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Comment by bradgessler | Hacker News Reader

I too have found myself searching more in Reddit. Not to throw shade on Reddit, but even if I find exactly what I’m looking for in there, it’s depressing that it’s all bound up inside of another walled garden who will eventually have the same incentive as Google: squeeze every last advertising dollar out of the produc… I mean users. Like Google, it’s just a matter of time before they too lose their balance.

A question worth posing to this community: how can we build an internet that’s hostile to advertisers? Secondarily, how can said internet also be much more accessible to content authors so they won’t have to learn a css, html, and JS to publish some stuff? Finally, how can that content be discovered from within this network?

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I "search" reddit a lot, but all my searches are always through Google. Reddit search is notoriously bad, even after multiple attempts by them to fix it. Suffixing my Google searches with "reddit" though gives all the results I'm looking for.

Yeah. I’ve run into this too. A lot of websites have terrible internal search. Google crushes it, esp when you have a “site:reddit.com” to the query.

A factor in there has got to be 'who pays?' If it's hostile to advertisers, then there's got to be money to pay for the infrastructure from somewhere.

Maybe a tax on ISPs? I think I'd happily pay $10 extra per month for access to an ad-free interrnet. Maybe $20. But how many of the people that are already happy with the ads and poor google results would do so? Would it be sustainable?

I think you're grossly underestimating how much is needed to replace the ad revenue that feeds today's Internet. Remember, majority of people wouldn't pay for getting rid of ads, because they don't have the disposable income. So they're also not really worthwhile to advertisers. You have to divide the revenue by some small fraction of current users.

Yep. It's really weird if you think about it. The first time I saw a company being upfront about their ad revenue [1] I was surprised.

> The Premium fee is basically about $7 per year, which is less than what a free user generates in ad revenue. Thus leagues that pay for Premium and use an ad-blocker are generating less revenue than free users.

They charge about $20 per user per year to remove ads. I pay for that, so I'm not sure what kind of ads they have, but I'd love to see what they're advertising and what the click through + conversion rates look like.

What you said makes sense to me. I wonder if advertisers are paying a fortune to acquire users with a lot of disposable income.

1. https://www.fantrax.com/forums/general/messages/public/l72mh...

Agreed, Facebook makes something like 8 dollars a user per year? That's just one of the mega services, imagine replacing that money for all of the players that power your internet.

It's very relevant to consider that the value of users is very unequal.

IIRC for Facebook American users the average revenue was 50+ dollars per year. Furthermore, if you're the type of person for whom saving a few dollars doesn't matter, you're likely worth more than that average; and for FB to break even on your ads an appropriate price is likely to be closer to $100 per year.

There must be a difference between paying for the infrastructure and paying for the content (including the code).

It's easy to imagine a future where the infrastructure is something analogous to a public good, like clean water. The infrastructure is agnostic to the content.

The content, on the other hand, is a product of a massive, churning, never-ending process of intellectual work. Ads, for the most part, provide the underlying economic incentive for that work.

And the dirty little secret of all that ad-supported creative content? Its value is minimal. Truly minimal. Often low quality, incoherent. If it all went away tomorrow, I would hardly notice.

That it is nevertheless so popular is something of a paradox. I know I sound ridiculous, but at the core, I'm beginning to believe that the fact that advertising is as powerful an economic force as it is, is a reflection of the fact that people's lives are more boring and devoid of meaning than we often admit.

Ads will always exist because they work. Only way is to ban them explicitly but you can do that with AdBlock for example but you still get SEO spam, placed content, inauthentic "recommendations".

> how can we build an internet that’s hostile to advertisers?

You have to reify "trust" into concrete, computer-representable data. Maybe borrow the "web of trust" concept from PGP, but do some sort of multiplicative thing where the amount you trust someone's recommendation online is the product of the trust relationships between you and the recommender. That's really the best you can do - even legislation against online advertising will be subverted by companies that go through layers of proxies to buy influence.

One small thought — having the search engine be configurable, so that the user can specify which sources to give priority to (e.g., Reddit, NYT Wirecutter, Wikipedia, etc.), would be an incremental improvement.

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