[mrtksn]

The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, the land grab was complete and the time to recoup the investment has come.

Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome.

It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.

[mattacular]

> The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken,

Categorically untrue and weird revisionism. Basically the opposite of what actually happened.

[II2II]

I agree with the untrue and revisionism bit, but I disagree with it being the opposite of what happened.

People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. While the early web was nowhere near as commercial as it is today, we quickly saw the development of search engines and (ad supported) hosting services that were. By the time 2000's hit, VC money was very much starting to drive the game. In the minds of most people, the Internet was only 5 to 10 years old at that point. (The actual Internet may be much older, but few people took notice of it until the mid-1990's.)

[sedatk]

> People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible

People were doing that even in ARPANET days. The commercial aspect was seen as a strong incentive to make ARPANET accessible by the masses.

[ryandrake]

> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.

Yes, No, Yes?

I don't demand constant updates. I don't want constant updates. Usually when a company updates software it becomes worse. I am happy with the initial version of 90% of the software I use, and all I want is bug fixes and security updates.

[throw10920]

> I don't want constant updates.

> all I want is bug fixes and security updates.

GP wasn't differentiating between different types of updates in their argument, because it doesn't make sense - they're discussing the economics of it, which doesn't care if you're fixing bugs or not.

>> How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.

[renewiltord]

I suspect then it doesn't matter whether Mozilla kills itself or not. You should be fine with the current release of Firefox. Maybe you'd lose the installer, so all you have to do is put it somewhere safe and you're good.

[Cpoll]

> all I want is bug fixes and security updates.

[renewiltord]

Yes yes, I don't want updates. I just want updates. haha.

[vegetable]

> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.

constant updates

[renewiltord]

"Don't give me security updates every time there's a security issue. Instead do it occasionally because I like my vulnerabilities to be a surprise"

[Cpoll]

I'm just pointing out that your proposal doesn't match their requirements.

> I don't want updates. I just want updates

It only sounds dumb if you write it like that. If you say "I don't want feature bloat, I just want security patches" it sounds reasonable.

[MindDraft]

while i may agree with the first line, rest are little skewed perspective.

> People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.

hate subscription?? may be. if it's anything like Adobe then yes, people will hate.

that constant update, is something planted by these corporates, and their behavior manipulation tactics. People were happily paying for perpetual software, which they can "own" in a cd//dvd.

[mrtksn]

People weren't happily paying, there was huge pirate business that was run on porn, gambling ads and spyware revenue. Then there were organizations with lots of lawyers paid by the "pay once use forever" companies to enforce the pay part because people didn't want to pay.

One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free. That's why this model was destroyed by the subscription and ad based "free" software.

The last example is Affinity which was the champion of pay once use forever model, very recently they end up getting acquired and their software turned into "free" + subscription.

[rightbyte]

> One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free.

What do you mean. Support contracts were not included by default. Consumers had some initial support to fight off instant reclamations.

[wrxd]

It wasn’t one time fee though. The one time fee bought a copy of the software and its patches. A couple of years later a new version would come out and people had the choice between keeping using the old version or buying the new one.

To convince people to buy they had to add genuinely useful features. I would have bought a new version with new features and better performance. I wouldn’t have bought a new version same as the previous one with AI crammmed in it

[shakna]

> The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money

Huh? Nexus was funded by CERN.

Newsgrounds was never investor funded.

Yahoo! Directory was just two guys, and you paid to be listed. There were no investors involved.

WebCrawler was a university project. Altavista was a research project.

[gr4vityWall]

People seem to forget the non-commercial web ever existed.

[mycall]

The long tail of the web, likely consisting of mostly small or noncommercial sites, are currently numerically huge but individually low traffic. Meanwhile, user attention is dominated by a relatively small set of commercial and platform sites.

[mrtksn]

That was ine inception age when very few people were online, its not the stage of mass adoption. The mass adoption starts with the dot.com era with mass infrastructure build up.

But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.

[skydhash]

I came to the web after dotcom and most of the content (accessibke trough search) was blogs and forums. It wasn’t until SEO that fake content started to grow like weeds.

[mrtksn]

That's the time when VC's were making huge investments into the web tech, most companies were losing crazy money.

The mentality of the age was portrayed like this in SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

There were companies that were making some money but those were killed or acquired by companies that give their services for free. Google killed the blogs by killing their RSS reader since they were long into making money stage and their analytics probably demonstrated that it is better people search stuff than directly going to the latest blog posts.

It's the same thing everywhere, the whole industry is like that. Uber loses money until there's no longer viable competition then lose less money by jacking up the prices. The tech is very monopolistic, Peter Thiel is right about the tech business.

[officialchicken]

The existing online mass is what attracted the VC in the first place, same as it ever was. It was mostly privately funded and very much a confederacy (AOL vs Prodigy vs BBS) at the time, much like now.

[shakna]

I don't think Altavista came before the bubble burst... They directly competed with Google and Yahoo.

[tietjens]

I take your point, but I think the comment was referring to Web 2.0.

[timeon]

Yeah Web 2.0 was scam but internet is broader than that.

[bambax]

If a time comes when there are zero free browser with effective ad-blocking, it will create space for a non-free browser that does it. It would create a whole ecosystem.

I currently pay zero for ad-blocking (FF + uBlock Origin) and it works perfectly; but I would pay if I had to.

[mrtksn]

I think they are trying to balance it between making as much as money possible, risking being sued for monopolistic practices and risking exodus. Microsoft once overplayed their hand and the anger and consumer dissatisfaction was so strong that people left Internet Explorer en masse.

So the best situation for google would be to have borderline monopoly where they pay for the existence of their competition and the competition(Firefox) blocks adblockers too by default but leaving Chrome and Firefox is harder than forcing installin adblockers through the unofficial way.

So basically, all the people who swear they never clicked ads manage to block ads, Firefox and Chrome print money by making sure that ads are shown and clocked by the masses.