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> Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month. I was able to do it for free because of ads. I was a teenager just getting into compu

> Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month. I was able to do it for free because of ads. I was a teenager just getting into computer security, I had a $0 budget. That blog is why I even have a career. > and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle How are people who are interested going to put something up? They'll have to pay for it. Say goodbye to "I'm a random person with a random interest, oh sweet I can post about it online" and hello to "Sponsor this content on patreon". > Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services All of this "I'll just pay for it" stuff ignores that the only reason you can find content creators to pay directly is because they have free platforms like Youtube that are paid for by advertising. > Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity So propose it. I'm all for this. Give me a new business model that doesn't involve ads and let people choose. Go for it. But maybe let's not break the entire internet before we even have an idea of what that will look like?

g-b-r 3y ago
Things were already free before the advertising boom, internet was not really worse twenty years ago
ifz 3y ago
Nowadays, you can get a free VM from some providers (GCP) and there are lots of sites where you can deploy a static website for free (github pages). I'd argue deploying something for free is easier than ever.
ndriscoll 3y ago
When I was a teenager, I found and installed Apache. WordPress apparently had existed for a year or two, but I didn't hear about it for several years after. I memorized my IP address and would link people to that, and never bought a hostname or anything. If you just want to host a blog and maybe dabble in PHP, Apache works great. These days as an adult who programs professionally, my personal site is just a directory that I point nginx to with xhtml/xslt/css files that I hand edit + things like photos. I do have a domain name these days, but it's not like you need one. If you wanted something to be permanent to avoid link rot, you should want browsers to support ipfs so you could use that.
- 0xDEADFED5 3y ago
  there's always dynamic dns, too
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Maybe someday ipv6 will become widespread and we can all have thousands of static IP addresses.
- insanitybit 3y ago
  Can we agree that "must be able to install apache" is not a good requirement for adding content to the web?
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    It's not a requirement; it's a $0 option. You could also pay someone a few dollars or befriend a local computer nerd. My memory is fading now, but I think ISPs used to offer web hosting and email as part of your Internet package, so they could always bring that back (I think they still give you email). Once upon a time, Windows came with a web server. You could imagine that sharing a folder on the web could be as easy as it is (was?) to share a folder through SMB (just open folder properties, click "Share", and give it a name). You asked what a free internet would look like without ads, but you need to keep in mind that ads have distorted the market that we have today. Even today, it's easy for a curious teenager to set up a web site for free on their computer, and it could be made even easier if the demand weren't being satisfied by people dumping onto markets.
hutzlibu 3y ago
Wikipedia is not funded by ads for example. Lots of other sites neither. So I would say, not the whole internet would go away without ads, but probably the worst parts and what remains is worth visiting.
- chii 3y ago
  But how many Wikipedias can there be? They got funding because they are large and have reputation behind them. If you tried starting up a new Wikipedia to compete, guess he much non-advert funding you'd get? Look at how quora tried and failed hard, and have to sell out to survive. Look at stack overflow these days?
  - beej71 3y ago
    I don't have the number offhand, but Wikipedia did exactly that kind of startup competing with online encyclopedias.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    "Look at how quora tried and failed hard" They made lots of bad choices, leading to users (including me) leaving the plattform. And in general I don't think that you need that many wikipedias, my point was, that donation funded websites work -> if people want it to work.
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    You don't need resources if you are small and unknown. Run it at your house until you have a few thousand users, and then move to something like Hetzner (if you're one of those Swiss people with 25 Gb/s Internet, skip step 2). If I'm interpreting their grafana[0] right, Wikimedia gets ~20 edits per second and usually peaks less than ~200k requests/second across all projects, and it looks like traffic has not exceeded 7 Gb/s over the last 90 days across all data centers. Even the largest projects are not a lot from a technical perspective these days. [0] https://grafana.wikimedia.org https://grafana.wikimedia.org

g-b-r 3y ago

Things were already free before the advertising boom, internet was not really worse twenty years ago

ifz 3y ago

Nowadays, you can get a free VM from some providers (GCP) and there are lots of sites where you can deploy a static website for free (github pages). I'd argue deploying something for free is easier than ever.

ndriscoll 3y ago

When I was a teenager, I found and installed Apache. WordPress apparently had existed for a year or two, but I didn't hear about it for several years after. I memorized my IP address and would link people to that, and never bought a hostname or anything. If you just want to host a blog and maybe dabble in PHP, Apache works great. These days as an adult who programs professionally, my personal site is just a directory that I point nginx to with xhtml/xslt/css files that I hand edit + things like photos. I do have a domain name these days, but it's not like you need one. If you wanted something to be permanent to avoid link rot, you should want browsers to support ipfs so you could use that.

0xDEADFED5 3y ago
there's always dynamic dns, too
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Maybe someday ipv6 will become widespread and we can all have thousands of static IP addresses.
insanitybit 3y ago
Can we agree that "must be able to install apache" is not a good requirement for adding content to the web?
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  It's not a requirement; it's a $0 option. You could also pay someone a few dollars or befriend a local computer nerd. My memory is fading now, but I think ISPs used to offer web hosting and email as part of your Internet package, so they could always bring that back (I think they still give you email). Once upon a time, Windows came with a web server. You could imagine that sharing a folder on the web could be as easy as it is (was?) to share a folder through SMB (just open folder properties, click "Share", and give it a name). You asked what a free internet would look like without ads, but you need to keep in mind that ads have distorted the market that we have today. Even today, it's easy for a curious teenager to set up a web site for free on their computer, and it could be made even easier if the demand weren't being satisfied by people dumping onto markets.

hutzlibu 3y ago

Wikipedia is not funded by ads for example. Lots of other sites neither. So I would say, not the whole internet would go away without ads, but probably the worst parts and what remains is worth visiting.

chii 3y ago
But how many Wikipedias can there be? They got funding because they are large and have reputation behind them. If you tried starting up a new Wikipedia to compete, guess he much non-advert funding you'd get? Look at how quora tried and failed hard, and have to sell out to survive. Look at stack overflow these days?
- beej71 3y ago
  I don't have the number offhand, but Wikipedia did exactly that kind of startup competing with online encyclopedias.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "Look at how quora tried and failed hard" They made lots of bad choices, leading to users (including me) leaving the plattform. And in general I don't think that you need that many wikipedias, my point was, that donation funded websites work -> if people want it to work.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  You don't need resources if you are small and unknown. Run it at your house until you have a few thousand users, and then move to something like Hetzner (if you're one of those Swiss people with 25 Gb/s Internet, skip step 2). If I'm interpreting their grafana[0] right, Wikimedia gets ~20 edits per second and usually peaks less than ~200k requests/second across all projects, and it looks like traffic has not exceeded 7 Gb/s over the last 90 days across all data centers. Even the largest projects are not a lot from a technical perspective these days. [0] https://grafana.wikimedia.org https://grafana.wikimedia.org