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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

This is what a lot of people on HN always wanted, right? Don't show ads, charge money.

I pay for YouTube Premium, even though ad blockers defang YouTube completely. I think consumers should definitely send such signals to companies, esp. since the price is of YT premium is very reasonable. I feel much less inclined to subscribe to most movie streaming platforms, as their UI and overall experience is usually worse than PirateBay + VLC, or to digital print media, as they still show ads to subscribers.

BTW what is kind of annoying is the "double ads" model in a lot of YT videos, where it's both YT showing you ad clips and then the youtuber editing in short commercials as well. You can pay YT premium to remove the first kind, but you can't do anything about the second kind...

My dislike for ads does not come from general disregard for the idea of advertising in the first place, but from the fact that most actual ads are "small e evil" - i.e. disingenuous, manipulative, gaudy, appealing to human weaknesses etc. They make the world a worse place.

The price might be very reasonable for someone making a US tech salary. But it's quite expensive for people in lower income countries, specially when you take into account that there are many services you could subscribe to, it adds up fast.

I'm from Poland, and the price here is $5 per month. It's easily acceptable for anyone with an upper-middle class salary.

> My dislike for ads does not come from general disregard for the idea of advertising in the first place, but from the fact that most actual ads are "small e evil" - i.e. disingenuous, manipulative, gaudy, appealing to human weaknesses etc. They make the world a worse place.

I sadly have to agree with this.

I think twitter did a great job of dealing with "small e evil" ads by allowing replies to ads - ads are just promoted tweets, that you can reply to, like other tweets. However, now twitter allows everyone to hide replies to their tweets. I still sometimes see ads on twitter with hostile replies, but that's probably only because they don't understand twitter as a channel, they treat it like any other channel where you don't have to worry about that. If they had someone ready to hide all critical replies that wouldn't happen.

I think reddit had a similar model, with promoted posts?

FYI, SponsorBlock takes care of in-video advertisements.

Each submission on HN with soft-paywalled link has a comment with link to archive/screenshot. Clearly people love the idea of paying for anything.

It's not just about the money but the convenience and potentially privacy.

Is there a newspaper out there that allows you to pay in one click and doesn't make you fill out a long form with all kinds of private info?

People are not going to spend 5 minutes filling in a form and creating yet another account if running the link through archive/etc takes 30 seconds instead.

Privacy is also another problem - if you block ads for privacy reasons, why would you then volunteer that info and your money? You may as well just deal with the ads - privacy impact is the same, but at least you don't pay.

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