Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
So I will preface my comment with the fact that I hate Internet ads and do everything within my power to block and/or avoid them. Aside from being annoying they're a blatant security and malware risk, and I avoid them for that reason alone.
That being said, hosting websites gets pretty expensive pretty fast when lots of people come to your site, especially with the advent of much higher bandwidth media that goes along with better quality images and video.
In my opinion the fact that the majority of people just have an expectation that everything online should be free is THE problem. I was there when the Internet was free and open and without ads. That was the culture, and the root of the issue we have today is that that culture is the foundation of the general expectation that it should continue to be so.
But that's not sustainable with the costs involved in hosting today. Shit costs money yo, why should other people bear that so you can search for recipes for free without it being annoying for you?
The fact that nobody is willing to pay for content via subscriptions or paid apps is literally why the ad-based model is the overwhelming majority of the Internet, and apps, and why data collection/sales is so rampant.
Web development and running a webpage is not easy. Even for those that are skilled enough that it's easy for them, it takes a ton of time. Usually multiple people's time for any site with enough visitors to make it a good site. App development is hard and takes a skill set that requires a lot of training or time investment to learn. Why should all that go for free for you?
Until people are willing to pay for content they find valuable the Internet will be a hell hole ridden with ads. YouTube ads are awful, but do you have any idea how much it costs to run YouTube? You think someone should just absorb that out of the goodness of their hearts? Ridiculous.
The goal of the Internet is still to share information and communicate, but all the hardware and bandwidth and time costs real dollars, and the only way for most sites to recoup that is via ads because people just won't pay anything if given an option, they'll just go to another site that has free content, because there's SO MUCH stuff that you can generally find what you want, for free with ads, somewhere else.
There's only two possible solutions that I see:
everyone starts being willing to pay for content they find valuable. I don't see this happening. There's too many people that share your opinion without taking into account what it costs to actually run a modern website.
some complicated type of system that directly pays websites for use, based off of usage from people. I think this is almost too complicated to implement that it's likely impossible with today's Internet. If we want to also maintain privacy/anonymity when surfing I can't see how this can ever work - so unless we have some future system where people are uniquely identifiable on the Internet, and then some additional system that somehow "fairly" compensates websites for traffic from users, this won't happen. It would need to involve ISPs, their customers, and web site owners in some coordinated payment system to work.
Not to sound too preachy but to me your comment comes off as super entitled.
I pay for apps that I think are valuable, even ones with no cost like Signal. Because I value what they provide. I subscribe to sites that I find valuable enough to do so when it's an option. I abhor data collection and ads and I fight them without prejudice. But even I don't think I pay enough directly to offset how much I cost providers, I'm sure I don't, but that's mostly laziness because it's a pain to pay every site directly so I donate to the ones I really appreciate and use heavily. If I could pay my ISP for my link and then have a direct credit system that throws dollars and cents directly into website coffers as I use them, that would be great - but I don't want to give up my privacy either, so.... Yeah.
Long story short, ad-based content is going nowhere until there's a fundamental shift in either people or how the Internet operates.
This is a fundamentally flawed take on this issue, internet is NOT a product, it is a platform where product (content) is hosted, or a platform where other platform is hosted which in turn hosts other products (content).
When was the last time you saw an ad for McDonald's Big Mac™ or LFS Aquarium's hang in the back fish tank pump on Steam? You don't.
That's because there are infinitely many different ways to run a business on the internet, and as a platform the internet does not inherently require you to go one specific way or the other. Yet they chose mass ads and search engine manipulation that augment mass ads because it is the most cost effective way to maximize profit at the detriment of the entire ecosystem.
The culture that on the internet you do not expect to make direct monetary transactions, in order to have access to anything on the internet at all is NOT the problem, rather the problem is a culture of endlessly and infinitely maximizing profit no matter what it takes. And this culture had a chance to lead to wide scale actions that are fundamentally ditremental to the entire internet because the internet was made into a capitalism heaven with practically no regulations at all, the only thing that keeps capitalism in check.
I have a little bit of that frustration with people not wanting to subscribe / donate to things, but I think there’s a very reasonable cause for that: Income disparity.
In the end, be it video game design building towards F2P live services or TV being terrible slop, a lot of it boils down to that issue: So much of your audience has so little to give. In a functioning economy, the money would cycle around a little more.