8 ms·

>Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such? And nobody rea

>Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such? And nobody really cared. People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake.

auggierose 4y ago
That's the same as saying that commercialisation of life was a mistake. I am not disagreeing, but let's just call it for what it is.
antiterra 4y ago
Back then people also got hit with ludicrous internet bills the moment their site had large scale use and banner ads were the only real path to managing that cost. Adding a paywall would have created a severe amount of bad will.
- sethammons 4y ago
  Lots of sites just turned off after a given amount of load and you would have to try again later, usually the following day. I think that is an appropriate trade off. It is one reason why mirror sites popped up.
- impossiblefork 4y ago
  These days though, that could be solved with things resembling bittorrent for websites etcetera though. I think some fairly complete solutions already exist in the video space, like peertube.
- convolvatron 4y ago
  the problem isn't that moving bits is too expensive. its that moving bits is _almost_ free. you would think the best model would be each of us ponying up a couple dollars a month to support the whole thing but in the US at least we don't trust anything unless its delivered to us by a long chain of scammers 'innovating'.
0dayz 4y ago
I really would disagree on how the internet was better, sure you could find a few people that were saints that just relesed things for free, but the internet back then was really barren and it was very slow to see new releases of said content and the only alternative was to pirate. Do I wish we had better money option back in the day? Yes. Most importantly I wish another model of how content is stored was implemented to ensure maximum diversity of said content, like specialized sites for different types of video content.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >but the internet back then was really barren The internet back then was a forest into which you couldn't really see, you just went dumpster diving and it was an adventure. Today's internet is barren, with most content centered around Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Youtube, and various commercial propaganda campaign sites known colloquially as journalism. That is a fucking desert, a wasteland.
  - 0dayz 4y ago
    I do agree and disagree, yes there were more diverse websites for sure, but quite a lot of it were just copies of others (flash games is a good example of how many different hosts there were with almost nothing unique to it). And two of the examples you brought up are social media focused, with one also being heavily focused on content discovery. And the places you did find was very slow with new content being added and limited because as I said you could mostly only get the juicy stuff through piracy (as most things was still heavily reliant on offline distribution).
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      >(flash games That was not the old internet but already the current one.
  - jmye 4y ago
    That seems like a real romanticization of the early internet - comparing, essentially, Geocities to a forest and simultaneously calling the plethora of content-creator sites available today (sites like Substack, not 'influencer' brands on IG) a "fucking desert, a wasteland" seems sort of disingenuous. Sure, if you never leave FB or Reddit, you're not going to see a ton of diversity. But it's still all there if you can get more than a page into search results, or put in literally the exact same level of effort you used to have to put in when AltaVista and Lycos were out giving horrendous search results. Even on Reddit, if you spend your time on what used to be the defaults versus finding the niche subs, you're going to have a vastly different understanding of forest/wasteland.
JohnBooty 4y ago
People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. I miss the old days too. And even now that independently-made, non-ad-supported content is what I prefer most. Spent a lot of years creating it myself. But let's not be naive. Not all art or journalism can be created that way. There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money. For example, imagine the sorts of investigative journalism where somebody might spend months or years researching a story. One that might not even pan out. That's not something you can realistically do, part-time, for free, while earning a living doing something else as your day job. Expecting everything to be free, and also ad-free, because it was created by some hobbyist in their spare time while they do something else for a living severely restricts the amount of people who can create and the types of things that can be created.
- jhoechtl 4y ago
  Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) There are studies where money ruins altruism and pure joy of creating sthg. has to be replaced with a payment which becomes according to Herzberg a hygiene factor and wears out. The --internet-- www as we know it - give it back!
  - chii 4y ago
    > Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) but it eventually had paid sponsorships from companies that make money off it.
  - linsomniac 4y ago
    Linux is a VERY different thing than investigative journalism. I can't think of a single bit of investigative journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned an entire industry, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough. Content costs money to make. Yes, sometimes give via self-funding of the content (without advertisement, like by working a job), and that's fantastic. But we also need a way to support the content that we like, and we can't expect everyone to be able to give.
mtts 4y ago
That’s a rose tinted view. For some fields (not unsurprisingly nerdy ones) the quality of the amateur content was good enough. For other fields it was abysmal. I remember trying to look up scholarly material on English literature in 1998 or so and not being able to find anything that was even remotely decent, for example. And it could have been worse: among the amateurs that put history related material online, crackpots and conspiracy theorists were (and, in fact, are) vastly over represented.
- everdrive 4y ago
  The highs are higher, but the lows are much lower too. I wish there were a way to preserve the best of both.
- Touche 4y ago
  It's ok that some content not be on the internet. The internet didn't have to become the epicenter of everything. Amateur content and communication was a fine outcome for what the internet could have been. Scholarly material could remain in journals.
  - abenga 4y ago
    > Scholarly material could remain in journals. And remain inaccessible to large parts of the world population aside from people in ivory towers with journal subscriptions?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
scarface74 4y ago
> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. When were these glory days that people made good content - news and/or analysis for free? Blog spam has been a thing since before Google when sites would have hidden text to appear on AltaVists. There was the X1 pop under windows and the punch the monkey banner ads early on.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Gamefaqs. Someone typed out the entire script of Deus Ex. For free. Don't fuck with gamers they are a force beyond human comprehension.
- b112 4y ago
  When were these glory days that people made good content - news and/or analysis for free? There were endless free sites, without advertising, back in the day. Many were people installing apache, and putting simple html/text pages up. Free content outnumbered anything commerical for a decade, including blog spam. Altavista being bad at filtering, is not relevant, becuase you're stating the problem, which gave rise to google. People could no longer find valid content, due to a tiny number of bad actors.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    There was content. But most of it was useless. Hobby level MySpace level, GeoCities stuff. When was this decade? Navigator came out in 1994. By 2004, the web was fully commercialized.
    - b112 4y ago
      The web isn't "fully commercialized" today even. Endless hobby sites, non-profit groups, and things such as clubs(bike clubs, etc), are completely free of any commerical intent or advertising. Even government sites are ad free, non-profit, non-commercial by their very nature. In 2004, before modern-class smartphones, before endless smaller companies even had a web presence, before facebook was a big thing, there was still mostly ad-free, commercial free content. And I should add here, paying for a computer and internet link at home, or paying for a server in a datacentre, or buying a pre-configured wordpress site, without ads, are all commerical free endeavours. Otherwise, nothing was ever commerical free, because everyone always paid for resources to provide content in some way. Paying for resources, does not make a thing commerical. You and I have a very different view of the past. Were you on the web pre-2000? I ask, because I don't understand the difference in our opinions.
mikae1 4y ago
> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. I agree. But the web was smaller then and I'd guess that in absolute numbers the amount of personal websites and blogs is greater now. They're just drenched in a tsunami of noise and search engines won't help you find them. > The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake. And inevitable as capitalism has a tendency to commodify almost everything, sooner or later.
- Touche 4y ago
  I'm not sure that's really true. I remember looking at pages of search results on Star Wars websites. All built from scratch, none of them had ads. All of them much better than for ex. Wookieepedia despite having less content. I think you would have a hard time finding more than a handful of websites (on any given niche topic) like this today.
rgrieselhuber 4y ago
I don’t even have a problem with commercialization, it’s just that the incentives need to be clear. Everyone defaulted to ad supported content because it was just the default. It takes a lot more time to build up your own revenue base but I think this is an important trend going forward. Kagi.com in the world of search is one example of a long-overdue approach to that market.
paxys 4y ago
You can continue to stick to your 90s hobbyist and research circles of the internet if you want. They haven't gone anywhere. The fact that billions more are online and doing their own thing now is not a mistake.
- rchaud 4y ago
  "Doing their own thing" is quite a big claim. Facebook and others would not have had teams of psychologists and neuroscientists on staff to maximize user's screen time if they were OK with people doing their own thing.
di456 4y ago
> The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake. The irony off posting this on a VC website that make money off the commercialisation of the internet.
- granshaw 4y ago
  The amount of tech folks that don’t realize how much their jobs and lifestyles only exist because of the commercialization of the internet and “capitalism”…
  - Touche 4y ago
    It's not an anticapitalist take to say that the internet would have been better without commercialization. There's a world outside of the internet. There's programming jobs outside of the internet. Not everything has to be commercialized. And that doesn't mean commercialization is inherently bad.
    - JohnBooty 4y ago
      I also don't think most internet-adjacent jobs don't even involve toxic, intrusive advertising. Maybe this is wildly presumptuous but it feels like most of the people complaining about "commercialization" seem to hate the toxic cycle of intrusive ads and algorithm-optimized content that is supported by those ads. Certainly, that's what the folks quoted in the linked article are railing against. Do the people railing against "commercialization" of the internet really hate the fact that you can like, order dog food or schedule a trip to the dentist online? Or do they just hate the toxic ad crap?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  You're right, it is ironic. But the fact remains, HN is free to use, the plugs on the front-page are clearly flagged so you don't have to read them, and apart from those the site is ad-free and looks and behaves a lot like the old internet.
layer8 4y ago
> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. People can still do that, and many still do. Possibly more do now than back then, in absolute numbers. The problem is search and discoverability, because of all the other, ad-driven content, and ad-driven search. More people would choose to not publish on ad-driven platforms if the alternatives (e.g. personal websites) would get them the same or better reach.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Also to add, when people made their own content, maybe a few 100,000 saw it. For the most part the ISP bill was something they could pay. But if I made a video and suddenly a billion people view it I could be bankrupted.
  - layer8 4y ago
    Usually your throughput just gets throttled once you’ve reached your bandwidth limit.

auggierose 4y ago

That's the same as saying that commercialisation of life was a mistake. I am not disagreeing, but let's just call it for what it is.

antiterra 4y ago

Back then people also got hit with ludicrous internet bills the moment their site had large scale use and banner ads were the only real path to managing that cost. Adding a paywall would have created a severe amount of bad will.

sethammons 4y ago
Lots of sites just turned off after a given amount of load and you would have to try again later, usually the following day. I think that is an appropriate trade off. It is one reason why mirror sites popped up.
impossiblefork 4y ago
These days though, that could be solved with things resembling bittorrent for websites etcetera though. I think some fairly complete solutions already exist in the video space, like peertube.
convolvatron 4y ago
the problem isn't that moving bits is too expensive. its that moving bits is _almost_ free. you would think the best model would be each of us ponying up a couple dollars a month to support the whole thing but in the US at least we don't trust anything unless its delivered to us by a long chain of scammers 'innovating'.

0dayz 4y ago

I really would disagree on how the internet was better, sure you could find a few people that were saints that just relesed things for free, but the internet back then was really barren and it was very slow to see new releases of said content and the only alternative was to pirate. Do I wish we had better money option back in the day? Yes. Most importantly I wish another model of how content is stored was implemented to ensure maximum diversity of said content, like specialized sites for different types of video content.

Dalewyn 4y ago
>but the internet back then was really barren The internet back then was a forest into which you couldn't really see, you just went dumpster diving and it was an adventure. Today's internet is barren, with most content centered around Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Youtube, and various commercial propaganda campaign sites known colloquially as journalism. That is a fucking desert, a wasteland.
- 0dayz 4y ago
  I do agree and disagree, yes there were more diverse websites for sure, but quite a lot of it were just copies of others (flash games is a good example of how many different hosts there were with almost nothing unique to it). And two of the examples you brought up are social media focused, with one also being heavily focused on content discovery. And the places you did find was very slow with new content being added and limited because as I said you could mostly only get the juicy stuff through piracy (as most things was still heavily reliant on offline distribution).
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    >(flash games That was not the old internet but already the current one.
- jmye 4y ago
  That seems like a real romanticization of the early internet - comparing, essentially, Geocities to a forest and simultaneously calling the plethora of content-creator sites available today (sites like Substack, not 'influencer' brands on IG) a "fucking desert, a wasteland" seems sort of disingenuous. Sure, if you never leave FB or Reddit, you're not going to see a ton of diversity. But it's still all there if you can get more than a page into search results, or put in literally the exact same level of effort you used to have to put in when AltaVista and Lycos were out giving horrendous search results. Even on Reddit, if you spend your time on what used to be the defaults versus finding the niche subs, you're going to have a vastly different understanding of forest/wasteland.

JohnBooty 4y ago

People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. I miss the old days too. And even now that independently-made, non-ad-supported content is what I prefer most. Spent a lot of years creating it myself. But let's not be naive. Not all art or journalism can be created that way. There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money. For example, imagine the sorts of investigative journalism where somebody might spend months or years researching a story. One that might not even pan out. That's not something you can realistically do, part-time, for free, while earning a living doing something else as your day job. Expecting everything to be free, and also ad-free, because it was created by some hobbyist in their spare time while they do something else for a living severely restricts the amount of people who can create and the types of things that can be created.

jhoechtl 4y ago
Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) There are studies where money ruins altruism and pure joy of creating sthg. has to be replaced with a payment which becomes according to Herzberg a hygiene factor and wears out. The --internet-- www as we know it - give it back!
- chii 4y ago
  > Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning) but it eventually had paid sponsorships from companies that make money off it.
- linsomniac 4y ago
  Linux is a VERY different thing than investigative journalism. I can't think of a single bit of investigative journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned an entire industry, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough. Content costs money to make. Yes, sometimes give via self-funding of the content (without advertisement, like by working a job), and that's fantastic. But we also need a way to support the content that we like, and we can't expect everyone to be able to give.

mtts 4y ago

That’s a rose tinted view. For some fields (not unsurprisingly nerdy ones) the quality of the amateur content was good enough. For other fields it was abysmal. I remember trying to look up scholarly material on English literature in 1998 or so and not being able to find anything that was even remotely decent, for example. And it could have been worse: among the amateurs that put history related material online, crackpots and conspiracy theorists were (and, in fact, are) vastly over represented.

everdrive 4y ago
The highs are higher, but the lows are much lower too. I wish there were a way to preserve the best of both.
Touche 4y ago
It's ok that some content not be on the internet. The internet didn't have to become the epicenter of everything. Amateur content and communication was a fine outcome for what the internet could have been. Scholarly material could remain in journals.
- abenga 4y ago
  > Scholarly material could remain in journals. And remain inaccessible to large parts of the world population aside from people in ivory towers with journal subscriptions?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

scarface74 4y ago

> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. When were these glory days that people made good content - news and/or analysis for free? Blog spam has been a thing since before Google when sites would have hidden text to appear on AltaVists. There was the X1 pop under windows and the punch the monkey banner ads early on.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Gamefaqs. Someone typed out the entire script of Deus Ex. For free. Don't fuck with gamers they are a force beyond human comprehension.
b112 4y ago
When were these glory days that people made good content - news and/or analysis for free? There were endless free sites, without advertising, back in the day. Many were people installing apache, and putting simple html/text pages up. Free content outnumbered anything commerical for a decade, including blog spam. Altavista being bad at filtering, is not relevant, becuase you're stating the problem, which gave rise to google. People could no longer find valid content, due to a tiny number of bad actors.
- scarface74 4y ago
  There was content. But most of it was useless. Hobby level MySpace level, GeoCities stuff. When was this decade? Navigator came out in 1994. By 2004, the web was fully commercialized.
  - b112 4y ago
    The web isn't "fully commercialized" today even. Endless hobby sites, non-profit groups, and things such as clubs(bike clubs, etc), are completely free of any commerical intent or advertising. Even government sites are ad free, non-profit, non-commercial by their very nature. In 2004, before modern-class smartphones, before endless smaller companies even had a web presence, before facebook was a big thing, there was still mostly ad-free, commercial free content. And I should add here, paying for a computer and internet link at home, or paying for a server in a datacentre, or buying a pre-configured wordpress site, without ads, are all commerical free endeavours. Otherwise, nothing was ever commerical free, because everyone always paid for resources to provide content in some way. Paying for resources, does not make a thing commerical. You and I have a very different view of the past. Were you on the web pre-2000? I ask, because I don't understand the difference in our opinions.

mikae1 4y ago

> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. I agree. But the web was smaller then and I'd guess that in absolute numbers the amount of personal websites and blogs is greater now. They're just drenched in a tsunami of noise and search engines won't help you find them. > The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake. And inevitable as capitalism has a tendency to commodify almost everything, sooner or later.

Touche 4y ago
I'm not sure that's really true. I remember looking at pages of search results on Star Wars websites. All built from scratch, none of them had ads. All of them much better than for ex. Wookieepedia despite having less content. I think you would have a hard time finding more than a handful of websites (on any given niche topic) like this today.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago

I don’t even have a problem with commercialization, it’s just that the incentives need to be clear. Everyone defaulted to ad supported content because it was just the default. It takes a lot more time to build up your own revenue base but I think this is an important trend going forward. Kagi.com in the world of search is one example of a long-overdue approach to that market.

paxys 4y ago

You can continue to stick to your 90s hobbyist and research circles of the internet if you want. They haven't gone anywhere. The fact that billions more are online and doing their own thing now is not a mistake.

rchaud 4y ago
"Doing their own thing" is quite a big claim. Facebook and others would not have had teams of psychologists and neuroscientists on staff to maximize user's screen time if they were OK with people doing their own thing.

di456 4y ago

> The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake. The irony off posting this on a VC website that make money off the commercialisation of the internet.

granshaw 4y ago
The amount of tech folks that don’t realize how much their jobs and lifestyles only exist because of the commercialization of the internet and “capitalism”…
- Touche 4y ago
  It's not an anticapitalist take to say that the internet would have been better without commercialization. There's a world outside of the internet. There's programming jobs outside of the internet. Not everything has to be commercialized. And that doesn't mean commercialization is inherently bad.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    I also don't think most internet-adjacent jobs don't even involve toxic, intrusive advertising. Maybe this is wildly presumptuous but it feels like most of the people complaining about "commercialization" seem to hate the toxic cycle of intrusive ads and algorithm-optimized content that is supported by those ads. Certainly, that's what the folks quoted in the linked article are railing against. Do the people railing against "commercialization" of the internet really hate the fact that you can like, order dog food or schedule a trip to the dentist online? Or do they just hate the toxic ad crap?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
denton-scratch 4y ago
You're right, it is ironic. But the fact remains, HN is free to use, the plugs on the front-page are clearly flagged so you don't have to read them, and apart from those the site is ad-free and looks and behaves a lot like the old internet.

layer8 4y ago

> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. People can still do that, and many still do. Possibly more do now than back then, in absolute numbers. The problem is search and discoverability, because of all the other, ad-driven content, and ad-driven search. More people would choose to not publish on ad-driven platforms if the alternatives (e.g. personal websites) would get them the same or better reach.

pixl97 4y ago
Also to add, when people made their own content, maybe a few 100,000 saw it. For the most part the ISP bill was something they could pay. But if I made a video and suddenly a billion people view it I could be bankrupted.
- layer8 4y ago
  Usually your throughput just gets throttled once you’ve reached your bandwidth limit.