Hacker News Reader

The line you quote is present tense, not future tense.

In fact, you even agree, advertising has been made the only driver, in present and past tenses. This is correct. It is.

I think we can all agree, none of us want it to be like this.

The line you quote is not - and nothing else in the piece I see - a statement that Mozilla is advocating for advertising being the only driver in future. They're saying "society has chosen this model, we can't ignore it, so here's our approach on making it better".

Does anything in the piece you consider "compromised", - because? What? It's compromised for accurately stating present reality? Albeit a reality we don't particularly enjoy? How is that compromised, exactly? - obstruct or block other economic drivers from becoming dominant? Does it prevent crowd funding, patronage, subscriptions or any other economic model you can think of?

Sure, effort spent on making adtech less crappy means that effort is not being spent on actively promoting some other driver, so I can see lost opportunity costs here, but you haven't actually named an alternate economic model they should invest in.

> but you haven't actually named an alternate economic model they should invest in

It is their job to find alternate models, their glory and ongoing relevance if they do. Otherwise somebody else will do it sooner or later (the status-quo is untenable) but it would imply needless waste and a sad requiem for an organization that has been loved by many for a long time.

As they continue seeking "...a balance between commercial profit and public benefit" my 2 cents contribution is to (re)state the obvious: the adtech billions are only a tiny part of the commercial world, let alone the public interest at large.

Even if ads must be improved for some reason, I don't see why Mozilla can come up with a solution that is only marginally better than what Google and Facebook have proposed the same group as Mozilla (PATCG). And PPA was jointly developed with Facebook, a company that has a monopoly on advertisements on its own platform.

> I think we can all agree, none of us want it to be like this.

Some people must want this, how else could it end up this way?

Basically all the people that have the revealed preference that they’ll however grudgingly pay with their attention than tossing down cash for most content.

These people do exist, but there's also the strong friction against filling out all your personal information (including credit card info) into every or entertainment site you thought interesting and then agree to some term with auto-renewal, etc. etc. Like maybe it just had the one good article/video/recipe or whatever. This is really an unworkable solution. For a pay-per-use internet sites to work, the payment has to be cheap, easy, trustworthy, and fast. This does not yet exist.

Micropayments have been tried through third party networks but they’ve never worked. Mental transaction costs is one explanation. People want “free” is probably the other.

Saying "people want free" strikes me as a warped view of the dynamic. It always seems presumptuous to me to think that people would be willing to pay to read what you have to say (or watch your video, etc.) merely because you said it. Most authors online aren't Socrates. Ads on the web are mostly on sites centered around idle distractions/entertainment. People pay exactly what that sort of "content" is worth: nothing.

> Micropayments have been tried through third party networks but they’ve never worked.

Never worked? Or weren't good enough (fast, trustworthy, easy, cheap) for the purpose? I don't think its an easy problem to solve.

People who want it to be like this are those who make money from it being like this.

It's the same for every other unliked aspect of life. Poverty, war, famine - they all exist because that condition makes some other group of people richer than they otherwise would be.

I am aware some parts of the World consider this observation to be a statement of socialist or communist support. It isn't meant to be.

Advertising is no different. There's a lot of money in the adtech business, and it drives and is driven by a large consumer economy. Most of the people working in it hate being advertised to (being "victims"), but are happy to make money from it (being "perpetrators"). Most of us don't get to make money from advertising, so are more likely to see it for the problems it imposes on us.

Morally there are huge differences, but logically you can see parallels in other disliked industries: arms dealing, modern slavery, enterprise IT sales...

The difference is that we are not talking about advertising as a sandboxed economic activity, but digital advertising on a common internet platform that is evolving into the only platform for practically everything that happens. Old style phone, radio, print communications are dissapearing in real time, everything is routed digitally over the internet.

Adtech with its "move fast and break things" morality conquered the internet hill, but it cannot defend that hill for much longer. Integrating vital functionalities for the digital economy (identity, payments, exchange of sensitive data etc.) cannot all be driven and controlled by adtech interests and designs. The dog is much, much bigger than the tail.

If Mozilla cannot help precipitate the new normal it should at least make sure it has ongoing relevance when the inevitable happens.

So this is a big problem then. Potentially insurmountable. There are in fact people then that want a privacy-invading ad-soaked shit internet and profit wildly from it. These people have outsized power and every incremental win leads to more power that results in more wins in a positive feedback loop.

How can this be stopped?

> How can this be stopped?

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/...

Power comes from the people and can be taken away by the people. Modern surveillance and control technology will make this harder but ultimately the possibility revolution is always there.

> People who want it to be like this are those who make money from it being like this.

There's no reason why this is true. Advertising means you look at stuff in exchange for a service you don't pay for, and removes friction in visiting sites. Lots of people want that. How many would choose a world where you pay for every website you look at, other than payments processors charging transaction fees?

> Poverty, war, famine - they all exist because that condition makes some other group of people richer than they otherwise would be.

Capitalism is the thing that's lifted more and more of the world out of poverty, so I don't see this being the case. People got wealthy by making and selling stuff other people need and want. That's fine. The key to lifting people out of poverty instead of starving millions of people to death in the name of equality is: inequality isn't important; the base level of poverty being raised is.

> and removes friction in visiting sites.

Advertising seriously increases that friction.

> How many would choose a world where you pay for every website you look at

Nobody, but that's not the alternative. That's not how it worked before advertising came in and degraded the web.

> Advertising means you look at stuff in exchange for a service you don't pay for, and removes friction in visiting sites. Lots of people want that.

Except the "free" here is a lie because the advertisers pay for you and they are only going to do that when they can (on average) get their money back and more. There is no free lunch, just a lunch paid with the money you were robbed.

Even if only 1% of people want this it can still be a shitty situation.

So far as I can tell, the article also ignores one extremely important distinction: that between "advertising" and "targeted advertising".

The ads that funded newspapers for decades were not targeted. They had no specific information about the individual readers' buying habits (as opposed to aggregate data). They had to put ads in that they felt would be the most broadly relevant to all the people reading that newspaper.

So, too, with the early internet ads: they were "targeted" based on the content they were served next to. They had no information about the individual people browsing those websites.

Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.

One codicil to your argument. Magazine advertising was very much targeted, just not at the individual level and specialty internet sites can do the same. Vogue did not run the same ads as Byte.

> Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.

Sadly I don't think this is true, there's still money to made by nefarious actors selling your data to other companies.

For example car companies selling your behavioral data to insurance companies to increase your rates, messaging platforms and financial institutions selling your profile to airlines and ecommerce businesses to adjust their prices based on how much they think you're willing to pay, etc.

The only way to stop this behavior is to make it illegal to do anything with personal data without explicit, revocable and completely optional consent. GDPR does this right, though it suffers from lack of enforcement.

I hope that some day we'll look at these abuses of personal data the same way we'd look at our banks if they decided to send some of our money to insurance companies outright.

That's true—there are still some places where such data can be used, even without targeted advertising.

However, from everything I can see, targeted advertising is massively broader, and if it is eliminated, a large percentage of the companies currently collecting the data will lose their primary reasons for doing so. The car, air, and insurance companies that might still want to buy it will not be enough to sustain nearly the kind of industry around collecting it that exists now.

It is even very possible that the precipitous drop of money in the system will cause its collapse, even if those few industries might still prefer to have access to the data.

The generator of that reality distortion field is "stuff you get without money changing hands". That is an extremely powerful energy source. It's incredibly hard to find an alternative that people like anywhere near as much -- despite much effort.

As Churchill said of democracy, advertising is the worst system except for all of the others. It would be great if they can come up with a good alternative that will scale to the billions of people who want stuff and dislike exchanging money. That leaves attention and ... ?

Adtech dominance goes beyond "stuff you don't pay". Plenty of non-commercial entities did and published stuff for free on the internet before ad money became dominant. For instance, the first forums I socialized on were all individual-owned or association-owned, and so were the webgames I played.

However, these entities became marginalized quickly through the creation of walled gardens, Google search discrimination pushing non-commercial websites out of the internet, and ad companies sabotaging open standards (e.g. RSS) and comitees (anyone hears about W3C these days?).

> As Churchill said of democracy, advertising is the worst system except for all of the others.

The analogy doesn't really work, because ad-tech is the reason other systems get stiffled. Democracies wouldn't look so good if their politicians got assassinated by neighbouring dictators whenever they feel like it.

> For instance, the first forums I socialized on were all individual-owned or association-owned, and so were the webgames I played.

You can still make these. Why do people choose platforms with ads on over these things you remember, do you think?

The crux of the question is "how people find internet resources". And the answer is that, generally, ad-driven companies have no interest in showing their users this kind of stuff, and have taken over pretty much every entrypoint.

For instance, if I was to build a webgame, there is zero chance it could be found through Google nowadays. If I made an app, I would have to plead with Google's or Apple's store.

I could share it on e.g. Reddit, Twitter or FB, but that would be a tiny trickle of users, and the odds of them staying on my platform and its associated forums would be extrelemy low, because the users aren't actually looking for it when they see it.

Also it wouldn't be large enough to be their daily doomscrolling experience (and there is zero chance it could be integrated to it using e.g. RSS feeds). On top of that, any site not algorithmically optimizing content shown for maximum addiction would not capture users in the long run.

Guess what option I have left to show my thing to people? Pay the ad-tech business. That's not something easy for an association or an individual who aren't looking to create revenue streams.

Okay, so what's your solution? People don't use search engines because they have ads; they use them for another reason. Can you compete with that reason?

I shared my opinion about a solution elsewhere on the tread, but in my opinion change won't happen without antitrust.

> "stuff you get without money changing hands". That is an extremely powerful energy source

Indeed, and this is something we didn't know before the "move fast and break things" phase but now we do, also the side-effects.

But my argument is that the stuff we get with money changing hands dwarfs the novelty of "freebies-for-data" by orders or magnitude.

And for that broader economy to properly integrate into the digital age its just not possible to keep basing the internet infrastructure on adtech.

Well, I don’t have the option of walking into a store, watching some ads, and walking out of the store with whatever I want.

I totally get it and some people are happy to produce online stuff without direct compensation—and a handful can attract enough cash to live on from fans. But you can bet there would be plenty of screaming on here if most content went behind hard paywalls. And people here probably on average make a lot more money than the average member of society.

If you're correct, and I fear that you are, then that means there's no room on the web for people like me. Which, I guess, has already been made really clear over the last couple of years.

I'm not arguing against your statements here, just crying in my beer over the loss.

> If Mozilla wants to continue being relevant (as I currently write this on a firefox browser, I surely hope they do) they need to escape the adtech black hole and its reality distortion field.

Nobody is going to escape the adtech blackhole before the US govt. actually does its job and does to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and a few others what it did to Standard Oil or AT&T.

We're talking about entities so tentacular and rich that they can (and did) run whatever service you provide for free for decades, just to kill you and gain control. No legitimate business can resist that.

I don't like ads either, but what is the alternative? Since content costs money to produce and host, there must be a revenue source somewhere. Is the solution paywalls?

Personally, I'm fine paying for some ad-free content. But Mozilla wants much of the internet to be free (as in free beer) and open, so an internet which replaces all advertising with paywalls is not their vision. Advertising without tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers sounds better than advertising with tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers.

I'd love for their to be another driver, but so far nobody has come with a broadly applicable revenue model other that paying for content or viewing ads. Suggesting that "just delete advertising" without providing an alternative is feasible is patently false and everything that follows is compromised.

Perhaps one day we will live in a post-capitalist utopia, but in the meantime making online advertising less shitty would be nice.

The world simply does not need profit-motivated online content. The internet can be a place for physical business to interact with customers and individuals/groups to share their ideas and art. None of that requires ad funding. The only thing that does require advertising for revenue (and is of any value) is reporting work, and they're struggling in the current model anyway. What great conveniences are you worried about losing? Social media sites? Forums existed without any funding but donations. Maps? OSM and Apple Maps exist. YouTube? Free video hosting is more expensive to operate than other media, but I'd bet nerds would rig up some near-seamless webtorrent protocol for embedding and sharing video with distributed load. The people making YouTube/online content? They're mostly fan-supported via patron relationships anyway. If advertising were banned overnight there would be maybe a month of readjustments, a few tech companies would have to pivot, and then life would go on but be a bit less shitty.

> Advertising without tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers sounds better than advertising with tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers.

It does! But that can be achieved with contextual advertising rather than advertising that relies on spying on everybody.

Also, I don't think that Mozilla's proposal eliminates the tracking and surveillance. It just makes the browser itself the one doing the tracking and surveillance.

How much of the "content" (what a disgustingly dystopian word to describe people's creative output) that you "consume" (ugh again) only today is paid and how much is already made for free and just hosted on platforms that profit from it?

> I'd love for their to be another driver

There is. Humans are literally driven by their creative urges.