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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

And how do you suggest a service such as Maps or Youtube stay free? Do you realize the amount of money that goes into maintaining those services? Would you be okay to returning to using paper maps? Or do you propose the rich get richer by having better tools and the poor are stuck with primitive tools?

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How has openstreetmap.org remained free, if it's impossible to do without ads? Or torrents? Or GitHub? Or webarchive? Or any of the millions of other dual-licensed services or volunteer run services?

It will still get done, even without ads. The internet has, oddly enough, been the one to prove that to be the rule, not the exception.

>And how do you suggest a service such as Maps or Youtube stay free?

Maps isn't fully free; they charge exorbitantly for the API. The freemium model works for e.g. Dropbox and Vimeo without needing to show ads.

Here Maps is free to end users (there is a cell phone app with traffic, and offline support).

It has (had?) 80% market share in car navigation systems, and makes money by charging car manufacturers for its product:

https://venturebeat.com/2015/08/03/why-3-car-giants-just-bou...

Apple maps is similar: you pay for the phone, and map updates are free. Android could be the same (if google charged for the OS).

I haven't tried it yet, but Peertube looks like an interesting alternative to Youtube. Mastadon and Matrix are similar exciting projects too. I host a Matrix instance that I and my extended family use to keep in touch, and we can seamlessly interoperate with anyone on any other Matrix instance. A few kinks to work out still (I wish the server software was way less bloated) but overall I think it's a really promising approach.

My instance is completely ad-free, I might add.

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