Infrastructure costs money. There's no way around it. I'm all up for banning ads. But there should be another viable business model to replace it.
Infrastructure costs money. There's no way around it. I'm all up for banning ads. But there should be another viable business model to replace it.
I don't think we have a right to a business model. Either you figure one out for your particular site (selling access to the website, donations, etc) or you don't and stop and either is ok.
For Google, they figured out it's ads... So is it ok?
Ostensibly not, if it is outlawed.
I think that's revisionism. Social media existed before online advertising. Usenet was quite massive and vibrant, countless IRC servers were maintained by volunteers, web-based forums covered pretty much the same ground as Reddit does today. All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses such as ISPs that actively wanted the internet to be interesting because they were making money by selling access to it.
The thing that changed in the mid-2000s was that we found ways to not only provide these services, but extract billions of dollars while doing it. Good for Mark Zuckerberg, but I doubt the internet would be hurting without that.
If it can only be funded via ads, it shouldn't be funded and is not essential to exist.
Banning ads? That's just so authoritarian and absurd. I hope you never become king
Regulation is freedom. Think of ads powering the web as current day's lead in gas.
Have we come to such a low cultural point that ads are seen as some kind of basic human right?
Fuck ads. What's absurd is tolerating them and the damage they do to media, consumers, kids, lesser and/or more honest businesses, culture, products, and so on all the way to the Windows and macOS system UIs.
Freedom of speech is a basic human right.
Ads are speech.
We already ban tobacco ads on tv (in the us) is their freedom of speech violated?
I don’t think you need to count companies being able to put any message out there as free speech.
Ads aren't free speech, they are the absence of it, because you are paid for a preselected speech.
I work in ads... :-/
I think HGttG had a good solution for that involving a large spaceship.
What do you do? Honest question
Work in something else. I make significantly more doing poison ivy removal than I ever did or was ever going to working in tech.
Tell that to the tobacco industry yeah?
Yeah hospitals cost money
HTTP Error 402: Payment Required was created for a reason. Maybe we need to rethink micropayments.
There’s nothing wrong with macro payments either.
Five dollars a month to subscribe or whatever. If people get the value out of it, you can get them to pay it.
Sounds good to me.
Why? Serious question. The internet was a mistake.
How can your question be serious if you already decided the internet was a mistake? I don't think it was. Far from it.
What part of an endless sea of SEO spam, AI slop, malware, polarized astroturf, and addictive-by-design walled gardens strikes you as the win? Seriously, where is the win?
But the internet is so much more than that, isn't it?
It used to be.
Honestly, some of the shit with ClawdBot^W MoltBot^W OpenClaw and molt.church and molt.book has been some quality entertainment, enabled largely by the Internet. And it's AI slop but that only seems to matter when one of them gets miffed about its PR being rejected and posts an unhinged blog post about the maintainer who rejected said PR. And in a "comedy equals tragedy plus time" way, it's pretty easy to laugh at that, too.