this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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We have made mistakes.
We wanted it all to be free. It was free. I remember the early days of the internet, the webforums, the IRC, it was mostly sites run by enthusiasts. A few companies showing their products to would-be customers. It was awesome and it was all free.
And then it got popular, it got mainstream. Running servers got expensive and the webmasters were looking for funding. And we resisted paywalls. The internet is free, that's how it's supposed to work!
They turned to advertising. That's fair, a few banners, no big deal, we can live with that. It worked for television! And for a while that was OK.
Where did it all go sideways? Well, it was much too much effort to negotiate advertisement deals between websites and advertisers one website at a time, so the advertisement networks were born. Sign up for funding, embed a small script and you're done. Advertisers can book ad space with the network and their banner appears on thousands of websites. Then they figured out they can monitor individual user's interests, and show them more "relevant" ads, and make more money for more effective ad campaigns.
And now we have no privacy online. Which caused regulators like the EU to step in and try to limit user data harvesting. With mixed results as we all know. For one it doesn't seem to get enforced enough so a lot of companies just get away with. But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.
And now we're swamped with ads, and sponsored content written by AI, because capitalism's gonna capitalism and squeeze as much profit as they can, until an equilibrium is reached between maximum revenue and user tolerance for BS. Look up "enshittification"
I wonder how the web would look like if we had not resisted paid content back then. There were attempts to do things differently. flattr was one thing for a while. Patreon, ko-fi and others are awesome for small creators. Gives them independence and freedom to do their thing and not depend on big platforms or corporations. The fediverse and open source are awesome.
There's still a lot of great stuff out there for those of us who know where to look. But large parts of the internet are atrocious.
honestly heartbreaking in a lot of ways to see the current turn of events and how the web is today.
but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would've been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could've worked? but its really hard to say.
i don't even have a problem with ads on sites to an extent, as long as they aren't overly obnoxious and don't spy on you and track your every move. that shouldn't be too much to ask, right? but alas, i guess it is in 2023. 🤷♀️
just such a sad state of things. the web is currently unusable without a content blocker or protection of some kind, which is insane to think about. this all really only scratches the surface too of the modern web's issues. in general a lot of the individuality and freedom of the internet is just... gone. all completely corporate and shall now, so much seo spam and clickbait and other garbage, just for the most clicks or revenue possible. there's little quality left for sure.
feels like we lost the internet in a lot of ways. i wonder what the solution is, if there even is one. i guess we just can't give up fighting.
So people don't want advertisements but they also don't want to pay for a bajillion subscriptions. I think the solution is socialization of the Internet. Governments should simply guarantee funding and make up the cost in taxes.
A lot of the VALUE of a news article on the internet is the ability to share it and discuss it with everyone else. Paywalls remove that value, or require all of the people you share it with to already have subscriptions to everything else.
News has been paid for via advertisements for a lot longer than the internet. The subscription fees for Newspapers really only covered the printing and distribution costs, while the reporters' salaries were paid for via advertising.
The problem is that the advertising has gotten TOO intrusive. It isn't just a banner ad anymore. It is a ton of banners speckled between every other paragraph on the page. As soon as advertising gets in the way, people will look to get around it.
I have found that I am overly sensitive to almost all forms of push-advertising (as opposed to pull-advertising where I am looking for marketing materials on something I want to research). I have browser ad blockers as well as DNS based ones on my wifi. I also watch very little broadcast TV. I have no problem waiting for a season of a TV show to be on DVD so I can watch it without breaks, or the annoying banners that pop up while watching.
I don't understand why so many people are making concessions towards advertisements. Yes, some aren't too bad, but at the end of the day all advertising is just brainwashing you to buy more things. If we're going to dream about an alternate universe where the internet was better, we don't need to compromise with our imaginations.
At the end of the day, running a server does cost money, and people's goodwill will only go so far. I don't want to have to pay directly for every service, website, or whatever I see, but don't mind doing it from time to time.
I buy a lot of DVD's, blurays, or 4K UHD movies and tv shows, and then immediately rip them onto my Jellyfin server so that I know I will be able to watch them when I want, how I want. I feel like that does my karma of supporting the creators of those shows.
Advertisements allow me to watch everything else. There are youtube channels I follow, that get sponsored by "NordVPN" or whatever, and even though I don't use Nord, and would probably go out of my way to NOT use them because of all of the sponsorship messages I see, I am glad they give money to the creators I like.
The real problem is when they become too intrusive. I use ad blockers to remove Youtube ads, because I don't want a video to be split up abruptly while watching it. If there was a simple, short, ad before the videos, I would have no problem with them, but they became intrusive, so I block them.