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Comment by Vampiero | Hacker News Reader

But how can the poor websites sustain themselves

Quoting myself from a previous post, I think we can solve several problem at once; including funding the sites you visit. Now I just have to get off my lazy ass and build it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677216

“ I’d like to see more work put into finding ways to utilize the work from PoW. For example I have an idea to use Monero’s CPU-favoring PoW for PoW based DDoS protection as seen in Tor [0]. When a user accesses a website they are given a PoW challenge to complete. This challenge is actually for a share of mining rewards as in P2Pool. The mining reward share would go to the website operator. This would harmoniously improve several things about the web. First, it would help protect websites against layer-7 DDoS attacks. Second, this L7 DDoS protection reduces the webs dependence on companies such as Cloudflare, the internets biggest man-in-the-middle. Third, it provides a way to pay website owners costing the users a small amount of their computers time and energy in much the same way as ads do currently. Fourth, it reduces the webs dependence on advertising as the way to fund your website. Fifth and finally, it helps secure the web-native currency in which website operators would be paid and which others can use for whatever they want.

I think such a solution would be truly beautiful.

0: https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defens... “

You joke but it’s actually shocking how often you’ll hear the refrain repeated that without ubiquitous advertising we could not possibly have a free public internet.

Why is it shocking? It seems to be true - I for one am not ready to pay for most of the online services I use

Microtransactions would solve this.

If you’re on a mobile and have metered traffic, chances are you are wasting more money downloading ads than the website owner would make. If you could pay directly instead, both you and the owner would be better off. Zero tracking, zero ads.

I don’t think anybody had any success yet, but we can dream.

I keep hearing this for the last 20 years but I have never once seen a successful implementation of this. So in theory micro transactions are the cure - in reality it’s never been tried

Yeah, I mean, it sounds doable, but it could be a tarpit idea of course. Or maybe adtech is too powerful and we need to let it crash before something like this can be implemented.

It doesn't seem true to me. Pretty much everything worthwhile on the web is gratis (nonprofits, academia, governments, hobbyists, etc.) or paid. The ad supported stuff is basically mainstream news, social media, youtube, and SEO spam sites. The overwhelming majority is less than worthless.

I think YouTube and maybe online banking are the only things I would actually miss.

Online banking is a service you pay for, not ad funded. I suspect if youtube disappeared tomorrow, peertube might become more popular for hobbies. Maybe the more entertainment focused professionals would find a way to make money, or maybe people would realize that if they're going to pay for entertainment, they expect something more like netflix.

If advertising were to disappear overnight, I'd argue the internet would go on.

First, there was an internet before there were ads. When there's a need there's a way and BitTorrent and Napster taught us that P2P is feasible when the users care about it.

Then there's the issue of competitive advantage. If the newspaper from the next town over has a website then my local newspaper has to have a website too. So the incentives would switch from "I'll finance this service with ads" to "this website costs money but that's another cost of doing business".

And finally, people do pay for services. Patreon and Wikipedia are examples where a bunch of users provide the funds for those who can't/won't pay for a service.

Would all services survive? No. And it would certainly be a different experience. But I believe an internet driven by a mixture of fans and sensible economic strategy wouldn't be a bad thing.

There wasn't really an internet before ads though.

p2p is feasible but you still need someone to produce the content that you're trading between yourselves.

> There wasn't really an internet before ads though.

You must be very young, or have forgotten?

The Internet (and the Web also) existed well before ads. Advertising (all commercial use) was forbidden.

The Internet existed and was much better. All content was from people who cared about it, not because they were exploiting you for ads. The glory days of the Internet was before ads were legal.

I don't know how old you are so I may be very young but I'm in my 40s and was on the internet in the early 90s and it was covered in ads then. It was about as early as you could get on the internet and not be part of a university or government contractor. You believe the glory days of the internet were the 70s and 80s?

And no one stops to ask how the internet sustained itself from the years 1995 to 2005. Or big search engines, for that matter. The answer is that they were smaller and their revenue was based on selling real things, not constant hassle and attention-grabbing. The internet was not an ad hellscape back then simply because every single market and every single sector was smaller. It's big now because tech giants are supercharged growth-addicted behemoths.

It was better when it was smaller. Pretty much everything is in some stage of enshittification.

The internet sustained itself during those times with Ads. Doubleclick was started in 95. Do you not remember pop ups, pop unders, banner ads on every site?

Ads have always been part of the commercial internet and I'd argue they were far worse back then.

Punch the monkey.

The reason Google started off so well was because adverts were non existent, then just relevant text on the side. Compare to altavista, excite, hit it etc it was a beacon of calm.

The linked page proposes to switch from behavioral ads to contextual ads:

> Ads could still be targeted contextually—based on the content of the page you’re currently viewing—without collecting or exposing sensitive information about you. This shift would not only protect individual privacy but also reduce the power of the surveillance industry.

Organized P2P networks can/should be used enable hosting

> Organized P2P networks can/should be used enable hosting

This is financial engineering. Someone still needs to pay for the metal and electricity.

Yeah? People do that for fun. A $160 minipc is capable of serving 1Gb/s of web traffic without breaking a sweat (limited by far by the NIC, and for most people, their Internet connection). At a 20W TDP even at 20¢/kWh you're looking at ~$3/month to drive it full tilt.

If I'm reading it right, the wikimedia grafana indicates they're usually under 20 Gb/s for reference.

I suspect there is substantial overlap between those of us who lament at consumers being unwilling to pay trivial sums for ad-free services and those of us who think people will spend even a hundred dollars on web-connected minipcs.

Consumers do pay for services (c.f. Netflix, Spotify, Steam. All are trivial to pirate but do billions in revenue). Some ad-supported services price dump onto the market, distorting it. Others are actually worthless. In any case, my point was these days computers are so absurdly powerful that the resource cost for a distributed web would be trivial. Even bargain bin low-power computers can handle millions of users.

Let them die.

I support the immediate end of all advertising,

but honestly, yeah, there's a lot of business models that wouldn't work without them, and some of those businesses make useful things.

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