That's not what OP said.
Sites displayed ads. Then they decided, or found, that ads didn't bring in enough revenue, so they added paywalls.
Paywalls are annoying, they don't scale, and they break the promise of an open web. All that is sad.
Sites displayed ads. Then they decided, or found, that ads didn't bring in enough revenue, so they added paywalls.
Paywalls are annoying, they don't scale, and they break the promise of an open web. All that is sad.
An open web, to me, does not imply access to all websites.
> So much of the Internet is pay-walled now.
It’s lamenting that more is behind paywalls. Not that the paywalls exist.
Hard disagree. There are many more websites with paywalls that still exist today vs the ones that relied on ads or donations to survive.
>they break the promise of an open web
The open web was never a thing because it has always cost $$ to even connect to the web.
Sites that began with the question "how can we share what we know?" are what I call the open web. Sites that began with the question "how can we make money from* the web?" are what are killing it.
* I don't have a problem with sites that make money on the web. For all its problems, Amazon is a store that operates online. That's wonderful. But Facebook views the open web as a problem, locking a bunch of it behind uncrawlable access controls and pathologically self-serving algorithms. We used to share the public parts of our lives on our personal websites, usually for free as a part of the ISP subscription that we already paid for. Now all that happens on Facebook, and we've paid a multi-trillion-dollar tax for the privilege of doing what we used to do for free.
I get that it's sad, but I'd gladly pay a monthly sub to use a not enshitified internet, rather than the cluster fuck of ads and data stealing that exists in the modern web. Spending time on the 90s and early 2000s internet and comparing it to this dumpster fire makes me so darn sad.