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by JohnBooty 2361 days ago
Yep. This battle was lost way, way back in the 90s when we collectively decided that everything on the Internet should be free.

I think it's one of the great lost opportunities in human history.

I don't know what the "correct" course of action would have been, instead of making everything ad-supported and mostly terrible. Some kind of very very seamless micropayments? Maybe there was no "correct choice." Maybe "free, but awful" always would have won no matter the alternative.

But man, this outcome sucks. The internet turned out to be just one more way to squirt advertisements into our eyeballs.
5 comments
gpvos 2361 days ago
Micropayments were tried, or at least planned, almost right from the beginning of the web, but no one found a way to make them catch on.

See error code 402 in the HTTP spec: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec1...

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swyx 2361 days ago
marc andreesen refers to this as “the original sin of the internet” https://podcastnotes.org/2019/08/31/andreessen-crypto/
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dev-ns8 2360 days ago
I think you could argue that this very battle was lost far before the 90s... Advertisers and marketers have been exploiting and targeting the mediums in which most consumers paid their attention too long before the Internet was around. Inevitably the Internet was going to have ads seep in because it garnered the majority of consumer attention
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neuronic 2360 days ago
Watch VR when it (or rather if) it takes off. Then ads will truly be squeezed into our eyeballs in the most literal sense.
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JohnBooty 2360 days ago
It's never taking off on the scale of the internet itself.

It just doesn't pass any kind of common-sense test. People don't really want to spend large portions of their lives wearing goofy headsets, seeing things nobody else can see. Even if (when) we shrink the screens down to the size and weight of regular eyeglasses, I don't see it. It is not compatible with anything else... you have to completely cease all other activities and utterly devote yourself to your VR experience, sealing yourself off from the world.

VR definitely delivers a pretty awesome experience when done well, don't get me wrong. I think it will hang around and have its fans. But, game-changer? Never.

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isthispermanent 2360 days ago
This is my gut feeling too.
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sqrt17 2360 days ago
Brave Browser has micropayments for exactly this Ads-vs-Micropayments rationale
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