[downandout]

Of course anyone who wanted to spend their time back then doing what we now call blogging, who wanted to pay for their own hosting, could have done so. However, I am not sure that the ability to read the thoughts of independent bloggers was a major driving force behind the mass adoption of the Internet. It was quality content and services, subsidized by investors who for the most part hoped companies could generate revenue from advertising, that drew the public to the Internet.

[wokwokwok]

Yes, and the companies who are making products which are actually good own the whole ecosystem, end to end, like google and Facebook, and will be almost totally unaffected by this change or future changes.

It’s everyone else who makes click bait ad spam that will suffer; and frankly, why should we care?

Gmail isn’t going to disappear.

Kotaku or TechCrunch might... or maybe some of those spam cooking sites. ...but, seriously? The whole internet exist because of personalised tracking > big marketing spend?

Come on.

You’re vastly overstating the case here: yes, there would be some impact, no it wouldn’t really make a big difference at this point.

Maybe if you go back in time, it would, but you can’t, so it’s a mute point.

What’s important is where we want to go from here, and personalised ad tracking driving content farms of fake cooking videos isn’t really the ideal “endstate” for the internet imo.

...even if some spammy companies I don’t like end up going out of business, along with some companies I do like.

[feanaro]

I often see this vague and unsubstantiated "quality content" mentioned in relation to this, but seeing this immediately after and counterpointed to independent, information rich blogs is even more puzzling. I see it mentioned, but I'm at a loss to what this financed quality content is.

[TelmoMenezes]

> It was quality content and services, subsidized by investors

You're joking about the "quality content" part, right?