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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps governments could make ad driven revenue illegal, force the internet to drop that particular business model.

Get rid of false free.

A half-way house which could be interesting to explore would be to make advertising “static” again, i.e. all visitors to a given page see the same ads, or at least one of the same ad-rotation with the same probability distribution. The intrusiveness and complexity mostly seem to come from targeting ads against visitors rather than page content.

There are still a few sites which run simple static “someone paid us and we edited in a link using notepad” style ads. Frankly, they’re higher quality and more likely to be relevant than anything that comes through the big ad-targeting networks.

(I’d vaguely hoped GDPR might have this effect. In fact, it just seems to mean business as usual with a slightly increased floor on the amount of process and bureaucracy...)

And eliminate access to ad-supported services that many - especially the poor - would no longer have access to. No ads is just as dumb as all ads.

Any examples?

BTW, back in the 90s there were a ton of free sites, no ads. Mainly hobbyist sites etc. No reason that still can't happen.

These sites are still there. In fact, many more of them, since the cost of hosting has dropped to near zero, especially for static content.

The new development is huge sites providing expensive content and services for free, and using ads and tracking to pay for it.

It's part of the natural move towards a centralized web. You want a website you can trust that delivers good content, as do other people, increasing the load on the host beyond minimal finance resulting in ads. That said a lot of sites aren't that trustworthy and don't deliver good content but are riddled with ads to try and make money

Besides the entire news industry? YouTube? Most informational sites besides Wikipedia? How about Google Search? Believe it or not, it costs money to run a business and not everything makes sense as a subscription model or pay-as-you-go.

I'm building this whole platform with tens of thousands of lines of code, which (in my opinion) is pretty unique, I use it every day with a couple of people that visit, but it's designed to handle much more. I'm not getting anything in terms of money out of it, if anything I'm losing money by hosting and stuff. I'll leave the link here: https://github.com/madprops/Hue . Also there's other successful open source solutions that are having a big impact right now, like Mastodon, it's a very active Twitter alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)

This is offtopic but I just have a small suggestion for Hue - When I checked it out, it required me to login/register right away. It would be nice if you could provide a demo version where one can check out the service without having to register first.

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