5 ms·

Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising. Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar

Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising. Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar sites advertising is part of their business model. But the primary reason here is foremost people creating content. That Youtube has insane infrastructure costs is secondary and we certainly don't need Browsers to help advertising at all. If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. Danger is that Firefox gets gimped because of bad business decisions, because other features regarding privacy aren't as good as they could be.

stavros 2y ago
> It was free before the insane amount of advertising. It was better before the insane amount of advertising.
- Pet_Ant 2y ago
  > It was better before the insane amount of advertising. There was anything on it really before that. Wikipedia didn't start until 2001 and there were already pop-ups and banner ads everywhere. t was better before the insane amount of advertising. I seem to recall GeoCities having ads everywhere.
  - geobmx540 2y ago
    In the beginning there was no ads, but they got pretty aggressive at the end (1999ish)
  - strictnein 2y ago
    Geocities is an interesting case. It didn't start with ads and they monitored sites and told people to remove them (I received one such email). It wasn't out of some altruistic ideals though. They just didn't want anyone to advertise before they got their ads running on everyone's sites.
LunaSea 2y ago
How can you say that the infrastructure costs are secondary? How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago
  Through torrents, for example.
  - LunaSea 2y ago
    The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents. And that is simply touching the easiest problem to solve which is the storage part. Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
    - Intralexical 2y ago
      > The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents. Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube. > Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem. No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent. The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
      - LunaSea 2y ago
        > Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube. I doubt it because a lot of this content doesn't exist outside of Youtube and because the content does exist on external drives has not internet connectivity or capacity to get it. > No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent. It seems to currently have 220K users, not exactly what I would call representative or a success for that matter. > The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity. Only if they agree to themselves share the content they host which is not necessarily the case.
mschuster91 2y ago
> Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising. It never was free before modern internet advertising, the costs were just hidden somewhere else. I remember the time before that... IRC servers and a lot of code hosting (SourceForge, Linux distro repositories) were paid for by volunteers/donors/universities, newsgroup servers were ran by ISPs and paid for by ISP customers, forums, MMORPGs, general online game servers and the likes by donations or sometimes just the pockets of whomever in the community had some money to spare, and a lot of the warez scene was just plainly skimming off of others: STROs for hosting, phone dialer scams and credit card fraud. Additionally, some sites made small, direct advertising deals with relevant companies (say, a forum about car DIY could run banners from a dealership). A lot of stuff that we take for granted today - especially animated content beyond short GIFs - simply was unfeasible because the amount of money you needed to cough up was so immense. The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place. Also, times (and legal responsibilities) changed, driving up the cost particularly for anything involving UGC. Blog comment sections, guestbooks and the likes got impossible to moderate due to spam, and as that vanished, so did blogs in general. Forums had to deal with CSAM spreaders hiding out, and then came terrorists and the regulatory responses towards them requiring very strict timeframe for the removal of such content... it's a real effort to host anything beyond a static HTML site these days.
- lelanthran 2y ago
  > The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place. If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change? BTW: Serious question, I really want to know what you think.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change? Oh of course it will, we're already seeing the first effects. Or rather, Twitter (now X) is - they lost pretty much all major brands as advertisers and the majority of their income as advertisers realized that appearing next to Catturd, porn spammers and dropshipping scams is not a platform that yields high returns. The only platforms still offering decent ROI are Meta and Google's search results, and the real game for online advertisers these days is influencer marketing.
xeromal 2y ago
I might not be old enough to remember when the internet was ad free but I'm 34 and since I've been on the internet, popups and advertising garbage have always been around. I want to say I started using it around 1996-1997
- rchaud 2y ago
  Ad space was sold directly by the website owner, and the ad banner was just static HTML or an image served from the site directly. Then iframes and DoubleClick arrived, and suddenly ads were served from third party sites via iframes, which would load advertiser scripts and it was downhill from there.
dylan604 2y ago
> It was free before the insane amount of advertising. It was free to users, but the operators were paying hosting fees. Maybe the did that out of love or charity or simply because nobody knew how to make money with it. First gen ads came from companies buying banners directly with the host based on user metrics which ultimately landed with GoogAnals installed every where. Hosts used that to offset their out of pocket expenses. But the content was still the content. The wheels started wobbling when blogs started chasing topics for the metrics. The wheels came completely off the bus when socials introduced algos tweaked to feed your addictions. It was never free. The form of payment has moved to unsuspecting users' data instead of money out of pocket.
autoexec 2y ago
> If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. This is already something they insisted on leaving enabled by default because they knew no one would opt into it. They knew full well that this isn't something people want. Mozilla is an ad-tech company now. Instead of improving firefox they spent a ton of money buying an ad company created by facebook employees. They're going to claw back a return on that investment and they're taking it from Firefox users. They simply do not care about the privacy of Firefox users. There is zero chance that this is as far as Firefox goes in violating your privacy. Expect more anti-features, expect things you disable in about:config to re-enable themselves after updates, expect more tracking that you can't disable, expect more invasive forms of tracking, and expect your ability to block ads on firefox to get increasingly limited until it becomes impossible. It's all downhill from here.
- irq-1 2y ago
  This feels like Adblock Plus adding "acceptable ads". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Ad_filtering,_ad_whitelisting,_and_%22acceptable_ads%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Ad_filtering,_ad_...

stavros 2y ago

> It was free before the insane amount of advertising. It was better before the insane amount of advertising.

Pet_Ant 2y ago
> It was better before the insane amount of advertising. There was anything on it really before that. Wikipedia didn't start until 2001 and there were already pop-ups and banner ads everywhere. t was better before the insane amount of advertising. I seem to recall GeoCities having ads everywhere.
- geobmx540 2y ago
  In the beginning there was no ads, but they got pretty aggressive at the end (1999ish)
- strictnein 2y ago
  Geocities is an interesting case. It didn't start with ads and they monitored sites and told people to remove them (I received one such email). It wasn't out of some altruistic ideals though. They just didn't want anyone to advertise before they got their ads running on everyone's sites.

LunaSea 2y ago

How can you say that the infrastructure costs are secondary? How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?

cynicalsecurity 2y ago
Through torrents, for example.
- LunaSea 2y ago
  The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents. And that is simply touching the easiest problem to solve which is the storage part. Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
  - Intralexical 2y ago
    > The YouTube size estimates represent between 10 and 15 exabytes, that's not a possible volume for Torrents. Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube. > Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem. No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent. The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
    - LunaSea 2y ago
      > Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube. I doubt it because a lot of this content doesn't exist outside of Youtube and because the content does exist on external drives has not internet connectivity or capacity to get it. > No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent. It seems to currently have 220K users, not exactly what I would call representative or a success for that matter. > The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity. Only if they agree to themselves share the content they host which is not necessarily the case.

mschuster91 2y ago

> Also advertising is certainly not the reason the web is free. It was free before the insane amount of advertising. It never was free before modern internet advertising, the costs were just hidden somewhere else. I remember the time before that... IRC servers and a lot of code hosting (SourceForge, Linux distro repositories) were paid for by volunteers/donors/universities, newsgroup servers were ran by ISPs and paid for by ISP customers, forums, MMORPGs, general online game servers and the likes by donations or sometimes just the pockets of whomever in the community had some money to spare, and a lot of the warez scene was just plainly skimming off of others: STROs for hosting, phone dialer scams and credit card fraud. Additionally, some sites made small, direct advertising deals with relevant companies (say, a forum about car DIY could run banners from a dealership). A lot of stuff that we take for granted today - especially animated content beyond short GIFs - simply was unfeasible because the amount of money you needed to cough up was so immense. The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place. Also, times (and legal responsibilities) changed, driving up the cost particularly for anything involving UGC. Blog comment sections, guestbooks and the likes got impossible to moderate due to spam, and as that vanished, so did blogs in general. Forums had to deal with CSAM spreaders hiding out, and then came terrorists and the regulatory responses towards them requiring very strict timeframe for the removal of such content... it's a real effort to host anything beyond a static HTML site these days.

lelanthran 2y ago
> The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place. If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change? BTW: Serious question, I really want to know what you think.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change? Oh of course it will, we're already seeing the first effects. Or rather, Twitter (now X) is - they lost pretty much all major brands as advertisers and the majority of their income as advertisers realized that appearing next to Catturd, porn spammers and dropshipping scams is not a platform that yields high returns. The only platforms still offering decent ROI are Meta and Google's search results, and the real game for online advertisers these days is influencer marketing.

xeromal 2y ago

I might not be old enough to remember when the internet was ad free but I'm 34 and since I've been on the internet, popups and advertising garbage have always been around. I want to say I started using it around 1996-1997

rchaud 2y ago
Ad space was sold directly by the website owner, and the ad banner was just static HTML or an image served from the site directly. Then iframes and DoubleClick arrived, and suddenly ads were served from third party sites via iframes, which would load advertiser scripts and it was downhill from there.

dylan604 2y ago

> It was free before the insane amount of advertising. It was free to users, but the operators were paying hosting fees. Maybe the did that out of love or charity or simply because nobody knew how to make money with it. First gen ads came from companies buying banners directly with the host based on user metrics which ultimately landed with GoogAnals installed every where. Hosts used that to offset their out of pocket expenses. But the content was still the content. The wheels started wobbling when blogs started chasing topics for the metrics. The wheels came completely off the bus when socials introduced algos tweaked to feed your addictions. It was never free. The form of payment has moved to unsuspecting users' data instead of money out of pocket.

autoexec 2y ago

> If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. This is already something they insisted on leaving enabled by default because they knew no one would opt into it. They knew full well that this isn't something people want. Mozilla is an ad-tech company now. Instead of improving firefox they spent a ton of money buying an ad company created by facebook employees. They're going to claw back a return on that investment and they're taking it from Firefox users. They simply do not care about the privacy of Firefox users. There is zero chance that this is as far as Firefox goes in violating your privacy. Expect more anti-features, expect things you disable in about:config to re-enable themselves after updates, expect more tracking that you can't disable, expect more invasive forms of tracking, and expect your ability to block ads on firefox to get increasingly limited until it becomes impossible. It's all downhill from here.

irq-1 2y ago
This feels like Adblock Plus adding "acceptable ads". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Ad_filtering,_ad_whitelisting,_and_%22acceptable_ads%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Ad_filtering,_ad_...