[dialtone]

What are you talking about? Advertising and marketing are among the oldest concepts and jobs in history and have since the early days of tv or journalism paid for free content.

If you have a new business idea that represents this third way... What are you doing here? Build a business and become a billionaire.

[why_Mr_Anderson]

Now I see the problem. You never experienced what the internet was like when it wasn't as ad-infested as it is now. It might be hard to comprehend, but people who were passionated about something and wanted to make a website about that paid for it out of their own pockets without focusing mainly on 'monetization', 'ad revenue', 'SEO' and similar garbage. Unbelievable, isn't it?

[UncleMeat]

Just insisting that somebody is ignorant is pretty rude.

The internet of the mid 90s had a lot of stuff for free. Usenet was great for certain groups of people. The internet of the mid 90s also lacked a ton of products that cost a ton of money to develop and maintain.

People are frightened now of relying on Google to store their photos forever. Imagine storing your photos with a passion project operated by just some person in their spare time. We see people already getting pissed off when OSS developers stop maintaining projects. It'd be that problem times 1000.

[krageon]

> insisting that somebody is ignorant is pretty rude.

This person claimed ignorance of the other party once and in context it's a very reasonable conclusion. There's nothing rude about that, except maybe when you find the state of ignorance bad in and of itself. That doesn't really make sense, as all humans are born ignorant. That's just how things are and that's what teaching is for. Which is what the post being discussed attempted to do.