Comment by huitzitziltzin
3 days ago
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.