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Comment by kylecordes | Hacker News Reader

I imagine an alternative history where browsers simply never had the feature of cookies and similar tracking mechanisms available to servers or domains other than the primary one in the URL bar. Or even more severely, where all assets and scripts had to be loaded from the same domain. That would have various downsides but would also have created a much less tracking prone web.

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The most likely scenario for that is that the browser would not allow any form of cross-domain linking.

And in that parallel universe, what ends up happening is that the ad companies provide you proxies to run on your server, and tracking is accomplished via the variety of "no-cookie" tracking options that already exist.

It's slightly better, because the bar for tracking would be raised a bit, but since there's money as a motivation for getting over it, mostly it would be passed.

The alternate reality I'm interested in is the one where the net was slightly less idealistic in the beginning and offered fewer free services, and people got used to paying for things rather than expecting them for free. I've banged this drum before, but one of the most shocking things to me is in general just how little money advertising is making per person, and how little money it would take to make it so that advertising wasn't even remotely worth it to anybody on the net if we paid directly for things.

(I worked out earlier this year that at most, Facebook makes $17/year/per user, and that's revenue, not profit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19459604#19462402 That means if you paid them $5/month, or $50 as a bundle for a year, you'd be increasing more than doubling their revenue for you. And who knows what Facebook could be if you were paying for it, and all those engineers were working on making Facebook better for you, instead of working so hard on tracking you and serving ads. You'd be paying $5/month for that Facebook instead of this one.)

I think that most people, if offered $17/year for Facebook, would quit. I don't think the value to the user is that great. That's not a problem for the company as it exists today. It feels like a flawed assumption that users have a committed interest in sites where they share content. People have a passing interest, and different parts on their brain conflict. Their lizard brain might want cat gifs, while the planning part of their brain knows they should stop procrastinating and get to work. The planning part is the one who gets out the credit card. The last thing that Facebook or ANY content-oriented site is to deal with the responsible parent, as opposed to the distracted child. Having the parent make the decisions is better for us. Much of the internet depends on that never happening.

I think doubting the value to the average user is a little uncreative -- a quick search tells me the average internet user in USA is paying $600 / year for internet access (sounds right to me, I pay $50/m for a fiber connection limited to 100mb/s, gigabit is $90/m)

For a lot of people, facebook is basically the internet. It's their messenger, their photo album, their event calendar, and their community church group.

Having the cost somehow bundled with bandwidth would make it seems a lot less significant a fee.

Otherwise I agree, an internet where every community wants $5/m here and $5/m there is basically the multi-streaming-tv hell that people complain about.

Facebook and Google are the monsters on the scene. Most sites make even less money. So the problem you get into isn't even the $5/month-too-many-places problem, it's the microtransaction problem, where broadly speaking the fixed costs of the transaction, both monetary and cognitive effort, exceed the value of the transaction. We haven't fixed that even in 2019, where transaction have gotten a lot cheaper than they were in 1995-ish. Hence, "alternate universe". I won't quite say it's an impossible alternate, but it sure isn't a likely one. Even if I could travel back in time with the power to mandate it in 1995, by 2000 someone would have had the bright idea of being advertising-based and it would have a very good chance of strangling the for-pay industry.

Probably more interesting is the question of what's stable in 2030. There are steps governments could theoretically take to really turn the tide of things. One of my favorites is a 1-cent-per-impression advertising tax. I am well aware of how expensive that it relative to a normal ad impression today; it's part of the point. Let the really lucrative stuff like luxury goods and mesothelioma ads continue, but kill the massive surveillance industry sprung up to wring literally .001 cents per impression more out of you at the cost of creating 80% of a ready-made police state. I think the costs the advertising industry are externalizing on to us are hard to overstate; I would quite literally and with full knowledge of what I am saying put them as on par with environmental externalities.

This is an enlightening comment.

I have always been intrigued by the idea of micro transactions. In a modern formulation, duplicate Reddit, but replace upvotes with 0.001 cents donations (to who? I don't care). If you hold shift and click the up arrow, it'll do 0.01. Hold control shift and click for 0.1 cents. Then have larger options you can drill into. People would throw around a lot of mili-cents. But at some point, "whales" would be sure to emerge as well.

I have no idea why this isn't happening, thus I must assume there are legal and financial barriers to implementing it.

The value prop likely varies greatly -- if you're making a living off being a "Facebook Influencer", or are running brand awareness through social, you'll be willing to pay a lot, possibly thousands, even millions, of dollars.

For the long tail at the bottom, a few bucks is too much.

And if you're just socialising with a small group, ultimately, the next available free-tier service, or Frank or Francine spinning up a Friendica node or Mailman instance is a viable alternative (or if not that than something else).

Keep in mind that FB started as a small exclusive network (a few hundreds of Harvard undergrads), and grew largely through cache and aspirational appeal. (danah boyd has developed this idea at length.) Now, it has at best neutral appeal other than it's where everybody is, which, if they go somewhere else, it instantly loses. And sticking everyone with a high fee will do that.

Also, the costs of revenue -- of simply billing for and collecting on services -- will almost certainly exceed all other costs of service, as will new-user recruitment. Which is why "free" keeps on winning (until it doesn't).

I know it doesn't help "the 99%", but you can set up your browser to block cookies by default and always block third party cookies.

What I've found is that a small subset of sites don't work without third party cookies (PlayStation store login being the only one I care about) and that a lot of sites don't expect localStorage access to ever fail (eg Codepen, I've had to fix some of my own sites that assumed localStorage access never throws).

The oddest issue I've come across was that LiveJournal would use JavaScript to immediately reload the site if a cookie wasn't detected so I had to disable JavaScript for all of LiveJournal to stop it from getting stuck in a reload loop.

Opera Browser (Presto engine) used to default to "Block third-party cookies", rather than "Accept all cookies". If I remember correctly, this subtly broken enough sites that they relented and changed the default.

I think that would be a good option. Allow first-party cookies for session tracking (logins, etc) but block third-party cookies.

Another way is to not use cookies at all and rely on local storage to store an authorization token. In fact, a site that I work on does this. We don't store your session in a cookie at all. Your token gets passed to API calls which return data for your user.

I wish there were a way to enforce this client side.

uBlock Origin and uBlock Matrix can both enforce it. But you won't be able to read the news or check the weather.

That's why you use AdNauseum instead. I read news, check the weather, and generally live my life. Combine it with ExplodingCookies and life is better than it was.

In my understanding, it's trivially easy to identify and filter out those fake clicks.

Also I don't want to screw with advertisers' perception of who I am. If anything, I really like how ads are actually relevant to me -- it's a lot better than the days of penis pill banners. I just want them to stop following me around so closely and putting my "anonymized" data at risk of exfiltration by hackers or governments.

I block all Javascript, cookies and third party sites by default. I still get news and weather. Even nytimes.com works.

uMatrix on firefox might be a good start

Pretty sure the Brave Browser can do this if you change a couple of settings :)

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