Comment by Aerroon
3 days ago
>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.
I'm not certain how early you saw the internet - but a lot of people threw up websites hosted on consumer quality computers sitting in the corner of their room. Don't underestimate people.
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.