> No it wasn't, let's not start spreading misinformation.
This website ("hacker" news) should really be renamed "confidently wrong"; just like smcin's laughable assertion. HN is a propaganda site run by billionaires who editorialize and moderate it to promote their own interests. It's infested with this type of confidently wrong know-it-all. You know what's worse than a pedant? An incorrect pedant. And this site is stuffed with them. It's a Dunning-Kruger hall of mirrors.
I think you're on the right track. Unfortunately, the toxic "free" model with ads has trained everybody to expect all content for free. This is completely unsustainable; there will be a correction of some sort, and it's my opinion that we've already entered that stage. It's going to be painful, but I'm hopeful that the end state is that people consider ad-laden "free" content to be not worth their time. I'm already there.
I signed up for Kagi search recently (I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a satisfied customer), and aside from searching reddit, I consider their results to be superior to Google's. One of their main signals for downranking is how heavily ad/tracker-laden a page is.
I'm also a Kagi user! I'm leaning towards using products that I pay for that promise me a dignified experience. I worry though, that we're heading to future where there's a class of people that do not see ads and have some degree of privacy and a class of people that do see ads and have no privacy and I fear for their minds and that culture, as I do not think that system lends itself to narrowing any inequality gaps. I worry for increasingly ad supported hardware. I worry. ;)
> the whole cheap/small web thing has me thinking of those people who buy used clothes but think nothing of paying $15 for a coffee at hipsterCafe. something virtue signally about it.
This says nothing about the article or topic, but says a lot about your mental baggage.
All content on this blog except for the about page was created by scraping news headlines and feeding them into an LLM. The result is truly awful. It costs about a penny per day to generate 4 daily articles.
It's a python script that periodically runs on Azure, that then posts to a ghost blog. The whole thing took less than a day to make.
And the moon was settled by whalers sometime in the 1750's! Seriously, you're approaching that level of wrong.