A lot of garbage like Facebook would fall and real social networks would take place with real interactions not algorithms trying to drive fake engagement.
It would, but it would be much harder to find content, because the major search engines pretty much only show corporate content marketing pieces that are written specifically to rank well in search results.
The other day, I was looking for some essays or blog posts about a particular TV show. The first 5 pages on Google were all variations of "10 things you didn't know", "this moment made our jaws drop", "How working in an office is like [completely dissimilar situation in the show]".
The only way I was able to actually find a human-written post (completely different style from a conversion-focused copy writer's post) was when I was searching for a screencap from the show on Google images. It's easy to distinguish user-captured images from corporate, licensed images, so clicking on the source link showed me a beautifully written, hilariously annotated season review on a cheap blogspot domain. That reminded me of the early Internet, when the writing felt much more personal and relatable.
There are also plenty of corporate sites offering some SaaS product that will put out semi-technical blog posts that rank high but don't give you the full picture and end with a CTA like "Want to learn more? Sign up for our webinar".
The goal is for you to arrive on their blog page, and "convert" into a customer, or fill out a contact form. The content is a means to an end, which hurts content quality.
Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia.
I mean, I think you mean "before online advertising", but that's not true either! Online advertising predates the web and even the Internet by decades; We had ads in the BBS days, and people didn't hate it. So what's going on?
China does a lot of "social" advertising and doesn't have the problems with ad fraud that the western world does: The trick is that "publishers" are responsible for what they serve. That's it.
> People still desire instant communication and they would pay for it if a free option did not exist.
People do pay for it. That's why we have slack and Cisco, and they aren't alone! The paid ones predate the "free" ones by decades too, but even the "paid" chat systems needed advertising to get those sales– we have throughout history always relied heavily on some form of sponsorship to bring products to market, so there will always be a channel for advertising.
Not really, unless you stretch the definition so much that it does not make sense anymore. The problem here is the advertising industry, not the small sign on a local business, when you stretch definitions, of course the reasoning does not work anymore.
The discussion of the origin of advertising is a different issue. But I'd say that "advertising" as normally understood didn't really exist before mass-produced newspapers at the very least, so that's less than four centuries and nowhere near millennia.
We got Netscape Navigator, Yahoo! and the famous AT&T banner ad all in the same year. Even still, we had irc, email and newsgroup spam in the preceding decades (even if you can still call that "the Internet"). I would see advertising prior to this on commercial online platforms (like AOL and compuserve) -- but I can accept that this might not have been considered "the Internet".
I was thinking maybe you define the few years between "the WWW" was invented (1991, if you believe some accounts) to when it became popular (1993, maybe) as some kind of "golden era" of Internet when there weren't any banner ads, despite the fact early websites were directly advertising for eachother (a kind of "sign on the local business" perhaps?). This interpretation seems unkind though.
So I'm left thinking you and these couple other people are just wrong.
I simply can't imagine the Internet before advertising, and I doubt most people could. I have been online since the 1980s and I have in that entire time seen ads, so if you actually meant something by this statement, I'll need some help unpacking it.
I'm sad a lot of the top tier newspapers in America are starting to enforce their paywalls now because we are back to the state where only richer people can afford high quality news.