and fans alike ( https://bandcamp.com ).
[+] [-] Marazan|10 years ago|reply
The lack of self awareness is outstanding. And astounding.
[+] [-] panic|10 years ago|reply
Given these alternatives, it's easy to see why people support their site with ads. So how can we make these alternatives more attractive? Or is there some other way for web sites to survive?
[+] [-] sirsuki|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidanhs|10 years ago|reply
Google wanted to challenge Facebook and had a huge userbases on lots of different platforms...you can see the reasoning which would lead them to add everyone to an umbrella google social network. The Verge saw a way to make money with relatively little investment on their part - a seductive offer. Soundcloud (presumably) found a business plan with a clear path to profit and evaluated it to be the best option.
In the end, all of these companies exist to make money. Those that do stick around to be criticised, those that fail are irrelevant! Buzzfeed is a great example because it's so polarising - it's criticised for having low quality content, and yet it's extremely popular, a perfect example of something that people clearly do actively want to use. If you had an isolated choice reduce your userbase by 20% but increase profit by 10x, that's an easy business decision to make.
I just find it difficult to make sweeping criticisms of these companies and the internet as a whole - these are independent evolutions, each of which can be criticised on their own demerits. Of course the internet will evolve to consist mostly of what the majority wants - this isn't inherently good or bad.
[+] [-] dlu|10 years ago|reply
That's what the 2012 nostalgia sounds like to me. Back when Twitter was hosting revolutions, but still having issues with uptime (not to mention revenue). And Project Loon was alive, but mostly getting mocked by both Wall Street and charities/nonprofits (With Bill Gates being the most visible).
I also suspect 2012-2014 was when SoundCloud had huge amounts of traffic and, without any way of making money, at its least profitable. I have no actual evidence of this.
Personally, Project Loon always sounded like some crazy way of getting more people to use Google than actual charity. Like some weird extrapolation from, "the more people that use the Internet, the more money Google makes" and "Google's reached market saturation in current markets, we need growth in developing countries"
Going off memory for all this. Sorry if I get some details wrong about Innovators Dilemma, Twitter in 2012, Project Loon and such.
[+] [-] netcan|10 years ago|reply
Would someone please fix "podcasting," and maybe even RSS?
The first tangent is 2012 (or maybe 2007, I dunno time is a blur). RSS and XML were one of the Web 2.0 buzz. Blogs were exploding and there was a lot of novel writing of a type we didn't have much of before. RSS, XML, semantic web and their friends were being brought up all the time (here too) in confusing contents. I didn't really get it but I assumed other people did.
I think there was something wrong with the conceptual design of it.
Podcasting though, that was a nice little bastard of RSS and ipod. She had weird hair in weirder places, but.. I'm going to abandon this metaphor ..podcast content has been getting better and better.
It's terrible to use though. It's hard to find or share content. It's hard to subscribe, even if you know the name of the show. All the podcatchers suck.
It has a lot os stuff going for it though. It's genuinely "web." Compared to youtube or any other centralized internet media. Anyone can host their own audio files and broadcast the feed. Apple, Sound cloud or whoever makes an app using podcast content can access all the content. They can filter, sensor and display it how they see fit. This could be great for competition, freedom of speech.
Why do all the apps suck? Why is it so hard to find content. If you're below median technically, just getting from the show's site to a feed in your app is a serious challenge. I suspect the protocol is partially to blame, but I don't know.
Anyway, HN… fix it?
[+] [-] sk8ingdom|10 years ago|reply
However, my love of RSS is really just a historic relic of becoming interested in computers between 2001 and 2005. Before that was Usenet and other technologies I'm probably unaware of. RSS has since been replaced by Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Google Plus, etc. Someone needs to pay the bills and it's a lot easier to monetize when you keep users in your walled gardens and control what they see. These newer technologies are also MUCH easier to use for the average consumer and have the net-benefit of being "social" which is likely beneficial for the ad conglomerates.
Companies who create (or curate or distribute) content are fundamentally at odds with their users. Users want relevant, high quality, add-free content, but most are not willing to pay for it. If they do, they expect a fine-tuned user experience or physical product (a magazine or Amazon Kindle for example). Even paid subscription magazines (NewScientist, Time, etc.) have ads to help keep their pricing competitive and increase quarterly profits for investors. Hell, even my Kindle (which I PAID for) came with ads. Granted, Amazon gave me the ability to remove them for $20. But, that gives you an idea of how valuable ads are. I never understood why more websites didn't just include ads in their RSS feeds. Easier to filter out? Less control since the user isn't visiting the site?
I'd be MORE than willing to pay for RSS or NNTP feeds of high quality content. To me, there is no better user experience than reading format-free text and images in Gnus, but I imagine I'm in the minority. Average consumers (my parents, non-tech friends, etc.) are more than willing to visit cnn.com in their browsers or dedicated phone app. Most people simply don't care enough. I feel like I'm constantly trying to chase the conversation of the topics I'm interested in by stringing together mostly-incompatible technologies and work flows.
I'd really just like the ability to read, annotate, comment on, share, and discuss media with people who are also interested.
[+] [-] mironathetin|10 years ago|reply
There, in the last sentence is the relevant insight. But, sadly, here the post stops.
I must admit, for me the most relevant information was google using the computers mike through chrome. I am shocked how far companies can go and do go. I think this finally ends the discussion about google being evil or not.
[+] [-] trevorstrohman|10 years ago|reply