We have made mistakes.
We wanted it all to be free. It was free. I remember the early days of the internet, the webforums, the IRC, it was mostly sites run by enthusiasts. A few companies showing their products to would-be customers. It was awesome and it was all free.
And then it got popular, it got mainstream. Running servers got expensive and the webmasters were looking for funding. And we resisted paywalls. The internet is free, that's how it's supposed to work!
They turned to advertising. That's fair, a few banners, no big deal, we can live with that. It worked for television! And for a while that was OK.
Where did it all go sideways? Well, it was much too much effort to negotiate advertisement deals between websites and advertisers one website at a time, so the advertisement networks were born. Sign up for funding, embed a small script and you're done. Advertisers can book ad space with the network and their banner appears on thousands of websites. Then they figured out they can monitor individual user's interests, and show them more "relevant" ads, and make more money for more effective ad campaigns.
And now we have no privacy online. Which caused regulators like the EU to step in and try to limit user data harvesting. With mixed results as we all know. For one it doesn't seem to get enforced enough so a lot of companies just get away with. But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.
And now we're swamped with ads, and sponsored content written by AI, because capitalism's gonna capitalism and squeeze as much profit as they can, until an equilibrium is reached between maximum revenue and user tolerance for BS. Look up "enshittification"
I wonder how the web would look like if we had not resisted paid content back then. There were attempts to do things differently. flattr was one thing for a while. Patreon, ko-fi and others are awesome for small creators. Gives them independence and freedom to do their thing and not depend on big platforms or corporations. The fediverse and open source are awesome.
There's still a lot of great stuff out there for those of us who know where to look. But large parts of the internet are atrocious.
This is what writers call "show don't tell"
I made a blogpost about that, and I promise you'll see no ads, no cookies, no JavaScript, just the blogpost.
Road to hell being paved with good intentions and all, I guess. The reason sites all have the cookie permission dialog now is because of the GDPR, which has the right idea on data privacy, but the implementation wound up being so terrible that it winds up doing this. Prior to that dialog, they'd just store/read the cookies without permission (though lots of people would proactively sandbox browsers to make it a non-issue). I honestly can't decide which is worse, at this point.
I like the ones that show the prompt for "we've detected an ad-blocker" with the option you can click for "continue without disabling and not supporting us". Guilt trips work in human to human interactions, but not for random Internet prompts.
Of course I'd prefer the web simply not using cookies on every single site I visit (therefore not needing the prompt), but that's not going to happen. Sites have to monetize somehow to stay alive.
On the other hand, Wired has always been trash. I used to adore starting in elementary school ever since I picked one up at a dentist reception area. Had a subscription all the way up until the end of high school. I loved the articles, the reply to readers at the back of the magazine, but most of all the gadget reviews a la Cool Tools by Kevin Kelly.
In retrospect it is a luxury lifestyle brand magazine with more advertisements than actual interesting content. The books always felt thick, but the damn thing would become a shitty pamphlet if you take out the ads.
Perfection
The communists cut many internet cables for some anti-capitalism reason!
@q5VtXnYt <details class="spoiler"><summary>The irony</summary>The irony</details>
this belongs to !memes@lemmy.ml
I wish they didn't do this. Before when there were no paywalls I did pay for Wired to support them, but nowadays nope.
🗿
gee I wonder :D
