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Comment by BizarroLand | Hacker News Reader

I would gladly pay an extra $20/m for a Disney style internet fast pass where I can browse any site that is subscribed to the service without ads, cookie preferences already set, no login or login managed by the extension for the fast pass service, and maybe a search provider that allows me to filter out SSO spam sites and adwhores like Meta and Google, and where some significant portion of my monthly pay is sent to the participating sites I browse.

My only overriding and most prominent concern is that given how every other webservice has been, that once they have sufficient ownership of the space they will increase the cost, likely significantly, and then they will likely add in their own ads on top of everything else.

It will take a literal once in a century genius to make something like this that actually works and that companies will latch onto.

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There are enormous piles of money looming around every corner seeking a return on investment. If you have users that are enjoying a service, one of those piles of money can buy out the owner, double the price, implement ads, and sell all the private data. The bet they are making is it will take longer for the userbase to quit than it will take to make back their investment.

Every popular / beloved service is a target for these giant piles of cash. The fact that lots of people like it is de facto proof that it's underpriced, or over-resourced, or coddles its users with too much content. According to the finance industry, a stable business relationship should have the userbase reluctantly concluding that they have no other option, gritting their teeth and opening their wallet - and that's the sort of maximally profitable entity that a giant pile of cash will leave alone, letting it just exist, as a business.

I think Kagi is kind of making this happen currently with search. Not sure how their adoption number are going, but people are willing to pay $$ for better search with no "sponsored content" rising to the top.

I'm hesitant about a lot of this stuff because it's very easy to get to a place where we let net neutrality degrade even more than it already has. Part of the way that platforms indoctrinate us to accept that paying extra for quality of service or "fast lanes" for specific content types are "necessary" is to degrade the existing experience so much that it seems inevitable.

Good catch. I didn't even think about the fast lanes fiasco. I don't know why businesses have decided that since they have connected to the internet that the internet owes them.

It should be a public utility. It should be as ad free as reasonable. It should not track you.

The internet should be a lot of things that it currently isn't all because rent-seeking money and power grubbing bastards have too many of the strings and love pulling them like they're pulling their puds.

I swear by Kagi and will never go back (until they inevitably start including ads after a bad earnings report)

Then there's the TV streaming problem where the three shows (or sites) you're interested in viewing regularly belong to three different subscription services, and they're jealously set against uniting. I guess that's like the same problem as individual paywalled sites, but bigger.

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