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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

> beyond what your ISP charged

This is misleading. Very little on the internet is actually free. Right now (and back then) there is tons of content that is either paywalled or supported by advertising.

I think by-in-large most people consume less "usage" than what they pay for with subscriptions, etc., and generate much more revenue via advertising for the sites they visit than the cost of the bandwidth they are consuming. Imagine if instead of being bombarded with ads or subscription CTAs, you are simply charged $0.00001 for your visit to [insert cool blog here], or $0.0001 per second of video you watch on [awesome youtube equivalent here]. That is the dream.

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>That is the dream.

It is? That sounds horrible to me. I don't want to have to constantly think about the ticking price meter every time I open a video. It also screws over anyone without means, or the developing world. The paid-for-by-advertising model lowers the barrier to entry and allows anyone, even those without change to spare, to participate.

I dislike ads, especially in their current state, but I dislike the "dream" you're describing even more.

I'll simply refuse to use such sites then. Just like I often turn off javascript because NYT or Wapo demand I login to see an article. No and no. If your site is online without authentication restrictions by default then whatever content you host outside of that authentication process is free in my opinion and you have no right to soft block me and others into giving you something for it.

In this kind of web, it would also be quite possible for a single developer to run a site as big as Youtube without needing tons of up-front cost. Bandwidth is free from the perspective of the site developer, and doing some small finite amount of video conversion work for the network before your video starts playing could also be built into the smart contract. Not all problems scale well this way, but video conversion is embarrassingly parallel at the keyframe level AFAIK. Conversely, the site operator could just calculate the cost of running video conversions in AWS and spread this cost out to all users by increasing the page view fee slightly.

> In this kind of web, it would also be quite possible for a single developer to run a site as big as Youtube without needing tons of up-front cost. Bandwidth is free from the perspective of the site developer,

How would that work? Blockchains are far too inefficient to host video files and nobody is hosting that much data for free so you still need to set up a paid hosting environment or learn why P2P video hosting has failed every time it's been tried in the past. You can charge people to host their video, at which point you'll learn that it's really hard to compete with ad-supported hosting because the number of people who say they want to pay up front for their stuff and actually do so is a rounding error of the number of users a major video site will have.

Check out IPFS, this is already happening in the NFT world. Have you noticed how all NFTs are high quality and not compressed to shit? That's because of the IPFS.

I'm familiar and it doesn't change this in any way because IPFS is not a magic want which provides infinite storage and bandwidth at no cost. Those have real costs and someone needs to pay for them.

Many NFTs reference third-party hosting services for this reason (that's the real service; the part on the blockchain is the expensive vanity link) and anyone using IPFS for real will need to pay for ongoing hosting if they want their content to remain available.

Part of what dictates this will be abuse: if you provide free hosting to strangers on the internet, they will exhaust your capacity and some will try to host material which violates copyright or other laws. Over time, anyone not getting paid to deal with that will stop offering free hosting to random strangers on the internet.

IPFS is technically off-chain, though still decentralized.

I remember the Web 1.0 era well, and while there was some advertising, it was usually the old school model where the advertiser emailed a GIF banner to the webmaster, who hosted it on their site.

It all went to hell in the 2.0 era when DoubleClick and Google introduced Real-Time Bidding and serving ads dynamically from their servers.

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