[HN Gopher] Vivaldi co-founder: Advertisers 'stole the internet ...
___________________________________________________________________
Vivaldi co-founder: Advertisers 'stole the internet from us'
Author : redbell
Score : 266 points
Date : 2023-03-12 11:44 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.xda-developers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.xda-developers.com)
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| amusing to see this on a page completely plastered with
| advertisements
| layer8 wrote:
| It perfectly illustrates the issue?
| qudat wrote:
| I resonate with the sentiment and wrote a post about the smol
| movement https://bower.sh/what-is-the-smol-web
| rchaud wrote:
| RE: playing Youtube audio on mobile browser tabs
|
| > That's typically a YouTube Premium feature, but with Vivaldi,
| you don't need to pay for it. It's up to you whether that's an
| ethical violation, but companies will understandably take issue
| with that and attempt to protect their revenue sources, and
| sometimes that may be through unfair means.
|
| Has there been a change to the ToS in Youtube with reference to
| this? Desktop Youtube has always had this, and it has worked on
| Firefox Android off and on. What is the ethical dilemma?
| floppydiscen wrote:
| Just reading the title, my first thought was: The advertisers
| "paid for the internet" for us. Open and free is such a dissonant
| idea, since the internet costs money to keep running.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Not my downvote. Corrective upvote actually.
|
| >the internet costs money to keep running.
|
| In the 1990's what you paid to your ISP every month covered it,
| and included enough web space for everyone to have an average
| site of their own, which the ISP would serve to the world for
| you.
|
| Google had no ads _because_ their motto was "Don't Be Evil".
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Speaking of being evil, even (especially?) Android is out of
| the question at this point :
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I (2015)
|
| > Under EU law, data-sharing with countries deemed to have
| lower privacy standards, including the US, are prohibited.
|
| When Android still has a Play Store and non-AOSP versions of
| it require access to Google services, not to mention that
| it's all likely to be backdoored for the benefit of the US
| intelligence agencies (which is the assumption this decision
| starts from), then effectively the Android Privacy Sandbox is
| unlikely to make Android legal again in the EU ?
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Oh, so that money that I pay to my ISP every month? I'm just
| hallucinating that?
|
| Give me a break.
|
| FB, Twitter, and the rest could go down and I would still be
| able to use the Internet. It would be more boring for about two
| weeks or so... then I would get used to it. Maybe go outside
| more. :)
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| Funny in light of the fact they have chosen "Vivaldi" as a name
| for their company and the product. Why not "Stephenson"?
| karaterobot wrote:
| Businesses sold a version of the internet to us, using
| advertising as a mechanism, and we eagerly bought it.
| college_physics wrote:
| The business model that Shoshana Zuboff termed surveillance
| capitalism did not just ruin the internet but undermined the
| future of the entire tech industry.
|
| Tech is far, far more than social or search. Most of it requires
| significant levels of _trust_ between tech provider and tech
| consumer. It also requires that the tech consumer _pays_ and
| therefore has some influence over the service, in a virtuous
| circle of demand and supply.
|
| Despite absurd claims that people just want "free stuff", people
| pay through their noses for 1) hardware, 2) software and 3)
| bandwidth - the entire stack that makes the internet (and
| therefore search and social) possible.
|
| The idea that they don't want to pay _specifically_ for these
| "last mile" trinkets of search or social (that in reality have no
| option but to pay with private data) does not stand scrutiny.
|
| The adtech gambit was so lucrative and it managed to buy so many
| consciences that people have normalized it. Yet it is a
| disastrous model that does not scale to deliver the promise that
| we all feel is within reach.
|
| The simple fact is that for tech to flourish somebody must pull
| the plug on surveillance capitalism. The sooner the better.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff
| thro1 wrote:
| Part of the problem is advertising needs metrics which require
| JavaScript and makes The Web unusable.
| draw_down wrote:
| [dead]
| favaq wrote:
| No, content creators gave the internet to advertisers because
| they needed something to eat.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| most ugc is uncompensated
| ppetty wrote:
| Well said ... "ads keep the content free" so says the anti-ad-
| blocking modal on that site.
| m_eiman wrote:
| It wasn't theirs to give, though.
| sseagull wrote:
| I dunno. Lots of people contribute to the web without
| expectation of payment. Like you posting here. The urge to
| create and share is powerful.
|
| Look at all the people editing wikipedia, answering questions
| on SO and various forums, and even making videos without any
| real expectation of payback.
|
| Seems like the web would be just fine without the professional
| "content creator" class.
|
| (I actually feel like "content creator" is dehumanizing
| pejorative now.)
| 0dayz wrote:
| While your point isn't exactly wrong I do think it's a bit of
| a oversimplification.
|
| Most editing of Wikipedia is done for personal reasons,
| including commercial (you get paid to write on Wikipedia) and
| with SO its most likely because information is cheap.
|
| In fact the points you raise is so trivial that we've had
| bots do it for us way before chatgpt.
|
| Compare this to artists, programmers and designers who only
| release things for free under strict circumstances (hobby,
| social gain, licensing requirements, etc.).
| favaq wrote:
| I choose to post here for free. Others choose to publish
| their content and have advertisers show ads for which they
| get paid. That's their prerogative. You have the option of
| not consuming the content of those who want to get paid or
| pirate it.
| esperent wrote:
| > You have the option of not consuming the content of those
| who want to get paid
|
| Not really. Suppose you go onto a platform like YouTube,
| where most people are not being paid and some are (through
| advertising). How would you choose to consume only the
| content of those not being paid? There's no way to do that
| except to avoid YouTube and all similar platforms entirely
| which is not a reasonable option for most people.
| Kye wrote:
| How many of those people can contribute for free _because_
| they get paid by something funded by ads?
|
| For example: I'm currently learning DaVinci Resolve. There's
| a lot of great videos, and they're all free. I expect a lot
| of these people got as good as they are working on at least a
| few advertising contracts, or on media that will run with ads
| interspersed.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Advertising and marketing have ruined _society_ , the internet is
| just one of a long string of casualties.
|
| Mail? We throw most of it out without reading it. Phones? We
| don't answer them. If you invent a new way for people to
| communicate advertisers will insert themselves and ruin it.
|
| But the big problem with them, and why Bill Hicks once told them
| to kill themselves, is that they prey on insecurities to create
| demand and manipulate people into giving them money.
|
| I assert that marketing is objectively a predatory industry with
| no positives for society and ludicrously huge negatives.
|
| I won't go so far as to say people who work in marketing should
| kill themselves, but I'd they'd all quit their jobs and try doing
| a job that actually benefits society for a change we'd all be a
| lot better off.
| mertd wrote:
| How does one start a new business or sell a product in a world
| without advertising?
|
| How do you scale something fast enough through just word of
| mouth to get out of the red?
|
| If I open a new bakery, is it predatory to send a pamphlet to
| the nearby houses? Should I just sit quietly and hope that
| enough people notice?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Theoretically, if I'm specifically looking for something then
| consulting a resource about those things makes sense. Like a
| catalog.
|
| But that isn't how advertising and marketing work is it? No,
| even your example is spamming people and hoping they give a
| shit. You're forcing them to deal with your bullshit so you
| can make a profit and that's detrimental to society.
| manicennui wrote:
| I've been looking for a great local baker for months. I don't
| think Americans realize just how bad most baked goods are
| here. And yes, even the stuff made by your local grocery
| store or bakery is probably quite bad. I was looking over the
| vendors from the local farmer's market, which hasn't opened
| yet this year, and noticed a baker. I checked out their
| website and found that during the offseason they take orders
| online and have about a dozen pickup locations on Saturdays.
| After checking out the small number of reviews I could find
| online, as well as the photos and descriptions on their
| website, I placed a small order. Their stuff it amazing and
| is exactly what I've been looking for.
|
| I bought some art last month after discovering the artist by
| seeing their art on the cover of a sci-fi/fantasy magazine.
|
| After watching a lot of content about digital music creation
| and explanations and reviews of various equipment, I bought a
| midi controller that I'm very happy with.
|
| I own several pieces of Made In cookware, and Made In no
| doubt gave away a lot of cookware to YT cooking channels, but
| I only bought it after seeing several people I trust use it
| and give honest reviews of it. The reviews were never the
| focus of the videos. Arguably there is not a lot of
| difference between an ad and a plug in a video, other than
| the source and context of the plug. I think it boils down to
| the fact that I neither care nor trust what companies think
| of their own products.
|
| For retail stores, it has always been known that physical
| location is everything. In a dense (for the US) city like
| Chicago, a new bakery would be discovered by everyone in the
| neighborhood. Even out in the suburbs this is how I discover
| new places, like the new dispensary that opened this year.
|
| I don't know how the financials would work, but I much rather
| receive a small weekly flyer from someone I trust pointing
| out good local businesses. I absolutely do not want all of
| the flyers I currently receive that were paid for by the
| businesses they are promoting.
| mertd wrote:
| > I don't know how the financials would work
|
| Therein lies the rub. There is not enough of you who would
| pay for such a flyer. So your local guy asks the businesses
| to help him out with the print and mailing costs and says
| in return I'll print your business' name in bold. At that
| point arguably we crossed the threshold into advertising.
| manicennui wrote:
| The problem is that as soon as it becomes about who is
| willing to pay, it becomes useless. I'd rather have
| nothing than the current situation.
|
| You can find services that manage to make this work. I
| subscribe to America's Test Kitchen. They have been
| around for over 20 years now. In addition to recipes they
| are well known for their equipment reviews. Many people
| subscribe to Consumer Reports, but for some reason I
| don't find their reviews very useful.
| idoubtit wrote:
| I concur to that: advertising is a kind of cancer of modern
| society. One obvious consequence of advertising is the
| worsening of climate change.
|
| I've seen a more direct consequence of advertising on fragile
| members of the society. Someone close to me has been working
| with orphans as they reach adulthood. Most have a job (can't
| make long studies when you have no family and no place to live
| once you are 18 years old). These past years, sport bets and
| money games had a devastating effect. Most of these young
| adults can't resist, and quite a few are now in debt.
| okamiueru wrote:
| Capitalism taken to it's natural conclusion, is ruining society
| (and the planet).
|
| The older I get, the more apparent and obvious this seems to
| me. I might be just getting disillusioned with what seems to be
| a worse planet for the next generation. It's easy to point the
| finger at what is wrong and provide no alternative. I'm not
| sure there is one, that is realistic. Though some things should
| perhaps help counter the negative sides:
|
| - Stronger regulation (it's almost never that company profits
| are in line with the common good, or preservation of nature or
| natural resources). To even the playing field, all must act
| within the regulated boundaries of what is sustainable. If you
| cannot, well... good riddance?
|
| - Much stronger focus on education. If we are being political
| for a second, just consider what US politics looks like to an
| outsider. The choice is between "well, maybe we should go in a
| direction of less shit. It's still largely shit, but, less" vs
| "More shit please! As long as it annoys the opposing 'team',
| fuck'em!". And the polls end up like around 50/50. Lack of
| education, and a Murdoc media seems to be the main culprit of
| this phenomenon. That, and to some, but much less extent,
| foreign influence (just imagine the field day opponents of the
| US are having when half the voting population end up wanting
| more shit).
|
| - Automation w/redistribution of wealth, likely only possible
| by force (like, if you are in the 0.01%, you can remove 99.9%
| of your accrued wealth and still live better than any king in
| human history).
|
| Anyways, maybe one day all of this becomes "common sense"
| rather than a political statement. If I were to make a bet, it
| would be that it becomes too little, too late, and we are in
| for a century of wars and dystopian famine. _shrug_
| oliveshell wrote:
| >It's easy to point the finger at what is wrong and provide
| no alternative. I'm not sure there is one, that is realistic.
|
| "It's often been said that Democracy is the worst form of
| government-- except for all the others..."
|
| -Winston Churchill
| dghughes wrote:
| I'm OK with some regulated advertising. I'm not OK with ad
| companies wanting to know my life story.
|
| Ad companies claim if I don't give up to them every bit of my
| life what I do, say, eat, work,leisure, my location, etc. then
| I'm the problem?! I'm ruining the Internet! Companies will fail!
|
| Show me your damn ad and move on. I'm not looking for a
| relationship.
| asddubs wrote:
| To me, an ad is someone trying to poison your brain trying to
| coerce you to act in someone elses best interest. So I will
| block ads no matter what.
|
| At least that's the simplified version. To backpedal on that a
| little bit/add nuance, I reject any form of advertisement that
| had more than, say, 2 people involved in it. I don't care if
| someone tries to advertise their lemonade stand or their
| personal art project, but as soon as people in suits get
| involved, I want nothing to do with it.
| akira2501 wrote:
| There's this presumption of a false dichotomy when it comes to
| advertising on the internet. That you can have no ads and
| content that you have to pay for, or you must let google spam a
| bunch of javascript programmatically into your browser for you.
|
| Having worked many years in traditional media, the amount of
| time this situation has lasted has really been surprising to
| me. You can make the best money selling advertisements
| directly. Even better, once you do so, you're no longer reliant
| on shady third parties to deliver your ads, and ad blockers
| generally aren't even able to block those ads.
|
| We just never got the kind of "content aggregators" who would
| do this middle man work. Collect content that you pay for,
| categorize it into publications based on reader interest, then
| sell direct advertisements over the top of that publication or
| set of publications.
|
| People like to think we're out of the "wild west" stage on the
| internet. We're just _barely_ starting to pull away from it.
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| The moment anyone uses "us", which contains both you, and their
| political or financial interests, keep your distance.
|
| Same goes for any unspecified "they".
|
| Once someone says "they took [good thing] from us", be very very
| wary.
| pictur wrote:
| The internet used to be good because there were few people. it's
| bad right now because too many people are on the internet. I
| don't think changing internet ads will fix the internet.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I think that if the whole wide internet was based on subscription
| service, we'd got a awfully monopolistic situation. People only
| have a limited amount of money to spend on these things
| (entertainment, news, etc.) - and they want to get most bang for
| the buck.
|
| So while ads suck, at least they make smaller (and larger)
| websites viable. You can seamlessly surf around...if every single
| website had login, you'd probably stick to a LOT fewer websites.
| htag wrote:
| From the consumer side, I think music subscriptions are doing
| it right. I understand we cannot copy and paste this plan onto
| other industries, but maybe there are some lessons here.
|
| * You only need one subscription to get access to all of your
| music content. Video is a mess with providers competing on
| content.
|
| * There are ad supported networks to view the content, if you
| do not want to pay.
|
| * They are generally regarded as affordable.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| Unfortunately from the businesses point of view it doesn't
| work necessarily. Small creators make proportionally much
| less money than big creators, specially in platforms such as
| Spotify. Also platforms such as Spotify aren't even
| profitable (at least not yet) [0].
|
| I would love to see a better internet, but I'm the first to
| admit I have no idea how to monetize it in less invasive ways
| that keep it accessible.
|
| [0]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/spotify-beats-
| revenue-for...
| ouid wrote:
| if everyone exercised their right to not render ads, this problem
| wouldnt exist...
| guhcampos wrote:
| I tried to read the article but got blocked by a "please disable
| your ad blocker".
|
| No joke.
| freediver wrote:
| The view strikes as hypocritical as Vivaldi itself is funded by
| advertising. You can not pay for Vivaldi browser.
| kebsup wrote:
| I'm surprised to not see a lot of one-time payment web apps. With
| my side project - https://gifmemes.io (shameless plug), I've
| experimented with Google Adsense and in a month, it made on about
| 5 % of what I got from one-time watermark removal payments, so
| I've turned it off. I've thought about experimenting with
| subscription as well, but just found it too repulsive for that
| kind of project.
| ttjjtt wrote:
| I cannot fathom why one time micro payments are not at least
| commonly found. I would have no problem paying my a newspaper
| or magazine say 20-50 cents for 24 hours of access. Id probably
| end up spending >EUR30 a month across several publications (if
| it could be done in one click). But monthly? Recurring
| subscription? No and no.
|
| So I pay nothing. And get mad about the dire content, ad
| tracking, and state of the internet.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| One-time payment for web apps doesn't work for 2 reasons (1)
| web apps have recurring costs (i.e. hosting, but also any
| updates are released for 'free' since it's really hard to pin a
| user on the specific version they 'bought'), (2) developers
| want recurring payments. there's less barrier to entry if you
| can sell your $1000 software for $50/mo instead.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I had high hopes for Brave Browser and BAT as a way to be able to
| easily fund content, but it hasn't really panned out. The idea is
| browser integration of micropayments, with a button in the
| browser enabling you to pay for content via tips or recurring
| payments.
|
| It's a catch-22 for a lot of content, if they ask for a
| subscription it needs to be enough to be worth their while
| (payment processing costs, overhead), but also needs to cover
| typical use. There are so many sites that have ones-and-twos of
| content I'd use, but want a $10/mo subscription or $30-50/year.
| It's hard as a casual consumer to justify that. But they also
| have to cover the serious consumer who finds value in all their
| content.
|
| Why can't we crack this micro-payments nut?
| kordlessagain wrote:
| The 402 response needs to be properly implemented. But, to do
| this expeditiously, we need people wanting to move away from
| advertising revenue for their content.
|
| I've consistently posted here about Aperture, Lightning
| Network's reverse proxy service that implements 402s via
| Lightning. With support from major browsers, this would provide
| a means for all different types of services and content
| providers to easily monetize their sites.
|
| https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture
| e-clinton wrote:
| Brave is failing at enabling Micro-payments because they are
| blocking ads and serving their own. Why would any serious
| publication use them as a paywall?
| [deleted]
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Flattr 2.0 has introduced an alternative that starts with a set
| monthly payment and splits it to all the (sub)websites you wish
| to fund.
|
| And compatible with all browsers taking extensions, and 2 years
| before Brave, but it still requires client-side tracking and
| monthly upload of aggregated data :
|
| https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/flattr2.html
|
| Also Francis Muguet (RIP) and Richard Stallman have been
| advocating for a taxpayer(ish) & government(ish) solution 14
| years ago :
|
| https://www.stallman.org/mecenat/global-patronage.html
| gnz11 wrote:
| > Why can't we crack this micro-payments nut?
|
| The nut has been cracked, it doesn't provide enough sustenance
| to survive off of.
| seydor wrote:
| Arcade machines had solved it in the '70s.
|
| Want to play? Insert coin. We need payments-hardware integrated
| to our computers
|
| Today that is not possible. Visa and Mastercard want to play
| world police so they set rules and regulations about what is
| allowed to be paid. Even if BAT tries to solve this, people
| still have to onboard their money somewhere , again via visa+MC
| rchaud wrote:
| Arcades had transaction costs too. They sold quarters in
| blocks. You couldn't just buy 1 at a time. Which is precisely
| how MC/Visa operate. Big players like Apple can sell songs
| for $1 because they pay for a minimum level of payment
| processing so their unit cost is less than the 2.9% + 30c or
| whatever the standard charge is.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Why can't we crack this micro-payments nut?
|
| Because nobody actually wants to 'solve' it. They just want to
| topple Visa and Mastercard and take their margins, preferably
| without following any of the numerous consumer regulations
| those companies abide by.
|
| Cash is perfect because there is no profit motive behind it. It
| doesn't cost you any more to take a $1 transaction than it does
| a $100 one. And that is something tech companies won't have any
| interest in.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| Even if Google AdSense forbids adult content in its terms and
| conditions, what can Google's algorithm do when that content
| comes through an ad network? Nothing at all. I've seen it many
| times: famous companies like BMW advertising next to porn. It's a
| strange world we live in.
| arbitrage wrote:
| Google refusing to do anything is not the same as Google being
| unable to do anything.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| On targeting, is anyone else shocked at how, even with all this
| data on us, ads are still so awful and irrelevant? I probably get
| ads that I'm most interested in on Instagram, where I've actually
| purchased things based on seeing them in ads before, but Hulu ads
| in particular are absolute garbage. I constantly get ads for
| prescription drugs for diseases no one in our household has. Hulu
| ad tech also frequently plays the same exact irrelevant ad back-
| to-back, thinks it's on an ad when it's actually on content and
| so disables FF / RW controls, repeatedly restarts an ad block
| when trying to go to the beginning of content and will start the
| whole 3 minute ad block from the beginning unless it completely
| finishes, sometimes ads ARE able to be FF'd through, sometimes
| content just downscales to the lowest quality and won't scale
| back up, etc etc. I just don't understand how they're such a huge
| platform and obviously advertisers are spending millions showing
| there, when the ad tech itself is such a steaming pile of hot
| garbage. If it was my business and they were doing this to my
| ads, I'd be very upset with them.
| ornornor wrote:
| You should try nextdns, it might make both problems go away (if
| streaming on an appliance)
| williamvds wrote:
| This is the kicker when it comes to the advertising industry.
| Advertisers pride themselves on slurping up all the personal
| information they can get their hands on, telling their
| customers it will help make their advertisements more
| effective. But anyone who uses the internet (without an
| adblocker) can tell just how poorly implemented, targeted, and
| ineffective those ads often are. On top of it being incredibly
| difficult to measure advertising effectiveness. It very much
| feels like a whole multibillion dollar industry (which created
| several megacorporations) is selling a whole load of bullshit,
| and causing great harm to a lot of people in order to justify
| it.
| freeAgent wrote:
| I think a big part of the problem is that the ads you see are
| the ones that win an auction and not necessarily the ones
| "most relevant" to your profile. There's an element of
| relevancy, but I believe it's frequently overwhelmed by the
| simple willingness of a given advertiser to pay, even if they
| know you may not be a precise match to a given profile. We
| still end up mostly with ads for products/services/industries
| where the return on ad spend is better, and it o my matters
| what your interests are at the margin.
| luckylion wrote:
| What's amazing to me is how terrible Amazon's ads, related
| products and upselling are. There's no adblocker there, they
| know exactly what you bought. Many / most are probably buying a
| significant amount of all products from them.
|
| And still their targeting is terrible. Why? Are they just
| incompetent? Is the tech just not good enough yet? Are they
| just not showing their true abilities to keep the population
| calm?
| rchaud wrote:
| > And still their targeting is terrible. Why?
|
| Why not? Most Amazon search results for non-branded goods
| (towels, furniture, appliances) are going to feature
| identical products from Chinese companies with unmemorable,
| nonsensical names. They cannot differentiate on anything
| besides price, and search position, so Amazon may as well
| give the largest bidders top billing.
| luckylion wrote:
| They might not be able to differentiate between the
| products, but they should know you, and they should know
| what you're most likely to buy. If they show ads but you
| don't click on them because they weren't relevant to you,
| they've failed. At least they ought to know whether you'll
| buy Chinese brands like HNWERZ or will prefer a household
| name you'll recognize.
|
| Essentially, they should be better than a great sales
| person in a regular store. You tell them what you're
| looking for "towels", and they'll show you some and quickly
| reiterate based on your feedback. Amazon has lots of
| advantages over a human sales person: they don't see you
| for the first time today. They have a perfect memory of all
| your orders of the past 20 years. They'll often even know
| what family members have bought recently. I don't believe
| they couldn't make you spend more money if they showed you
| an ad for the brand name your wife loves.
| Regnore wrote:
| My favourite example of this is when I get ads for something
| that I've just recently purchased and clearly no person would
| want more than one of. Just bought a waffle maker? Why not
| buy another identical one? Never know when you're going to
| need a backup right?
| luckylion wrote:
| I'd totally understand that when you're returning the
| waffle maker and they're like "hey, that one probably
| sucked, here are 12 others", but yeah, it's weird. And
| that's coming from a guy who absolutely does buy backups of
| the things he likes, because how would I survive if my
| electric foot warmer would die and I had to wait 4 days for
| a replacement?
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| Paramount Plus generally (exclusively?) shows me ads
| for...other shows on Paramount Plus. Which I'm obviously
| already paying for.
|
| Most recently, it showed me an advertisement for Star Trek:
| Strange New Worlds. I've already seen every episode of that
| series, and at least one their systems is well aware of this
| fact. In fact, Star Trek shows are the ONLY things I've watched
| on Paramount Plus.
|
| There is clearly no thought going into their ad selection
| whatsoever.
| kernal wrote:
| How does Vivaldi make money?
|
| >Every time you search using one of the pre-installed search
| engines, you're helping us grow, one search at a time. Currently,
| we work with DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Startpage, Yahoo!, Bing, Yandex
| and Neeva. The only exception is Google - we don't make money
| when you search with Google.
|
| So their money comes indirectly from search engines that make
| money from ads.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I don't want to dunk on a single out-of-context quote, and I'm
| sure that Mr. Tetzchner fully understands what I'm about to type
| as he seems like a brilliant guy. But blaming the current miasma
| on "advertisers" is so short-sighted.
|
| The reason why everything is ruined by advertising is because
| _nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on
| the internet._ The money has to come from somewhere, so
| advertising it is.
|
| Why does everybody want everything to be free? That's a more
| interesting question.
|
| Is it because years of free broadcast television and radio
| conditioned us to expect everything to be ad-supported and
| "free?"
|
| Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the
| early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment
| systems and such?
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Why does everyone expect everything to be free? I'd argue that
| while money's part of it, the more important aspect is
| friction.
|
| Much of the time the internet is a platform for procrastination
| (he says, posting here while waiting for Vivado to do its
| thing!) - if I'm just idly reading a page or two and I'm
| interrupted by the need to create an account and worry about
| payment details then I'd have to be heavily invested in what I
| was reading to bother jumping through such hoops, instead of
| just going somewhere else.
|
| I'd also argue that advertising itself isn't the problem - it's
| the fact that the goal of maximising returns for advertising
| spends incentivises sleazy behaviour (not just the tracking,
| but also obnoxious audio ads and videos that partially obscure
| the content the user's trying to read.)
| yourabstraction wrote:
| I think friction is a big part. I've never paid for a website
| subscription but I have several subscription apps on my
| iphone because the payment (and cancellation) process is
| streamlined.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Most of the things I read online, I would probably not be
| willing to pay much for. For example, for "news" opinion
| pieces, my analogy is to a long form version of something one
| might find posted on a bulletin board at a coffee shop. Sure
| it is entertaining to skim and might be vaguely informative,
| but it isn't really journalism and if someone tried to charge
| me to read it, I'd happily move on.
|
| I don't expect everything to be free, I expect things to be
| priced in line with their value. Listening to somebody's rant
| on something--I mean, therapists charge for it!
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The system of roads that carries goods from point A to point B
| is not 'free', it's taxpayer-financed. Governments could also
| use tax revenue to pay for nationwide fiber-optic systems that
| carry information from point A to point B.
|
| Note 'paying for' doesn't mean hiring private contractors to
| run the system, it means having government employees run the
| systems while relying on the competitive private sector for
| things like manufacturing fiber optic cable (comparable to the
| road system, where equipment like road graders is privately
| manufactured).
|
| If congestion becomes a problem, as with roads, alternatives
| like trains for public transit to reduce traffic loads are also
| plausible. Regardless, those who claim there is a competitive
| free market solution to the issue of basic infrastucture are
| either highly ignorant or just pushing for private monopoly
| control with high rents.
| Asdrubalini wrote:
| How does this have anything to do with ads? Advertisements
| are used to fund the content you watch, not the
| infrastructure. Infrastructure is funded with the money you
| pay each month to your ISP.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Aren't most freeways and interstates built by private
| contractors? Lots of toll roads are even "operated" by
| private companies and those tend to be the nicest, best
| maintained, lowest congestion roads.
| pentagrama wrote:
| I do see a lot of billboard ads on the road.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| But why, when we can inject billions into the pockets of ATT,
| Comcast, Verizon, and friends. It's far too lucrative an
| opportunity to let any more infrastructure ever be public
| again.
| tensor wrote:
| This is not a good analogy. The infrastructure, e.g. roads,
| is the one thing we all already do pay for via our ISP. It's
| the store fronts and movie theatres on the road that we want
| to be free, that are currently paid for by ads.
| ronsor wrote:
| I now wonder about the viability of an ad-supported movie
| theater and grocery store.
| t-3 wrote:
| Grocery store is definitely not viable - the profit
| margins are already among the lowest in retail and don't
| leave much room to drop. Movie theaters just need to be
| able to pay for the building and electricity and to clean
| up once in a while though (food and drink could be
| handled by outside vendors renting space to set up).
| Seems doable in a large enough metro.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| Movie theaters are pretty much ad supported aren't they.
| From what I hear the payment we make doesn't cover the
| cost of the film, which is why you get about half an hour
| of ads and trailers before the film starts.
| jeremy_wiebe wrote:
| Re: movie theatres. We're already on that road. 20 years
| ago I'd go to a move and see a few trailers. Now I have
| to sit through a bunch of ads, then trailers, and then
| finally we get to the movie I paid for.
| renonce wrote:
| It's more like free public attractions like national parks.
| In real life they are paid by taxpayers which are in turn
| paid by estate taxes and income taxes by local residents.
| guhcampos wrote:
| Everybody used to make content for free in the early 2000s,
| that's a shallow argument.
|
| That's what communities do, they cooperate out of the mutual
| benefit the cooperation achieves.
|
| The monetization of content was born out of the ad business
| model. Someone had to pay the bill of the tools the tech giants
| were building, not the bill of small content creating
| communities and individuals.
|
| It was, and still is, relatively cheap to run a blog or a
| forum. Individuals can pay for it, and a couple dozen people
| can share the upkeep burden of relatively big forums with no
| issue. Now, however, everybody wants to turn everything into a
| profit, simply because it's so easy to do it, so "why not?". If
| you can monetize your own pet dog, your child, the food you
| eat, why not?
|
| And now we're all furbed.
| IvanK_net wrote:
| People writew Wikipedia for free, people answer at
| StackOverflow for free, we got used to it.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Wikipedia is an aggregator of knowledge and content created
| elsewhere. It's a wonderful resource and success story.
|
| That "hey, pitch in whenever you feel like it" model works
| wonderfully for some things but is not a universal or
| automatic solution.
| cratermoon wrote:
| What about all the businesses that provide a free tier of their
| service with advertising but offer a paid version without
| advertisements? Many smartphone apps are free but ad-supported,
| but you can purchase the app to remove the ads.
|
| And to be clear, the personally targeted advertising based on
| harvesting personal information is fundamentally different than
| the audience-targeted advertising in mass media. That and the
| interaction with the service to grab and sustain attention is
| what has led to Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" of the
| internet.
| [deleted]
| bobajeff wrote:
| I think the reason that the internet is a cesspool of privacy
| invading malware and fraud is because of get rich quick
| schemes. Basically the same thing that's affecting the majority
| of the cryptocurrency use. That's why there's always clickbait
| sites and auto generated content dominating search results and
| you're constantly being recommended crappy sponsored videos
| with no real content in them.
|
| It's not that people don't want to pay for things or they don't
| expect the pay for things. It's that most people don't know how
| to run a legitimate business but running a get rich quick
| scheme that's another ballpark.
| tyingq wrote:
| He does seem to be specifically ranting about the privacy
| invasion of deeply targeted advertising, rather than ads in
| general.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Very very true. But, I feel the answer is the same.
|
| Advertisers are spending money for ads and they of course
| want the best possible return for their money and this
| involves as much tracking and intelligence-gathering as is
| technically possible. If one is now creating an advertising-
| supported site, you are now at the whims of advertisers.
|
| There are alternatives, but I've never seen them scale. For
| example some independent blogs and other content creators
| have "hand picked" ads from selected partners. For example,
| DaringFireball.net runs one ad per week and he appears to
| work carefully with advertisers to select ads he feels
| comfortable running. But I've never seen this scaled up very
| far.
|
| (not that everything needs to be scaled up)
| [deleted]
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-
| sighted
|
| The problem isn't advertising. The problem stems from combining
| advertising with relentlessly spying on everyone all the time.
|
| Television, newspapers, and glossy magazines had their content
| funded through ad sales without spying on the public for
| decades, so we know the spying on people part is not a hard
| requirement.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| People want something for free when the service offered does
| not have enough value for them to pay for it. The whole economy
| of startups is somewhat delusional and in a sense bubble (if
| you ignore advertising). Having success for giving away
| something for free is not a measure of economically viable
| success. If you add up what many startups request in monthly
| fees, almost no one will be willing to pay that sum.
|
| Many people also couldn't possibly pay if they wanted. Most
| people don't even have the discretionary salary to pay for a
| few non-essential services per month, let alone dozens or
| hundreds.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-
| sighted.
|
| I'm not so sure. Do you work for an advertiser? (Quote marks
| are not for emphasis, by the way.)
|
| Morally, advertising is bankrupt at a minimum, and
| adversarial/predatory when taken to extremes.
|
| Advertisers will take any surface, real or virtual, which can
| host advertisements in a cost effective way but does not, and
| place advertisements on that surface, gleefully. They simply do
| not care what happens to the thing they place advertisements
| upon, and they do not care if they ruin it. They see an
| untapped source of revenue and they wish to tap it.
|
| Advertisers did that to the Internet. Browse on mobile for a
| few minutes without an ad blocker to see what has happened. To
| an advertiser, you the reader are a source of funds, and
| absolutely nothing more. Twenty years ago you were considered a
| crass advertiser at best if your advertisement animated or even
| _moved_ in any way. Now we have full-page interstitials and
| half-page ads which slide in and slide out, and even auto-
| playing videos which cover a third of the screen. To top it all
| off, advertisers are upset that the ability to block ads is
| even possible.
|
| They say they're "losing money" when people use ad blockers,
| when in reality they are simply not gaining as much money as
| before. The motive of an advertiser is money, and money alone.
| Morally advertisers are bankrupt at best, and malignant and
| predatory at worst.
| kmbfjr wrote:
| I can't say you are wrong since that was the original deal when
| it came to broadcast entertainment, but it lacks nuance. Not
| only was advertising on broadcast media somewhat regulated (by
| the government) or controlled by industry ad boards (the
| networks themselves), at no point did radio, TV or newsprint
| ever report back so much information to the advertisers.
|
| It isn't a matter of expecting everything to be free. For
| example, look at attending a professional hockey game where
| there is absolutely zero expectation of anything free, yet
| attendees are deluged with advertising upon entering the venue.
| There are often breaks in game play, just for advertising.
|
| With respect to the internet, the ad industry has managed to
| ingrain itself where ads may never be shown. Google (an ad
| company) provides site analytics for free, and those analytics
| can be used by Google to steer advertising on sites far removed
| from the site being monitored.
|
| Take an hour and watch the DNS traffic from any streaming app,
| free or paid, and watch the privacy circus unfold. This
| industry simply can't help itself from figuring out ways to
| look over everyone's shoulders.
|
| Recall that I mentioned that at no point did radio, TV or
| newsprint report back so much information, even that has been
| changing. ATSC3 TV receivers by default will report back
| location information and viewing habits not only to the TV
| stations, but to any number of ratings services. Over the air
| guide data is intentionally hobbled so one must use the
| internet to get it, providing metadata on viewing habits.
| Online subscriptions to newspapers require use of readers,
| again reporting home on reading habits.
|
| While I think you are correct to raise the point that in some
| ways it is the price of free, the advertising industry has
| managed to wiggle their way into data collection for things
| that are not free, and on devices for which we pay a
| considerable amount of money to own. It may be wrong to say
| they've taken over the internet, but they've sure come into our
| lives uninvited in increasingly intrusive ways.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I love your post, though I was by no means defending the
| intrusive privacy mess we have now. It is indeed orders of
| magnitude more disturbing than what was possible 25 or 100
| years ago and I deeply hate it.
|
| I was only pointing out how/why people have been conditioned
| to tolerate the current state of affairs.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| > nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user
| on the internet.
|
| as it has been the first years of the internet?
|
| I did pay back then ... with my taxes. Public funded
| Universities were large back bones of the internet. Then it all
| got privatized and we are in the sump were in right now.
|
| The internet is a public good and should be financed
| accordingly.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Yeah I was on the internet back then. It was basically
| useless for decent content when I was in college in the mid
| 90s
|
| For reference, my first paid work i did involving development
| was making modifications to a Mac/HyperCard based Gopher
| server.
| [deleted]
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Why does everybody want everything to be free?_
|
| Personally, I want it to continue to be free because:
|
| * It's very low friction: you can go from site to site without
| needing to provide payment details, sign up, or consider
| whether a sites per pageview charge is reasonable.
|
| * It lets everyone participate. If you have some form of paying
| money for content then I expect that amount gets set high
| enough that it excludes a large fraction of the population.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Exactly. I think given the choice of having a free experience
| with ads vs the subscription model, the majority of people
| would pick the former.
|
| This model won because this model works best. The hardest
| part is getting users, and as you say, ad-model is low
| friction. Most people won't subscribe to thousands or random
| small sites.
| ta988 wrote:
| There is also the problem that even the tinyiest writing or
| video produced in a garage by an individual is now covered in
| advertisements, sponsoring and hidden or not product placement.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Lest we forget that banner ads date back to the late 90s at
| least. "Free by default" was enabled largely by advertising
| from the first, or as a sort of loss leader for traditional
| media companies. It's more of a sophisticated chicken and egg
| scenario than you are making it out to be. It sounds like you
| are just victim blaming for people not demanding to be charged
| money for online content.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| What if you just charge people? TBH I don't want to pay because
| I don't need the content. It's good but optional. Turn it into
| paid and I simply go away. People may view your content just
| because it's free.
| criley2 wrote:
| Is it because the majority of people in American society are
| struggling financially and have less real money than their
| parents or grandparents, and are being nickel and dimed as
| their entire existence is converted to a subscription mechanic,
| from rent, to Amazon, to Netflix? Is it because they
| desperately seek out non-monetized content to spend what little
| free time they have in peace without losing what little money
| they have left?
|
| Nah...
| drstewart wrote:
| So before ~2000, living in houses, buying goods, and watching
| movies was free? Weird, I must have missed all of that,
| because I sure as hell was paying rent and $5 to rent a movie
| from Blockbuster. Can you point to where all these free
| resources were that I missed out on?
| hgsgm wrote:
| The ad monetized content is mostly garbage though. But it's
| dangled in front people to attack out lizard brains. The non-
| ad-monetized content is better.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user
| on the internet
|
| Just like newspapers and magazines, right?
|
| No? We pay for those and they also have ads?
|
| Hmm. Maybe that's not why, then!
| [deleted]
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > Why does everybody want everything to be free? That's a more
| interesting question.
|
| > Is it because years of free broadcast television and radio
| conditioned us to expect everything to be ad-supported and
| "free?"
|
| > Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the
| early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment
| systems and such?
|
| Well, we were sold the dream: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-
| free/
|
| > But blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-
| sighted.
|
| It's tangential but it's not short-sighted. There are
| generations being introduced to the web through Tik-tok, FB,
| etc., that don't know it could be/was different. A lot of money
| into making sure they stay in the garden.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| [dead]
| lapcat wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. He's clearly not against
| advertising per se, nor against free content; rather, he's
| against online tracking.
|
| > "They stole the internet from us", he says of advertisers.
| "The internet is supposed to be open and free, and you
| shouldn't be afraid of being monitored.
|
| > he believes the current state of advertising is less
| profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking
| was in place.
|
| > He mentions "normal ads," which you may see in a magazine or
| on TV, were the standard for about a decade, even on the
| internet. "A lot of sites were more profitable, and people were
| less worried about having to block ads. The ads were normal, it
| was kind of like what you were seeing if you were going and
| reading a magazine. There were ads, but they weren't following
| you."
|
| Advertising has existed for as long as business has existed.
| But for most of business history, advertisers could not track
| you. A magazine or a billboard can't track you or personally
| identify you.
| dreen wrote:
| Local radio stations can advertise local businesses which
| could be an example of good/useful targeted ad. The
| difference is of course the targetting is "passive" and they
| don't know me, at a downside of being only able to estimate
| the number of listeners. I'd welcome some passive system like
| that on the internet but have no idea how it could work.
| hgsgm wrote:
| > The internet is supposed to be open and free,
|
| Ok
|
| > and you shouldn't be afraid of being monitored.
|
| If it's open, people will see you. Don't be afraid.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Sites were profitable because the average person couldn't
| create a site easily, so they had little competition.
|
| This very site exists because the creator got a gob smacking
| fortune for a web store, something that you can literally
| create by a following textbook today.
| [deleted]
| lapcat wrote:
| Why did you write two separate replies to the same comment?
| KrugerDunnings wrote:
| Let me give a slightly different explanation: if you look at
| the capitalisation of the global market of consumer's household
| budget reserved for education and entertainment vs the
| capitalisation of the global market for company's budget
| reserved for advertisement it is a two order magnitude
| difference. I don't remember exact details but it was like 1
| trillion vs tens of trillions.
|
| Like even if you wanted the sell consumers their entertainment
| you don't have the same budget as someone giving it away for
| free.
|
| There is no easy fix for this, the information economy has
| reached the point of post scarcity and you don't really want to
| fix that.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I don't believe that.
|
| People used to pay to have their sites published just because
| they had something to say and wanted others to read it. This is
| how it should work. Why should _we_ pay to read some guy 's hot
| opinions? Would you pay me to read this comment? I doubt it. If
| you actually have something to say, you need to go out there
| and actively say it to people. You don't charge them for the
| privilege of listening to you.
|
| Truth is these for-profit sites just want our undivided
| attention so that fractions of that attention span might be
| redirected towards ads and therefore their pockets. They don't
| really have anything real to say. They'll say anything that
| brings them the desired profits. They'll avoid saying anything
| that could harm profits. Therefore, not only are they
| untrustworthy, they are essentially worthless.
| Nadya wrote:
| >They'll avoid saying anything that could harm profits.
|
| I'm on mobile so won't respond as well as I'd like to. But
| 1000000% this is why I'm vehemently against advertisements as
| a primary model of income.
|
| Want money? Ask for donations or sell your content. Nobody
| pays you? You aren't worth being paid in the eyes of the
| public. It's your job to convince the public that you are
| worth paying!
|
| All of my favorite websites and content creators are 100%
| funded by donations from supporters. It works because the
| value is high enough to be worth paying for. If the donations
| ever stop rolling in that speaks more about the quality - it
| stopped being worth financially supporting.
| numpad0 wrote:
| This makes sense to me. The quality of content from creators
| practicing "100/1000 true fans" model seem to deteriorate
| rapidly. Fully un-supported or ad-supported content on the
| Internet has more tangency to the mode thus value.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| This is a common (not necessarily majority-) opinion on this
| startup website.
|
| I don't understand why the theory asserts that the causality
| necessarily goes from the user to the business. Say some social
| media comes along. They want users. What reason do the users
| have to care? Their friends are not on it. Why pay money for
| that? Oh, pay X amount of dollars a month and hope that in
| _three years_ the network effects will have payed off? How is
| that rational?
|
| _But FB and Twitter (etc.) did get popular!_ Someone responds.
| Aha, but that's just survivorship bias.
|
| The above is an argument for why the regular users have little
| reason to accept a paid-for option when it comes to social
| media.
|
| But does that mean that they necessarily (indirectly) demanded
| a free option? No. Because if you look back twenty years, it's
| not like Social Media was some kind of innate need that people
| had. As is usually the case, it was a manufactured need. And
| who could have manufactured it? It could have simply been
| business people with some foresight (who knew about network
| effects).
|
| Did _the people_ need social media? Not any more than they
| needed luxury dog grooming to be a thing. But businesses always
| need money. And so needs are manufactured.
|
| This _woe-is-businesses who have to make their money through
| advertising_ (because of the lusers' choices) narrative is
| predictable (understandable) for a startup website. But the
| causality might not really have started with the (l)users.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| >Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the
| early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment
| systems and such?
|
| And nobody really cared.
|
| People made content because they wanted to, and it was
| generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have
| now.
|
| The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > People made content because they wanted to, and it was
| generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have
| now.
|
| When were these glory days that people made good content -
| news and/or analysis for free?
|
| Blog spam has been a thing since before Google when sites
| would have hidden text to appear on AltaVists.
|
| There was the X1 pop under windows and the punch the monkey
| banner ads early on.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Gamefaqs. Someone typed out the entire script of Deus Ex.
| For free.
|
| Don't fuck with gamers they are a force beyond human
| comprehension.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _When were these glory days that people made good content -
| news and /or analysis for free?_
|
| There were endless free sites, without advertising, back in
| the day. Many were people installing apache, and putting
| simple html/text pages up.
|
| Free content outnumbered anything commerical for a decade,
| including blog spam.
|
| Altavista being bad at filtering, is not relevant, becuase
| you're stating the problem, which gave rise to google.
|
| People could no longer find valid content, due to a tiny
| number of bad actors.
| scarface74 wrote:
| There was content. But most of it was useless. Hobby
| level MySpace level, GeoCities stuff.
|
| When was this decade? Navigator came out in 1994. By
| 2004, the web was fully commercialized.
| bbarnett wrote:
| The web isn't "fully commercialized" today even. Endless
| hobby sites, non-profit groups, and things such as
| clubs(bike clubs, etc), are completely free of any
| commerical intent or advertising.
|
| Even government sites are ad free, non-profit, non-
| commercial by their very nature.
|
| In 2004, before modern-class smartphones, before endless
| smaller companies even had a web presence, before
| facebook was a big thing, there was still mostly ad-free,
| commercial free content.
|
| And I should add here, paying for a computer and internet
| link at home, or paying for a server in a datacentre, or
| buying a pre-configured wordpress site, without ads, are
| all commerical free endeavours.
|
| Otherwise, nothing was ever commerical free, because
| everyone always paid for resources to provide content in
| some way.
|
| Paying for resources, does not make a thing commerical.
|
| You and I have a very different view of the past. Were
| you on the web pre-2000? I ask, because I don't
| understand the difference in our opinions.
| sirl1on wrote:
| > Endless hobby sites, non-profit groups, and things such
| as clubs(bike clubs, etc), are completely free of any
| commerical intent or advertising.
|
| As people aren't okay with having to actively looking for
| content (anymore), this has been relegated to
| Facebook/Discord/Telegram/WhatsApp/etc. Groups. You
| either are bombarded with ads or pay with your metadata.
| scarface74 wrote:
| My first for pay project was modifying a Mac HyperCard,
| Gopher server in 1993 that used C based XFNs (?) for
| TCP/IP (yeah there was such a thing) to implement a
| chatbot.
|
| My earliest post I can find on Usenet was from 1993.
|
| Yeah I learned a lot from comp.lang.c. But there really
| wasn't that much of value for research. Sure there was
| tidbits and ftp Mac archive sites for shareware.
| 0dayz wrote:
| I really would disagree on how the internet was better, sure
| you could find a few people that were saints that just
| relesed things for free, but the internet back then was
| really barren and it was very slow to see new releases of
| said content and the only alternative was to pirate.
|
| Do I wish we had better money option back in the day? Yes.
| Most importantly I wish another model of how content is
| stored was implemented to ensure maximum diversity of said
| content, like specialized sites for different types of video
| content.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >but the internet back then was really barren
|
| The internet back then was a _forest_ into which you couldn
| 't really see, you just went dumpster diving and it was an
| adventure.
|
| _Today 's_ internet is barren, with most content centered
| around Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Youtube, and various
| commercial propaganda campaign sites known colloquially as
| journalism. That is a fucking desert, a wasteland.
| jmye wrote:
| That seems like a real romanticization of the early
| internet - comparing, essentially, Geocities to a forest
| and simultaneously calling the plethora of content-
| creator sites available today (sites like Substack, not
| 'influencer' brands on IG) a "fucking desert, a
| wasteland" seems sort of disingenuous.
|
| Sure, if you never leave FB or Reddit _, you 're not
| going to see a ton of diversity. But it's still all there
| if you can get more than a page into search results, or
| put in literally the exact same level of effort you used
| to have to put in when AltaVista and Lycos were out
| giving horrendous search results.
|
| _ Even on Reddit, if you spend your time on what used to
| be the defaults versus finding the niche subs, you're
| going to have a vastly different understanding of
| forest/wasteland.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >the plethora of content-creator sites available today
| (sites like Substack,
|
| They all exhibit a tremendous level of "likethink"
| bubbling, I find everyone on a given platform to be more
| or less the same spewing the same crap over and over
| again.
|
| Contrast Geocities, where you could find everyone and
| everything imaginable, short of straight up illegal
| stuff.
| 0dayz wrote:
| I do agree and disagree, yes there were more diverse
| websites for sure, but quite a lot of it were just copies
| of others (flash games is a good example of how many
| different hosts there were with almost nothing unique to
| it).
|
| And two of the examples you brought up are social media
| focused, with one also being heavily focused on content
| discovery.
|
| And the places you did find was very slow with new
| content being added and limited because as I said you
| could mostly only get the juicy stuff through piracy (as
| most things was still heavily reliant on offline
| distribution).
| prmoustache wrote:
| >(flash games
|
| That was not the old internet but already the current
| one.
| z3c0 wrote:
| > Do I wish we had better money option back in the day?
| Yes.
|
| I didn't. Digital content is the closest thing to a post-
| scarce resource that we have ever achieved. Ushering in a
| business model based on the limited resources of physical
| mediums was a tremendous mistake, and was only done so
| because media companies couldn't stop salivating at the
| notion of charging $10 for something they could copy
| infinitely at almost no cost.
| kelnos wrote:
| Charging for digital content is (or at least should be)
| about recouping the cost it took to make it, not the
| (near-zero) cost to distribute it.
| z3c0 wrote:
| There are other methods to recoup the cost that actually
| hand something of tangible value to the customer (the
| physical mediums I mentioned, for example.) Handing over
| a digital asset for the same price, and then lambasting
| those who choose to distribute it freely, is 100% the
| shittiest way to do it.
| thfuran wrote:
| And at scale, the cost ceases to be remotely near zero.
| Netflix would implode rapidly without income even if they
| stopped producing content.
| z3c0 wrote:
| Netflix never would have existed to begin with in a world
| without DRM-loaded media.
|
| (The streaming platform, that is, not the original
| movies-in-your-mailbox service)
| layer8 wrote:
| > remotely near zero
|
| That sounds like an oxymoron ;), had to take a double-
| take when reading.
| mtts wrote:
| That's a rose tinted view. For _some_ fields (not
| unsurprisingly nerdy ones) the quality of the amateur content
| was good enough. For other fields it was abysmal. I remember
| trying to look up scholarly material on English literature in
| 1998 or so and not being able to find anything that was even
| remotely decent, for example. And it could have been worse:
| among the amateurs that put history related material online,
| crackpots and conspiracy theorists were (and, in fact, are)
| vastly over represented.
| [deleted]
| everdrive wrote:
| The highs are higher, but the lows are much lower too. I
| wish there were a way to preserve the best of both.
| Touche wrote:
| It's ok that some content not be on the internet. The
| internet didn't have to become the epicenter of everything.
| Amateur content and communication was a fine outcome for
| what the internet could have been. Scholarly material could
| remain in journals.
| abenga wrote:
| > Scholarly material could remain in journals.
|
| And remain inaccessible to large parts of the world
| population aside from people in ivory towers with journal
| subscriptions?
| di456 wrote:
| > The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake.
|
| The irony off posting this on a VC website that make money
| off the commercialisation of the internet.
| granshaw wrote:
| The amount of tech folks that don't realize how much their
| jobs and lifestyles only exist because of the
| commercialization of the internet and "capitalism"...
| Touche wrote:
| It's not an anticapitalist take to say that the internet
| would have been better without commercialization. There's
| a world outside of the internet. There's programming jobs
| outside of the internet. Not everything has to be
| commercialized. And that doesn't mean commercialization
| is inherently bad.
| [deleted]
| denton-scratch wrote:
| You're right, it is ironic.
|
| But the fact remains, HN is free to use, the plugs on the
| front-page are clearly flagged so you don't have to read
| them, and apart from those the site is ad-free and looks
| and behaves a lot like the old internet.
| paxys wrote:
| You can continue to stick to your 90s hobbyist and research
| circles of the internet if you want. They haven't gone
| anywhere.
|
| The fact that billions more are online and doing their own
| thing now is not a mistake.
| rchaud wrote:
| "Doing their own thing" is quite a big claim. Facebook and
| others would not have had teams of psychologists and
| neuroscientists on staff to maximize user's screen time if
| they were OK with people doing their own thing.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| People made content because they wanted to, and it
| was generally better quality than the corporate
| blogspam we have now.
|
| I miss the old days too. And even now that independently-
| made, non-ad-supported content is what I prefer most. Spent a
| lot of years creating it myself.
|
| But let's not be naive. Not all art or journalism can be
| created that way.
|
| There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless
| somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need
| money to live, the people making that stuff need money.
|
| For example, imagine the sorts of investigative journalism
| where somebody might spend months or years researching a
| story. One that might not even pan out. That's not something
| you can realistically do, part-time, for free, while earning
| a living doing something else as your day job.
|
| Expecting everything to be free, and also ad-free, because it
| was created by some hobbyist in their spare time while they
| do something else for a living severely restricts the amount
| of people who can create and the types of things that can be
| created.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| I think doing journalism part time for free is how
| bellingcat started.
| rchaud wrote:
| > There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless
| somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need
| money to live, the people making that stuff need money.
|
| I definitely agree. And even for people doing it solo as a
| full-time job (email newsletters come to mind), the quality
| tends to be less than what would be possible if they had
| even one other person sharing the work.
| indigochill wrote:
| > And since people need money to live, the people making
| that stuff need money.
|
| Yes, but I believe advertising is a poor solution for that.
| Because it seems to tend to lead to optimizing for
| advertising at the expense of quality.
|
| I believe crowdfunding is a better solution for a couple
| reasons.
|
| 1. Enough people want the thing to be made to be willing to
| front the cost for it (contrast this with advertising-
| funded journalism, much of which is just a constant barrage
| of noise rather than it all being something someone's
| passionate enough about making to pitch).
|
| 2. Over time, creators develop reputations for good or ill,
| and this enables trustworthy creators to start to bank on
| their reputation for future, perhaps riskier projects,
| while making it harder for untrustworthy creators to
| continue practicing.
|
| 3. Related to point 2, over time this optimizes for
| delivery of quality output (which is the most important way
| this is better than advertising, IMO). It does require
| quality pitches as well to convince people to front the
| money for the effort, but if you deliver a quality pitch
| and bail on the output, your reputation takes a nosedive.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Crowd funding is a complete failure. Look at any high
| quality project or content used by hundreds of thousands
| and they will have a dozen people donating if any.
| Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders
| can be left behind.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Charging for content access is the only way,
| freeloaders can be left behind.
|
| Newspaper publishers were slow to pick up on the free
| www. Until they did, all we needed was a dialup
| connection, and we could go anywhere, serve anything, and
| talk to anyone.
|
| I'm not sure what broke the dam, but it might have been
| when browsers started behaving according to some kind of
| documented standard.
|
| Then adblockers came, and the publishers started pushing
| nag modals.
|
| Then publishers decided to try to run ads as well as
| paywalls; yeah, suckers, pay us to watch our ads!
|
| I regret the passing of an internet that was free to use,
| give or take a connection. They did steal it.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I regret the passing of an internet that was free to
| use, give or take a connection. They did steal it.
|
| That's when I fell in love with the potential of the
| www/internet and switched career paths.
|
| But in hindsight that was never really going to last.
| When the guts of the public www (browsers, servers, data
| pipes, protocols, TCP/IP support in operating systems)
| were being built out in the 90s, it was all predicated on
| the belief that it was the future of commerce.
|
| Without that explosion, "the free internet" probably
| would have just been a slightly evolved version of the
| dial-up BBS scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Which is cool,
| and honestly depending on my mood I might be willing to
| trade 2023's technology hellscape for that simpler time.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)
|
| There are studies where money ruins altruism and pure joy
| of creating sthg. has to be replaced with a payment which
| becomes according to Herzberg a hygiene factor and wears
| out.
|
| The --internet-- www as we know it - give it back!
| linsomniac wrote:
| Linux is a VERY different thing than investigative
| journalism. I can't think of a single bit of
| investigative journalism someone did as a side project
| that has spawned an entire industry, but maybe I'm not
| thinking hard enough.
|
| Content costs money to make. Yes, sometimes give via
| self-funding of the content (without advertisement, like
| by working a job), and that's fantastic. But we also need
| a way to support the content that we like, and we can't
| expect everyone to be able to give.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| > Content costs money to make
|
| Some content costs money, other content - and how I
| dislike the word 'content' which turns that which makes
| the 'net interesting inside-out to make it into a money-
| making scheme - costs time to make. Not all time is
| money, lots of it is time spent on activities which
| people do without the need for payment since they enjoy
| it. Call it a 'hobby' or 'pastime' if you want, something
| to do when you're free to do what you want. Some people
| like to go and watch sports games, others like to sit on
| the sofa and watch televised drivel while others park
| themselves in front of a computer to create something.
| Much of what is created is interesting only to the
| creator for the act of creation but some of it has value
| beyond the experience of the creator. That is indeed how
| the Linux kernel got started, it is how a lot of music is
| made, artwork is created and more.
| mejutoco wrote:
| > I can't think of a single bit of investigative
| journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned
| an entire industry
|
| Maybe not an entire industry, but Bellingcat has been
| impactful and it started with a guy commenting on the
| guardian comments section.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Investigative journalism, (the media), sometimes referred
| to as "The Fourth Estate", is too important to be funded
| by advertising, and should be funded by the people, and
| be for the people. Just like the legislative, executive,
| and judicial branches of our governments.
| rchaud wrote:
| Linux is the exception that proves the rule.
|
| While it is completely free (beer + libre), Google and
| Facebook exploited numerous Linux-related technologies to
| turn the internet into a planet-scale ad machine.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I apologise for my pedantry, but:
|
| > the exception that proves the rule
|
| To prove the rule is to test the rule; proof spirit is
| spirit that passes the test, and the proof of the pudding
| is in the eating. The exception that proves the rule is
| the exception that violates it (and shows that the rule
| is a heuristic, not a law).
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Survivorship bias?
| unity1001 wrote:
| > Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)
|
| Linux happened mostly through the contributions of the
| paid developers of the Linux foundation. And still the
| majority of the commits belong to those developers. And
| it was possible to do so because the foundation received
| enough support from major donors, most of which were
| corporations. If you would want to choose an Open Source
| success story that wasnt backed by corporations,
| WordPress would be what you are looking for. But even
| then, the WordPress ecosystem found a way to fund itself
| directly through its users. Which means that they are
| also funded. In contrast, a gigantic amount of Open
| Source projects were abandoned when its contributors were
| no longer able to maintain them because life
| responsibilities started raining on them...
|
| Unfortunately any social paradigm, movement or setup must
| be able to sustain itself economically. The best way to
| do it is to do it through its users, directly, so that
| concentrated capital wont be able to take it over.
| chii wrote:
| > Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)
|
| but it eventually had paid sponsorships from companies
| that make money off it.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)
|
| Red Hat started in 1993 and SUSE in 1994. So you got 2
| whole years before money entered the picture.
| [deleted]
| bbarnett wrote:
| In the early years, these companies were tiny, struggled
| to not go out of business.
|
| And because they were so small, they contributed very
| little paid time... anywhere.
|
| Linux happened for free.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| Yes, Linux was started for free as a student project, but
| the reason why it became the standard choice for data
| centers is because large corporations like Oracle, IBM
| and later Google united behind it in order to stop
| Microsoft from dominating servers. These corporations
| along with some commercial distributions have been
| funding Linux development for decades. Linux as we know
| it today is a child of corporate strategic thinking.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| IBM, DEC, Sun, HP and others already had commercial Unix
| offerings with support that corporate users wanted for
| servers. Why unite behind Linux, which at the time was
| inferior to all those others?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| To attack Windows from the top and bottom simultaneously.
| It may seem excessive but MS was in a _very_ strong
| position at the time. Many of us wondered if anything
| else would survive.
| tokai wrote:
| I'm not against Red Hat but the sentiment that they are
| ruining Linux is not that uncommon.
| strogonoff wrote:
| I believe "you create for free and live poor" vs. "you
| need to monetize your work via ads" is definitely the
| wrong dichotomy.
|
| You can simply create out of inspiration, while having a
| job that pays your bills (that is actually how a lot of
| OSS happened). Or you could publish some work openly,
| while suggesting the reader to buy your book, for
| example.
|
| Over-reliance on ad-based model and the resulting
| prevalence of double-sided "social" platforms where the
| advertiser is the customer, actual user needs count for
| nothing because no one will leave and no honest
| competitor can compete with "free", most certainly seems
| to me to be at the root of a lot of dysfunction--if these
| platforms make more money from engagement thanks to
| aggravating inflammatory posts, regardless of whether
| they are well informed or in good faith, then that's what
| they will promote and reward one way or another.
|
| The expectation of "free" is part of the problem, sure,
| but I don't think that's the cause. The cause can
| probably be distilled to "abuse of information asymmetry
| in free market enabled by regulatory inaction" (free
| market is great, but in presence of malicious actors it
| needs some regulation or it stops working). That leads to
| the aforementioned platforms, then the expectation of
| "free" and non-appreciation of work published completely
| for free just out of altruism or to feel
| pride/recognition, and generally goes counter to how the
| market is supposed to work.
| sohtym wrote:
| Open source is by volunteers if you count it by volume.
| But probably not if you count by impact. Especially not
| if you include all the accompanying things like
| maintenance, packing and running software.
|
| I think what is lacking from open source is reciprocity.
| Traditional copyright is extreme in that it reserve
| almost all rights. Open source is extreme in that is
| reserve almost no rights. The result is the same, the
| middle men gets all the power.
|
| It isn't going to happen though. Because what is going to
| happen already is and it isn't that.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's primarily a cultural difference.
|
| In print media ads were fairly tame. They weren't
| personally targeted and in some contexts they were quite
| welcome.
|
| Although print magazines made most of their money by
| selling ad pages, the content was largely firewalled.
| (Byte is a good example. The content was always hacker
| culture not ad culture.)
|
| On the internet, ad _culture_ - not just ads themselves -
| has consumed everything. Whether it 's a YouTube channel
| owner reminding everyone to like-and-subscribe, or some
| TikTok nonsense desperately trying to go viral, it's
| mostly about reach - defined entirely by potential ad
| spend - and not about the content, which is almost
| incidental to monetisation.
|
| And that's why it's so noisy, and often trivial.
|
| In fact I suspect there's a general Gresham's Law
| principle of cultural systems. As access and delivery
| become cheaper, content becomes noisier, more trivial,
| and less culturally valuable. As we go from manual
| content generation to automated AI content reach will
| increase, but cultural value - in the sense of
| challenging, original ideas and experiences that have
| lasting widespread relevance - will decrease even
| further.
| waboremo wrote:
| >And since people need money to live
|
| And now we're getting to the actual root of the problem.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| You don't have to go all the way back in time to the root
| to reach the point where it cost so much less to live,
| that things which were within reach for the ambitious
| individual are now out of the question due to the
| exorbitant cost of living itself today by comparison.
| sohtym wrote:
| Which is exactly why it costs so much to live. That is
| how markets work, by allocating opportunities to those
| with the most money.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| If you make it so people don't need money to live,
| they'll invent a new currency. People are hardwired to
| barter.
| waboremo wrote:
| That's not even remotely true. Nothing about us is
| inherent to bartering.
|
| That's of course relying on the assumption that we would
| get rid of money entirely as the only solution.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Bartering is an offshoot of "fairness". Even dogs, crows
| get upset, if treated unfairly.
|
| There are experiments where giving desired treats,
| unfairly, causes these animals(monkeys too), to exhibit
| outrage. EG, giving some to one animal, and less
| desirable treats to another.
|
| Bartering is an offshoot of "being fair". I "worked" to
| make this thing, but now I need a thing you have. You
| worked for it. Each of us spent time, effort, work, but
| how much, who spent more? We negotiate. We settle.
|
| This is bartering. And at the root of this, is fairness.
|
| And even animals, inherently, know this.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Right. Tax, whether to a government, or to an employer,
| is the beginnings of unfairness. Taxes can be used for
| fairness (enforced savings for everyone for the winter),
| and as a form of barter (military protection), but the
| value gained by singular authorities makes things
| disproportionately unfair.
|
| I guess maybe the taxation is not the problem, it's the
| centralization of the taxed wealth to particular figures
| in the government (nobles) or corporations (shareholders
| and executives).
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| I don't even have a problem with commercialization, it's just
| that the incentives need to be clear. Everyone defaulted to
| ad supported content because it was just the default. It
| takes a lot more time to build up your own revenue base but I
| think this is an important trend going forward. Kagi.com in
| the world of search is one example of a long-overdue approach
| to that market.
| mikae1 wrote:
| _> People made content because they wanted to, and it was
| generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have
| now._
|
| I agree. But the web was smaller then and I'd guess that in
| absolute numbers the amount of personal websites and blogs is
| greater now. They're just drenched in a tsunami of noise and
| search engines won't help you find them.
|
| _> The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake._
|
| And inevitable as capitalism has a tendency to commodify
| almost everything, sooner or later.
| Touche wrote:
| I'm not sure that's really true. I remember looking at
| pages of search results on Star Wars websites. All built
| from scratch, none of them had ads. All of them much better
| than for ex. Wookieepedia despite having less content. I
| think you would have a hard time finding more than a
| handful of websites (on any given niche topic) like this
| today.
| auggierose wrote:
| That's the same as saying that commercialisation of life was
| a mistake. I am not disagreeing, but let's just call it for
| what it is.
| layer8 wrote:
| > People made content because they wanted to, and it was
| generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have
| now.
|
| People can still do that, and many still do. Possibly more do
| now than back then, in absolute numbers. The problem is
| search and discoverability, because of all the other, ad-
| driven content, and ad-driven search. More people would
| choose to not publish on ad-driven platforms if the
| alternatives (e.g. personal websites) would get them the same
| or better reach.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Also to add, when people made their own content, maybe a
| few 100,000 saw it. For the most part the ISP bill was
| something they could pay.
|
| But if I made a video and suddenly a billion people view it
| I could be bankrupted.
| layer8 wrote:
| Usually your throughput just gets throttled once you've
| reached your bandwidth limit.
| antiterra wrote:
| Back then people also got hit with ludicrous internet bills
| the moment their site had large scale use and banner ads were
| the only real path to managing that cost. Adding a paywall
| would have created a severe amount of bad will.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| These days though, that could be solved with things
| resembling bittorrent for websites etcetera though.
|
| I think some fairly complete solutions already exist in the
| video space, like peertube.
| convolvatron wrote:
| the problem isn't that moving bits is too expensive.
|
| its that moving bits is _almost_ free.
|
| you would think the best model would be each of us ponying
| up a couple dollars a month to support the whole thing
|
| but in the US at least we don't trust anything unless its
| delivered to us by a long chain of scammers 'innovating'.
| sethammons wrote:
| Lots of sites just turned off after a given amount of load
| and you would have to try again later, usually the
| following day. I think that is an appropriate trade off. It
| is one reason why mirror sites popped up.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" The reason why everything is ruined by advertising is
| because nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end
| user on the internet. The money has to come from somewhere, so
| advertising it is."_
|
| The internet was doing just fine before corporations and
| advertisers swarmed on to it in the first great internet gold
| rush.
| jefftk wrote:
| Are you saying it was great up until ~1995? The web has had a
| large commercial component for over two decades, and it was
| very small before then.
| kps wrote:
| Today is Sunday, the 10785th of September, 1993.
| Linosaurus wrote:
| 'Eternal September' possibly started as far back as 1993,
| so this particular nostalgia isn't unique.
| luckylion wrote:
| Yeah, but it was also very much a thing for academics to play
| around with. Commercialization democratized the internet and
| let normal people access it. That usually makes it more
| crowded and degrades peak quality.
|
| And, to be honest, I much prefer today's internet and
| technology with all the flaws to what was there in the 90ies.
| Commercialization and turning it into a mass market is what
| drove innovation.
| zaphar wrote:
| If you define "doing fine" as only available to a limited few
| and barely sratching the surface of what was possible with
| the technology then sure. But to scale it to a broader
| audience and to empower more business models than just
| hobbyist site and university faculty pages you needed a way
| to fund it.
|
| I was there before the gold rush. If you had a page on the
| internet and it got at all popular half the people who
| visited would see either a notice from the hosting company
| that the page was no longer available because some limit had
| been reached or you would get some outrageous bill from your
| ISP. Only a limited few people could afford to visit the
| internet let alone publish on it. It had a certain
| exclusivity that came with certain benefits. But I'm not sure
| that staying exclusive was either a good idea or useful to
| society at large.
|
| Advertising in the early days helped the internet provide
| real value to more people than ever before. Like many good
| things though taken to extremes it has particular failure
| modes that we are seeing now. That doesn't mean introducing
| advertising was the problem necessarily. It does mean that
| controlling the failure modes of advertising is probably
| necessary for a well functioning society.
| rapind wrote:
| > Why does everybody want everything to be free? That's a more
| interesting question.
|
| Huh? How is this an interesting question? I would love it if my
| food, housing, transportation were free... because then i have
| more money for non-free things. This is like 2 + 2 = 4 level of
| obvious.
|
| If advertisers found a way to make food free, or cars free, or
| housing free, etc, then some sizeable portion of society would
| benefit from it in the short term while society as a whole gets
| shittier.
|
| The problem is figuring out the actual cost of advertising to
| society, and finding a way to communicate that cost to the
| public in a way that isn't really abstract and sleep inducing.
| paxys wrote:
| There's a difference between wanting something to be free and
| _expecting_ it to be free.
|
| We'd all like a free coffee, but people glay pay $5 at
| Starbucks every morning because they know things cost money.
| Ask these same people for $5 to install an app on their phone
| - that was built over years by a team of hundreds - and they
| will flip out. People who used to buy a single $5 newspaper
| or magazine from the newsstand will not pay $5 for a monthly
| subscription to the same paper.
|
| There's a fundamental disconnect in how people value digital
| assets, and that is why the internet is the way it is.
| rapind wrote:
| If you gave them free coffee for a few years though and
| then started charging $5 then it's a lot harder to argue
| that it costs money to make coffee. How the hell were you
| able to give it away for free for the last few years if it
| costs money to produce?!
|
| Advertising enabled this model. It makes people value your
| work less because it is perceived to be free, even though
| in reality you might be raking in way more money due to the
| wider reach (no cost friction).
|
| Advertising is literally the root problem here. The
| expectation of free didn't come from somewhere else. Also,
| not all digital assets are expected to be free. Only those
| that advertising got it's claws into.
| mfer wrote:
| > he believes the current state of advertising is less
| profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking
| was in place
|
| When he talks about advertisers stealing the Internet he's
| talking about how they operate now.
|
| Interestingly, it's become the middle men who have become
| really rich while the content creators only see a fraction of
| the money.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the
| early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment
| systems and such?
|
| We still haven't worked out per-view micropayments. Instead,
| the only viable models are begging people to sign up for a
| subscription.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Why does everybody want everything to be free?_
|
| To fully understand the question, we need to understand the
| alternative.
|
| The only viable, practical alternative to a free, ad-supported
| internet is basically a monthly subscription one, where your
| ISP charges an extra $20/mo. (or allows metered usage) and the
| money gets distributed through some proportion of the pages you
| visit and the minutes of videos you watch. Basically the same
| way you pay Spotify $10/mo. and the money gets distributed to
| the artists you listen to, more or less.
|
| But this would have required the government to step in and set
| this all up in a mandatory way which would have been totally
| against the original decentralized ethos of the internet. It
| requires massive tracking and so forth, and a centralized
| authority to manage all of the billing and payments.
|
| And basically very few people want that. Hackers and
| libertarians are against the centralization and tracking, left-
| wingers are against the poor having to pay more for internet
| because it's almost like a regressive tax, consumers in general
| don't want to pay more for internet, and so forth.
|
| Whereas nobody _likes_ advertising, but they 'll put up with it
| or just block it if they can.
|
| (And the other funding alternative -- micropayments -- is dead
| in the water because everybody hates them. Nobody wants to be
| constantly deciding whether it's worth $0.02 or $0.07 or $0.12
| or $0.87 to read this one news article on this one site when it
| might turn out to be a crappy, useless article anyways.)
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Free -> open -> editable
|
| Paid -> closed -> broken and outdated
|
| Funded -> quality?
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| This would be true IF websites ran just enough ads to keep the
| lights on.
|
| But no you can make PROFIT with ads. Which gave us BuzzFeed.
| gexla wrote:
| Nah, I miss the hobby web. The money doesn't have to come from
| somewhere. I don't have to pay to see friends. I don't have to
| pay to walk downtown. There's a lot that I can do without
| having to pay people. Most of the SEO content I see is
| something I would rather not come across, let alone pay for. I
| would rather hang out with real friends than to hang out with
| SEO friends. It's just that the SEO crowd has the money to
| shove everyone else out. Maybe the issue is that we need to get
| back to the old school ways of finding interesting things.
| There was no Google back then.
| scarface74 wrote:
| And the article also says he complains about paywalls. I don't
| have a problem with paywalls. I like the plain simple model of
| "I pay you money and you give me goods and services".
| hgsgm wrote:
| The main problem with paywalls is when you don't know what
| you are getting and the teasers are deceptive.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Which sites are deceptive?
| bee_rider wrote:
| A lot of stuff, even stuff that is sold as "journalism" is just
| re-packaged opinions. The writing that has flourished on the
| internet is stuff they can be produced cheaply (for example
| without going anywhere to do journalism). Or it is stuff that
| nobody would pay for, but if you stick it up with some ads,
| it'll absorb some eyeballs. Or it is something that essentially
| benefits the author; pushing a particular opinion, trying to
| build a brand. All of this stuff serves to convince the user
| that paying for internet content would be foolish.
|
| It might be possible to build an internet that is worth paying
| for, but it will be a massive bootstrapping project.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Agreed, and I'd go further.. this is inherent to modern
| societies. Business invades every space possible, they need
| ads, enough people like it, it provides jobs (shitty ones
| probably) .. it makes some part of the economy runs, and
| maintains itself.
|
| Free internet would require people with enough self sufficiency
| to keep doing deep and joyful activities and share it. It's
| rarely the case, any activity soon requires more investment,
| more hands.. and then you need money inflow, you'll get it one
| way or another. Patreons and the likes are too brittle for many
| (unless you're really recognized as a worthy person, in which
| case lots of money going your way. But as some recent events,
| like the javascript polyfill guy, even that is not guaranteed)
| pessimizer wrote:
| > nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user
| on the internet.
|
| The concept of paying for content that isn't trade-
| related/educational is mostly bizarre. I hate a large amount of
| the content I consume on the internet, and wish I could somehow
| take money away from the people who published it. You can
| understand people paying for entertainment, but only because
| modern entertainment is aimed at that sort of consumption. It's
| largely completely empty; having nothing to say about anything
| other than sort of expansions of cliched aphorisms, and/or
| childish and simplistic anti-crime, pro-patriotic, anti-cruelty
| messages."Real" art has an agenda. Art built for mass
| consumption carefully avoids any dangerous agenda because it
| doesn't to alienate any potential audience unless absolutely
| necessary.
|
| While I have to admit that I pay for investigations because I'm
| curious about their outcome (which is why I'd pay an
| investigative journalist or a detective), other than that I
| support for the media that I want _other people_ to read.
|
| The baseline assumption is strange, where I pay people to
| communicate something to me that they presumably find important
| to communicate. I'd rather pay people to shut up. Content
| blocking is literally about shutting people up.
| verisimi wrote:
| Blaming advertising for the reason the Internet is like it is,
| is one possibility.
|
| But what if advertising is actually the least bad face of
| governmental control? This is to argue that the poor model is
| by design, as it allows for control and data gathering, that is
| actually as useful to the governance structure as it is to
| advertisers.
|
| If you think that we already live in a fascist governance
| system (where fascism is government and corporations working
| together) why not choose the more covert path to gather the
| essential information that the control structure requires for
| technocracy? Ie why not use corporations to collect the data
| (as they are perceived to be competitive), rather than the
| government (which would be accused of being 'Big Brother')?
|
| Similar to how verified twitter accounts = government
| passports.
| traverseda wrote:
| >The money has to come from somewhere, so advertising it is.
|
| Does it though? If you completely removed profit incentive from
| some subset of the internet would we really be worse off? Sure,
| the content would be less professional, less glossy, and there
| would be less of it, but the content that remained would
| probably be pretty good and it wouldn't have to compete with
| mega-corporations with huge advertising budgets.
| hgsgm wrote:
| People like glossy.
| mg wrote:
| Hacker News is kind of ad based. Via the "Company X (YC YYYY) is
| hiring" posts.
|
| How does the community feel about this?
|
| Could this type of "native advertising" be a model for other
| websites too?
|
| On the one hand, it so much less annoying than a colorful,
| animated javascript banner loaded from a 3rd party server. On the
| other hand, I have the feeling these little lines of text get
| noticed more due to not being filtered by "banner blindness".
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I am ok with these ads. They don't track you and they make
| sense in this context. I also don't mind kiteboarding ads on a
| kiteboarding site. They are actually useful there. What I don't
| like is ads that make no sense in the context of the site and
| are powered by massive data collection.
| dewey wrote:
| That would mean that these posts are funding the site, which
| they are not as the site is a marketing tool of a big VC fund.
|
| Similar to companies offering free tools on their website to
| funnel people into their paid services.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-12 23:02 UTC)