Comment by xp84
1 day ago
Because it doesn't mean anything specific and breaks entire business models (merely logging that you landed from an ad click and seeing if you check out counts as 'tracking,' doesn't it?) if interpreted purely literally. So, the only way to treat it is to either ignore it or to just send back an error code and message that says "Sorry, having some tracking is the condition to get this free content. Accept or don't."
Like it or not, the Web is a two-way street, meaning that the server end of the transaction doesn't owe the client end anything in particular unless there's some relationship in place (like a payment). It appears the "just ignore it" matches the intent of most web users, though, since an overwhelming majority of web visitors accept a bunch of spammy ads + free 'content,' and a slim minority pay for ad-free alternatives.
> "Sorry, having some tracking is the condition to get this free content. Accept or don't."
OK great! Lets have that! Honesty on websites! And then people will turn elsewhere, because they don't actually consent. They would go to places where this tracking is not precondition to see/read content. Then we will have revealed what people actually want and what they don't want.
Oh, but of course most businesses are too much of cowards to actually do this, fearing exactly, that their content isn't really worth that much to the viewer, and that they would lose whatever they gained through non-consensual tracking and ads.
>breaks entire business models
So do car alarms.
I'm not convinced this is a business model I want to exist. We had an internet before it, and Google, and Facebook. I'm increasingly sad we can't return to it.
Let me be clear, I can't stand the social-media industrial complex and the advertising universe. I've seen the bottom that we've raced to, with absolute bullshit popping up everywhere and entire sites full of slop with clickbait "headlines" just rigged to get ad impressions.
And I'd gladly trade today's BS for any version of "The Internet" pre-2007.
But the "Before" Internet wasn't some natural sustainable state.
Before 1997 or so, "the Internet" was being paid for by academic institutions and big companies, and wasn't really all that commercial at all. It was also pretty tiny and blessedly simple. Honestly this version is the most achievable (re-creatable?) today since we can set up indie websites much easier today than we could then. Instead of using your free webspace from your university or employer, 20 of us could share a $5 a month instance, and link to each other's webpages, and add an IRC server to that instance just for fun.
In the 1998-2007 era, the Internet got a lot bigger, but was also still pretty fun and not that enshittified, but that's just because it was being paid for by VC money being burned.
Today we are where we are in terms of business model[1] because Google and Facebook achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better, and because consumers of The Internet have spoken, loudly, with their closed wallets. They've said "We will only pay for content if it's All The Music and ~$10 a month flat rate, or if it's a big/interesting enough video on-demand service and under $20 a month. We'll never pay for news or text content of any kind." So, the businesses with other types of content do what the public wants them to do: have cost-free content whose access is conditional on being advertised to very annoyingly, or they marginalize themselves with paywalls, subscribed to by only a small minority of users.
[1] i'm setting aside the non-business aspects of our mess, namely the poison that social media, 'engagement' optimization, and ragebait-as-news has wrought on society.
> achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better
There's an old saying in advertising, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half." - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/
The supposed benefit of the current model is to find and eliminate that wasted half.
Facebook has shown me ads for dick pills and boob surgery, ads I can't read because I don't know the Cyrillic alphabet, and ads for services that only apply to citizens of nations I've never been a citizen of who moved to a country I had in fact moved out of.
The reports I hear from people who buy ad slots are mostly unimpressed with the results; the word on the grapevine is that the "success" cases are not even average customers, but those who are vulnerable to getting scammed.
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I don’t know, back in the day you could just buy a newspaper and read it.
Now, if you want to read an article you have to pay $20/month to that news organization in perpetuity. I don’t see how that can be expected to work.
Their targeted ads suck. I've been a professional developer for quite a while and fb keeps peddling me programming courses for beginners to become a developer.
Or, I liked one single page of an amputee woman (I am myself) and now all I see are amputee women.
They just buy all the competitors, but they aren't good at all.
> "Sorry, having some tracking is the condition to get this free content. Accept or don't."
The law that caused the cookie banners also says companies cannot block access to the site if the cookies are not required for the functioning of the site.
Some German news sites have broken this and have "accept or pay" and I think this leaked to news sites in other countries. Facebook even tried it.
So, sure, if DNT is true, try to make people pay. Fine by me.
> Some German news sites have broken this and have "accept or pay" and I think this leaked to news sites in other countries. Facebook even tried it.
One annoying example: Golem. Some people in my circles sometimes share a Golem link every now and then. I don't even click them any longer.
The most annoying thing about that is not even the "accept or pay" banners. There are more:
- even if you accept the tracking, you might still not be able to read the article, because while the site may be free in principle if you accept ads, that specific article is not.
- and the most annoying thing is that such paywalled articles show up on Google News. Not sure if they're tricking Google into showing them (by showing the full article to search crawlers, but the paywall to actual users), or if this is some understanding between Google and EU news providers, but it's annoying...
Speaking of the news-type sites you bring up:
I hate all these patterns too, but interestingly it feels like I hate it more because the whole Internet has been designed around the "free to read with ads" paradigm -- we've been taught that if you can see something, get the URL and share it, so that others can reference the thing you're trying to either comment on or raise awareness about.
With paper newspapers or magazines it wasn't ever a problem, because if I subscribed to the Dallas Morning News, I automatically got all their articles, and even stories that weren't local to Dallas were covered by them too. I didn't need a subscription to the San Francisco Chronicle and didn't miss it.
Today, if someone is reading an article in the Chronicle, or even the Verge, it's a huge problem for them to share it with someone else even if the other person actually pays for subscriptions to say, NY Times and Bloomberg. Even if all four of those publications each have articles just summarizing the same 5 bullet points.
I'd blame the "news" industry as a whole for not implementing some kinds of reciprocal agreements. Even giant news conglomerates like Media News Group[1] who publish dozens of major US papers don't give you a simple subscription that at least covers all their own properties. I'd argue that they should try harder to stand up some shared subscription services with heavy reciprocal benefits and revenue sharing, so that most people would be able to read most paywalled articles with one monthly subscription. That industry has no one to blame but themselves for not figuring this one out.
[1] https://www.medianewsgroup.com/about-us/
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> breaks entire business models
Good. No one is entitled to a business model working in perpetuity. Doubly so when it's ethically dubious.
The very thing entrepreneurs are glorified for - their ability to invent and execute on new business models. They'll manage, don't worry about them. Hopefully they'll settle on more honest models this time.