| > I'm guaranteed to not be flooded with ads That seems more like an artifact of it not being popular than a feature of the protocol. If companies wanted to, they could just run native advertisement on Gemini just like they do elsewhere, just disguise the ad as regular news article and call it a day. Nothing stops them from putting banners on top of every page either or how about showing you an ad text before you are allowed to visit the actual content? You could even have a server-side wait time before you are allowed to move on from the ad. Gemini just feels like rolling back the Web to an earlier stage without actually adding anything meaningful. If it ever got popular, it would devolve just the same as the Web already did, as it's nothing more than the same thing with a different paint job. My personal take on this is that the core of everything wrong with the Web is the request–response nature of the protocol, as that allows to do a lot of crooked stuff on the server side, either intentionally (e.g. monitoring user activity, showing different content to different people) or unintentionally (e.g. causing broken links by servers going down). If the client gets plain-text or HTML really doesn't make a difference. Another big issue is that publishing on the Web is far too complicated and expensive, which is why nobody is doing it anymore and instead relies on Facebook, Youtube and Co. Something like IPFS feels like a much more valuable attempt as fixing the Web, as IPFS gets away from the request-response and turns the Web into a persistent data structure, that can't just be meddled with at the server side. It also makes publish substantially easier, as hosting is no longer tied to any single company, multiple people can host the same content and you don't have to pay and maintain a DNS record. The part that is still missing with IPFS is a better replacement HTML. Stuff like pagination, image galleries, shopping carts, comments, etc. really need to become part of HTML, instead of stuff people hack together with Javascript or server side scripts. And how come we don't have an <advertising> tag yet? Efforts in simplification should really happen on the users side, not in the protocol. |
The problem that people have with ads on the web is cross-site tracking and targeted ads. Gemini protocol does indeed prevent that by restricting one request to just one response. Non targeted ads wouldn't be a privacy concern, or even an attractive option.