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I used to think this. and I do run some of your suggestions. But how is the internet economy supposed to function without these micro transactions, in the form

I used to think this. and I do run some of your suggestions. But how is the internet economy supposed to function without these micro transactions, in the form of ads. A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism.

crims0n 10mo ago
I too struggle with this. It's not like people can't publish things on the web without ads. If the author/artist wanted it to be free, the ads wouldn't be there. So people who use ad blockers are either making a moral choice to consume a paid service for free, or are ignorant of how the internet economy works. There is an argument to be made that advertisements are so detrimental to the user experience and mental health of the recipient that they are morally justified in blocking them. However, that is debatable when you consider the alternative, which is that the medium you are consuming may not exist at all if not for the advertisements published along with it.
- deckard1 10mo ago
  The day I stopped giving half a fraction of a shit was the day Google served me malware in an ad. It was one of those fake "Download" buttons on a very popular open source tool. I wonder how many people have been harmed by that. > medium you are consuming may not exist at all I've realized that's not my problem. It's not like most of the internet is healthy anyway. It's psychologically manipulative and designed to keep you fearful, angry, spiteful, jealous, and above all, depressed. Fuck Google. Fuck Meta. And fuck every single last person working for them.
- tcfhgj 10mo ago
  If a medium doesn't exist because of the lack of ads and you think it's a loss, you should have paid for it (which overall is cheaper than paying though ads).
- BeetleB 10mo ago
  > If the author/artist wanted it to be free, the ads wouldn't be there. That's a logical leap. The artist can want both things. There are two payments involved: 1. The user pays with his time/attention 2. The ad company pays the site In most cases, the author doesn't mind getting the payments from number 2 even if you skip 1. Many, many sites explicitly point out they don't find a it a problem if you install an ad blocker. I don't have ads on my site. I'm OK with you consuming it for free. If I put ads one day, I'll still be OK with it, because I know I'll get some money regardless. It's practically free money. I will not miss the vast majority of sites I go to that serve ads if they all decided to shut down and/or go paid only. I should be spending a lot less time on the Internet/phone to begin with!
godelski 10mo ago
I struggle with this too. I struggle less when I remind myself of how much the tech sector has grown in the past 20 years. Not even just in power and control over critical infrastructure, but in wealth. Market Cap by Year Year 0 1 2 3 4 2025 Nvidia (4.6T) Apple (3.9T) Google (3.8T) Microsoft (3.5T) Amazon (2.6T) 2020 Apple (2.3T) Microsoft (1.7T) Amazon (1.6T) Google (1.2T) Meta (777M) 2015 Apple (598M) Google (534M) Microsoft (440M) Berkshire (324M) Exxon (325M) 2010 Exxon (369M) PetroChina (303M) Apple (296M) BHP (244M) Microsoft (239M) Some Billionaires... Year Musk Page Bezos Ellison Zuck Buffett Current 714B 257B 251B 244B 227B 148B 2024 195B 114B 194B 141B 177B 133B 2023 180B 79B 114B 107B 64B 106B 2022 219B 111B 171B 106B 67B 118B 2021 151B 92B 177B 93B 97B 96B 2020 25B 51B 113B 59B 55B 68B 2016 11B 35B 45B 44B 45B 61B - There are currently 19 people worth more than $100bn! - 4 of them are not American (Arnault, Ortega, Ambani, Helu) - 27 of the top 50 richest are non-Americans - 57 of the top 100 are non-Americans - Bill Gates was first worth $100bn in 1999, becoming the first centibillionaire It is hard to feel bad when we've seen such an explosion of wealth, especially over the last 5 years. I mean we had a fucking pandemic and all the big players doubled (or nearly) their market caps. We constantly hear about how these companies are having "money issues" but then keep announcing record profits and record bonuses to CEOs. > A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism. So I don't agree that it is *ONLY* through this mechanism. Or that if it is that it needs to be done to this degree. It is hard for me personally to take pity when we're on the verge of having the first trillionaire. Honestly, I don't care about a wealth cap and I don't think there should be. It isn't a zero-sum game. But I do care about the wealth floor. It is hard to think of that floor when just the top 5 richest made $887B last year and $1.47T in the last 5 (2024 was a "good" year. Musk is 519B/689B so 368B/781B excluding) and average people are feeling the pressure. If times were good for the rest of us I honestly couldn't care less if Musk became a trillionaire. Good for him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But while wages are stagnant, while the job market is very competitive, we have major layoffs, while inflation is hitting average people hard, and while they keep pretending they can replace us all with AI; then hell fucking yeah I do care. It ends up being a question about what is more right, than what is right. I'd feel more conflicted if we all, or the majority of us, were benefiting from the advancements. But sympathy is difficult when we look at those numbers. https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/ https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/ P.S. here's a fun game for understanding how much a billion dollars is. It's difficult because that level of money generates so much interest. Imagine you have a billion dollars. You put it in an investment account that earns 10% yearly interest, compounded daily. On day 1 you need funds, so sit on your ass and do nothing. After than, on each weekday you hire a new employee at the cost of $250k/yr and is also paid daily. How many employees can you hire before you have less than a billion dollars? There's a lot of variants you can run on this kind of thought experiment and I think they're helpful for understanding that level of wealth.
kibwen 10mo ago
> But how is the internet economy supposed to function If the existence of a given industry requires the annihilation of individual privacy and the elimination of free thought, then that industry does not deserve to exist. Kill the ad industry.
- suriya-ganesh 10mo ago
  And in the process kill all the possibilities the internet has empowered? Medicine being better delivered, all the research that has been accelerated because of reducing compute and storage costs, the list is infinite.
  - sumalamana 10mo ago
    Yes, kill it all. None of that is worth the panopticon that is being built.
  - nananana9 10mo ago
    You will need to provide stronger justification how "medicine being delivered" hinges upon me watching a 60 second unskippable ad before a YouTube video.
tcfhgj 10mo ago
Other types of micro transactions and payments are possible
akersten 10mo ago
Behavioral (invisible) analytics alone is the secret trillion dollar industry that online advertisers want to distract you from by focusing on the morality of ad blocking. A good blocker should block many of those scripts too, but there's no stopping server-side analytics at scale.
OkayPhysicist 10mo ago
Most things worth doing on the internet are either A) paid for B) garner enough good will that they can be supported via some polite pan-handling or C) cheap enough to operate that it's a perfectly acceptable hobby expense for 1 person in your community. Streaming services and E-commerce are the classic examples for A. Wikipedia is the quintessential example for B. C includes pretty much all the social outlets: Web forums, a Matrix server, private game servers (public game servers fall under A), blogs, etc.

crims0n 10mo ago

I too struggle with this. It's not like people can't publish things on the web without ads. If the author/artist wanted it to be free, the ads wouldn't be there. So people who use ad blockers are either making a moral choice to consume a paid service for free, or are ignorant of how the internet economy works. There is an argument to be made that advertisements are so detrimental to the user experience and mental health of the recipient that they are morally justified in blocking them. However, that is debatable when you consider the alternative, which is that the medium you are consuming may not exist at all if not for the advertisements published along with it.

deckard1 10mo ago
The day I stopped giving half a fraction of a shit was the day Google served me malware in an ad. It was one of those fake "Download" buttons on a very popular open source tool. I wonder how many people have been harmed by that. > medium you are consuming may not exist at all I've realized that's not my problem. It's not like most of the internet is healthy anyway. It's psychologically manipulative and designed to keep you fearful, angry, spiteful, jealous, and above all, depressed. Fuck Google. Fuck Meta. And fuck every single last person working for them.
tcfhgj 10mo ago
If a medium doesn't exist because of the lack of ads and you think it's a loss, you should have paid for it (which overall is cheaper than paying though ads).
BeetleB 10mo ago
> If the author/artist wanted it to be free, the ads wouldn't be there. That's a logical leap. The artist can want both things. There are two payments involved: 1. The user pays with his time/attention 2. The ad company pays the site In most cases, the author doesn't mind getting the payments from number 2 even if you skip 1. Many, many sites explicitly point out they don't find a it a problem if you install an ad blocker. I don't have ads on my site. I'm OK with you consuming it for free. If I put ads one day, I'll still be OK with it, because I know I'll get some money regardless. It's practically free money. I will not miss the vast majority of sites I go to that serve ads if they all decided to shut down and/or go paid only. I should be spending a lot less time on the Internet/phone to begin with!

godelski 10mo ago

I struggle with this too. I struggle less when I remind myself of how much the tech sector has grown in the past 20 years. Not even just in power and control over critical infrastructure, but in wealth. Market Cap by Year Year 0 1 2 3 4 2025 Nvidia (4.6T) Apple (3.9T) Google (3.8T) Microsoft (3.5T) Amazon (2.6T) 2020 Apple (2.3T) Microsoft (1.7T) Amazon (1.6T) Google (1.2T) Meta (777M) 2015 Apple (598M) Google (534M) Microsoft (440M) Berkshire (324M) Exxon (325M) 2010 Exxon (369M) PetroChina (303M) Apple (296M) BHP (244M) Microsoft (239M) Some Billionaires... Year Musk Page Bezos Ellison Zuck Buffett Current 714B 257B 251B 244B 227B 148B 2024 195B 114B 194B 141B 177B 133B 2023 180B 79B 114B 107B 64B 106B 2022 219B 111B 171B 106B 67B 118B 2021 151B 92B 177B 93B 97B 96B 2020 25B 51B 113B 59B 55B 68B 2016 11B 35B 45B 44B 45B 61B - There are currently 19 people worth more than $100bn! - 4 of them are not American (Arnault, Ortega, Ambani, Helu) - 27 of the top 50 richest are non-Americans - 57 of the top 100 are non-Americans - Bill Gates was first worth $100bn in 1999, becoming the first centibillionaire It is hard to feel bad when we've seen such an explosion of wealth, especially over the last 5 years. I mean we had a fucking pandemic and all the big players doubled (or nearly) their market caps. We constantly hear about how these companies are having "money issues" but then keep announcing record profits and record bonuses to CEOs. > A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism. So I don't agree that it is *ONLY* through this mechanism. Or that if it is that it needs to be done to this degree. It is hard for me personally to take pity when we're on the verge of having the first trillionaire. Honestly, I don't care about a wealth cap and I don't think there should be. It isn't a zero-sum game. But I do care about the wealth floor. It is hard to think of that floor when just the top 5 richest made $887B last year and $1.47T in the last 5 (2024 was a "good" year. Musk is 519B/689B so 368B/781B excluding) and average people are feeling the pressure. If times were good for the rest of us I honestly couldn't care less if Musk became a trillionaire. Good for him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But while wages are stagnant, while the job market is very competitive, we have major layoffs, while inflation is hitting average people hard, and while they keep pretending they can replace us all with AI; then hell fucking yeah I do care. It ends up being a question about what is more right, than what is right. I'd feel more conflicted if we all, or the majority of us, were benefiting from the advancements. But sympathy is difficult when we look at those numbers. https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/ https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/ P.S. here's a fun game for understanding how much a billion dollars is. It's difficult because that level of money generates so much interest. Imagine you have a billion dollars. You put it in an investment account that earns 10% yearly interest, compounded daily. On day 1 you need funds, so sit on your ass and do nothing. After than, on each weekday you hire a new employee at the cost of $250k/yr and is also paid daily. How many employees can you hire before you have less than a billion dollars? There's a lot of variants you can run on this kind of thought experiment and I think they're helpful for understanding that level of wealth.

kibwen 10mo ago

> But how is the internet economy supposed to function If the existence of a given industry requires the annihilation of individual privacy and the elimination of free thought, then that industry does not deserve to exist. Kill the ad industry.

suriya-ganesh 10mo ago
And in the process kill all the possibilities the internet has empowered? Medicine being better delivered, all the research that has been accelerated because of reducing compute and storage costs, the list is infinite.
- sumalamana 10mo ago
  Yes, kill it all. None of that is worth the panopticon that is being built.
- nananana9 10mo ago
  You will need to provide stronger justification how "medicine being delivered" hinges upon me watching a 60 second unskippable ad before a YouTube video.

tcfhgj 10mo ago

Other types of micro transactions and payments are possible

akersten 10mo ago

Behavioral (invisible) analytics alone is the secret trillion dollar industry that online advertisers want to distract you from by focusing on the morality of ad blocking. A good blocker should block many of those scripts too, but there's no stopping server-side analytics at scale.

OkayPhysicist 10mo ago

Most things worth doing on the internet are either A) paid for B) garner enough good will that they can be supported via some polite pan-handling or C) cheap enough to operate that it's a perfectly acceptable hobby expense for 1 person in your community. Streaming services and E-commerce are the classic examples for A. Wikipedia is the quintessential example for B. C includes pretty much all the social outlets: Web forums, a Matrix server, private game servers (public game servers fall under A), blogs, etc.