Link without the paywall
I liked the web a lot more when it didn’t have a business model.
YOU KIDS GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN!
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I’m still fucking ashamed, I was 9 and me and my sis had an ICQ friend. He was the same age as our IRL friend, had the same name, except it was a different guy someplace in Germany. Yet somehow the friendship a bit transcended that little nuance.
And I wrote such horribly idiotic stuff.
And that was back when hosting, storage, and bandwidth were expensive. Those are basically free for text-based content now, and getting cheaper for audio and video. Nowadays, anything made by amateurs shouldn’t really need a “business model” at all, and anything made by professionals could be damned cheap, if there were no middlemen taking the majority of the cut.
Almost every website idea nowadays people are like but how will it make money?!?
And it’s like dude, keeping a website afloat is cheaper than pet rent.
Such bullshit.
“AI is going to fix everything, so we need a new way to make money.”
- AI is nothing but a delusional and unwanted waste of energy.
- The web doesn’t need a business model, period. Money-grubbing billionaires are the only ones who need a business model.
AI as a technology at its core is fine, what is at issue here is the unnecessary scaling up of AI. There were great strides being made in making models as small and efficient as possible before OpenAI fucked up the entire market by becoming a for-profit company. They literally can’t scale the models much further no matter how much data and compute they throw at them nowadays, and the money faucet still hasn’t been turned off to disastrous consequences.
Who pays for your servers and static ip.
Not op, but I pay for my own server, domain and IP (though it is not a static one). And I’ve donated to some of the fediverse platforms that I use, like lemmy.world.
I’m not sure what you are trying to get at?So what’s your public facing site address and we’ll see how we’ll it can hold against the onslaught on the net. You gonna pay to host all the YouTube videos too. Do you host instances for thousands of others to mess with. What SaaS offerings does your site present. If you’re not sure what my point is you’re not informed enough to present a legitimate argument.
fyi, the way you write seems like you are upset over something. It’s somewhat odd to write that on a website that is hosted by volunteers on a shoestring budget for thousands of users “against the onslaught on the net.” So you better understand, anything besides youtube videos (i.e., the majority of the content on the net) is fairly economical to host. Of course it depends on the system, but a small group can easily stand up something dynamic like a lemmy instance, and an individual can host their static blog for basically free -open to the wide internet. Youtube is hard because video uses an incredible amount of bandwidth. Google looses money on it, despite it being plastered with advertising. So even capitalism hasn’t figured out how to do it yet without being subsidized by another revenue stream.
If you’re not sure what my point is you’re not informed enough to present a legitimate argument.
Or maybe you didn’t present your point clearly.
Or maybe you’re just wrong.
These are entirely possible scenarios you might want to consider.
I’m a bit baffled by his hostile response. All I said is that I host and pay for my own server.
Nowhere did I claim that I host YouTube videos on that server, or that it is open to the public. I host that server for personal use, and for me and a few friends of mine. At most there is going to be two people connecting to it at once.I have looked into hosting a peertube instance, but I’ve not really gotten around to figuring out how to set that all up.
I did consider them. And they’re false. It’s a simple concept. Remove that which pays for everything and everything will go away. This isn’t difficult.
The premise of a web business model is that websites must make a profit - either directly or indirectly.
That’s utter bullshit. Some of us are old enough to remember when the web (or for that matter, the pre-web internet) was there for sharing of information, social interaction, and community. Schools, the government, and nonprofits provided hosting for free.
Later on, ISPs started to add hosting as part of their internet service - along with usenet access and an email address. The cost to them was negligible, especially vs. the benefits of being able to say “switch to us and create your own website!”
Nowadays you can run a site from your home PC in a VM, punch a hole through your firewall, and pay a modicum for DDNS to a custom domain for under a hundred bucks a year. If you’re a bigger site with more traffic, maybe you spin it up on AWS and pay ten or twenty bucks a month.
The very idea that “The Web” is a homogeneous, for-profit entity is a profound and fundamental mistake that is made by every money-obsessed organization around - not just the financial rags like Forbes and The Economist, but essentially corporations as well. Take a look at the support site for your favourite product and try to convince yourself that they didn’t just put the minimum required effort in to send customers into the arms of their competitors.
Nobody ever offered free web hosting. They put ads on your shit or you paid for it. You became the product. You’re talking about shit that very few these days even know how to do. And no those costs weren’t negligible which is why geo cities and all those other “free” pages disappeared. Same with all the couple dozen different chat programs that sprung up. Free shit works partially at small scale but can’t handle any kind of serious activity. People can barely navigate Salesforce there’s no way they’re setting up their own hooks or poking holes in their routers or setting up external dns.
Don’t pull that age bullshit on me. Im nearly 50. I was there in the muds, in the bbs, on icq, watched Napster sutdown. Been configuring this shit since 3.1 and wordperfect in dos.
Kagi’s model is working well for them. A traditional search engine where AI results are limited and optional, and they actively try to filter away slop, images, clickbait, and other low quality results.
I’ve been paying for 3 months and I’ll never go back. I hope they increase their market share as others ratchet up their enshittification cranks.
The web needs a new web. The internet was never created for privacy and security. People trying to plug the holes isn’t enough.
Can we please just pay a cent or half a cent for each page we vist. Its like 50x what the website would get from our view with ads and its not much. I’m sure it would encourage others to start their own website as well if you could get $1 from 100 page views.
There are so many things like this news article where they want to charge me a few dollars. Bro I cant afford to pay $5 a month for every single platform that would close me 1000s.
Don’t you already pay to use the Internet? Why does anybody have to make record profits every quarter, fuck all ads. The Internet was much better when corporations were not involved.
Idc about corporations but the internet costs and you cant get away from that. Servers and the infrastructure around them has to be paid for. And I’m happy to pay my share when I vist someones website. My issue is that my share is a few cents not a few dollars like a lot of these newpapers try and charge.
How long have you been using the Internet if I may ask?
20 years
I wish I could take you back 10 years further. It’s like a national forest that someone build a parking lot and strip mall over, and everyone cheers because they finally tore the mall down and put up a giant fence water park with cameras everywhere.
Yes things were different back then. It wasnt a national forest, it was forest in a world where no cities existed anywhere. Nothing had been built on the internet back then. You didnt have websites that served userbases in the 100s of millions. You didnt have to serve images, videos, live streams and other dynamic content. You didnt have the same security overhead now required. If the internet were only text chat over irc I wouldnt be sitting here worrying about internet funding.
I dont go to the cbd of my city and think “I wish they replaced this with a forest” because I know there are plenty of forests outside the city, and people choose to live in the city over the forest. Same for the internet and so we need to think about solving the problem instead of wishing to tear everything down.
Like a functional city made to serve the populous or like a typical American city that only works for the rich?
You don’t pay for the services in it. Storage, computation, bigger channels.
So yes, I think it should be possible to make paid connections to a service, like a paid phone call.
Or to buy storage.
There should be a new stack of web-like (application-layer and up) protocols. To separate requesting storage (put, get), computation (submit a task, get a result) and search (get from index by keywords) into technically different tasks and to make them paid on technical level. Probably make some procedure for aggregated payment for accessing a service. Then the service itself should be on the next level, and probably built from these services on the client.
It should be a client-side decision to “continue to a paid service for N monies”.
People who’ve built the Internet - they were an academic bunch, or in case of Sun founders, an economically inept bunch (yes, I can repeat that ; their period of huge success was mostly when they were making workstations ; though to be honest I liked Bill Joy’s interview on climate and externalia). They didn’t consider this important. They made a library system for a community of peers.
That’s an intermediate version of what I’m dreaming of, except what I’m dreaming of would have uniform infrastructure completely separated from content, so services would serve many applications in a uniform way, storage and computation and search and maybe message relay to another user. The applications themselves would differ from each other, and their differences would exist locally on user machine.
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You are clueless.
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If there’s a way to easily pay directly for pooled resources in the Internet, then you don’t have to use what big companies milking you in some other way provide.
So it would seem that what I’m proposing is less like slavery. But you do you.
And then the new meta instead of making you scroll through a million ads to get to the content it will make you go to page 2 then 3 then 4… to get to the content to get many more cents XD
But yea i do agree that if the websites aked us to pay the same amount that they get from ads to not see them it would cost us a fraction of a penny. Just needs some kind of wallet that either the website or ad provider can take from to delete the ads.
Maybe you could do it as the website sets a suggested price and the user either agrees or chooses their own. I think if the process of paying was seemless enough most people would be happy to pay and the few people putting 0 for everything probably need the money more anyway.
I literally sent a message to google in the ads part of my google account since google is one of the biggest ad provider, about a wallet that would pay automatically to not see the ads. Idk if anyone reads these messages there XD
unfortunately google gains a lot more from getting our data and selling us as potential clients to businesses and would most likely not want to get on that.
Maybe paypal wich already have wallets and widespread addoption could try to replace ads provider.
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Clickbait is one of the bigger problems on the net. I don’t want to pay for more of it.
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I am much less opposed to being tracked than some people here. But the complete and unavoidable surveillance implied by such a scheme takes it a bit far.
Actually, given Lemmy’s usual knee-jerk reaction to tracking and commercialization, I can only assume that people aren’t thinking through this proposal.
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You do that and the prices will just keep going up. See Netflix/streaming as an example. Enough $ is never enough. Line must go up.
First of all, prices already go up for things like netflix. This isnt aimed at subscription sites like netflix its more for pages where you browse for free at the cost of viewing ads like blogs, youtube, substack, lemmy etc. Yes prices would go up over time no doubt but the idea is that the users providing the money should lower the cost. 1000 humans visting your site should be willing to pay more than an advertiser is to show an ad to those 1000 people. Google generally pays around 5cents to 30cents for 1000 views. I dont know about you but I can split 30 cents between 1000 people, hell i’ll even double it cause im generous. I think if 1000 people are viewing your website you should get paid for providing something interesting enough for 1000 people to enjoy. If everyone gave 1cent thats $100, if everyone paid double what the ad was they’d be paying $0.0003 each.
I dont want people who write a blog that is read by many people to need to subject their readers to ads all only to get a check from google saying heres a few cents bud. We can do better, and I dont think the answer is asking people to pay a $5 a month.
I loved the idea of Flattr.
Web use is hard to measure, but by one estimate monthly traffic from search engines has fallen by 15% in the past year. Some of the loudest complaints have come from the news media, an industry in which we acknowledge an interest. But the drought is a wider problem. Science and education sites have lost a tenth of their visitors in the past year. Reference sites are down by 15% and health sites by 31%. Some big names are being gutted: Tripadvisor.com, which recommends the best hotels or beaches, is down by a third; Webmd, which offers reassurance (or alarm) to the poorly, has fallen by half.
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As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for ai to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with ai companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. (The Economist Group has yet to license its work for ai training, but has agreed to let Google use select articles for one of its ai services.) Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.
No one should expect the web of the future to look just as it does today. ai-powered search will rightly shake up some services: business directories, for instance, face disintermediation as answer-bots field queries such as “emergency plumber” or “houses for sale”. But the evaporation of incentives to create content presents a fundamental problem. If human traffic is drying up, the web will need a new currency
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Bringing a new business model to the web is daunting; it may take a shove from regulators to get started. Yet everyone has an interest in making content-creation pay. Publishers may be the ones complaining now, but if the content tap dries up, ai companies will suffer, too. Some are more vulnerable than others. Whereas Meta can draw on data posted to its social networks and Google owns YouTube, the world’s biggest video vault, Openai relies entirely on others for its content.
If nothing changes, the risk is of a modern-day tragedy of the commons. The shared resource of the open web will be over-exploited, leading to its eventual exhaustion. If that process is not stopped, one of the great common properties of humanity could be gravely diminished. The tragedy of the web would be a tragedy for everyone.
As others have commented, the economist is presenting this as a capitalist issue that requires a monetary fix. The most ironic element to me is that one of the elements of the tragedy of the commons is that is indicates the requirement of a public interest and it’s regulatory interest so the commons can work. So another way to perceive this is that we need a non-capital framework to allow the web to persist. Say perhaps like roads are created as infrastructure to allow the free movement of it’s citizens in a “safe” and organized way, perhaps we should change our perspective on the utility of the we and it’s content. I’m not suggesting that we copy the transportation to the internet as it obviously breaks down, but the need to think outside the capitalist box is apparent. Libraries have been funded both publicly and privately as public interest, and have the capacity to work both for and nonprofit. This adaptation need not just be ‘free’ market driven. Especially as we do not actually live in a free market, but I’ll let others drive down that hole.
Don’t put AI in anything and everything because it’s the new .com. That’s the business model that will work
Just realized a whole generation of kids will have ai links to the web, so if they look for something theyll get the one sanitized link, think the whole skill of searching and sifting through links will be lost (it was thought in schools when I was a kid)
Most of the people I know now never really acquired this skill, can’t really lose what they didn’t have
lol. You’re not wrong that it’ll be way easier to rely on AI to do the sorting for you, but you’re implying Google didn’t sanitize information and only give you results they approve of…
There’s way more to the internet than you can find on search engines.
Like what, why never use examples, why do people always refer to something but not say what it is? If there is more, what do you think I’m missing?
Enjoy.
Yeah the search engines are filled with ways to access the dark web
google “dark web search engine” and google isnt hiding sht
Better off using tor? Reddits a bigger issue here they had heaps of guides and wikis related to it, they banned all that sht before lemmy became a thing`
end of the day its showing you 20 results per page or whatever not just one link and a summary
To survive the AI age we will need a completely different capitalism model - which I honestly think will happen, but the transition period is guaranteed to be extremely difficult.
web 1.0 was the last good era of the internet
I should get into the model business
