Mozilla assumes ads are required.
Ad blockers assume ads are not required.
Ad blockers are probably more popular than Firefox.
The original web did not have targeted ads and did not require ads to exist. It has never faced an existential threat due to "not enough data collection and targeted advertising".
Ad blockers are correct.
The web is not TV. At least it did not begin that way. The above is from the mid-1990s when the web was nothing like TV, not even close. The first paragraph is prophetic.
For a "non-profit" organisation, Mozilla is extremely focused on making/keeping the web a source of profits for a selected few.
Giant websites calling themselves "tech companies" are nothing like newspapers. Newspapers sold a product: journalism. Readers paid for newspapers. These giant websites do not sell a product. They do not hire journalists to produce news. These websites are free. If they chanrged for access few people would pay. They use the products of other peoples' labor as bait to lure in ad targets because the product of their own labor has no such value, it draws no significant audience. They are intermediaries, middlemen.
Mozilla wants to encourage and protect this behaviour, not change it. Make ads "private". Mozilla is along for the ride. Keep the money flowing.
If newspapers are your model of a better alternative - pre internet, newspapers were funded largely by advertising. Yes, they also took subs and sales, but they could not operate on that alone. A very large amount of product and service discovery -not just consumer, but B2B -happened by means of ads (including classifieds) in newspapers and professional magazines. Have a look at a 19th century issue of "The Engineer" or "The Builder", it's very enlightening.
If we want to get rid of the current internet giants, we need to figure out what can replace them so effectively that businesses dump them like they did the newspapers.
Ads are the wrong monetization model for the web. Instead of paying for information directly, you are now paying for information by buying something physical (most ads are about physical items). In this resource-limited world, this is clearly ridiculous.
Yes! If our culture(s) weren't so damned full of pure consumerism, forgetting the first 'R' in Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, we'd potentially be living in a healthier ecosystem.
And honestly, having gone from living with a hoarder to living with a tad more than essentials where I can see the damned floor in my house, it's such a f-ing relief.
The main problem with ads is... I do not want them.
My computer, my electricity, my network, my ISP contract, my privacy, my life and my decision.
This is a fork of Firefox that I support:
And exactly: I reject C. I reject the monetization of the web. It didn't need to happen; we just wanted it to happen in our greed. We bit the apple. Money is the root of all evil. It ruins everything.
This means that the standard information wants to be free/free software arguments ultimately have costs to cover (like, you used to need to pay for GNU tools to cover the cost of postage and storage).
Any approach that ignores this economics is just gonna fail (and that would be sad).
I mean, we call social media companies social media companies despite them being ad funded.
We call newspapers newspapers despite them being ad funded.
We call sports teams sports teams despite them being ad funded.
There are other business models out there.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/news_hole
We could just return to a culture of paying for things (that are conspicuously not tracked) and this whole imposition of advertising in our daily consumption can go away. But the vast majority of people simply don't care.
People say how can new products reach people, but the solution to that problem isn't ads but platforms/websites that catalog new products and allow for easy discovery.
Ads actually make the problem of finding new products worse because you only see a fraction of new products if you consume ads, primarily those from companies that already have lots of money to invest into ads.
Temporarily, before they inevitably add the ads back in even for paying users.
If Mozilla produce software, funded by search engines, funded by ads, funded by laundry detergent manufacturers, are they a laundry detergent company?
The original web is irrelevant because it didn't sustain large economies. It's like comparing radio hobbyists to the central TV station, the economics change when you have to actually pay employees and serve a mass market.
A large number of us wish that we could go back to a web that didn't exist primarily to sustain large economies. Back to a web that existed for academics and enthusiasts, a web where modern HN discussions would have been ranked in the lower half of quality instead of the top 5%.
That web existed as late as 2010 (already as a bit of an enclave, but a thriving one). It was killed by ad-funded social media and some of us are still bitter about it.
But it also strikes me as very odd if not elitist to say you'd wish for a web when it consisted of academics and enthusiasts. Because for everyone who doesn't come from money or academia, like me, the fact that there's a real economy underpinning the web now means I have a job that actually feeds my family. (I in particular don't work for an ad company for what it's worth).
It's one major business model that keeps the lights on in a lot of places and to say we should all be enthusiasts, who in this industry do a lot of work and get almost no compensation just doesn't work for most people. And is also just bad for software in general.
It's also possible to use a computer network for advertising. For example, putting ads one every page of every website so when a www user is reading some noncommercial page, ads are everywhere. Or when a www user is communicating about noncommercial topics over someone else's website,^1 ads are everywhere.
1. A dumb idea because of "tech" company surveillance and ads
IMHO, the two are not mutually inclusive. Perhaps there are only so many widgets that can be sold over the web. But with ads, there is no limit. The ads are not there to provide "free" services despite the messaging from Silicon Valley. The ads are there so that so-called "tech" companies can make money. They do not even have any widgets to sell. They have nothing that web users will pay for. Thus, surveillance and ads.
A common retort every time someone mentions that the original web had no ads usually goes something like "The early web sucked" or "I don't wan't to go back to the early web". But that is not the point of mentioning the original web. With today's hardware, there is no going back. The internet is incredibly fast now. It does not have to suck anymore.
The point of mentioning the early web without all the ads is that bogus claims by entities like Mozilla that "the web needs ads to survive" or by Google that they are "making the web faster" while still delivering same/more ads are pure nonsense. The web does not need ads. Ads are what makes the web slow. Google deliberately adds delay to webpages when they "load" so ad auctions can take place.
At the same time, it is common to HN commenters reminiscing about the early web and complaining about the current web.