> 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?
The thing is, this isn’t my problem. The fact that someone wants to market their business doesn’t entitle them to my attention.
if you're looking at someone's website then yes they are entitled to your attention. what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host?
They didn't, though, they made it available to be looked at alongside advertisements.
HN users just love twisting themselves in circles to justify their belief that they're somehow entitled to consume content from private websites without consuming the ads that support that content. (If you don't want to see ads, there's a really simple solution: don't look at websites that display them! No one's forcing you to!)
> If you don't want to see ads, there's a really simple solution: don't look at websites that display them!
And as a user, if the person hosting the website doesn't want me to look at their content without also looking at their ads, there is a simple solution: don't serve me your content until after you force me to look at your ads.
You do not get to have it both ways. Either the content is available for free and you can hope that the user also views your ads, or the content is not available for free and you can force the user to view your ads.
I believe that humans are social animals, and that a view on enshittification that ignores society is useless. Media is, IMO, holistically worse now than in the mid-90s. An individual cannot undo that. The negatives are not wished away by "no one's forcing you".
> what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host?
The fact that their HTTP server replied 200 OK. If they want to put up a paywall or use a different protocol they're totally free to do so, but permission was inherently granted by the act of serving the content.
Acting like anyone who views a webpage has any obligations regarding how they render or reproduce it is like putting a barbecue on the side of the road with a free sign on it after hiding a bill inside, then getting mad when you don't get paid. Trying to tack on riders that fundamentally alter the mechanics of the underlying protocol is fundamentally invalid.
In the case of an incorrectly configured browser, sure, but definitely not mine - which is the whole point. Once freely offered, conditions can't be imposed on use. If you don't want my browser to render content as it sees fit, don't serve the content over a protocol where that dynamic is inherent.
The reason very few actually take that route is because they want to have their cake and eat it too: the openness of www/http but the monetizability of AOL-esque pseudointernet schemes. If a publisher wants to fuck off to corponet with blackjack, hookers, DRM and WEI they're more than free to do so, but traffic may not follow them. Mine certainly won't.
I think the above comment is spot on, the level of hypocrisy here is quite off the charts. With "protocol" defense, would you view the content with adblock if the browser displayed a gate screen (that adblock didn't block - e.g. a separate page with a custom one-time link to content) saying "by viewing the content I created you consent to view ads. Yes / no" - yes serves HTTP 200 with no enforcement. You could argue "yes serves HTTP 200, protocol yada yada, they should have blocked it", but how, other than the amount of property lost, is it really different from e.g. someone jumping into your car when you step out for 10 seconds and driving away cause hey, you should have locked it?
I also use adblock, but I'm honest with myself - ads suck, and I'm a dick who doesn't care about most content creators. If they ask for money (e.g. on Substack), I pay them or stop reading them. If they use ads I block them cause I don't care. Kinda like speeding on a highway - probably not a right thing to do, oh well if they catch me I'll pay a fine... no need to invent some bogus defense about how speed limits are wrong.
Well kinda. The business wanting to market themselves certainly isn't your problem, but the "how does the website monetize itself" is exactly your problem, or rather, it's part of the interaction between the owner of the website you're visiting and you.
You could say "oh, they should just charge for their content", and some definitely do. But the ad model allows for really interesting price discrimination in terms of "who pays for the content". So, if someone buys say.. a Tesla through a website, that conversion subsidizes a million poor kids who don't have to pay anything. In some ways the ad-supported model is the most progressive way to pay content creators - the people who end up paying are the people who spend the most money online.
I'd prefer reading content written by people who are just interested in the topic and sharing their thoughts. I want genuine interaction, not commercial garbage.
If you're not paying for a product in which you see the ad, it is your problem though, no? What's in the ad space is immaterial, just that is how the product is monetized.
Problem is though that everyone is being tracked, whether they use free products that show ads based on that data or not. I don't want to be tracked like that but I have very little power here other than blocking certain domains which is never perfect.
The freaking ad is making me pay twice. Once with my attention, and then again with my money if I buy the product (since the advertising cost is incorporated into the price).
That's really the root of it. Unless I am actively searching for the exact something your small business offers, I don't care whether your business exists. I don't want to know about it. I don't want you to "reach" me. Your ability or inability to let me know that you exist is not my problem.
My browsing to a website (or watching a TV show, or driving along a road with billboards, or filling up my gas tank) does not entitle anyone to my attention.
The thing is, this isn’t my problem. The fact that someone wants to market their business doesn’t entitle them to my attention.