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Why is the internet overflowing with rubbish ads – and what can we do about it?
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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In general, you're not wrong in your summary of how the Web developed. The problem is, though, that you seem to be assuming that since the Web did develop that way, that it had to develop that way. I disagree with that: I think other possibilities existed and might have been viable or even dominant if the dice of fate/random chance had happened to land differently. (And I think that they would've been much more likely to be viable or even dominant if some of the regulatory environment had been different, e.g. if residential ISPs hadn't been allowed to get away with things like drastically asymmetric connections and prohibiting users from running servers. More enforcement of accessibility and standards compliance, instead of tolerating companies deliberately abusing things like Flash and Javascript to unduly restrict users, would've also gone a long way.)
That was not only totally optional, but also arguably considered harmful. HTML was intended to leave presentation up to the client to a certain extent, by design. Megalomaniacal marketers and graphic designers demanding to have pixel-perfect control and doing a bunch of dirty hacks (e.g. abusing
<table>for page layout instead of tabular data) to achieve it were fundamentally Doing It Wrong.Or they implement a distributed architecture that offloads the bandwidth and storage costs to users directly, a la Bittorrent, IPFS, Freenet, etc.
No, I'm not wrong. I'm telling you that there is a threshold beyond which a service cannot support the number of users it has without additional funding and that ads right now provide that additional funding, and always have. And now that we've gotten to this point with billions of online users using services daily, we're to the point where in order to provide a service to that many people bills must be paid and to do that one of two things needs to happen. Ad aggregation, or subscription.
The only reason most of the fediverse survives as it stands now is that it has a small userbase or daily users. When it grows too big to sustain in that regard (given that most of its users now do not actually donate to it), it will die or move to a model that pays the bills. That doesn't have to be ads. But it absolutely could be, in the same way that it could be subscription service.
Grayjay is an example of a competing service that is subscription based. So was floatplane. Both of these service compete with YouTube. Both of them cost money to run. Each of the examples I have been given that don't run on ads or subs can be supported currently by the user base because the user base is small and people are providing what it needs out of a labor of love because it doesn't cause them a hardship to do so. That will not remain the case as the user base grows.
The ones like bittorent and such offload the bandwidth cost to the users but that's only one facet of what we're talking about here.