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Comment by fdewrewrewf | Hacker News Reader

The internet and all related technology is largely funded by advertising. It would indeed be very fun to watch that all disappear.

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Major websites are ad-funded, the internet isn't. Networking technology, IPV4/6, http, ssl and most website frameworks aren't funded by advertising ( and even if they are eg react, they won't disappear.)

Let FAANGs fail. Let them try to disguise ads into content, fail and go off the deep end. What is there to lose, really? Search? Someone will take their place. Instant gratification online ordering (not funded by ads but fuck it) orchestrating modern slavery? We'l be fine. Facebook products? Might be a bit of a panic as chat for 50% of the world population goes down, but we'll manage. RCS is good now, matrix is right there, we'll manage. TikTok? We'l be fine.

Pretty much any thing funded by advertising is not vital to society (otherwise they could make you pay for it) and like half of it is parasitic.

Photo & video hosting for all of your major life events that delivers the content to all of your friends and family?

Is there any cloud that is ad-supported? AFAIK, all of them (including google) is supported by charging directly for it and/or bundling it a different purchase (physical phone, software subscription, etc.)

I'm referring here to Instagram / Facebook. How are you going to send your wedding or vacation or dog photos to your network? Mass email? The social platforms have a utility for most people at this point.

Group chats work pretty damn well

>vacation or dog photos

>social platforms have a utility for most people

Hard to tell if you're serious!

I quit all social media and gave up my smartphone. I don't miss that brief "huh, that's nice" moment when being seeing an acquaintance's random photo they felt they had to share, and moments when visual imagery are shared now feel much more special.

I, for one, would love to see the existing incumbents fail, and a mad scramble by upstarts to do this better. This could be done way, way, way better, and I would love to see what happened if the network effect got out of the way of that happening.

If they have an utility, people will pay for it (they don't even have to pay as much as they pay indirectly via advertising). If not, not gonna miss it

You can create a group share in Apple Photos. Non-Apple folks can use a web link to view photos.

Is this a joke? This is a joke, right? We're being poed.

Ads, military and porn, the three pillars of the internet!

But that advertising money still come from somewhere and someone, right? Surely there is some other way to make those someones to spend that money on the internet and all related technology?

That someone is the one watching the ad by buying products the person sees in ads

Back in 2015, there was this "The Website Obesity Crisis" talk that claimed [0], among other things, that in fact most money in the ad industry is coming not from the ad-seeing consumers, but from VC investors. Has something changed in 7 years? Or was it never true in the first place?

[0] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm#fatads

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