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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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Ads = revenue that keep sites and services running. What can you do about it? Pay.
Or let all the commercial sites go out of business and fucking die, so that the labor-of-love websites that dominated the net in the '90s can return to prominence. And nothing of value would be lost.
Anyone who wasn't around then can't really know what they missed.
That sounds wonderful. But I've been using the web a long time. I remember the time you're talking about when we first got web browsers etc. And let me tell you, the windows 95/98 time frame before Google and ask Jeeves etc was not a golden age. Ads were still on web pages, and while people with the right technical knowledge and access to a computer could create a server and a website and so on, they still had to get that website in front of people's eyes.
We had visitor counters and web rings and a rush to buy up domain names before everyone else, and so on. That still costs money though. The electric to run a server. The time to upkeep a website (even in html), and make it look/function the same across different screens and different brands of computers.
Google and even Jeeves and Alta Vista came at a time when we badly needed to connect the internet together in a way that the average new user would be able to find usable and.intuitive enough to get away from books and papers.
Search engines that ran on ads became one of the few good ways to do this. And a lot of the way the business of ad aggregation and web search have developed to make it easier to find what you're looking for for on the web makes sense when you give it any thought. But people spent a good couple of decades completing ignoring that to the point that now it's gotten out of hand and Google basically has a monopoly on search, and half the internet doesn't seem to even know they're not a search company but an ad aggregation company doing what makes them money.
I don't honestly care if you agree with what Google is doing or not. But I do wonder if anyone is thinking about how foss replacements and competition will gain any ground because honestly they either pay the bills with donations and ads, or they charge a subscription fee because these things cost money to run.
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.
How about becoming literally disabled and pushed away from the one area i was deemed proficient in?
Seriously, if the internet is going to be like this, might as well pull the plug.
I have been investing in running my own services and programming my own life essential tools anyway. I will always be computer nerd but one of these years i am just going offline, trow my phone away and glue my mailbox shut.
And yeah this is anger talking but i am so fed up with this “someone must make profits to justify our existence” excuse. That is not how passion works.
I'm not talking about "someone must make profits" that's disingenuous. What I'm saying is that services that you consume for free cost money to run. Someone somewhere has to provide if nothing else the computer/server, and electricity to run it the fediverse runs on donations and ads literally the sync app I'm using runs on ads, paid tier, etc. because it costs time and money to upkeep.
Your personal problems with tech in general and your disability don't have anything to do with that. People are talking on the tech community about how Google is taking out competing front ends for YouTube and what this means for an ad free experience, and while I agree that Google is obviously the bad guy for being the mutli-trillion dollar company it is, I also recognize that they have always been an ad company and the thing about Google is that before it existed as a free to use service we relied really heavily on an open web that was pretty empty by comparison and very disjoined. Finding things was a problem. Web rings may give people nostalgia for a "better time", but they weren't efficient ways to find information.
I can understand being angry but paying for the things you use is the one way to create alternatives to these services that are literally taking advantage of their users for profit as you put it. Lots of web services that are big "gotta make money" companies started out offering us free or inexpensive alternatives to the companies that were overcharging us and gouging us.
The fact that they've got too big is an issue with capitalism not the concept that people shouldn't have to pay for the things they use.
The Internet is full of ads because ads pay bills and keep the lights on.
As with any devil's bargain, one must evaluate whether it's really worth it or not.
If all advertising on the Web disappeared tomorrow, would some valuable content be lost because the people putting it up are not willing to fund their site out of pocket? Certainly yes.
Would even more worthless garbage be lost? I think that's also a "yes".
I'm willing to accept a smaller Web with some losses in order to get rid of obnoxious advertising. So are many others. You appear to disagree, as is your right. In any case, it would take a major legislative movement and/or cultural change to cram the genie back into the bottle at this point, so the argument is most likely moot.
Yeah but the web has been this way since the mid 90's. It's been funded by ads the way that things that came before it were. Broadcast television is a good example. People switched to cable because of less ads and more channels with the expectation that there would be better content. That didn't last. Then we had tivo and DVRs and so many other products to get around ads. But the root of the problem is that people won't buy things they don't know about, won't use services they don't know about, will have a hard time looking for goods and services that they do want without some form of advertisement. Word of mouth is advertisment too when you get right down to it. The ads were often less intrusive but became more so over time because it's such a hotly contested area that pretty much every company small and large is throwing money at.
What's worthless garbage to some may be useful in a pinch to others. The point is that combating ads means taking away a source of revenue not just for ad aggregators and ad companies but for business full stop. I hate billboards. I'd be perfectly happy to never see a billboard again in my life. That being said, they have been effective ads for a long time, and have been used for good purposes occasionally (missing persons, unsolved crimes etc come to mind).
I'm not saying ads aren't more often than not intrusive, annoying, or lost on me. I actually do find them intrusive, run a pihole and a private DNS etc. But I also recognize that really laws to curtain what ads can do is a major problem, and that services have bills to pay.
And all that is to also say that worth is subjective.
I run some of those services that people use. 24/7 I have been doing so for years.
That does costs a lot of time and energy, i ask nothing In return. Well except they they wont be upset with me In person when i end up going dark. ( I’ll make sure to opensource provide it all naturally. )
Right now on lemmy, you are using a free service running on someones computer, there are no ads nor subscriptions to support it. If it would then i would be spinning up my own instance quicker then bender can imagine his own themapark.
The alternative isn't just possible, but the default way people have gotten things done since prehistoric times. Do things because we want to, share resources, providing for others. Lift everyone else up and you too will rise.
What i see when i observe services that complain about not being able to sustain without some form of financing is a lack of motivation and passion. To me they are a red flag that they are disfunctioneel by nature. I lose completely faith in there ability to provide competence or quality.
Of course i do understand that being unwilling to compromise morality under treat of poverty is an exception rather then rule.
But honestly how people do this shit and Not want to kill themselves in shame is actually weird to me.
Lemmy only survives today because people donate, which I did talk about in my subsequent comments which is exactly my point. It's not ad supported now (most instances aren't at any rate) but there are absolutely ad supported fediverse services, and if it gets bigger, it likely will run ads because more users means more content, more bandwidth, more electricity etc. The alternative is possible small scale, when you don't have billions of users per day. There's a threshold where the number of users far exceed a what even a group of people can put into a project like Lemmy without needing additional funding.
So either the majority of Lemmy users pays to use the service through subs or donations, or this won't last either.
I have nothing against having the option to donate, which has worked for many projects.
The idea you are sketching, it is a possible reality but that is the bad future to me.
There’s a threshold where the number of users makes it impossible for your service to still have any real sense of identity or intend and it ought to be broken up in smaller parts. Some of the larger instances have already passed that threshold in my opinion.
You did mention the solution, "The alternative is possible small scale" The good future is where every family has their own private instance and every business and service has their own public one, interconnected.
Keep things small, manageable, focused and responsible.
I do agree this (fediverse) likely won't last, not with so many predators waiting to grab a piece. Web3 is not here yet, as much as meta threads want to believe we are it.
That doesn't sound reasonable for a lot of reasons. The idea that each family can host their own instance (which still has costs, and as you reasonably pointed out can't generally be done with a server in the basement because of broadband laws preventing that kind of usage, is kind of ludicrous. That would lead to an internet where only people with money would be able to host a website of any kind. And even then, public services (video hosting, cloud storage, news, any kind of public service or so on) wouldn't get anything out of the deal so why would they let you connect to them and mirror their content?
Also, if we keep things small scale, social networks die because new people aren't coming in to replace dead accounts as people leave. So what happens then? Those social networks die. Social network sites like Lemmy and mastodon and so on need people. Without people to post content and people to consume it the site is basically just an empty husk of random 1's and 0's.
Keep things responsible? How do we do that? You've given me an outline of an idea you have but it's all broad strokes and no details.
There is a lot to unpack here. I think you misunderstand how the fediverse we're part of is designed for the dynamic I'm explaining.
First, I never claimed not everyone can afford self-hosting (that does not need to be) in their basement. You might be mixing up someone else's comment. In many cases its cheaper then joining someone else's.
Modern modems are already built with similar hardware to what's needed for self-hosting a small domain. Computers have become so cheap and accessible that it is trivial. For example, a Raspberry Pi can host many things for under $50.
I also discovered yesterday that a public “hackerspace” near me is saving computers from landfills precisely to be given away for free and used for self hosting + sharing the knowledge on how to set it up.
I'm curious where you live that self-hosting is illegal. That's a law I'd find so repulsive I'd need to break it on principle.
Your ideas about decentralized systems seem contradictory. You say only the rich could host under fediverse, but also believe it's illegal to self-host?
Dont ask why big centralized services would connect to ours and instead ask what reason we have to connect to centralized systems. I run my own cloud server; it's cheaper than a subscriptions. People are designing decentralized video hosting systems like PeerTube where everyone hosts their own videos. The proof is all around you here.
The fediverse operates exactly how you say is impossible. The question isn't why big servers would allow connections, but why I'd connect to centralized domains with so many decentralized alternatives available.
It's surprising you're here without knowing this. Maybe it's a sign decentralization is going mainstream?
You asked a more detailed explanation of how this works.
Here's how decentralized social media and web 3 actually works, right here and now.
1. Instead of one central server, there are many independent servers (instances) run by different individuals or groups.
2. You create an account on one instance, but can interact with users on any instance.
3. When you post, it's stored on your home instance. Other instances your followers are on fetch and display your post to them.
4. If you want to follow someone on another instance, your server connects to theirs to get their posts. (The ability to connect = federated)
5. Each instance owner sets their own rules and can choose which other instances to federate with.
6. You can move your account between instances, taking your followers with you. (Wip)
7. Popular fediverse platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, and PeerTube all work this way, allowing cross-platform interaction.
This system allows for a social media experience similar to centralized platforms, but with more user control and privacy. No single entity owns all the data or controls the entire network.
Here is video from the Free Software Foundation which is a great source if you want to learn more about the hows and why.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video
I haven't read everything in this comment yet because to be honest it's a lot. But one fundamental thing I think you misunderstood about what is said is the bit about it being illegal to self host. While there's no law against using residential broadband service for the purposes of a web server, there's definitely a lot of sections of the TOS for broadband service that prohibit this and those have been deemed to be legal and enforceable.
I claimed everyone can't afford self hosting, and that's because it's true. Not everyone has the kind of Internet setup or computer that would allow it regardless of what you're saying about older computer's and raspberry pi, and that doesn't even take into account the fact that it still requires technical knowledge, not just of running a server or a network, but also of the security measures that would be required to do so to protect yourself.
The thing is, you hadn't before now, laid out what you assumed that the fediverse in your vision would function as, you just threw some quick terms at me attached sort of tangentially to the fediverse and assumed that I would know what you meant. I'll continue reading this when I have more time but, I just don't understand the motivation anyone would have to join Subway's instance. Or why they'd want to be federated with it.
If my explanation is to complex you dont need to take my word for it.
Definitely watch this video: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video
The way we the internet want to build the better system is called “web3” if you look this up youl find whole sites and even books written about it (but watch out for crypto scammers framing it)
Pretty much al you appear to be worried about comes from a web2 understanding of the internet.
The fediverse is supposed to be web3 in action. To me its more like a prototype.
It's not that it's complex. It's that before I lacked context and now my brain has moved on to other things for the moment.
Understandable, have a good day.
Side note:
This meme is from a year ago:
I am not faulting you for this, your preferente is yours but it strikes me that sync is made for a demographic that would not be as much aware of open source philosophy.
In context of this what your saying makes more sense, I still very much disagree but i see better from what angle your perspective is coming.
If you do want to look around: voyager has blown me Away in how well it was designed. Blazing fast.
I'm not sure what you're expecting me to do with this. I wasn't using sync as an example of a foss Lemmy app exactly. I was pointing out that sync doesn't have that many users and its developer offers a free tier but to give the service that people want it has to be developed and maintained which costs time and time is money.
I wasn't claiming it as a foss app. I was pointing out that lists of Lemmy users use apps like it (if not that particular one).
The meme does not confuse Sync with Foss apps, it points out that Foss is the rule here rather then an exception and Sync stands out among the others like a sore thumb.
So its a very bad example to how things are run here.
Now a good argument against this meme i have seen is that you shouldn't compare a Foss app with a non Foss app, oranges vs apples. But personalty i think all software should be Foss by principle (and many seem to agree here), so I am comparing software that is build using an ethical model vs software that is not.