If we could kill advertisement permanently, we can have an internet as described in the question. This will almost be like an emergent feature of the internet.
- ranking content that users you have upvoted higher
- ranking content that users with similar upvote behaviour higher
While there is a risk of upvote bubbles, it should potentially make it easier for niche content to spread to interested people and make it possible for products and services to spread using peer trust rather than cold shouting.
That's how you make echochambers
I was also wondering what would be good options to store votes/upvotes in a decentralized way.
Yeah, I wonder if there is a cheap way to test this. Actually! There could be! Like using favorite's here on hacker news. That could be mined and visualized in various ways. (Although a quick sample shows me that it's a rarely used feature)
> I was also wondering what would be good options to store votes/upvotes in a decentralized way.
Yeah there are a lot of interesting optimization challenges if you really want to utilize upvote graphs for ranking.
This is what Reddit originally tried to do before they pivoted.
https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/11fiab/are_memes_maki...
Makes me think that their original plan could still work if they just put a bit more effort into crafting that algorithm.
For example, the main criticism brought up is that things that you dislike that your peers like keep getting recommended. Why not add a de-ranking aspect into it and try adding downvote-peers in addition to upvote peers.
I imagine you could create this interesting query language that could answer questions like: what things do you like if you like X and Y but not Z? (I kind of remember that something akin to this have been hacked together using subreddit overlap.)
I sure hope my content of preference beats out yours for not getting killed.
Can you propose any viable alternative?
So from a user's perspective it didn't fully work. Also the ad space wasn't fully removed (perhaps due to technical reasons) but was replaced with a blank image. It also didn't catch on much.
So they tried to pivot and now the program works with certain cooperating websites to fully get rid of all ads but I'm sure bigger websites would rather be in total control of monetizing themselves and can spend on the necessary IT infra. similar to most online newspapers these days.
I think an advertiser (eg. a legal firm) might be willing to pay eg. $10 per ad impression but no user is willing to outbid it so I think the first model (outbid in the auction) is more sustainable and profitable for both parties but needs to have all ad exchanges on board.
So in short, it's been tried but wasn't an instant (or even a slow) success and idk whether Google will continue investing in it or not.
But I think the combination of advertising+search engines is particularly bad, so paying for search would be a great first step.
https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7...
For the remaining free sites you will see advertising in different forms (self promotion blog, the upsell, t-shirt stores on everysite, spam-bait).
Advertising saved the internet.
Now tracking.. for advertising or other purposes is the real problem.
By and large, people don't seem to be willing to pay for content on the web. Hence, advertising became the dominant business model for content on the web.
Find another way for someone to pay for relevant content and you can do away with advertising. It's as simple as that.
Not so simple. What is relevant for me may be irrelevant for you.
I don't think the causality is right here. People might not be willing to pay for content on the web because advertising enables competitors to offer content for free. If you removed that option, if people had no choice but to pay, it might just turn out that people would pay.
Isn't this what different newspapers like NYT and WSJ are moving towards? Why can't both models coexist?
Slave labour, selling poison or dumping waste into rivers are all superior business models too, but that doesn't mean they should exist in a civilized society.
Just because it totally destroys another business model doesn't mean it is wrong. Felony interference with a business model protectionism isn't good for societies. Historically this stagnant "stability" gets them lapped and forced into the modern world if lucky or conquered if not no matter how vigorously they insist that it is the only and right way.
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[0] - as seen today; not the imaginary "informing customers about what's on the market" form, but the real "everyone stuck in a shouting contest of trying to better manipulate customers" form.
There absolutely are paid options on the web. It's just that they don't seem to appeal to a sufficient number of buyers so advertising could become irrelevant.
Yes.
> There absolutely are paid options on the web. It's just that they don't seem to appeal to a sufficient number of buyers so advertising could become irrelevant.
They aren't appealing in the presence of ad-subsidized free alternatives. Remove the latter, and they just might become appealing again.
For example, using browsers that impose a Content Security Policy that prevents anything from being loaded from domains other than the origin.
You can block third party advertising structurally using uBlock without ruining the internet for everyone else.
I think a combination of consumer protection laws, truth in advertising laws and data protection laws, all turned up to 11 (even GDPR), could achieve most of the desired outcome on the Internet without much problematic "content-policing". But I'm not sure. You won't eliminate advertising from the Internet entirely, but making it illegal would make undesirable advertising more expensive, by creating vast amount of risk for advertisers and simultaneously destroying the adtech industry, thus rendering most of the abusive practices that much less efficient.
(Also, to be clear, I want all advertising gone. Not just on-line, the meatspace one too.)
There's a saying in sales: "people hate to be sold, but they love to buy"... which is akin to what you are saying here. Advertising isn't the problem... the problem is that the reasons why people are promoting aren't novel enough... (rent seeking... which creates noise)
Until then, you're going to have demand for ferrying information between sellers and buyers, and vice versa, because of information asymmetry. You may disagree with some of the mediums currently used, finding them annoying, but advertising is always evolving to solve this problem, as is evident in the last three decades.