4 ms·

People didn't pay for content 20-25 years ago either. What changed is that people want to make money with the web, not just share.

• psadri 3y ago
  That is true. The initial wave was driven by the sheer excitement of being able to “publish”. I do think that the ad supported model is still responsible for what happened next. Ads encourage optimizing for eyeballs and traffic vs quality. And that’s exactly what happened. The good stuff was buried by the ad optimized garbage everyone is complaining about. Btw, I’m not dogmatically against ads. I believe they serve a purpose and are necessary. Just pointing out the side effects.
  • midoridensha 3y ago
    25 years ago, people were happy to post their own personal webpage on Tripod for free and look at how many hits their hit counter got, and get thank-you emails from people who liked whatever they posted. Now everyone wants to get paid for whatever they produce.
• Dan_Sylveste 3y ago
  > What changed is that people want to make money with the web People always wanted to make money on the web, but the sites of people that didn't still appeared in search results. Now search result positioning depends on the amount of ads you're prepared to host. So, the people who are optimizing for revenue are listed way above the people who aren't optimizing at all and are just creating. There are times when I've searched for a tumblr page literally by the exact and totally unique name and still not found it on the 3rd page of results, all of which were unrelated garbage. They've decided that they'd rather piss you off than lose money sending traffic to sites that won't pay to play. It's toxic.