alt Hacker News>Hackernews is free. The posts are valuable to me and I guess my posts are valuable to me, but I wouldn't pay for it and I definitely don't expect to get paid.
at this point, we may need future forums to be premium so we can avoid the deluge of AI bots plauging the internet. a small, one time cost is a guaranteed way to make such strategies untenable. SomethingAwful had a point decades ago.
But like any other business, you need to follow the money and understand the incentives. Hackernews has ads, but ads for companies with us as the audience. It's also indirectly an ad for YCombinator itself as bringing awareness of the accelerator (note what "hackernews.com" redirects to).
I'm fine with a company advertising itself; if I wasn't the idea of a company ceases to really function. And in this structure for companies, I can also get benefits by potentially getting jobs from here. So I don't mind that either. Everything aligns. I agree and support the structure. I can't say that about many other "free" websites.
As for me. I do want to monetize my data one day. I can't stop the scraping the entire internet over (that's for the courts), but I sure as heck won't hand it to them on a silver platter.
Definitely to each their own. I will never have a job at a YC company and I will also never apply to YC, so the ads are completely useless. I did discover some of my favorite shoes from an IG ad, though.
It wouldn't ever be worth me getting $.0001431 dollars for my data and individual data will always be worthless on it's own because 1. taking away one individuals data from a model does not make the model worse. 2. the price of an individuals data will always be zero because you have people like me who are willing to give it away for free in exchange for a free service (aka hackernews or IG)
One user's LTV on IG may be $34, but one user's data is worth $0. Which I think a lot of people struggle with.
From a more moral standpoint, the best part about the advertising business model is that it makes the internet open to everyone, not just those who can pay for every site they use.