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Consumers vote with their wallets and will virtually always take a free product with ads over anything else, so taking a dogmatic stance against ads is just goi

Consumers vote with their wallets and will virtually always take a free product with ads over anything else, so taking a dogmatic stance against ads is just going to be financial suicide. Ad blockers simply live on borrowed time until they're banned or made unusable. In which case if a competitor springs up, at some point they need money, which means they'll need to serve ads. Like say Brave, which blocks ads and then ... serves you their own ads. The original web is irrelevant because it didn't sustain large economies. It's like comparing radio hobbyists to the central TV station, the economics change when you have to actually pay employees and serve a mass market.

lolinder 2y ago
> The original web is irrelevant because it didn't sustain large economies. It's like comparing radio hobbyists to the central TV station, the economics change when you have to actually pay employees and serve a mass market. A large number of us wish that we could go back to a web that didn't exist primarily to sustain large economies. Back to a web that existed for academics and enthusiasts, a web where modern HN discussions would have been ranked in the lower half of quality instead of the top 5%. That web existed as late as 2010 (already as a bit of an enclave, but a thriving one). It was killed by ad-funded social media and some of us are still bitter about it.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  Multiple things exist on the internet at once right, I mean we're having this discussion on an old-school website right now, it didn't go away, that's the nice thing about the internet, pretty much unlimited space. But it also strikes me as very odd if not elitist to say you'd wish for a web when it consisted of academics and enthusiasts. Because for everyone who doesn't come from money or academia, like me, the fact that there's a real economy underpinning the web now means I have a job that actually feeds my family. (I in particular don't work for an ad company for what it's worth). It's one major business model that keeps the lights on in a lot of places and to say we should all be enthusiasts, who in this industry do a lot of work and get almost no compensation just doesn't work for most people. And is also just bad for software in general.

lolinder 2y ago

> The original web is irrelevant because it didn't sustain large economies. It's like comparing radio hobbyists to the central TV station, the economics change when you have to actually pay employees and serve a mass market. A large number of us wish that we could go back to a web that didn't exist primarily to sustain large economies. Back to a web that existed for academics and enthusiasts, a web where modern HN discussions would have been ranked in the lower half of quality instead of the top 5%. That web existed as late as 2010 (already as a bit of an enclave, but a thriving one). It was killed by ad-funded social media and some of us are still bitter about it.

Barrin92 2y ago
Multiple things exist on the internet at once right, I mean we're having this discussion on an old-school website right now, it didn't go away, that's the nice thing about the internet, pretty much unlimited space. But it also strikes me as very odd if not elitist to say you'd wish for a web when it consisted of academics and enthusiasts. Because for everyone who doesn't come from money or academia, like me, the fact that there's a real economy underpinning the web now means I have a job that actually feeds my family. (I in particular don't work for an ad company for what it's worth). It's one major business model that keeps the lights on in a lot of places and to say we should all be enthusiasts, who in this industry do a lot of work and get almost no compensation just doesn't work for most people. And is also just bad for software in general.