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Comment by meiraleal | Hacker News Reader

> At the same time, ads made a lot of the free web possible.

What made all the free web possible was free software, not ads. Google and the likes created empires through ads and breaking laws, we owe nothing to them. The sooner they go, the better. Also, they don't own the ads business model, there are healthier ways to sell, buy and deliver ads and that's not what Google and Meta are doing. They need to go.

> And a big chunk of the last 20 years of internet innovations was sponsored with ads money.

and a much bigger chunk was killed with it.

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>and a much bigger chunk was killed with it.

To say nothing of the opportunity costs. They killed a lot of what was, but they’ve also prevented so much of the promise of the internet from coming to fruition. Lost time, lost talent and lives, and a gaping hole in society where a more productive internet might have been. Somehow we let them.

You are right. But the pendulum swings back.

It’s hard to swing back over walled gardens, they employ behavioral tactics to hook people into certain behaviors. When internet was new it grew organically, these tactics weren’t needed. Now all large platforms do it. Imagine how much effort it would take to unhook people off doomscrolling for example.

Yeah but at the same time, 1% of the internet today is bigger than what I thought it was a huge market 20 years ago, when I started. And now with the new tech available I can reach even a bigger global audience.

Big tech became too big even for themselves. Infinite growth is impossible and the capital market will punish them heavily when they stop growing. And they will. This big tech recess might never end. The likes of Google and Meta will go into maintenance mode and operate with much smaller engineering teams. I'm betting on the end of an era.

It is possible it’s the end of an era and when an era ends another one begins. Maybe something good will come out of the ashes but it will take a while…

It was all considered risky and niche (anything on the internet).

What made the free web possible was first and foremost, access to it.

Then, probably a combination of technological, cultural, and economic factors and the human beings behind the scenes who worked to either create software to give it away or to make money with ads by creating foobar service.

Yes, free software, and yes, because of advertising.

It’s both.

It is not both. The free web would never exist without free software. But would have thrived even more without those parasites.

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