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>breaks entire business models So do car alarms. I'm not convinced this is a business model I want to exist. We had an internet before it, and Google, and Fac

>breaks entire business models So do car alarms. I'm not convinced this is a business model I want to exist. We had an internet before it, and Google, and Facebook. I'm increasingly sad we can't return to it.

xp84 2mo ago
Let me be clear, I can't stand the social-media industrial complex and the advertising universe. I've seen the bottom that we've raced to, with absolute bullshit popping up everywhere and entire sites full of slop with clickbait "headlines" just rigged to get ad impressions. And I'd gladly trade today's BS for any version of "The Internet" pre-2007. But the "Before" Internet wasn't some natural sustainable state. Before 1997 or so, "the Internet" was being paid for by academic institutions and big companies, and wasn't really all that commercial at all. It was also pretty tiny and blessedly simple. Honestly this version is the most achievable (re-creatable?) today since we can set up indie websites much easier today than we could then. Instead of using your free webspace from your university or employer, 20 of us could share a $5 a month instance, and link to each other's webpages, and add an IRC server to that instance just for fun. In the 1998-2007 era, the Internet got a lot bigger, but was also still pretty fun and not that enshittified, but that's just because it was being paid for by VC money being burned. Today we are where we are in terms of business model[1] because Google and Facebook achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better, and because consumers of The Internet have spoken, loudly, with their closed wallets. They've said "We will only pay for content if it's All The Music and ~$10 a month flat rate, or if it's a big/interesting enough video on-demand service and under $20 a month. We'll never pay for news or text content of any kind." So, the businesses with other types of content do what the public wants them to do: have cost-free content whose access is conditional on being advertised to very annoyingly, or they marginalize themselves with paywalls, subscribed to by only a small minority of users. [1] i'm setting aside the non-business aspects of our mess, namely the poison that social media, 'engagement' optimization, and ragebait-as-news has wrought on society.
- dullcrisp 2mo ago
  I don’t know, back in the day you could just buy a newspaper and read it. Now, if you want to read an article you have to pay $20/month to that news organization in perpetuity. I don’t see how that can be expected to work.
- LtWorf 2mo ago
  Their targeted ads suck. I've been a professional developer for quite a while and fb keeps peddling me programming courses for beginners to become a developer. Or, I liked one single page of an amputee woman (I am myself) and now all I see are amputee women. They just buy all the competitors, but they aren't good at all.
- ben_w 2mo ago
  > achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better There's an old saying in advertising, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half." - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/ The supposed benefit of the current model is to find and eliminate that wasted half. Facebook has shown me ads for dick pills and boob surgery, ads I can't read because I don't know the Cyrillic alphabet, and ads for services that only apply to citizens of nations I've never been a citizen of who moved to a country I had in fact moved out of. The reports I hear from people who buy ad slots are mostly unimpressed with the results; the word on the grapevine is that the "success" cases are not even average customers, but those who are vulnerable to getting scammed.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Megagiantcorp Proctor & Gamble cancelled all internet advertising, with no loss in sales.
    - xp84 2mo ago
      That proves little though. Their ads would be brand advertising anyway, notoriously hard to measure. Just "Don't forget Coca-Cola exists!" and you can accomplish the same with billboards or in-store advertising. The ads that perform online are the direct response type.

xp84 2mo ago

Let me be clear, I can't stand the social-media industrial complex and the advertising universe. I've seen the bottom that we've raced to, with absolute bullshit popping up everywhere and entire sites full of slop with clickbait "headlines" just rigged to get ad impressions. And I'd gladly trade today's BS for any version of "The Internet" pre-2007. But the "Before" Internet wasn't some natural sustainable state. Before 1997 or so, "the Internet" was being paid for by academic institutions and big companies, and wasn't really all that commercial at all. It was also pretty tiny and blessedly simple. Honestly this version is the most achievable (re-creatable?) today since we can set up indie websites much easier today than we could then. Instead of using your free webspace from your university or employer, 20 of us could share a $5 a month instance, and link to each other's webpages, and add an IRC server to that instance just for fun. In the 1998-2007 era, the Internet got a lot bigger, but was also still pretty fun and not that enshittified, but that's just because it was being paid for by VC money being burned. Today we are where we are in terms of business model[1] because Google and Facebook achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better, and because consumers of The Internet have spoken, loudly, with their closed wallets. They've said "We will only pay for content if it's All The Music and ~$10 a month flat rate, or if it's a big/interesting enough video on-demand service and under $20 a month. We'll never pay for news or text content of any kind." So, the businesses with other types of content do what the public wants them to do: have cost-free content whose access is conditional on being advertised to very annoyingly, or they marginalize themselves with paywalls, subscribed to by only a small minority of users. [1] i'm setting aside the non-business aspects of our mess, namely the poison that social media, 'engagement' optimization, and ragebait-as-news has wrought on society.

dullcrisp 2mo ago
I don’t know, back in the day you could just buy a newspaper and read it. Now, if you want to read an article you have to pay $20/month to that news organization in perpetuity. I don’t see how that can be expected to work.
LtWorf 2mo ago
Their targeted ads suck. I've been a professional developer for quite a while and fb keeps peddling me programming courses for beginners to become a developer. Or, I liked one single page of an amputee woman (I am myself) and now all I see are amputee women. They just buy all the competitors, but they aren't good at all.
ben_w 2mo ago
> achieved great success with ad-based business models because of the ability to target ads better There's an old saying in advertising, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half." - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/ The supposed benefit of the current model is to find and eliminate that wasted half. Facebook has shown me ads for dick pills and boob surgery, ads I can't read because I don't know the Cyrillic alphabet, and ads for services that only apply to citizens of nations I've never been a citizen of who moved to a country I had in fact moved out of. The reports I hear from people who buy ad slots are mostly unimpressed with the results; the word on the grapevine is that the "success" cases are not even average customers, but those who are vulnerable to getting scammed.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Megagiantcorp Proctor & Gamble cancelled all internet advertising, with no loss in sales.
  - xp84 2mo ago
    That proves little though. Their ads would be brand advertising anyway, notoriously hard to measure. Just "Don't forget Coca-Cola exists!" and you can accomplish the same with billboards or in-store advertising. The ads that perform online are the direct response type.