Well said! Outrage sells and it is easy to keep it stoked. Everyone is addicted to free. If we get rid of ads, how does (even the barest bones) Twitter keep the lights on?
I wonder if there is a cross-over between Patreon, Substack and Twitter. This would probably work for niches but not writ large. But at the end of the day, we need to find a way to pay for what we value because that is how we get more of it. Interested in new ideas in this space....
The Medium/Spotify model -- per-user constant subscription fee, apportioned to content creators on the basis of their views + some time-viewing / read-to-end adjustments to discourage clickbaiting -- seems fairly decent, but really requires a global platform to work.
But product companies don't like it because they can't scale revenue user-transparently by repackaging data (e.g. building new / better ad products), and raising prices for users sucks.
The original sin is that the web was free, and the consequence of that, once post-content-scarcity in a free market system, has been continual sleight of hand to make money from "free."
If everyone has gotten in the habit of paying for quality content... we'd have a very different world now.
(And this said as a hard-charging "information wants to be free" type. But the end commercial result nowadays is terrible)
Well, that there was a rich and vibrant internet before advertising existed on it seems to indicate it's entirely possible.
But I don't think we chose ad-supported. The ads came in before anyone was seriously thinking about how to charge people for things. The decision was made for us. And even if we did pay cash money, the ads would have come anyway if history is any indication.
So perhaps the degradation of the internet in this way was inevitable. Still, it's a real loss and a real shame.
The academic, and then niche, Internet was always a fundamentally different dynamic than once you let everyone in. Eternal September etc. I'm not sure post-mass market the "early Internet" was still a stable outcome.
I'd agree that we (the users) certainly didn't chose ad-supported. At least in any more specific way than saying "I like free things more than not free things" ("we" as in a majority).
And I don't think pay-for-things or any other not-ads model was fundamentally flawed... it just wasn't superior or even at parity at the time that ads took off (i.e. DoubleClick/AdWords)... and so we got ads.
And I'm not arguing that we should have ads! No one would be happier than me if they disappeared from the face of the Internet tomorrow, at least in massively-tracked form.
But I do think moving past them requires an honest appraisal of why they exist -- people, on the whole, are cheapskates.
We're in a thread about social networks, so the content is still provided for free by users while the host company tries to monetize. You can't be making the point that providing content for free wasn't sustainable...
I'd prefer not to live in the AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve blackhole that was the Internet before "the original sin that the web was free." Originally, it wasn't free.
I do agree with you that it would have been better if the payment-related features of the HTTP spec weren't just dead-on-arrival stubs.
I wonder if there is a cross-over between Patreon, Substack and Twitter. This would probably work for niches but not writ large. But at the end of the day, we need to find a way to pay for what we value because that is how we get more of it. Interested in new ideas in this space....