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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to dunk on a single out-of-context quote, and I'm sure that Mr. Tetzchner fully understands what I'm about to type as he seems like a brilliant guy. But blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-sighted.

The reason why everything is ruined by advertising is because nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet. The money has to come from somewhere, so advertising it is.

Why does everybody want everything to be free? That's a more interesting question.

Is it because years of free broadcast television and radio conditioned us to expect everything to be ad-supported and "free?"

Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such?

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>Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such?

And nobody really cared.

People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now.

The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake.

That's the same as saying that commercialisation of life was a mistake. I am not disagreeing, but let's just call it for what it is.

Back then people also got hit with ludicrous internet bills the moment their site had large scale use and banner ads were the only real path to managing that cost. Adding a paywall would have created a severe amount of bad will.

Lots of sites just turned off after a given amount of load and you would have to try again later, usually the following day. I think that is an appropriate trade off. It is one reason why mirror sites popped up.

These days though, that could be solved with things resembling bittorrent for websites etcetera though.

I think some fairly complete solutions already exist in the video space, like peertube.

the problem isn't that moving bits is too expensive.

its that moving bits is _almost_ free.

you would think the best model would be each of us ponying up a couple dollars a month to support the whole thing

but in the US at least we don't trust anything unless its delivered to us by a long chain of scammers 'innovating'.

I really would disagree on how the internet was better, sure you could find a few people that were saints that just relesed things for free, but the internet back then was really barren and it was very slow to see new releases of said content and the only alternative was to pirate.

Do I wish we had better money option back in the day? Yes. Most importantly I wish another model of how content is stored was implemented to ensure maximum diversity of said content, like specialized sites for different types of video content.

>but the internet back then was really barren

The internet back then was a forest into which you couldn't really see, you just went dumpster diving and it was an adventure.

Today's internet is barren, with most content centered around Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Youtube, and various commercial propaganda campaign sites known colloquially as journalism. That is a fucking desert, a wasteland.

I do agree and disagree, yes there were more diverse websites for sure, but quite a lot of it were just copies of others (flash games is a good example of how many different hosts there were with almost nothing unique to it).

And two of the examples you brought up are social media focused, with one also being heavily focused on content discovery.

And the places you did find was very slow with new content being added and limited because as I said you could mostly only get the juicy stuff through piracy (as most things was still heavily reliant on offline distribution).

>(flash games

That was not the old internet but already the current one.

That seems like a real romanticization of the early internet - comparing, essentially, Geocities to a forest and simultaneously calling the plethora of content-creator sites available today (sites like Substack, not 'influencer' brands on IG) a "fucking desert, a wasteland" seems sort of disingenuous.

Sure, if you never leave FB or Reddit, you're not going to see a ton of diversity. But it's still all there if you can get more than a page into search results, or put in literally the exact same level of effort you used to have to put in when AltaVista and Lycos were out giving horrendous search results.

Even on Reddit, if you spend your time on what used to be the defaults versus finding the niche subs, you're going to have a vastly different understanding of forest/wasteland.

>the plethora of content-creator sites available today (sites like Substack,

They all exhibit a tremendous level of "likethink" bubbling, I find everyone on a given platform to be more or less the same spewing the same crap over and over again.

Contrast Geocities, where you could find everyone and everything imaginable, short of straight up illegal stuff.

> Do I wish we had better money option back in the day? Yes.

I didn't. Digital content is the closest thing to a post-scarce resource that we have ever achieved. Ushering in a business model based on the limited resources of physical mediums was a tremendous mistake, and was only done so because media companies couldn't stop salivating at the notion of charging $10 for something they could copy infinitely at almost no cost.

Charging for digital content is (or at least should be) about recouping the cost it took to make it, not the (near-zero) cost to distribute it.

And at scale, the cost ceases to be remotely near zero. Netflix would implode rapidly without income even if they stopped producing content.

Netflix never would have existed to begin with in a world without DRM-loaded media.

(The streaming platform, that is, not the original movies-in-your-mailbox service)

> remotely near zero

That sounds like an oxymoron ;), had to take a double-take when reading.

There are other methods to recoup the cost that actually hand something of tangible value to the customer (the physical mediums I mentioned, for example.) Handing over a digital asset for the same price, and then lambasting those who choose to distribute it freely, is 100% the shittiest way to do it.

It's pretty obvious that media companies are not ok with simply recouping cost plus a reasonable margin but instead all try for a recurring income stream with little recurrent effort to earn it. No amount of profit is enough if more can be had and with the current copyright regime they can legally get away with it too. Plenty of old games are still sold at prices way above zero even when the companies that originally made them have long since stopped existing. So no, digital content is not priced around recouping costs but around maximising profit.

And going back to the original topic, a lot of advertising infested sites on the web still have their content created for free by users and those profiting from the advertisement are merely the middlemen that handle the distribution.

    People made content because they wanted to, and it 
    was generally better quality than the corporate 
    blogspam we have now.

I miss the old days too. And even now that independently-made, non-ad-supported content is what I prefer most. Spent a lot of years creating it myself.

But let's not be naive. Not all art or journalism can be created that way.

There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money.

For example, imagine the sorts of investigative journalism where somebody might spend months or years researching a story. One that might not even pan out. That's not something you can realistically do, part-time, for free, while earning a living doing something else as your day job.

Expecting everything to be free, and also ad-free, because it was created by some hobbyist in their spare time while they do something else for a living severely restricts the amount of people who can create and the types of things that can be created.

Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)

There are studies where money ruins altruism and pure joy of creating sthg. has to be replaced with a payment which becomes according to Herzberg a hygiene factor and wears out.

The --internet-- www as we know it - give it back!

> Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)

but it eventually had paid sponsorships from companies that make money off it.

Linux is a VERY different thing than investigative journalism. I can't think of a single bit of investigative journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned an entire industry, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough.

Content costs money to make. Yes, sometimes give via self-funding of the content (without advertisement, like by working a job), and that's fantastic. But we also need a way to support the content that we like, and we can't expect everyone to be able to give.

> Content costs money to make

Some content costs money, other content - and how I dislike the word 'content' which turns that which makes the 'net interesting inside-out to make it into a money-making scheme - costs time to make. Not all time is money, lots of it is time spent on activities which people do without the need for payment since they enjoy it. Call it a 'hobby' or 'pastime' if you want, something to do when you're free to do what you want. Some people like to go and watch sports games, others like to sit on the sofa and watch televised drivel while others park themselves in front of a computer to create something. Much of what is created is interesting only to the creator for the act of creation but some of it has value beyond the experience of the creator. That is indeed how the Linux kernel got started, it is how a lot of music is made, artwork is created and more.

> I can't think of a single bit of investigative journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned an entire industry

Maybe not an entire industry, but Bellingcat has been impactful and it started with a guy commenting on the guardian comments section.

Investigative journalism, (the media), sometimes referred to as "The Fourth Estate", is too important to be funded by advertising, and should be funded by the people, and be for the people. Just like the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our governments.

Survivorship bias?

>Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)

Red Hat started in 1993 and SUSE in 1994. So you got 2 whole years before money entered the picture.

In the early years, these companies were tiny, struggled to not go out of business.

And because they were so small, they contributed very little paid time... anywhere.

Linux happened for free.

Yes, Linux was started for free as a student project, but the reason why it became the standard choice for data centers is because large corporations like Oracle, IBM and later Google united behind it in order to stop Microsoft from dominating servers. These corporations along with some commercial distributions have been funding Linux development for decades. Linux as we know it today is a child of corporate strategic thinking.

IBM, DEC, Sun, HP and others already had commercial Unix offerings with support that corporate users wanted for servers. Why unite behind Linux, which at the time was inferior to all those others?

To attack Windows from the top and bottom simultaneously. It may seem excessive but MS was in a very strong position at the time. Many of us wondered if anything else would survive.

I'm not against Red Hat but the sentiment that they are ruining Linux is not that uncommon.

I believe “you create for free and live poor” vs. “you need to monetize your work via ads” is definitely the wrong dichotomy.

You can simply create out of inspiration, while having a job that pays your bills (that is actually how a lot of OSS happened). Or you could publish some work openly, while suggesting the reader to buy your book, for example.

Over-reliance on ad-based model and the resulting prevalence of double-sided “social” platforms where the advertiser is the customer, actual user needs count for nothing because no one will leave and no honest competitor can compete with “free”, most certainly seems to me to be at the root of a lot of dysfunction—if these platforms make more money from engagement thanks to aggravating inflammatory posts, regardless of whether they are well informed or in good faith, then that’s what they will promote and reward one way or another.

The expectation of “free” is part of the problem, sure, but I don’t think that’s the cause. The cause can probably be distilled to “abuse of information asymmetry in free market enabled by regulatory inaction” (free market is great, but in presence of malicious actors it needs some regulation or it stops working). That leads to the aforementioned platforms, then the expectation of “free” and non-appreciation of work published completely for free just out of altruism or to feel pride/recognition, and generally goes counter to how the market is supposed to work.

It's primarily a cultural difference.

In print media ads were fairly tame. They weren't personally targeted and in some contexts they were quite welcome.

Although print magazines made most of their money by selling ad pages, the content was largely firewalled. (Byte is a good example. The content was always hacker culture not ad culture.)

On the internet, ad culture - not just ads themselves - has consumed everything. Whether it's a YouTube channel owner reminding everyone to like-and-subscribe, or some TikTok nonsense desperately trying to go viral, it's mostly about reach - defined entirely by potential ad spend - and not about the content, which is almost incidental to monetisation.

And that's why it's so noisy, and often trivial.

In fact I suspect there's a general Gresham's Law principle of cultural systems. As access and delivery become cheaper, content becomes noisier, more trivial, and less culturally valuable. As we go from manual content generation to automated AI content reach will increase, but cultural value - in the sense of challenging, original ideas and experiences that have lasting widespread relevance - will decrease even further.

Open source is by volunteers if you count it by volume. But probably not if you count by impact. Especially not if you include all the accompanying things like maintenance, packing and running software.

I think what is lacking from open source is reciprocity. Traditional copyright is extreme in that it reserve almost all rights. Open source is extreme in that is reserve almost no rights. The result is the same, the middle men gets all the power.

It isn't going to happen though. Because what is going to happen already is and it isn't that.

> Open source is extreme in that is reserve almost no rights.

There are copyleft licenses which can encourage reciprocity.

I suspect Copilot and related tech pose more danger, they basically allow to sidestep licensing altogether even as they return 1:1 training data in some cases. Hopefully a lawsuit against Microsoft comes in due time.

> Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)

Linux happened mostly through the contributions of the paid developers of the Linux foundation. And still the majority of the commits belong to those developers. And it was possible to do so because the foundation received enough support from major donors, most of which were corporations. If you would want to choose an Open Source success story that wasnt backed by corporations, WordPress would be what you are looking for. But even then, the WordPress ecosystem found a way to fund itself directly through its users. Which means that they are also funded. In contrast, a gigantic amount of Open Source projects were abandoned when its contributors were no longer able to maintain them because life responsibilities started raining on them...

Unfortunately any social paradigm, movement or setup must be able to sustain itself economically. The best way to do it is to do it through its users, directly, so that concentrated capital wont be able to take it over.

Linux is the exception that proves the rule.

While it is completely free (beer + libre), Google and Facebook exploited numerous Linux-related technologies to turn the internet into a planet-scale ad machine.

I apologise for my pedantry, but:

> the exception that proves the rule

To prove the rule is to test the rule; proof spirit is spirit that passes the test, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The exception that proves the rule is the exception that violates it (and shows that the rule is a heuristic, not a law).

>And since people need money to live

And now we're getting to the actual root of the problem.

If you make it so people don't need money to live, they'll invent a new currency. People are hardwired to barter.

That's not even remotely true. Nothing about us is inherent to bartering.

That's of course relying on the assumption that we would get rid of money entirely as the only solution.

Bartering is an offshoot of "fairness". Even dogs, crows get upset, if treated unfairly.

There are experiments where giving desired treats, unfairly, causes these animals(monkeys too), to exhibit outrage. EG, giving some to one animal, and less desirable treats to another.

Bartering is an offshoot of "being fair". I "worked" to make this thing, but now I need a thing you have. You worked for it. Each of us spent time, effort, work, but how much, who spent more? We negotiate. We settle.

This is bartering. And at the root of this, is fairness.

And even animals, inherently, know this.

Right. Tax, whether to a government, or to an employer, is the beginnings of unfairness. Taxes can be used for fairness (enforced savings for everyone for the winter), and as a form of barter (military protection), but the value gained by singular authorities makes things disproportionately unfair.

I guess maybe the taxation is not the problem, it's the centralization of the taxed wealth to particular figures in the government (nobles) or corporations (shareholders and executives).

> giving desired treats, unfairly, causes these animals(monkeys too), to exhibit outrage

This mechanism might stem from offspring times when they were receiving food/care from parents. I wouldn't connect it with barter, as these species do not exchange any goods.

You don't have to go all the way back in time to the root to reach the point where it cost so much less to live, that things which were within reach for the ambitious individual are now out of the question due to the exorbitant cost of living itself today by comparison.

Which is exactly why it costs so much to live. That is how markets work, by allocating opportunities to those with the most money.

I think doing journalism part time for free is how bellingcat started.

> And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money.

Yes, but I believe advertising is a poor solution for that. Because it seems to tend to lead to optimizing for advertising at the expense of quality.

I believe crowdfunding is a better solution for a couple reasons.

1. Enough people want the thing to be made to be willing to front the cost for it (contrast this with advertising-funded journalism, much of which is just a constant barrage of noise rather than it all being something someone's passionate enough about making to pitch).

2. Over time, creators develop reputations for good or ill, and this enables trustworthy creators to start to bank on their reputation for future, perhaps riskier projects, while making it harder for untrustworthy creators to continue practicing.

3. Related to point 2, over time this optimizes for delivery of quality output (which is the most important way this is better than advertising, IMO). It does require quality pitches as well to convince people to front the money for the effort, but if you deliver a quality pitch and bail on the output, your reputation takes a nosedive.

Crowd funding is a complete failure. Look at any high quality project or content used by hundreds of thousands and they will have a dozen people donating if any. Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind.

> Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind.

Newspaper publishers were slow to pick up on the free www. Until they did, all we needed was a dialup connection, and we could go anywhere, serve anything, and talk to anyone.

I'm not sure what broke the dam, but it might have been when browsers started behaving according to some kind of documented standard.

Then adblockers came, and the publishers started pushing nag modals.

Then publishers decided to try to run ads as well as paywalls; yeah, suckers, pay us to watch our ads!

I regret the passing of an internet that was free to use, give or take a connection. They did steal it.

    I regret the passing of an internet that was free to 
    use, give or take a connection. They did steal it.

That's when I fell in love with the potential of the www/internet and switched career paths.

But in hindsight that was never really going to last. When the guts of the public www (browsers, servers, data pipes, protocols, TCP/IP support in operating systems) were being built out in the 90s, it was all predicated on the belief that it was the future of commerce.

Without that explosion, "the free internet" probably would have just been a slightly evolved version of the dial-up BBS scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Which is cool, and honestly depending on my mood I might be willing to trade 2023's technology hellscape for that simpler time.

> There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money.

I definitely agree. And even for people doing it solo as a full-time job (email newsletters come to mind), the quality tends to be less than what would be possible if they had even one other person sharing the work.

That’s a rose tinted view. For some fields (not unsurprisingly nerdy ones) the quality of the amateur content was good enough. For other fields it was abysmal. I remember trying to look up scholarly material on English literature in 1998 or so and not being able to find anything that was even remotely decent, for example. And it could have been worse: among the amateurs that put history related material online, crackpots and conspiracy theorists were (and, in fact, are) vastly over represented.

The highs are higher, but the lows are much lower too. I wish there were a way to preserve the best of both.

It's ok that some content not be on the internet. The internet didn't have to become the epicenter of everything. Amateur content and communication was a fine outcome for what the internet could have been. Scholarly material could remain in journals.

> Scholarly material could remain in journals.

And remain inaccessible to large parts of the world population aside from people in ivory towers with journal subscriptions?

> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now.

When were these glory days that people made good content - news and/or analysis for free?

Blog spam has been a thing since before Google when sites would have hidden text to appear on AltaVists.

There was the X1 pop under windows and the punch the monkey banner ads early on.

Gamefaqs. Someone typed out the entire script of Deus Ex. For free.

Don't fuck with gamers they are a force beyond human comprehension.

When were these glory days that people made good content - news and/or analysis for free?

There were endless free sites, without advertising, back in the day. Many were people installing apache, and putting simple html/text pages up.

Free content outnumbered anything commerical for a decade, including blog spam.

Altavista being bad at filtering, is not relevant, becuase you're stating the problem, which gave rise to google.

People could no longer find valid content, due to a tiny number of bad actors.

There was content. But most of it was useless. Hobby level MySpace level, GeoCities stuff.

When was this decade? Navigator came out in 1994. By 2004, the web was fully commercialized.

The web isn't "fully commercialized" today even. Endless hobby sites, non-profit groups, and things such as clubs(bike clubs, etc), are completely free of any commerical intent or advertising.

Even government sites are ad free, non-profit, non-commercial by their very nature.

In 2004, before modern-class smartphones, before endless smaller companies even had a web presence, before facebook was a big thing, there was still mostly ad-free, commercial free content.

And I should add here, paying for a computer and internet link at home, or paying for a server in a datacentre, or buying a pre-configured wordpress site, without ads, are all commerical free endeavours.

Otherwise, nothing was ever commerical free, because everyone always paid for resources to provide content in some way.

Paying for resources, does not make a thing commerical.

You and I have a very different view of the past. Were you on the web pre-2000? I ask, because I don't understand the difference in our opinions.

My first for pay project was modifying a Mac HyperCard, Gopher server in 1993 that used C based XFNs (?) for TCP/IP (yeah there was such a thing) to implement a chatbot.

My earliest post I can find on Usenet was from 1993.

Yeah I learned a lot from comp.lang.c. But there really wasn’t that much of value for research. Sure there was tidbits and ftp Mac archive sites for shareware.

> Endless hobby sites, non-profit groups, and things such as clubs(bike clubs, etc), are completely free of any commerical intent or advertising.

As people aren't okay with having to actively looking for content (anymore), this has been relegated to Facebook/Discord/Telegram/WhatsApp/etc. Groups. You either are bombarded with ads or pay with your metadata.

> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now.

I agree. But the web was smaller then and I'd guess that in absolute numbers the amount of personal websites and blogs is greater now. They're just drenched in a tsunami of noise and search engines won't help you find them.

> The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake.

And inevitable as capitalism has a tendency to commodify almost everything, sooner or later.

I'm not sure that's really true. I remember looking at pages of search results on Star Wars websites. All built from scratch, none of them had ads. All of them much better than for ex. Wookieepedia despite having less content. I think you would have a hard time finding more than a handful of websites (on any given niche topic) like this today.

I don’t even have a problem with commercialization, it’s just that the incentives need to be clear. Everyone defaulted to ad supported content because it was just the default. It takes a lot more time to build up your own revenue base but I think this is an important trend going forward. Kagi.com in the world of search is one example of a long-overdue approach to that market.

You can continue to stick to your 90s hobbyist and research circles of the internet if you want. They haven't gone anywhere.

The fact that billions more are online and doing their own thing now is not a mistake.

"Doing their own thing" is quite a big claim. Facebook and others would not have had teams of psychologists and neuroscientists on staff to maximize user's screen time if they were OK with people doing their own thing.

> The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake.

The irony off posting this on a VC website that make money off the commercialisation of the internet.

The amount of tech folks that don’t realize how much their jobs and lifestyles only exist because of the commercialization of the internet and “capitalism”…

It's not an anticapitalist take to say that the internet would have been better without commercialization. There's a world outside of the internet. There's programming jobs outside of the internet. Not everything has to be commercialized. And that doesn't mean commercialization is inherently bad.

I also don't think most internet-adjacent jobs don't even involve toxic, intrusive advertising.

Maybe this is wildly presumptuous but it feels like most of the people complaining about "commercialization" seem to hate the toxic cycle of intrusive ads and algorithm-optimized content that is supported by those ads.

Certainly, that's what the folks quoted in the linked article are railing against.

Do the people railing against "commercialization" of the internet really hate the fact that you can like, order dog food or schedule a trip to the dentist online? Or do they just hate the toxic ad crap?

You're right, it is ironic.

But the fact remains, HN is free to use, the plugs on the front-page are clearly flagged so you don't have to read them, and apart from those the site is ad-free and looks and behaves a lot like the old internet.

I wish there were more websites like it or an easy way to find them. Maybe there's a business case for it, like an index of web pages.

But seriously, are there any good search engines of text only or mostly text websites?

Are people really opposed to the commercialization of the internet, or just intrusive advertising?

People are using the terms interchangeably here but I would draw a fairly sharp line between intrusive online advertising and other aspects of internet commercialization, and I think most people would as well.

I love being able to buy physical goods and online. I think most people love this. I think you could ban ads from the internet tomorrow, and most online retailers would continue to flourish just fine. Though it would be harder for new retailers to break into the game.

I also love various online services. I love being able to schedule a trip to the dentist or access my bank account online. Again I think very few people object to this.

It's really only content delivery and search that are hopelessly entangled with toxic advertising that is necessitated by the fact that people expect those things to be free. I know those are a couple of enormous "onlys." However, to return to your point:

    The irony off posting this on a VC website that make 
    money off the commercialisation of the internet.

They get a lot of press and mindshare, especially in SV, but the majority of internet-adjacent companies and engineers are not involved in the search, content, or advertising industries.

> They get a lot of press and mindshare, especially in SV, but the majority of internet-adjacent companies and engineers are not involved in the search, content, or advertising industries.

This is a pretty big divergence from GP's comment. Besides, many of them are customers of the same industry buying ads, or vendors selling data. The whole thing reeks of needless fingerpointing. While consumers keep feeding their data and money to these companies. They don't have to. Consumers are trading personal info and preferences for convenience and dopamine.

Who's the worse bad guy here? It seems like everyone is getting what they want one way or the other. I'd argue that making the internet addictive is the real problem here.

Not saying this to justify any of it, it's just the reality I see.

Online shopping sites relies on ads. You can see many ads for shopping

Worse than ads, they also often have referral programs which causes discussion of the sold products elsewhere to be drowned out by listicles that care more about getting you to buy something that they have a referral link for than meaningful comparison.

> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now.

People can still do that, and many still do. Possibly more do now than back then, in absolute numbers. The problem is search and discoverability, because of all the other, ad-driven content, and ad-driven search. More people would choose to not publish on ad-driven platforms if the alternatives (e.g. personal websites) would get them the same or better reach.

Also to add, when people made their own content, maybe a few 100,000 saw it. For the most part the ISP bill was something they could pay.

But if I made a video and suddenly a billion people view it I could be bankrupted.

Usually your throughput just gets throttled once you’ve reached your bandwidth limit.

I can't say you are wrong since that was the original deal when it came to broadcast entertainment, but it lacks nuance. Not only was advertising on broadcast media somewhat regulated (by the government) or controlled by industry ad boards (the networks themselves), at no point did radio, TV or newsprint ever report back so much information to the advertisers.

It isn't a matter of expecting everything to be free. For example, look at attending a professional hockey game where there is absolutely zero expectation of anything free, yet attendees are deluged with advertising upon entering the venue. There are often breaks in game play, just for advertising.

With respect to the internet, the ad industry has managed to ingrain itself where ads may never be shown. Google (an ad company) provides site analytics for free, and those analytics can be used by Google to steer advertising on sites far removed from the site being monitored.

Take an hour and watch the DNS traffic from any streaming app, free or paid, and watch the privacy circus unfold. This industry simply can't help itself from figuring out ways to look over everyone's shoulders.

Recall that I mentioned that at no point did radio, TV or newsprint report back so much information, even that has been changing. ATSC3 TV receivers by default will report back location information and viewing habits not only to the TV stations, but to any number of ratings services. Over the air guide data is intentionally hobbled so one must use the internet to get it, providing metadata on viewing habits. Online subscriptions to newspapers require use of readers, again reporting home on reading habits.

While I think you are correct to raise the point that in some ways it is the price of free, the advertising industry has managed to wiggle their way into data collection for things that are not free, and on devices for which we pay a considerable amount of money to own. It may be wrong to say they've taken over the internet, but they've sure come into our lives uninvited in increasingly intrusive ways.

I love your post, though I was by no means defending the intrusive privacy mess we have now. It is indeed orders of magnitude more disturbing than what was possible 25 or 100 years ago and I deeply hate it.

I was only pointing out how/why people have been conditioned to tolerate the current state of affairs.

Appreciate the time you took to write this. What is the solution to rein in control from advertisers? Adopt an EU style approach to regulation?

The system of roads that carries goods from point A to point B is not 'free', it's taxpayer-financed. Governments could also use tax revenue to pay for nationwide fiber-optic systems that carry information from point A to point B.

Note 'paying for' doesn't mean hiring private contractors to run the system, it means having government employees run the systems while relying on the competitive private sector for things like manufacturing fiber optic cable (comparable to the road system, where equipment like road graders is privately manufactured).

If congestion becomes a problem, as with roads, alternatives like trains for public transit to reduce traffic loads are also plausible. Regardless, those who claim there is a competitive free market solution to the issue of basic infrastucture are either highly ignorant or just pushing for private monopoly control with high rents.

But why, when we can inject billions into the pockets of ATT, Comcast, Verizon, and friends. It’s far too lucrative an opportunity to let any more infrastructure ever be public again.

This is not a good analogy. The infrastructure, e.g. roads, is the one thing we all already do pay for via our ISP. It's the store fronts and movie theatres on the road that we want to be free, that are currently paid for by ads.

I now wonder about the viability of an ad-supported movie theater and grocery store.

Movie theaters are pretty much ad supported aren't they. From what I hear the payment we make doesn't cover the cost of the film, which is why you get about half an hour of ads and trailers before the film starts.

Re: movie theatres. We’re already on that road. 20 years ago I’d go to a move and see a few trailers. Now I have to sit through a bunch of ads, then trailers, and then finally we get to the movie I paid for.

Grocery store is definitely not viable - the profit margins are already among the lowest in retail and don't leave much room to drop. Movie theaters just need to be able to pay for the building and electricity and to clean up once in a while though (food and drink could be handled by outside vendors renting space to set up). Seems doable in a large enough metro.

It's more like free public attractions like national parks. In real life they are paid by taxpayers which are in turn paid by estate taxes and income taxes by local residents.

How does this have anything to do with ads? Advertisements are used to fund the content you watch, not the infrastructure. Infrastructure is funded with the money you pay each month to your ISP.

That depends. Are Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Wikia, etc. the content or the infrastucture? A lot of content online is created for free but still infested by advertisements added by those handling the distribution.

Aren’t most freeways and interstates built by private contractors? Lots of toll roads are even “operated” by private companies and those tend to be the nicest, best maintained, lowest congestion roads.

I do see a lot of billboard ads on the road.

Why does everyone expect everything to be free? I'd argue that while money's part of it, the more important aspect is friction.

Much of the time the internet is a platform for procrastination (he says, posting here while waiting for Vivado to do its thing!) - if I'm just idly reading a page or two and I'm interrupted by the need to create an account and worry about payment details then I'd have to be heavily invested in what I was reading to bother jumping through such hoops, instead of just going somewhere else.

I'd also argue that advertising itself isn't the problem - it's the fact that the goal of maximising returns for advertising spends incentivises sleazy behaviour (not just the tracking, but also obnoxious audio ads and videos that partially obscure the content the user's trying to read.)

Most of the things I read online, I would probably not be willing to pay much for. For example, for “news” opinion pieces, my analogy is to a long form version of something one might find posted on a bulletin board at a coffee shop. Sure it is entertaining to skim and might be vaguely informative, but it isn’t really journalism and if someone tried to charge me to read it, I’d happily move on.

I don’t expect everything to be free, I expect things to be priced in line with their value. Listening to somebody’s rant on something—I mean, therapists charge for it!

I think friction is a big part. I’ve never paid for a website subscription but I have several subscription apps on my iphone because the payment (and cancellation) process is streamlined.

"The reason why everything is ruined by advertising is because nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet. The money has to come from somewhere, so advertising it is."

The internet was doing just fine before corporations and advertisers swarmed on to it in the first great internet gold rush.

Are you saying it was great up until ~1995? The web has had a large commercial component for over two decades, and it was very small before then.

Today is Sunday, the 10785th of September, 1993.

‘Eternal September’ possibly started as far back as 1993, so this particular nostalgia isn’t unique.

Yeah, but it was also very much a thing for academics to play around with. Commercialization democratized the internet and let normal people access it. That usually makes it more crowded and degrades peak quality.

And, to be honest, I much prefer today's internet and technology with all the flaws to what was there in the 90ies. Commercialization and turning it into a mass market is what drove innovation.

If you define "doing fine" as only available to a limited few and barely sratching the surface of what was possible with the technology then sure. But to scale it to a broader audience and to empower more business models than just hobbyist site and university faculty pages you needed a way to fund it.

I was there before the gold rush. If you had a page on the internet and it got at all popular half the people who visited would see either a notice from the hosting company that the page was no longer available because some limit had been reached or you would get some outrageous bill from your ISP. Only a limited few people could afford to visit the internet let alone publish on it. It had a certain exclusivity that came with certain benefits. But I'm not sure that staying exclusive was either a good idea or useful to society at large.

Advertising in the early days helped the internet provide real value to more people than ever before. Like many good things though taken to extremes it has particular failure modes that we are seeing now. That doesn't mean introducing advertising was the problem necessarily. It does mean that controlling the failure modes of advertising is probably necessary for a well functioning society.

This is a common (not necessarily majority-) opinion on this startup website.

I don’t understand why the theory asserts that the causality necessarily goes from the user to the business. Say some social media comes along. They want users. What reason do the users have to care? Their friends are not on it. Why pay money for that? Oh, pay X amount of dollars a month and hope that in three years the network effects will have payed off? How is that rational?

But FB and Twitter (etc.) did get popular! Someone responds. Aha, but that’s just survivorship bias.

The above is an argument for why the regular users have little reason to accept a paid-for option when it comes to social media.

But does that mean that they necessarily (indirectly) demanded a free option? No. Because if you look back twenty years, it’s not like Social Media was some kind of innate need that people had. As is usually the case, it was a manufactured need. And who could have manufactured it? It could have simply been business people with some foresight (who knew about network effects).

Did the people need social media? Not any more than they needed luxury dog grooming to be a thing. But businesses always need money. And so needs are manufactured.

This woe-is-businesses who have to make their money through advertising (because of the lusers’ choices) narrative is predictable (understandable) for a startup website. But the causality might not really have started with the (l)users.

>The money has to come from somewhere, so advertising it is.

Does it though? If you completely removed profit incentive from some subset of the internet would we really be worse off? Sure, the content would be less professional, less glossy, and there would be less of it, but the content that remained would probably be pretty good and it wouldn't have to compete with mega-corporations with huge advertising budgets.

People like glossy.

    If you completely removed profit incentive from 
    some subset of the internet would we really be worse off?

Solo hobbyist and crowdsourced community efforts have always existed online and those of course would continue to exist just fine.

Lots of other stuff doesn't happen unless folks get paid.

Journalism (actual, primary-source journalism, not talking about somebody else's journalism on your blog) takes time and money.

You have to go places, sometimes thousands of miles away, see things, talk to people, and sometimes you spend three months or six months working fulltime on a story and it doesn't pan out. That costs money and lots of it. You can't do it in your spare time while you work a day job.

Citizen journalism is cool, and vital, but it can't do everything.

It's also awfully tough to create art for free in your spare time. It can take a lot of time or money. Certainly a lot of great art was created that way, but think of the great works of art that have survived for decades or centuries. Shakespeare. Michaelangelo. Van Gogh. Dudes were getting paid for making their art full-time, either by selling it directly or via patronage. You think Shakespeare's plays happen on some hobbyist basis while the guy works fifty hours a week shoveling mud or tending sheep? Probably not.

> blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-sighted.

I'm not so sure. Do you work for an advertiser? (Quote marks are not for emphasis, by the way.)

Morally, advertising is bankrupt at a minimum, and adversarial/predatory when taken to extremes.

Advertisers will take any surface, real or virtual, which can host advertisements in a cost effective way but does not, and place advertisements on that surface, gleefully. They simply do not care what happens to the thing they place advertisements upon, and they do not care if they ruin it. They see an untapped source of revenue and they wish to tap it.

Advertisers did that to the Internet. Browse on mobile for a few minutes without an ad blocker to see what has happened. To an advertiser, you the reader are a source of funds, and absolutely nothing more. Twenty years ago you were considered a crass advertiser at best if your advertisement animated or even moved in any way. Now we have full-page interstitials and half-page ads which slide in and slide out, and even auto-playing videos which cover a third of the screen. To top it all off, advertisers are upset that the ability to block ads is even possible.

They say they're "losing money" when people use ad blockers, when in reality they are simply not gaining as much money as before. The motive of an advertiser is money, and money alone. Morally advertisers are bankrupt at best, and malignant and predatory at worst.

> blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-sighted

The problem isn't advertising. The problem stems from combining advertising with relentlessly spying on everyone all the time.

Television, newspapers, and glossy magazines had their content funded through ad sales without spying on the public for decades, so we know the spying on people part is not a hard requirement.

> nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet.

The concept of paying for content that isn't trade-related/educational is mostly bizarre. I hate a large amount of the content I consume on the internet, and wish I could somehow take money away from the people who published it. You can understand people paying for entertainment, but only because modern entertainment is aimed at that sort of consumption. It's largely completely empty; having nothing to say about anything other than sort of expansions of cliched aphorisms, and/or childish and simplistic anti-crime, pro-patriotic, anti-cruelty messages."Real" art has an agenda. Art built for mass consumption carefully avoids any dangerous agenda because it doesn't to alienate any potential audience unless absolutely necessary.

While I have to admit that I pay for investigations because I'm curious about their outcome (which is why I'd pay an investigative journalist or a detective), other than that I support for the media that I want other people to read.

The baseline assumption is strange, where I pay people to communicate something to me that they presumably find important to communicate. I'd rather pay people to shut up. Content blocking is literally about shutting people up.

> nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet.

as it has been the first years of the internet?

I did pay back then ... with my taxes. Public funded Universities were large back bones of the internet. Then it all got privatized and we are in the sump were in right now.

The internet is a public good and should be financed accordingly.

Yeah I was on the internet back then. It was basically useless for decent content when I was in college in the mid 90s

For reference, my first paid work i did involving development was making modifications to a Mac/HyperCard based Gopher server.

I don't believe that.

People used to pay to have their sites published just because they had something to say and wanted others to read it. This is how it should work. Why should we pay to read some guy's hot opinions? Would you pay me to read this comment? I doubt it. If you actually have something to say, you need to go out there and actively say it to people. You don't charge them for the privilege of listening to you.

Truth is these for-profit sites just want our undivided attention so that fractions of that attention span might be redirected towards ads and therefore their pockets. They don't really have anything real to say. They'll say anything that brings them the desired profits. They'll avoid saying anything that could harm profits. Therefore, not only are they untrustworthy, they are essentially worthless.

>They'll avoid saying anything that could harm profits.

I'm on mobile so won't respond as well as I'd like to. But 1000000% this is why I'm vehemently against advertisements as a primary model of income.

Want money? Ask for donations or sell your content. Nobody pays you? You aren't worth being paid in the eyes of the public. It's your job to convince the public that you are worth paying!

All of my favorite websites and content creators are 100% funded by donations from supporters. It works because the value is high enough to be worth paying for. If the donations ever stop rolling in that speaks more about the quality - it stopped being worth financially supporting.

I'm on desktop now so can explain a bit more in depth. Also a minor correction. Projects are often times funded out of pocket by the creator. Though due to that nature these products cannot scale or eventually must adopt a profit model - often in the form of advertisements as it is both the laziest and one of the most successful models.

Not only will ad-driven models avoid saying anything that might harm profits - people who profit from ads are incentivized to have the ads been seen by as many Consumers as possible. The Producer/Content Creator's job is no longer to produce worthwhile content but to try and capture and retain as many eyeballs (views) as possible. Producing worthwhile content and capturing+retaining eyeballs are only loosely intertwined. The issue that presents itself later is that garbage content is both cheaper and often easier/faster to make and is also better at capturing+retaining eyeballs. So the quality of the content inevitably declines which results in issues later on for other people not only the Content Creator and the Advertiser - more on this later.

Anything that results in more views is thus encouraged by the model. Clickbait? There would still be some because some people want to go viral or be the center of attention - but most clickbait is incentivized due to the ad model. Ragebait? Same thing - incentivized by the ad model. Gamified products that give Consumers a brief hit of dopamine so they'll keep coming back for more? Incentivized by the ad model. Simplifying or watering down complex/niche content to cater to a broader audience at the expense of the original/niche audience? Incentivized by the ad model. Showing back-to-back ads? The model incentivizes showing as many ads as a user base will tolerate watching. In fact an ad model's ideal world is one where people sit and watch a channel that is nothing but 24/7 non-stop advertisements and occasionally make purchases.

Why are ads an issue? (#1) in modern times ads are often tied at the waist with invasive user tracking and (#2) Ads are rarely ever designed to enrich a Consumer's life but instead to extract value from the Consumer by convincing them to purchase a product or service even if they are not in need of the product or service. This includes abusive tactics such as making the Consumer feel worse about themselves or their lives and that buying the advertised product or service will make them feel better! Or by associating the product with good feelings. Hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into researching how to make advertisements as effective as possible - and the results of that research is that advertisements work best when they "plant seeds" in a Consumer's subconscious and bias later decisions or alter the Consumer's behavior without them ever having realized it. Issue #1 is an issue of privacy but the larger issue is that it feeds into Issue #2. The data collected is sold to other Businesses & Advertisers to better extract value by being able to target their advertisements at a more vulnerable or susceptible population.

Remember the decline of quality mentioned earlier? There is a certain level of "garbage" that the general population will not only tolerate but will choose over a higher quality product if the higher quality product comes with a higher cost. This disincentivizes producing any higher quality content if the "garbage" is acceptable enough and can be produced more cheaply. Why is investigative and long form journalism a dying art? Not necessarily that people don't want to fund it but that people don't want to fund it when they can keep getting garbage. Garbage also isn't free to produce - it's cheaper to produce. So if you can produce more garbage and the people seem to accept it - why would anyone ever spend more to earn less? You wouldn't. This applies to more than monetary costs too - time spent on creation is another factor that gets perverted. If the monetary cost to produce garbage or quality is the same but you can churn out garbage x3 faster - you're going to churn out garbage. And much like throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks - inevitably there will be some quality things that are ad funded but it will come alongside a plethora of garbage (this is a way to say "Yes, there are some rare exceptions." but you can probably only count them on your hands.)

TL;DR The ad model creates perverse incentives that harms Consumers and almost inevitably results in lower quality content by Content Creators.

This makes sense to me. The quality of content from creators practicing "100/1000 true fans" model seem to deteriorate rapidly. Fully un-supported or ad-supported content on the Internet has more tangency to the mode thus value.

People writew Wikipedia for free, people answer at StackOverflow for free, we got used to it.

Wikipedia is an aggregator of knowledge and content created elsewhere. It's a wonderful resource and success story.

That "hey, pitch in whenever you feel like it" model works wonderfully for some things but is not a universal or automatic solution.

Agreed, and I'd go further.. this is inherent to modern societies. Business invades every space possible, they need ads, enough people like it, it provides jobs (shitty ones probably) .. it makes some part of the economy runs, and maintains itself.

Free internet would require people with enough self sufficiency to keep doing deep and joyful activities and share it. It's rarely the case, any activity soon requires more investment, more hands.. and then you need money inflow, you'll get it one way or another. Patreons and the likes are too brittle for many (unless you're really recognized as a worthy person, in which case lots of money going your way. But as some recent events, like the javascript polyfill guy, even that is not guaranteed)

> Why does everybody want everything to be free?

Personally, I want it to continue to be free because:

* It's very low friction: you can go from site to site without needing to provide payment details, sign up, or consider whether a sites per pageview charge is reasonable.

* It lets everyone participate. If you have some form of paying money for content then I expect that amount gets set high enough that it excludes a large fraction of the population.

Exactly. I think given the choice of having a free experience with ads vs the subscription model, the majority of people would pick the former.

This model won because this model works best. The hardest part is getting users, and as you say, ad-model is low friction. Most people won't subscribe to thousands or random small sites.

Nah, I miss the hobby web. The money doesn't have to come from somewhere. I don't have to pay to see friends. I don't have to pay to walk downtown. There's a lot that I can do without having to pay people. Most of the SEO content I see is something I would rather not come across, let alone pay for. I would rather hang out with real friends than to hang out with SEO friends. It's just that the SEO crowd has the money to shove everyone else out. Maybe the issue is that we need to get back to the old school ways of finding interesting things. There was no Google back then.

He does seem to be specifically ranting about the privacy invasion of deeply targeted advertising, rather than ads in general.

Very very true. But, I feel the answer is the same.

Advertisers are spending money for ads and they of course want the best possible return for their money and this involves as much tracking and intelligence-gathering as is technically possible. If one is now creating an advertising-supported site, you are now at the whims of advertisers.

There are alternatives, but I've never seen them scale. For example some independent blogs and other content creators have "hand picked" ads from selected partners. For example, DaringFireball.net runs one ad per week and he appears to work carefully with advertisers to select ads he feels comfortable running. But I've never seen this scaled up very far.

(not that everything needs to be scaled up)

I think you're missing the point. He's clearly not against advertising per se, nor against free content; rather, he's against online tracking.

> "They stole the internet from us", he says of advertisers. “The internet is supposed to be open and free, and you shouldn’t be afraid of being monitored.

> he believes the current state of advertising is less profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking was in place.

> He mentions "normal ads," which you may see in a magazine or on TV, were the standard for about a decade, even on the internet. "A lot of sites were more profitable, and people were less worried about having to block ads. The ads were normal, it was kind of like what you were seeing if you were going and reading a magazine. There were ads, but they weren’t following you."

Advertising has existed for as long as business has existed. But for most of business history, advertisers could not track you. A magazine or a billboard can't track you or personally identify you.

Local radio stations can advertise local businesses which could be an example of good/useful targeted ad. The difference is of course the targetting is "passive" and they don't know me, at a downside of being only able to estimate the number of listeners. I'd welcome some passive system like that on the internet but have no idea how it could work.

> The internet is supposed to be open and free,

> and you shouldn’t be afraid of being monitored.

If it's open, people will see you. Don't be afraid.

Sites were profitable because the average person couldn't create a site easily, so they had little competition.

This very site exists because the creator got a gob smacking fortune for a web store, something that you can literally create by a following textbook today.

Why did you write two separate replies to the same comment?

> he believes the current state of advertising is less profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking was in place

When he talks about advertisers stealing the Internet he's talking about how they operate now.

Interestingly, it's become the middle men who have become really rich while the content creators only see a fraction of the money.

> Why does everybody want everything to be free? That's a more interesting question.

> Is it because years of free broadcast television and radio conditioned us to expect everything to be ad-supported and "free?"

> Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such?

Well, we were sold the dream: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/

> But blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-sighted.

It's tangential but it's not short-sighted. There are generations being introduced to the web through Tik-tok, FB, etc., that don't know it could be/was different. A lot of money into making sure they stay in the garden.

Everybody used to make content for free in the early 2000s, that's a shallow argument.

That's what communities do, they cooperate out of the mutual benefit the cooperation achieves.

The monetization of content was born out of the ad business model. Someone had to pay the bill of the tools the tech giants were building, not the bill of small content creating communities and individuals.

It was, and still is, relatively cheap to run a blog or a forum. Individuals can pay for it, and a couple dozen people can share the upkeep burden of relatively big forums with no issue. Now, however, everybody wants to turn everything into a profit, simply because it's so easy to do it, so "why not?". If you can monetize your own pet dog, your child, the food you eat, why not?

And now we're all furbed.

I think the reason that the internet is a cesspool of privacy invading malware and fraud is because of get rich quick schemes. Basically the same thing that's affecting the majority of the cryptocurrency use. That's why there's always clickbait sites and auto generated content dominating search results and you're constantly being recommended crappy sponsored videos with no real content in them.

It's not that people don't want to pay for things or they don't expect the pay for things. It's that most people don't know how to run a legitimate business but running a get rich quick scheme that's another ballpark.

People want something for free when the service offered does not have enough value for them to pay for it. The whole economy of startups is somewhat delusional and in a sense bubble (if you ignore advertising). Having success for giving away something for free is not a measure of economically viable success. If you add up what many startups request in monthly fees, almost no one will be willing to pay that sum.

Many people also couldn't possibly pay if they wanted. Most people don't even have the discretionary salary to pay for a few non-essential services per month, let alone dozens or hundreds.

> nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet.

I think this is a trope. It's a classic explanation, which may not be true at all.

I think if advertising on the internet was outlawed, we would have found a different approach from the beginning, one that worked just as well, if not better.

This would be true IF websites ran just enough ads to keep the lights on.

But no you can make PROFIT with ads. Which gave us BuzzFeed.

A lot of stuff, even stuff that is sold as “journalism” is just re-packaged opinions. The writing that has flourished on the internet is stuff they can be produced cheaply (for example without going anywhere to do journalism). Or it is stuff that nobody would pay for, but if you stick it up with some ads, it’ll absorb some eyeballs. Or it is something that essentially benefits the author; pushing a particular opinion, trying to build a brand. All of this stuff serves to convince the user that paying for internet content would be foolish.

It might be possible to build an internet that is worth paying for, but it will be a massive bootstrapping project.

Let me give a slightly different explanation: if you look at the capitalisation of the global market of consumer's household budget reserved for education and entertainment vs the capitalisation of the global market for company's budget reserved for advertisement it is a two order magnitude difference. I don't remember exact details but it was like 1 trillion vs tens of trillions.

Like even if you wanted the sell consumers their entertainment you don't have the same budget as someone giving it away for free.

There is no easy fix for this, the information economy has reached the point of post scarcity and you don't really want to fix that.

What if you just charge people? TBH I don't want to pay because I don't need the content. It's good but optional. Turn it into paid and I simply go away. People may view your content just because it's free.

What about all the businesses that provide a free tier of their service with advertising but offer a paid version without advertisements? Many smartphone apps are free but ad-supported, but you can purchase the app to remove the ads.

And to be clear, the personally targeted advertising based on harvesting personal information is fundamentally different than the audience-targeted advertising in mass media. That and the interaction with the service to grab and sustain attention is what has led to Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" of the internet.

There is also the problem that even the tinyiest writing or video produced in a garage by an individual is now covered in advertisements, sponsoring and hidden or not product placement.

Is it because the majority of people in American society are struggling financially and have less real money than their parents or grandparents, and are being nickel and dimed as their entire existence is converted to a subscription mechanic, from rent, to Amazon, to Netflix? Is it because they desperately seek out non-monetized content to spend what little free time they have in peace without losing what little money they have left?

Nah...

The ad monetized content is mostly garbage though. But it's dangled in front people to attack out lizard brains. The non-ad-monetized content is better.

So before ~2000, living in houses, buying goods, and watching movies was free? Weird, I must have missed all of that, because I sure as hell was paying rent and $5 to rent a movie from Blockbuster. Can you point to where all these free resources were that I missed out on?

Lol as someone who lived quite some time before 2000, we had all kinds of ways of bootlegging. Ear worms would bootleg grateful dead shows, we would tape everything we could off public TV, we'd record radio to tape, we'd trade it. Radio was free and ubiquitous, cable TV didn't come around until the 80s and even then public access TV was much bigger pre HD and Y2k. And of course we simply spent more time together, something which our cultures has wound down quite effectively these last few decades.

Just saying, humanity has always found ways to be entertained for free, and Blockbuster is a short aberration in a long history of human culture. The aggressive monetization going on right now is not the story of history, and it's IMO not sustainable.

> nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet

Just like newspapers and magazines, right?

No? We pay for those and they also have ads?

Hmm. Maybe that's not why, then!

Lest we forget that banner ads date back to the late 90s at least. "Free by default" was enabled largely by advertising from the first, or as a sort of loss leader for traditional media companies. It's more of a sophisticated chicken and egg scenario than you are making it out to be. It sounds like you are just victim blaming for people not demanding to be charged money for online content.

> Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such?

We still haven't worked out per-view micropayments. Instead, the only viable models are begging people to sign up for a subscription.

> Why does everybody want everything to be free?

To fully understand the question, we need to understand the alternative.

The only viable, practical alternative to a free, ad-supported internet is basically a monthly subscription one, where your ISP charges an extra $20/mo. (or allows metered usage) and the money gets distributed through some proportion of the pages you visit and the minutes of videos you watch. Basically the same way you pay Spotify $10/mo. and the money gets distributed to the artists you listen to, more or less.

But this would have required the government to step in and set this all up in a mandatory way which would have been totally against the original decentralized ethos of the internet. It requires massive tracking and so forth, and a centralized authority to manage all of the billing and payments.

And basically very few people want that. Hackers and libertarians are against the centralization and tracking, left-wingers are against the poor having to pay more for internet because it's almost like a regressive tax, consumers in general don't want to pay more for internet, and so forth.

Whereas nobody likes advertising, but they'll put up with it or just block it if they can.

(And the other funding alternative -- micropayments -- is dead in the water because everybody hates them. Nobody wants to be constantly deciding whether it's worth $0.02 or $0.07 or $0.12 or $0.87 to read this one news article on this one site when it might turn out to be a crappy, useless article anyways.)

Content has always been free. Before the days of zero-cost copying, we were paying for the actually hard copy; it's still common for physical books to cost more based on the quality of paper and binding, illustrations etc.

> it's still common for physical books to cost more based on the quality of paper and binding, illustrations etc.

Is the increased price usually actually due to the increased production cost or is this just good old price discrimination?

Probably both, but it doesn't really matter: if the content is exactly (or even mostly) the same, obviously it's only the production value that justifies the price difference.

Blaming advertising for the reason the Internet is like it is, is one possibility.

But what if advertising is actually the least bad face of governmental control? This is to argue that the poor model is by design, as it allows for control and data gathering, that is actually as useful to the governance structure as it is to advertisers.

If you think that we already live in a fascist governance system (where fascism is government and corporations working together) why not choose the more covert path to gather the essential information that the control structure requires for technocracy? Ie why not use corporations to collect the data (as they are perceived to be competitive), rather than the government (which would be accused of being 'Big Brother')?

Similar to how verified twitter accounts = government passports.

I'm curious whether advertising or paid usage has the higher potential profit. You can look at it as a mostly closed system. Users buy the products, ultimately paying for advertising.

Alternatively, if VCs/failing companies pour money into advertising that fails, this money does not come from users. In this scenario, users get content for free and, combined with the above, the total potential profit of the system is greater with advertising than without.

Advertising both alters what people buy and gets them to buy more.

As a result, I suspect that even if users are willing to pay for content, the potential revenue in a system that uses advertising is greater. This makes it a rather intractable problem in an unregulated revenue-maximizing capitalist society, requiring both an attitude change from consumers along with regulation.

And the article also says he complains about paywalls. I don’t have a problem with paywalls. I like the plain simple model of “I pay you money and you give me goods and services”.

The main problem with paywalls is when you don't know what you are getting and the teasers are deceptive.

Which sites are deceptive?

Free -> open -> editable

Paid -> closed -> broken and outdated

Funded -> quality?

> Why does everybody want everything to be free? That's a more interesting question.

Huh? How is this an interesting question? I would love it if my food, housing, transportation were free… because then i have more money for non-free things. This is like 2 + 2 = 4 level of obvious.

If advertisers found a way to make food free, or cars free, or housing free, etc, then some sizeable portion of society would benefit from it in the short term while society as a whole gets shittier.

The problem is figuring out the actual cost of advertising to society, and finding a way to communicate that cost to the public in a way that isn’t really abstract and sleep inducing.

There's a difference between wanting something to be free and expecting it to be free.

We'd all like a free coffee, but people glay pay $5 at Starbucks every morning because they know things cost money. Ask these same people for $5 to install an app on their phone – that was built over years by a team of hundreds – and they will flip out. People who used to buy a single $5 newspaper or magazine from the newsstand will not pay $5 for a monthly subscription to the same paper.

There's a fundamental disconnect in how people value digital assets, and that is why the internet is the way it is.

If you gave them free coffee for a few years though and then started charging $5 then it’s a lot harder to argue that it costs money to make coffee. How the hell were you able to give it away for free for the last few years if it costs money to produce?!

Advertising enabled this model. It makes people value your work less because it is perceived to be free, even though in reality you might be raking in way more money due to the wider reach (no cost friction).

Advertising is literally the root problem here. The expectation of free didn’t come from somewhere else. Also, not all digital assets are expected to be free. Only those that advertising got it’s claws into.

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