[samhw]

> And maybe also ads generally.

This is all well and good, but then we need a serious alternative funding model for websites.

Right now, a lot of people with adblockers are benefiting from a situation fausse where they free-ride on the ad-click revenue generated by others. I think in some people's minds this leads to an impossible expectation that they can continue to enjoy freely provided services, provided at considerable expense to the service provider, without paying anything or even having the inconvenience of having to see some ads.

I'm all for abolishing ads, but it needs a serious proposal, not just "what we have right now, but no ads". I'd also be all for an online payment mechanism embedded into browsers through a new protocol - something like https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/ but designed with more of a view towards paywalls - but I'm under no illusion: most people's revealed preference is consistently for ads over paying anything, as many startups in that space have discovered.

[handrous]

> This is all well and good, but then we need a serious alternative funding model for websites.

Why?

Without competition from free-but-funded-with-$billions ad-supported services, most of the valuable stuff would probably be replaced by volunteer and non-profit efforts.

Others would survive by charging (more) money.

Some would be replaced by protocols (several social networks would be among those replaced). Clients & hosting may be paid, or not. It'd work out fine.

Most of the rest isn't valuable.

[samhw]

> Without competition from free-but-funded-with-$billions ad-supported services, most of the valuable stuff would probably be replaced by volunteer and non-profit efforts.

It wouldn't just be 'non profit', it would be 'considerable loss'. You can't provide a service like YouTube or Google without incurring enormous expense, even if you're only counting the infrastructure costs.

> It'd work out fine.

You have no idea whether it would work out fine. Neither do I. I'm intensely sceptical of anyone who issues hand-waving proclamations about how a dramatic change would affect an almost indescribably complex system.

You may have your own wishes and preferences, but it's not a good idea to let those invade the rational, evaluative part of your mind.

> Most of the rest isn't valuable.

Anything that's used by someone is valuable to someone. I don't like paella, but I don't propose to eradicate all paella restaurants for that reason. Again, this feels like a hand-wavey and not very wise answer to dismiss problems with your idea.

[handrous]

> It wouldn't just be 'non profit', it would be 'considerable loss'. You can't provide a service like YouTube or Google without incurring enormous expense, even if you're only counting the infrastructure costs.

I'm not a bit worried we'd go without capable search engines, without ads. Very likely there'd be donation-supported ones that are at least as good, and maybe better for some purposes (IMO Google's utility peaked around '08).

The free side of Youtube is a UX problem to be solved by something like torrent clients (maybe plus some RSS). Or probably a dozen other ways. It's far from insurmountable, there's just no motivation to fix that now (because there's no demand for it). That's the story for most of the services that could be replaced by [two or three existing protocols] + [some not-exactly-rocket-science UX effort]. The commercial side of it is solved by... hosting videos. Yourself, or paying a service to do it for you (these services already exist, despite YouTube's dominance, all the way from simple video-hosting to full white-label video streaming services).

> Anything that's used by someone is valuable to someone. I don't like paella, but I don't propose to eradicate all paella restaurants for that reason. Again, this feels like a hand-wavey and not very wise answer to dismiss problems with your idea.

It's plain that a huge percentage of online content could be replaced with Snake Game on an old Nokia with ~0 loss of enjoyment for the consumer. A perfect replacement for them is a book of Sudoku puzzles. People look at the stuff but the value is extremely close to zero, in that nearly any other time-wasting activity is just as good. And that's after dismissing the ~75% of the Web that's spammy garbage of negative value (because it drowns out better material covering the same thing).

> You may have your own wishes and preferences, but it's not a good idea to let those invade the rational, evaluative part of your mind.

Beats accepting the wishes and preferences that created the bad situation that exists now, right? Why should that be privileged over what I'd prefer? Has zip to do with a lack of rationality on my part, though it's easier to dismiss ideas if one first paints them as irrational.

We can have useful, widely-used open protocols or we can have spying (ads may or may not also be on the table, but take away the spying and there goes much of the advantage of the huge tech companies, anyway). The two very clearly cannot co-exist. I'd prefer the former.

[samhw]

> I'm not a bit worried we'd go without capable search engines, without ads. Very likely there'd be donation-supported ones that are at least as good, and maybe better for some purposes (IMO Google's utility peaked around '08).

This isn't necessarily wrong. I personally use Gigablast, which is excellent and entirely independent (unlike many 'alternative' search engines it isn't backed by Google or, more often, Bing).

However, pace the problem of other minds, I am not the only person in the world, and many people enjoy and rely on Google. I think this conversation is continually falling into the trap of muddling up what you personally prefer vs what would most satisfy the majority of people, and thus achieve adoption.

It's not a good solution if most people consider it worse for their needs, irrespective of your own personal preferences, or your feelings about what other people should like.

> The free side of Youtube is a UX problem to be solved by something like torrent clients (maybe plus some RSS).

Come on. This is as near as possible to an objectively worse solution. Again, I think you're struggling to see beyond your own preferences and abilities, to how most people in the world interact with technology.

> It's plain that a huge percentage of online content could be replaced with Snake Game on an old Nokia with ~0 loss of enjoyment for the consumer.

I refer back to my previous sentence. [Also, both Snake and old Nokias are exactly as available today as they ever were, and I see no sign whatsoever of this happening, despite the clear advantages in price, battery, uptime, etc.]

> People look at the stuff but the value is extremely close to zero, in that nearly any other time-wasting activity is just as good.

I refer back to my penultimate sentence.

> Why should that be privileged over what I'd prefer?

I refer back to my antepenultimate sentence. The answer is: because you are one person in a world of seven billion, and your solution is not going to go anywhere if the mass of people don't like it.

---

Look, in summary, this is not a useful conversation if all you have to contribute is moralising about the worth of other people's preferences. I don't care if you think most people should spend their time knitting or listening to Brahms. I'm trying to come up with a solution that satisfies people, and, therefore, can actually compete.

[handrous]

You seem to be assuming I don't consume a bunch of content that could be replaced with Snake Game or Solitaire at ~0 loss of enjoyment, because it's incredibly low-value entertainment, so am somehow looking down on others. What do you think this is? That I'm doing right now? The value, in every sense, of nearly all online activities can be found next to "marginal" in the dictionary.

[EDIT]

> if all you have to contribute is moralising about the worth of other people's preferences

Definitely a complete characterization of my views on this, and of these posts. You've looked carefully, considered thoughtfully, and discovered the entire thing. Very good.

[fouric]

You make a very good point about adblockers having that negative second-order effect where they continue to let people have the expectation of getting things that are intrinsically expensive (storage, bandwidth, sysadmins) for free - I didn't think about that before.

As for alternative funding models - why not microtransactions? Attaching an explicit price tag onto website access (subscription model) or individual media/document objects (standard "pay for what you use" model) would have some other beneficial effects, such as reducing extraneous media consumption (mindlessly scrolling for hours suddenly starts costing you money, better to buy a book and get value out of it) - most advertisements are a mental cancer that we should try to get rid of anyway.

[samhw]

Thanks for the kind reply, I appreciate it. I do think that's the kind of mindset that adblockers are inculcating in people - they don't quite realise the extent of all the costs that are borne by everyone else. Perhaps especially so because the sort of person who uses an adblocker is probably the sort of person who can't imagine himself clicking an ad, and so underestimates the amount of revenue made from ads. And thus also likely underestimates all the costs which that revenue pays for. (And then you end up in a predicament like the very-self-aware fellow in the other subthread, insisting that Google and YouTube and Facebook could be run by non-profits, and 'it would all work out fine'.)

As for alternative funding models - which is definitely a much more interesting conversation - I actually considered starting a company in exactly that space. I have some experience in fintech ("very credentialised" according to my former Anglo-German lead investor, haha) and so I thought I could pull it off. I couldn't, and it didn't get past the MVP stage ... luckily. The trouble is that people aren't willing to pay even the $0.01 to access an article. There's something deep in people's brains which is averse to spending money, no matter how small the amount.

I believe - and this is more second-hand evidence from other founders rather than first-hand - that the approaches which typically see the most success are those where people 'top up' a certain amount and then spend it gradually. That doesn't set off the same psychological alarm that directly spending money does. However, that kind of approach would be much harder to implement - especially as something like a browser protocol - because it would require holding probably-vast sums of money in escrow[0], which is an extremely burdensome legal and regulatory position to be in.

Personally I think Brave - much as it's a stupid company started by a stupid clever man - might be onto the right big idea here (despite getting a million little things wrong, and alienating virtually all of its users and most of its non-users too). The core idea of buying attention tokens which are paid out to websites to which you pay attention is a brilliant one. However, it needs a lot more refining, since the crude version of that model is not particularly well-equipped to deal with the difference between e.g. a movie-streaming site, on the one hand, and a shorthand news site, or even a site like Twitter, on the other hand. I may well watch a movie for 180 minutes but get less value from it than I do a tweet. So attention != value, or at least the concept of 'attention' needs refining to be more than simply 'time I spend on a website', but there's a promising kernel there, I think.

[0] Compare it to Starbucks's gift card program. Starbucks is one of the largest commercial debtors in the world just by virtue of the vast number of Starbucks gift cards in people's drawers. These things add up quickly and bigly.