I subscribe, and yet they still bombard me with ads. Fuck that. One reason I don’t use apps is that I can’t block ads.

Dead trees FTW.

I'm lucky enough to live somewhere that gets dead trees for NYT, WSJ, local rag, and more. I value news, so I pay for it, and it's still less than I spend on coffee each month.

The best part: The newspaper ends. No everscroll zombie addiction.

It's closer to 30% that block ads. For subscription conversion, it's under 1%.

It's a large reason why the situation is so bad. But the internet is full of children, even grown children now in their 40's, who desperately still cling to this teenage idea that ad blocking will save the internet.

For a while it looked like companies were going to offer a good product at a fair price. I started getting a few subscriptions to various services.

Then all of those services got enshitefied. I got ads in paid accounts, slow loads, obvious data mining, etc.

Paying for services now often offers a degraded experience relative to less legitimate methods of acces.

Youtube is a horrible way to watch videos. It's constantly pushing stupid content at me and refuses to let me tame it.

Almost all of social media is optimized for engagement as a way to attract advertisers. Instead of "hot" or "controversial" sort button I want buttons that sort for "factual", "relevant", "insightful", etc. Those will never be well correlated with "optimal for advertisers", so they need an entirely different model to work.

If a merchant requires me to disable any of my security, I leave immediately.

I initially signed up for Hulu to get the add-free experience. Then they started showing adds anyway and I cancelled.

Amazon Prime is a far degraded experience form what I initially got. The "free shipping" got entirely factored into increased prices. Prime video generally requires me to pay for anything I actually want to watch (if they have it in their catalog).

Video streaming, in general, sucks now. I don't want to pay for a subscription just so I can watch one movie. I also don't want to get 15 different subscriptions for a reasonable lineup of shows.

I ditched Spotify because I couldn't prevent it from auto-playing. Tidal is much better about that and they have better sound quality. They also pay their artist better.

I moved to Apple when they initially introduced OSX. Since then they've been driving heavily back to the walled garden philosophy.

Verizon was my telco for around 20 years. They suddenly decided that the phone I had been using for a year "wasn't compatible with their network" and kicked me off.

It's not a product problem. It's a problem of companies creating virtual monopolies. They don't need to meet the technical legal definition of a monopoly; if something like network effects makes it difficult to move away from them or choose an other option they are de-facto a monopoly.

This isn't a simple as it sounds, in fact it's rather complicated (far too involved to cover in depth here).

In short, ethics are involved (and believe it or not I actually possess some)!

In the hayday of newsprint people actually bought newspapers at a cheap affordable price and the bulk of their production was paid for by advertisements. We readers mostly paid for what we read, newspapers were profitable and much journalism was of fair to good quality. Back then, I had no qualms about forking out a few cents for a copy of the NYT.

Come the internet the paradigm changed and we all know what happened next. In fact, I feel sorry about the demise of newsprint because what's replaced it is of significantly lesser value.

In principle I've no objection to paying for news but I will not do so for junk and ads that I cannot avoid (with magazines and newspapers ads are far less intrusive).

So what's the solution? It's difficult but I reckon there are a few worth considering. For example, I mentioned some while ago on HN that making micro payments to websites ought to be MUCH easier than it is now (this would apply to all websites and would also be a huge boon for open source developers).

What I had in mind was an anonymous "credit" card system with no strings attached. Go to your local supermarket, kiosk or whatever and purchase a scratchy card with a unique number to say the value of $50 for cash and use that card to make very small payments to websites. Just enter the card's number and the transaction is done (only enter one's details if purchasing something that has to be delivered).

That way both the card and user remain anonymous if the user wishes, also one's privacy is preserved, etc. It could be implemented by blockchain or such.

The technical issues are simple but problems are obvious—and they're all political. Governments would go berserk and cry money laundering, tax evasion, criminal activity, etc., and the middlemen such as Master and Visa cards would scream to high heaven that their monopolies were being undercut.

In short, my proposal is essentially parallels what now exits with cash—I go to a supermarket and pay cash for groceries, the store doesn't need to know who I am. It ought to be no big deal but it isn't.

It seems to me a very simple micro payments system without name, rank and serial number attached would solve many of the internet payment problems.

Sure, there'll always be hardline scavengers and scrapers but many people would be only too happy to pay a little amount for a service they wanted, especially so when they knew the money was going into producing better products.

For example, I'd dearly love to be able to say purchase a copy of LibreOffice for $10 - $20 and know there was enough money in the organisation to develop the product to be fully on par with MSO.

Trouble is when buying stuff on the internet there's a minimum barrier to overcome and it's too high for most people when it comes to making micro payments (especially when the numbers could run into the hundreds per week).

I cannot understand why those who'd benefit from such a scheme haven't at least attempted to push the matter.

Oh, and that's just one aspect of the problem.