Comment by bitpush
9 days ago
> Request says "Hey... can I read a document named this?" and the computer shows you the document.
Did you not skip over a lot of steps in between?
User: Hey can I read a document named this?
Server: Sure, let me spend resources and spin harddisk and lookup the thing you wanted. Oh hey, I found it .. here ya go
User: Great.
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You've conviently ignored the resources the "old" web had to spend to serve you. Nothing has really changed it. Also the thing you wanted, that was "source code". We just called it html. It is no different than javascript+css+html5.
This argument makes no sense, because the CPU and disk resources required to serve up a modern ad (and the megabytes of JavaScript that come with it) are 100-1000x more expensive than just serving up the content.
You're right, but that's not the point the person is making is it? A bare modern webpage is no where comparable to the site of the past. If you take hackernews as an example with no ads, no tracking as an example, it still be orders of maginitude _costly_ than index.html in the past.
Hacker News is dynamic, a webserver has to dynamic stitch together the comments and send you an html. It has to make sure the page is always fresh with latest comments, and vote count. There's batch processing happening in the background, with multiple rounds of storage and backup.
So yes, to the user it is "Please give me the homepage" and "Here ya go" but behind the scenes it is expensive, at this scale.
I did not intend to omit that, but the origin of the web was in a peer-to-peer, collaborative Internet that no longer exists.
Yes, the server resources that were necessary to serve web pages are the origin of advertising, because the admins somehow had to keep the lights on and their bills paid. I don't fault them for this. I don't begrudge them for being, basically, forced into carrying advertising because the freeloading users wouldn't settle for any other way. Advertising allowed a "free web" to continue unabated for a long time.
But advertisements don't need to be resource-intensive on the client side. They don't need to eat gobs of bandwidth, CPU, memory, or our eyeballs. But the fact that they do chew up these resources is partly for why they need to die now.
Server admins can pay for their resources however, and offset their costs however they please. I'm fine with subscription or pay-per-use models or whatever. I honestly have very little use for ad-supported models, and my daily web habits are such that I really don't visit ad-supported websites at all, except for YouTube, where I normally pay for a Premium subscription to completely eliminate all formal ads, anyway. And that's the way it should be.