I'm tired of pretending tech makes things better.
I'm tired of kidding myself that all these apps, these chatbots, these "tools" are doing anything but dragging us into the mud and the shit and calling it progress.
I sat down at a cafe a few days ago, hungry and ready
People weren’t willing to pay with money. Usually every tech product with ads has an “insert coin to remove” option. If you don’t insert coin, advertisers will.
Paying for the product and paying to not be inconvenienced by ads have become separate things. The first is standard business, the second is extortion.
Paying 80 for a product that is worth 100 and have ads is standard practice nowadays, to the point that not doing this puts you in competitive disadvantage. You are than asked to pay the remaining 20 or put up with ads.
You see this in every lemmy discussion about smart TVs. People complain that TVs have ads and there’s always someone that suggest getting a “dumb” TV but complain that they are more expensive. It’s almost like ads subsidize the purchase price or something…
I disagree, I think the removal of ads is often painted as a benefit that had inherent value. Look at YouTube premium or Prime video. Both haven’t actually improved their offering, just made it worse by introducing ads and insisting users that don’t want to see ads have to pay for the privilege of not being advertised to.
This means the total price adds up to higher than 100% of the product value, because it’s a ‘premium’ version that comes without advertisement inconvenience.
Prime video I don’t know so well, but YouTube was free without ads in the beginning, for something that is incredibly expensive to run. They had to introduce any monetization or shut down the service. They went with ads because 99% of users prefer that to payment. Later they gave the option to pay to remove the ads, only as an extra, because very few people are ready to do that.
There are some ad-free video platforms out there but they have a tiny fraction of the user base of YouTube. Most people couldn’t even name one, let alone considering using it, when YouTube is “free”.