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Comment by viro | Hacker News Reader

Then who pays for 99% of the websites on the internet? hosting isn't free.

Web sites used to exist before advertising was pervasive and will continue to exist after. By removing all the ad funded businesses squatting in the space, we make room for alternatives. Just think - forums run by enthusiasts rather than people who think they can make money off of enthusiasts. Web sites designed to maximize knowledge transfer, rather than maximize rage and web traffic. It can certainly be free or nearly so to host a web site that doesn't need to maximize engagement. They won't be as slick, but they don't need to be because they are not trying to sell you anything. Or... who knows, lets see what people come up with! Its sure to be better than the status quo, which many of us are opting out of with ad-blockers and privacy plugins and simply going to alternative sources.

" Then who pays for 99% of the websites on the internet? hosting isn't free."

Those who can afford it could pay their own hosting fees, and donations, governments, and philanthropic foundations could subsidize the cost of hosting for those who can't.

Most businesses could of course pay for their own hosting, and even now don't operate on "free" (ad-supported) hosting services.

So, yeah, I'm not really worried about the survival of the internet if unsolicited ads were banned. There's already a glut of content being created every day, and that's unlikely to be significantly reduced.

I think you underestimate how much of the useful Internet is supported by ads, including affiliate links and the like.

The Internet isn't entirely run by volunteers with a hosting budget. Not by a long stretch.

Why do those ads need to be so aggressively targeted? I don’t mind ads related to the primary topic of the website for example. I might actually find those useful! What I have a problem with is the invasion of privacy created by highly personalized, persistent profiling of my life for the purpose of selling things to me.

You moved the goalpost

I’m not GP.

Honestly, I'd be fine with 99% of the internet going away.

My personal website is hosted by:

Microsoft who lets people use the github cdn for free if they're not obnoxious about it.

and my mail server on linode which I'm paying for anyway.

Web hosting is just not that expensive unless your doing stuff like video streaming.

Is it like a custom setup on a linode vps? Or does linode offer some kind of managed solution? I’ve always wanted to run my own email setup but then, just seems like too much hassle. How is it going for you?

I've run my own email since I was ~18 (I'm 27 now.) Currently I use OpenSMTP with a custom patch for the address parser. My only real issue is that I'm never able to send mail to hotmail (no one seems able to do that so often the users understand.) Otherwise once you have dkim and whatnot set up and you keep things updated it's not a big deal.

I think I saw some stats showing that beyond the top 1 percent of websites, the usage goes way way down meaning they wouldn’t cost much to maintain. As for the 1 percent, there would probably be various solutions depending on the situation and more ethical ways to advertise.

I’d pay for a non-tracking YouTube, email, news, and a small fee to access my banking online.

Back to mechanics like AdWords where it’s based on the content you’re consuming.

We are already paying for websites right now. We pay for ads when we buy products and services.

Also we pay ISPs who pay carriers who pay for peering with popular networks.

We'd be better off without the ad-supported web sites. Twitter, facebook, pinterest, ad-supported web sites centralized something that was arguably better when decentralized. Every web site should be artisanal, a labor of love, like a lot of the better blogs, or subscription based. Content wouldn't be homogenized for mass consumption.

you don't seem to understand... This would have the exact opposite result.. I would pay for a Twitter and YouTube sub and every other website could fuck all the way off. I'm not paying separately for 40 other random sites.

I believe the claim is this wouldn't happen. You wouldn't need to separately pay for 40 sites if they were content to have a few thousand users each like the old days. Hosting that really is close enough to free that people would still do it. Keep communities small. You don't need to network with 3 billion people.

> Keep communities small. You don't need to network with 3 billion people.

With federated platforms like Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, you technically can network with 3 billion people, despite the lack of the central server.

Of course, and that's another option, too. Make truly distributed applications that don't rely upon servers you own serving everyone, and you pay no hosting costs at all.

Good! Consumer choice in action, Invisible Hand of the Marketplace would help weed out the weak or harmful businesses. Ad supported web sites can be really harmful. Direct, monetary feedback would allow us to have more say in things.

it would also kick poor people off the internet

The very opposite: 99% of Internet use is to consume/download content rather than produce/upload.

Ads and heavy websites are slow and expensive to browse for half of human population due to poor connectivity.

By that logic the status quo says poor people can only participate on the internet if they subject themselves to ever-increasing digital surveillance under the guise of "advertising"

Thats a rather fancy way to say. poor people can't afford to pay a sub for every ad supported site they use.

Repeating this point ad nauseam does not make it true.

you know what makes it true? common sense. You're detached from reality if you don't think this will now have a massive negative effects on poor people.

What are some of those negative effects.

the inability to gain access to anywhere near the same level of content they did before. Is a quick and simple one.

What type of content? I can't imagine anything necessary would sit behind a paywall given this scenario.

Spotify and YouTube

>Spotify and YouTube

That's entertainment or otherwise nonessential, no?

Most of the internet is technically non nonessential.

I don't think it would, anymore than poor people are already kicked off the internet by the cost of devices and an ISP.

Some of the best parts of the internet are already free despite the option to monetize them with ads (e.g. wikipedia), if ads weren't an option, I think you would see many more spaces like that popping up.

It's cheap enough to run a server that people frequently do so without expecting compensation. Not everything needs to be paid.

The sites that actually have something good to say will never block out poor people by virtue of their owners being smart enough to factor this into their costs.

If we would all be better of if facebook etc didn't exist, doesn't it stand to reason that poor people would also be better of?

Open street map and wikipedia runs of of donations/free labor so I don't think poor people would be kicked of those. Google would presumably come with your internet subscription, so that would be factored in for most libraries where the poor would access the internet.

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