Comment by munk-a
3 days ago
Oh darn, maybe we should just ban the entire online advertising industry. Gosh, what value we'd lose if we couldn't have our personalized attention destroying glitter boxes.
My opinion on web infra patronage has shifted over time, I used to generally accept that for small websites to exist advertising was a necessary evil since they were too niche to have a real revenue source. Then I ran one and I realized that there's far more labor costs involved in maintaining a site than infra costs and that for niche hobbies and communities ten bucks can just find its way into a central pot every month to keep the lights on by those with a bit more to spare.
I am now of the opinion that web communities can survive in the same way arts and other liberal pursuits have always survived. People with a bit more to spare put more into the pot to create the community they want to exist in and "freeloaders" is an alien concept to the genuinely interested since that money is being spent to create a place where meeting can take place without a financial requirement.
>I am now of the opinion that web communities can survive in the same way arts and other liberal pursuits have always survived.
And the only 'users' of these websites will be rich people? Because the moment a paywall goes up on a website it becomes unusable for a large portion of the planet.
Not at all, a few people pay to make it available as a service to others because they want it to exist. It's like this website - there are no (traditional) ads and most of us have paid nothing to use it. A small expenditure creates a good community for technical discussion that the hosts value existing and for being able to occasionally promote their ventures on.
It wouldn't work like that. Yes, there are some exceptions, but that wouldn't work for the vast majority of sites. The rest of them would end up being Facebook pages or Fandom wikis or similar.
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Were the hypothetical "paywalls everywhere" scenario to play out, sites would quickly consolidate their subscriptions. So a subscription to something like Engadget would get you access to a wide swath of sites, making the paywall a lot more palatable overall. This would be the inevitable outcome because it would be the most natural way for sites to compete with other sites.
It doesn't matter because simply having to pay any amount at all makes those sites inaccessible. Most of the world do not have credit cards.
But that aside, I think what we would see is a lot more Facebookification. A bunch of walled gardens that you pay a subscription for and then you get access to a whole slew of sites that FB buys up. Of course, they will make sure every site ends up toeing their line too.
Cool, cool… the “pot of money” model you’re proposing is possible right now, yet is used essentially nowhere outside of substack writers. That’s a very clear signal.
If you ban online advertising, every publisher you know and like will either exit the market or need to use a paywall (which are famously… popular and successful for niche publishers? No.)
You can call online advertising loathsome if you want (indeed a lot of it sucks - no argument!) but it pays for content that everyone consumes. (Unless you only use HN, which is 99% of the time a collection of links to other sites with ads or paywalls or both.)
Regulate online advertising - fine. But “banning” it (what would that even involve?) is not a serious suggestion.
Tons of webforums have donation links or premium memberships. People will pay for their name to be displayed in a different color and basically nothing else, and it's not super hard if you have a few hundred users to pay for servers this way.
It's a fine model so long as you don't need it to scale to one million active users.
I'm still of the opinion that the end of online advertising would be a significant net benefit to society, if for no other reason then the incentives to keep you interacting with a social network / website / app / media / etc. fade away.
> If you ban online advertising, every publisher you know and like will either exit the market or need to use a paywall (which are famously… popular and successful for niche publishers? No.)
OK.