5 ms·

> the ad run internet What is the alternative? And I do mean an alternative that would incentivize and yield the same creative explosion we've seen with the we

> the ad run internet What is the alternative? And I do mean an alternative that would incentivize and yield the same creative explosion we've seen with the web over the last 30 years.

notacoward 4y ago
I challenge your axiom that there has been an ad-fueled creative explosion. Yes, there has been an explosion in volume and perhaps in drama, but creativity specifically? Above and beyond what already existed in free, OSS, or subscription based media? A return to other models might mean less profits, fewer ultra-wealthy founders and VCs, but I'm not at all convinced that it would lead to less creativity.
- dageshi 4y ago
  There were a huge amounts of niche sites written to answer questions on niche topics. All with the aim of being helpful enough to get google to send them traffic they could monetise with ads. Many of these sites were peoples hobbies which they could further explore or even dedicate themselves to based on the income from their website. This wouldn't have happened without ads, no other alternative has ever been found that got the author of a website paid while not directly charging the reader. The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web without, hell without ads there probably wouldn't even be a search engine to find anything on the web and without a search engine nobody would be able to find anything of any use.
  - notacoward 4y ago
    > All with the aim of being helpful enough to get google to send them traffic All? That's such a ridiculous generalization that it's practically a lie. If that's all you remember, then I suggest that your experience has been too short and/or limited. Before Google even existed there were tons of sites that were there for reasons other than ads. (I've been involved with the internet since before it became public BTW, plus Usenet and other things before that, so I have some perspective.) Even after Google became the ad behemoth it is today, plenty of sites flourished while having nothing to do with it. I had my own blog from 2000 until last year, moderately well known in some circles, but neither I nor most of the other bloggers I interacted with had anything to do with ads. There were forums without ads, e-commerce sites without ads (not counting their own), etc. The current situation, where everything seems to be a walled garden or infested with ads, is pretty recent ... and even now, there are plenty of sites that decline to play that game. Like the one we're having this conversation on.
    - dageshi 4y ago
      Well I got online around 98ish so I've been around for a while and seen close to around 25 years worth of development, which I'd say is the majority of the webs lifespan. And I re-iterate, whatever and however many sites there were knocking around on the early internet pale in comparison to the breadth of sites and information that came onto the web fueled by ads when people realised they could fund their hobbies and write about topics they loved at the same time. It's really very simple, if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense and it will vastly outpace the output of the contingent who simply wish to write for the sake of it. Ads supercharged the webs development and I see nothing that could've replaced them, I say that as someone who's never been involved in the ad industry.
      - notacoward 4y ago
        > the breadth of sites and information that came onto the web fueled by ads Confuse correlation with causation much? The internet has certainly grown, but not just because of ads. In some ways it has shrunk because of ads. Innumerable forums and blogs and even social-media sites like MySpace were shunted aside as VC- and ad-funded walled gardens like Facebook became dominant. That's a loss (and I say that as someone who worked at Facebook for a while). As I said, the volume has increased but the creativity hasn't. I'll take ten truly creative people over a hundred YouTube or TikTok "influencer" types any day. > if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense It makes me sad when I see people who can't even imagine a motive other than profit. Seems particularly common here, and I've learned not to engage with such. Have a nice day.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        > It's really very simple, if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more And most of what people write in order to get ad revenue is pure garbage. And even the stuff that isn't garbage is constrained by what advertisers approve of.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > All with the aim of being helpful enough to get google to send them traffic they could monetise with ads. You're not going back far enough. The heyday for the web predated Google. > The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web without This does not at all comport with what I've experienced.
epgui 4y ago
Public funding works really well in functional countries.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I mean, I love me some BBC, but there are plenty of publicly funded media outlets that are essentially just state propaganda. I don't think public funding is a panacea.
  - cookie_monsta 4y ago
    No, being a functional country is the panacea
  - epgui 4y ago
    It's obviously not a panacea, but it solves or can solve a specific set of problems. For anyone that has trouble imagining what I could possibly be talking about, there are some examples discussed here [1], from which I highlight a handful of bullet points, which may not all be mutually exclusive: - financial stability - the need to "chase the algorithm" - sensationalism as a perverse incentive of the market - a lack of incentivization of quality content - the perverse disincentivization of long-form content - the perverse incentivization of cheap editorial content over expensive investigative journalism - the availability of quality information to people who can't afford to pay for an expensive news subscription or who may simply not have access to news where they are - editorial independence from commercial or industrial interests - long-term viability of more local news - collapsing advertising revenue due to macro, social and tech trends - parasitic audience capture by social media platforms [1] https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/human_rights-droits_homme/policy-orientation-independence-independance.aspx?lang=eng https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_developme...
- briandear 4y ago
  How often does public funded media investigate those funding them?
jjtheblunt 4y ago
Aren’t subscriptions at scale a viable model?
- coldpie 4y ago
  Maybe. The catch-22 of this is that subscription models more-or-less can't work while ad-based business models exist. If someone can profit by taking your paywalled content, slapping ads on it, and putting that up on a free site, then someone will do that, destroying your business model. We need to destroy ads as a viable business model before we can even try exploring other models. Installing an ad blocker is ethical.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > The catch-22 of this is that subscription models more-or-less can't work while ad-based business models exist. I suspect this dynamic also applies to software, including, perhaps counterintuitively, FOSS software. "Free" (but ad-supported) competes for attention with both paid and free (actually free). Interest in developing FOSS is lower, I would wager, when interest in using FOSS is lower, so we likely get less and worse FOSS in a world with lots of ad-supported (mostly spyware) software, than one without it.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      We need to stop calling ad-supported stuff "free". Because it's certainly not. You're just paying with a different currency.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  that question has been downvoted without comments? people who contribute want to know the thoughts and insights of others, so comment!
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Yes. There exist many successful subscription models. That the are successful proves the idea is a viable one.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Vanishingly little of the "creative explosion" has made the creators meaningful amounts of money. A fuckton of that was going on well before there was much money in Web ads, period.
anononaut 4y ago
If what we're seeing now is the logical outcome of this "creative explosion," I prefer no alternative. I would be willing to sacrifice quantity for quality at this point. Any sort of reversion of what it used to be, driven scholars, hobbyists, tech nerds, entrepreneurs, and so forth, would be welcome. Like back in the '00s. If you have something to say, by God say it, but generating or aggregating nonsense in order to farm clicks should die.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  How will you convince the majority of the population reading Buzzfeed listicles?
  - xcdzvyn 4y ago
    I don't think there's anything to be done about this, at least apart from letting this transparently monstrous era of the internet slowly tear itself apart. It's unfortunate the internet went this way, but as you said, it happened because people "wanted" it to. Oh. Well.
  - anononaut 4y ago
    I would not. Let them rot on the vine.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    A... listicle... about how to make the internet a better place?
- renewiltord 4y ago
  You can get that by using Gemini protocol sites alone. There's no reason to spend time on things you dislike.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jdworrells 4y ago
The early to mid 90's through the very early 2000's were a /real/ creative explosion, before the vultures descended on the Internet and took it in a revenue-seeking direction. Most netizens had personal webpages, chock full of their passions and sharing information. Now it's a vast wasteland of constantly regenerated rage-inducing content and vapid self-promotion and attention seeking. Our search engines have become ad businesses. Our "social media" only exists to siphon off our information and build dossiers on us to more precisely target ads to us and get us to buy worthless crap. There's been an explosion all right, but one more akin to a burst sewer pipe.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  The internet then was an elite group of people that had 1. Disposable income for computers (or access at University) 2. Disposable income for Internet (or access at University) 3. The ability to put together the skills to create the things you listed. The more I reflect on the changes the more classist I realize this statement/argument is (not making a moral judgement just highlighting the reality).
  - officeplant 4y ago
    As a fairly lower class rural kid I had internet in the late 90s. I was just lucky my dad decided to start up a local dialup ISP and sell internet to farmers.
- at_a_remove 4y ago
  I am an Old. Pre-ads, before the <img> tag made someone out there think banners (and then animated banners, and then Flash, and then flash ads at the side of dancing silhouettes that sent your CPU fans whirring), this was still Someone Else's Hardware. Typically a university. Most of those old IRC networks ended in .edu, as a good example. We never really paid for what we got on the internet, it just switched from an "under the table" scam off of universities to ad-supported.
Mikushi 4y ago
> the same creative explosion What creative explosion? Trash news sites, social media? The world would be a better place without any of these.
JohnFen 4y ago
I think the ad ecosystem has decreased quality and creativity on the internet, not increased it.

> the ad run internet What is the alternative? And I do mean an alternative that would incentivize and yield the same creative explosion we've seen with the web over the last 30 years.

notacoward 4y ago

I challenge your axiom that there has been an ad-fueled creative explosion. Yes, there has been an explosion in volume and perhaps in drama, but creativity specifically? Above and beyond what already existed in free, OSS, or subscription based media? A return to other models might mean less profits, fewer ultra-wealthy founders and VCs, but I'm not at all convinced that it would lead to less creativity.

dageshi 4y ago
There were a huge amounts of niche sites written to answer questions on niche topics. All with the aim of being helpful enough to get google to send them traffic they could monetise with ads. Many of these sites were peoples hobbies which they could further explore or even dedicate themselves to based on the income from their website. This wouldn't have happened without ads, no other alternative has ever been found that got the author of a website paid while not directly charging the reader. The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web without, hell without ads there probably wouldn't even be a search engine to find anything on the web and without a search engine nobody would be able to find anything of any use.
- notacoward 4y ago
  > All with the aim of being helpful enough to get google to send them traffic All? That's such a ridiculous generalization that it's practically a lie. If that's all you remember, then I suggest that your experience has been too short and/or limited. Before Google even existed there were tons of sites that were there for reasons other than ads. (I've been involved with the internet since before it became public BTW, plus Usenet and other things before that, so I have some perspective.) Even after Google became the ad behemoth it is today, plenty of sites flourished while having nothing to do with it. I had my own blog from 2000 until last year, moderately well known in some circles, but neither I nor most of the other bloggers I interacted with had anything to do with ads. There were forums without ads, e-commerce sites without ads (not counting their own), etc. The current situation, where everything seems to be a walled garden or infested with ads, is pretty recent ... and even now, there are plenty of sites that decline to play that game. Like the one we're having this conversation on.
  - dageshi 4y ago
    Well I got online around 98ish so I've been around for a while and seen close to around 25 years worth of development, which I'd say is the majority of the webs lifespan. And I re-iterate, whatever and however many sites there were knocking around on the early internet pale in comparison to the breadth of sites and information that came onto the web fueled by ads when people realised they could fund their hobbies and write about topics they loved at the same time. It's really very simple, if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense and it will vastly outpace the output of the contingent who simply wish to write for the sake of it. Ads supercharged the webs development and I see nothing that could've replaced them, I say that as someone who's never been involved in the ad industry.
    - notacoward 4y ago
      > the breadth of sites and information that came onto the web fueled by ads Confuse correlation with causation much? The internet has certainly grown, but not just because of ads. In some ways it has shrunk because of ads. Innumerable forums and blogs and even social-media sites like MySpace were shunted aside as VC- and ad-funded walled gardens like Facebook became dominant. That's a loss (and I say that as someone who worked at Facebook for a while). As I said, the volume has increased but the creativity hasn't. I'll take ten truly creative people over a hundred YouTube or TikTok "influencer" types any day. > if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more. You will hire people to write with you. This is common sense It makes me sad when I see people who can't even imagine a motive other than profit. Seems particularly common here, and I've learned not to engage with such. Have a nice day.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > It's really very simple, if you can literally get paid to write on your website, you will write more And most of what people write in order to get ad revenue is pure garbage. And even the stuff that isn't garbage is constrained by what advertisers approve of.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > All with the aim of being helpful enough to get google to send them traffic they could monetise with ads. You're not going back far enough. The heyday for the web predated Google. > The web with ads is immensely more useful than the web without This does not at all comport with what I've experienced.

epgui 4y ago

Public funding works really well in functional countries.

throwaway894345 4y ago
I mean, I love me some BBC, but there are plenty of publicly funded media outlets that are essentially just state propaganda. I don't think public funding is a panacea.
- cookie_monsta 4y ago
  No, being a functional country is the panacea
- epgui 4y ago
  It's obviously not a panacea, but it solves or can solve a specific set of problems. For anyone that has trouble imagining what I could possibly be talking about, there are some examples discussed here [1], from which I highlight a handful of bullet points, which may not all be mutually exclusive: - financial stability - the need to "chase the algorithm" - sensationalism as a perverse incentive of the market - a lack of incentivization of quality content - the perverse disincentivization of long-form content - the perverse incentivization of cheap editorial content over expensive investigative journalism - the availability of quality information to people who can't afford to pay for an expensive news subscription or who may simply not have access to news where they are - editorial independence from commercial or industrial interests - long-term viability of more local news - collapsing advertising revenue due to macro, social and tech trends - parasitic audience capture by social media platforms [1] https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/human_rights-droits_homme/policy-orientation-independence-independance.aspx?lang=eng https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_developme...
briandear 4y ago
How often does public funded media investigate those funding them?

jjtheblunt 4y ago

Aren’t subscriptions at scale a viable model?

coldpie 4y ago
Maybe. The catch-22 of this is that subscription models more-or-less can't work while ad-based business models exist. If someone can profit by taking your paywalled content, slapping ads on it, and putting that up on a free site, then someone will do that, destroying your business model. We need to destroy ads as a viable business model before we can even try exploring other models. Installing an ad blocker is ethical.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > The catch-22 of this is that subscription models more-or-less can't work while ad-based business models exist. I suspect this dynamic also applies to software, including, perhaps counterintuitively, FOSS software. "Free" (but ad-supported) competes for attention with both paid and free (actually free). Interest in developing FOSS is lower, I would wager, when interest in using FOSS is lower, so we likely get less and worse FOSS in a world with lots of ad-supported (mostly spyware) software, than one without it.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    We need to stop calling ad-supported stuff "free". Because it's certainly not. You're just paying with a different currency.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
that question has been downvoted without comments? people who contribute want to know the thoughts and insights of others, so comment!
JohnFen 4y ago
Yes. There exist many successful subscription models. That the are successful proves the idea is a viable one.

yamtaddle 4y ago

Vanishingly little of the "creative explosion" has made the creators meaningful amounts of money. A fuckton of that was going on well before there was much money in Web ads, period.

anononaut 4y ago

If what we're seeing now is the logical outcome of this "creative explosion," I prefer no alternative. I would be willing to sacrifice quantity for quality at this point. Any sort of reversion of what it used to be, driven scholars, hobbyists, tech nerds, entrepreneurs, and so forth, would be welcome. Like back in the '00s. If you have something to say, by God say it, but generating or aggregating nonsense in order to farm clicks should die.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
How will you convince the majority of the population reading Buzzfeed listicles?
- xcdzvyn 4y ago
  I don't think there's anything to be done about this, at least apart from letting this transparently monstrous era of the internet slowly tear itself apart. It's unfortunate the internet went this way, but as you said, it happened because people "wanted" it to. Oh. Well.
- anononaut 4y ago
  I would not. Let them rot on the vine.
- klyrs 4y ago
  A... listicle... about how to make the internet a better place?
renewiltord 4y ago
You can get that by using Gemini protocol sites alone. There's no reason to spend time on things you dislike.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jdworrells 4y ago

The early to mid 90's through the very early 2000's were a /real/ creative explosion, before the vultures descended on the Internet and took it in a revenue-seeking direction. Most netizens had personal webpages, chock full of their passions and sharing information. Now it's a vast wasteland of constantly regenerated rage-inducing content and vapid self-promotion and attention seeking. Our search engines have become ad businesses. Our "social media" only exists to siphon off our information and build dossiers on us to more precisely target ads to us and get us to buy worthless crap. There's been an explosion all right, but one more akin to a burst sewer pipe.

ROTMetro 4y ago
The internet then was an elite group of people that had 1. Disposable income for computers (or access at University) 2. Disposable income for Internet (or access at University) 3. The ability to put together the skills to create the things you listed. The more I reflect on the changes the more classist I realize this statement/argument is (not making a moral judgement just highlighting the reality).
- officeplant 4y ago
  As a fairly lower class rural kid I had internet in the late 90s. I was just lucky my dad decided to start up a local dialup ISP and sell internet to farmers.
at_a_remove 4y ago
I am an Old. Pre-ads, before the <img> tag made someone out there think banners (and then animated banners, and then Flash, and then flash ads at the side of dancing silhouettes that sent your CPU fans whirring), this was still Someone Else's Hardware. Typically a university. Most of those old IRC networks ended in .edu, as a good example. We never really paid for what we got on the internet, it just switched from an "under the table" scam off of universities to ad-supported.

Mikushi 4y ago

> the same creative explosion What creative explosion? Trash news sites, social media? The world would be a better place without any of these.

JohnFen 4y ago

I think the ad ecosystem has decreased quality and creativity on the internet, not increased it.