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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

If advertising model is doomed (so far all the signs suggest otherwise), wouldn’t “big tech” just adjust models? What makes you think they just go away?

I’m not sure why technology is the “solution” to an alternative… people seem to just want good content delivered well. Content creators want to make as much money as possible. And that’s for “honest” content… the internet is filled with disinformation and people trying to spread conspiracies, recruit for X, or otherwise mass influence the entire population.

How a decentralized Bitcoin based model magically get us amazing content, something people want to use, and minimization of negative forces? Why is technology the key issue?

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Indeed, its not about the tech. Changing the business model is key.

It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.

See here a description + full implementation of a music industry based on Creative Commons content. Artists release their music and receive direct Bitcoin donations from fans. 100% artists, 0% music label, 0% Big Tech, 0% credit card fee. It's a Bitcoin DAO with Spotify-inspired music discovery.

[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/11814767/First.Depl...

Indeed, its not about the tech. Changing the business model is key.

It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.

There is a stark difference between the case of Linux and content. In the case of Linux, ROI is measurable in dollars. In the case of content, value is in large part the perception of customers.

This is going to be very difficult in the particular use case of news media, which is arguably the most critical area. We're already in a situation there where "value" is in the form of the strengthening of biases and misinformation.

The point here, is that to succeed, Tribler might have to find a niche where superior value generation becomes undeniably obvious to some sizable segment. (Perhaps music can serve this function.)

I think the advertising model is bound to collapse once GPT agents / assistants progress to the point where anyone can set one up to do a lot of their internet searching for them. The GPT will take your query and provide you an answer, bypassing both search engines and websites. If you control the GPT, then of course you can simply use one that distills whatever it finds into useful information free of ads. If it is designed to be able to evaluate product listings, it can simply find you the product you are actually looking for, bypassing sponsored results. Once the technology reaches this level of capability, any trend toward wide adoption will pull the rug out from under most forms of web advertising.

I have zero faith in this direction. How will you pay for the GPT agent operations? These things are expensive to run, which means there are going to crop up cheaper ad-supported alternatives and we're back to square 1.

They’re expensive to train, not to run. A technical person could produce and run the kind of agent I’m talking about today on pro-sumer hardware. It would take a lot more effort to make something that non-technical people can use.

Well, sure. Technical people even today are able to run ad blockers and pi-holes and use DDG or Kagi or what have you. But what will non-technical people do? They will have to buy a device with a hardware accelerator, and ad people are going to get into that game just like they are with smart TVs today.

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