People made content because they wanted to, and it
was generally better quality than the corporate
blogspam we have now.
I miss the old days too. And even now that independently-made, non-ad-supported content is what I prefer most. Spent a lot of years creating it myself.
But let's not be naive. Not all art or journalism can be created that way.
There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money.
For example, imagine the sorts of investigative journalism where somebody might spend months or years researching a story. One that might not even pan out. That's not something you can realistically do, part-time, for free, while earning a living doing something else as your day job.
Expecting everything to be free, and also ad-free, because it was created by some hobbyist in their spare time while they do something else for a living severely restricts the amount of people who can create and the types of things that can be created.
> And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money.
Yes, but I believe advertising is a poor solution for that. Because it seems to tend to lead to optimizing for advertising at the expense of quality.
I believe crowdfunding is a better solution for a couple reasons.
1. Enough people want the thing to be made to be willing to front the cost for it (contrast this with advertising-funded journalism, much of which is just a constant barrage of noise rather than it all being something someone's passionate enough about making to pitch).
2. Over time, creators develop reputations for good or ill, and this enables trustworthy creators to start to bank on their reputation for future, perhaps riskier projects, while making it harder for untrustworthy creators to continue practicing.
3. Related to point 2, over time this optimizes for delivery of quality output (which is the most important way this is better than advertising, IMO). It does require quality pitches as well to convince people to front the money for the effort, but if you deliver a quality pitch and bail on the output, your reputation takes a nosedive.
Crowd funding is a complete failure. Look at any high quality project or content used by hundreds of thousands and they will have a dozen people donating if any. Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind.
> Charging for content access is the only way, freeloaders can be left behind.
Newspaper publishers were slow to pick up on the free www. Until they did, all we needed was a dialup connection, and we could go anywhere, serve anything, and talk to anyone.
I'm not sure what broke the dam, but it might have been when browsers started behaving according to some kind of documented standard.
Then adblockers came, and the publishers started pushing nag modals.
Then publishers decided to try to run ads as well as paywalls; yeah, suckers, pay us to watch our ads!
I regret the passing of an internet that was free to use, give or take a connection. They did steal it.
I regret the passing of an internet that was free to
use, give or take a connection. They did steal it.
That's when I fell in love with the potential of the www/internet and switched career paths.
But in hindsight that was never really going to last. When the guts of the public www (browsers, servers, data pipes, protocols, TCP/IP support in operating systems) were being built out in the 90s, it was all predicated on the belief that it was the future of commerce.
Without that explosion, "the free internet" probably would have just been a slightly evolved version of the dial-up BBS scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Which is cool, and honestly depending on my mood I might be willing to trade 2023's technology hellscape for that simpler time.
There are studies where money ruins altruism and pure joy of creating sthg. has to be replaced with a payment which becomes according to Herzberg a hygiene factor and wears out.
The --internet-- www as we know it - give it back!
I believe “you create for free and live poor” vs. “you need to monetize your work via ads” is definitely the wrong dichotomy.
You can simply create out of inspiration, while having a job that pays your bills (that is actually how a lot of OSS happened). Or you could publish some work openly, while suggesting the reader to buy your book, for example.
Over-reliance on ad-based model and the resulting prevalence of double-sided “social” platforms where the advertiser is the customer, actual user needs count for nothing because no one will leave and no honest competitor can compete with “free”, most certainly seems to me to be at the root of a lot of dysfunction—if these platforms make more money from engagement thanks to aggravating inflammatory posts, regardless of whether they are well informed or in good faith, then that’s what they will promote and reward one way or another.
The expectation of “free” is part of the problem, sure, but I don’t think that’s the cause. The cause can probably be distilled to “abuse of information asymmetry in free market enabled by regulatory inaction” (free market is great, but in presence of malicious actors it needs some regulation or it stops working). That leads to the aforementioned platforms, then the expectation of “free” and non-appreciation of work published completely for free just out of altruism or to feel pride/recognition, and generally goes counter to how the market is supposed to work.
In print media ads were fairly tame. They weren't personally targeted and in some contexts they were quite welcome.
Although print magazines made most of their money by selling ad pages, the content was largely firewalled. (Byte is a good example. The content was always hacker culture not ad culture.)
On the internet, ad culture - not just ads themselves - has consumed everything. Whether it's a YouTube channel owner reminding everyone to like-and-subscribe, or some TikTok nonsense desperately trying to go viral, it's mostly about reach - defined entirely by potential ad spend - and not about the content, which is almost incidental to monetisation.
And that's why it's so noisy, and often trivial.
In fact I suspect there's a general Gresham's Law principle of cultural systems. As access and delivery become cheaper, content becomes noisier, more trivial, and less culturally valuable. As we go from manual content generation to automated AI content reach will increase, but cultural value - in the sense of challenging, original ideas and experiences that have lasting widespread relevance - will decrease even further.
Open source is by volunteers if you count it by volume. But probably not if you count by impact. Especially not if you include all the accompanying things like maintenance, packing and running software.
I think what is lacking from open source is reciprocity. Traditional copyright is extreme in that it reserve almost all rights. Open source is extreme in that is reserve almost no rights. The result is the same, the middle men gets all the power.
It isn't going to happen though. Because what is going to happen already is and it isn't that.
> Open source is extreme in that is reserve almost no rights.
There are copyleft licenses which can encourage reciprocity.
I suspect Copilot and related tech pose more danger, they basically allow to sidestep licensing altogether even as they return 1:1 training data in some cases. Hopefully a lawsuit against Microsoft comes in due time.
Yes, Linux was started for free as a student project, but the reason why it became the standard choice for data centers is because large corporations like Oracle, IBM and later Google united behind it in order to stop Microsoft from dominating servers. These corporations along with some commercial distributions have been funding Linux development for decades. Linux as we know it today is a child of corporate strategic thinking.
IBM, DEC, Sun, HP and others already had commercial Unix offerings with support that corporate users wanted for servers. Why unite behind Linux, which at the time was inferior to all those others?
To attack Windows from the top and bottom simultaneously. It may seem excessive but MS was in a very strong position at the time. Many of us wondered if anything else would survive.
> Linux happened and nobody paid (in the beginning)
Linux happened mostly through the contributions of the paid developers of the Linux foundation. And still the majority of the commits belong to those developers. And it was possible to do so because the foundation received enough support from major donors, most of which were corporations. If you would want to choose an Open Source success story that wasnt backed by corporations, WordPress would be what you are looking for. But even then, the WordPress ecosystem found a way to fund itself directly through its users. Which means that they are also funded. In contrast, a gigantic amount of Open Source projects were abandoned when its contributors were no longer able to maintain them because life responsibilities started raining on them...
Unfortunately any social paradigm, movement or setup must be able to sustain itself economically. The best way to do it is to do it through its users, directly, so that concentrated capital wont be able to take it over.
Linux is a VERY different thing than investigative journalism. I can't think of a single bit of investigative journalism someone did as a side project that has spawned an entire industry, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough.
Content costs money to make. Yes, sometimes give via self-funding of the content (without advertisement, like by working a job), and that's fantastic. But we also need a way to support the content that we like, and we can't expect everyone to be able to give.
Some content costs money, other content - and how I dislike the word 'content' which turns that which makes the 'net interesting inside-out to make it into a money-making scheme - costs time to make. Not all time is money, lots of it is time spent on activities which people do without the need for payment since they enjoy it. Call it a 'hobby' or 'pastime' if you want, something to do when you're free to do what you want. Some people like to go and watch sports games, others like to sit on the sofa and watch televised drivel while others park themselves in front of a computer to create something. Much of what is created is interesting only to the creator for the act of creation but some of it has value beyond the experience of the creator. That is indeed how the Linux kernel got started, it is how a lot of music is made, artwork is created and more.
Investigative journalism, (the media), sometimes referred to as "The Fourth Estate", is too important to be funded by advertising, and should be funded by the people, and be for the people. Just like the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our governments.
While it is completely free (beer + libre), Google and Facebook exploited numerous Linux-related technologies to turn the internet into a planet-scale ad machine.
To prove the rule is to test the rule; proof spirit is spirit that passes the test, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The exception that proves the rule is the exception that violates it (and shows that the rule is a heuristic, not a law).
You don't have to go all the way back in time to the root to reach the point where it cost so much less to live, that things which were within reach for the ambitious individual are now out of the question due to the exorbitant cost of living itself today by comparison.
Bartering is an offshoot of "fairness". Even dogs, crows get upset, if treated unfairly.
There are experiments where giving desired treats, unfairly, causes these animals(monkeys too), to exhibit outrage. EG, giving some to one animal, and less desirable treats to another.
Bartering is an offshoot of "being fair". I "worked" to make this thing, but now I need a thing you have. You worked for it. Each of us spent time, effort, work, but how much, who spent more?
We negotiate. We settle.
This is bartering. And at the root of this, is fairness.
Right. Tax, whether to a government, or to an employer, is the beginnings of unfairness. Taxes can be used for fairness (enforced savings for everyone for the winter), and as a form of barter (military protection), but the value gained by singular authorities makes things disproportionately unfair.
I guess maybe the taxation is not the problem, it's the centralization of the taxed wealth to particular figures in the government (nobles) or corporations (shareholders and executives).
> giving desired treats, unfairly, causes these animals(monkeys too), to exhibit outrage
This mechanism might stem from offspring times when they were receiving food/care from parents. I wouldn't connect it with barter, as these species do not exchange any goods.
> There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen unless somebody is working on it full-time. And since people need money to live, the people making that stuff need money.
I definitely agree. And even for people doing it solo as a full-time job (email newsletters come to mind), the quality tends to be less than what would be possible if they had even one other person sharing the work.
That’s a rose tinted view. For some fields (not unsurprisingly nerdy ones) the quality of the amateur content was good enough. For other fields it was abysmal. I remember trying to look up scholarly material on English literature in 1998 or so and not being able to find anything that was even remotely decent, for example. And it could have been worse: among the amateurs that put history related material online, crackpots and conspiracy theorists were (and, in fact, are) vastly over represented.
It's ok that some content not be on the internet. The internet didn't have to become the epicenter of everything. Amateur content and communication was a fine outcome for what the internet could have been. Scholarly material could remain in journals.
But the fact remains, HN is free to use, the plugs on the front-page are clearly flagged so you don't have to read them, and apart from those the site is ad-free and looks and behaves a lot like the old internet.
Are people really opposed to the commercialization of the internet, or just intrusive advertising?
People are using the terms interchangeably here but I would draw a fairly sharp line between intrusive online advertising and other aspects of internet commercialization, and I think most people would as well.
I love being able to buy physical goods and online. I think most people love this. I think you could ban ads from the internet tomorrow, and most online retailers would continue to flourish just fine. Though it would be harder for new retailers to break into the game.
I also love various online services. I love being able to schedule a trip to the dentist or access my bank account online. Again I think very few people object to this.
It's really only content delivery and search that are hopelessly entangled with toxic advertising that is necessitated by the fact that people expect those things to be free. I know those are a couple of enormous "onlys." However, to return to your point:
The irony off posting this on a VC website that make
money off the commercialisation of the internet.
They get a lot of press and mindshare, especially in SV, but the majority of internet-adjacent companies and engineers are not involved in the search, content, or advertising industries.
> They get a lot of press and mindshare, especially in SV, but the majority of internet-adjacent companies and engineers are not involved in the search, content, or advertising industries.
This is a pretty big divergence from GP's comment. Besides, many of them are customers of the same industry buying ads, or vendors selling data. The whole thing reeks of needless fingerpointing. While consumers keep feeding their data and money to these companies. They don't have to. Consumers are trading personal info and preferences for convenience and dopamine.
Who's the worse bad guy here? It seems like everyone is getting what they want one way or the other. I'd argue that making the internet addictive is the real problem here.
Not saying this to justify any of it, it's just the reality I see.
Worse than ads, they also often have referral programs which causes discussion of the sold products elsewhere to be drowned out by listicles that care more about getting you to buy something that they have a referral link for than meaningful comparison.
The amount of tech folks that don’t realize how much their jobs and lifestyles only exist because of the commercialization of the internet and “capitalism”…
It's not an anticapitalist take to say that the internet would have been better without commercialization. There's a world outside of the internet. There's programming jobs outside of the internet. Not everything has to be commercialized. And that doesn't mean commercialization is inherently bad.
I also don't think most internet-adjacent jobs don't even involve toxic, intrusive advertising.
Maybe this is wildly presumptuous but it feels like most of the people complaining about "commercialization" seem to hate the toxic cycle of intrusive ads and algorithm-optimized content that is supported by those ads.
Certainly, that's what the folks quoted in the linked article are railing against.
Do the people railing against "commercialization" of the internet really hate the fact that you can like, order dog food or schedule a trip to the dentist online? Or do they just hate the toxic ad crap?
> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now.
People can still do that, and many still do. Possibly more do now than back then, in absolute numbers. The problem is search and discoverability, because of all the other, ad-driven content, and ad-driven search. More people would choose to not publish on ad-driven platforms if the alternatives (e.g. personal websites) would get them the same or better reach.
I don’t even have a problem with commercialization, it’s just that the incentives need to be clear. Everyone defaulted to ad supported content because it was just the default. It takes a lot more time to build up your own revenue base but I think this is an important trend going forward. Kagi.com in the world of search is one example of a long-overdue approach to that market.
"Doing their own thing" is quite a big claim. Facebook and others would not have had teams of psychologists and neuroscientists on staff to maximize user's screen time if they were OK with people doing their own thing.
> People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now.
I agree. But the web was smaller then and I'd guess that in absolute numbers the amount of personal websites and blogs is greater now. They're just drenched in a tsunami of noise and search engines won't help you find them.
> The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake.
And inevitable as capitalism has a tendency to commodify almost everything, sooner or later.
I'm not sure that's really true. I remember looking at pages of search results on Star Wars websites. All built from scratch, none of them had ads. All of them much better than for ex. Wookieepedia despite having less content. I think you would have a hard time finding more than a handful of websites (on any given niche topic) like this today.
Back then people also got hit with ludicrous internet bills the moment their site had large scale use and banner ads were the only real path to managing that cost. Adding a paywall would have created a severe amount of bad will.
Lots of sites just turned off after a given amount of load and you would have to try again later, usually the following day. I think that is an appropriate trade off. It is one reason why mirror sites popped up.
The web isn't "fully commercialized" today even. Endless hobby sites, non-profit groups, and things such as clubs(bike clubs, etc), are completely free of any commerical intent or advertising.
Even government sites are ad free, non-profit, non-commercial by their very nature.
In 2004, before modern-class smartphones, before endless smaller companies even had a web presence, before facebook was a big thing, there was still mostly ad-free, commercial free content.
And I should add here, paying for a computer and internet link at home, or paying for a server in a datacentre, or buying a pre-configured wordpress site, without ads, are all commerical free endeavours.
Otherwise, nothing was ever commerical free, because everyone always paid for resources to provide content in some way.
Paying for resources, does not make a thing commerical.
You and I have a very different view of the past. Were you on the web pre-2000? I ask, because I don't understand the difference in our opinions.
My first for pay project was modifying a Mac HyperCard, Gopher server in 1993 that used C based XFNs (?) for TCP/IP (yeah there was such a thing) to implement a chatbot.
My earliest post I can find on Usenet was from 1993.
Yeah I learned a lot from comp.lang.c. But there really wasn’t that much of value for research. Sure there was tidbits and ftp Mac archive sites for shareware.
> Endless hobby sites, non-profit groups, and things such as clubs(bike clubs, etc), are completely free of any commerical intent or advertising.
As people aren't okay with having to actively looking for content (anymore), this has been relegated to Facebook/Discord/Telegram/WhatsApp/etc. Groups. You either are bombarded with ads or pay with your metadata.
I really would disagree on how the internet was better, sure you could find a few people that were saints that just relesed things for free, but the internet back then was really barren and it was very slow to see new releases of said content and the only alternative was to pirate.
Do I wish we had better money option back in the day? Yes.
Most importantly I wish another model of how content is stored was implemented to ensure maximum diversity of said content, like specialized sites for different types of video content.
The internet back then was a forest into which you couldn't really see, you just went dumpster diving and it was an adventure.
Today's internet is barren, with most content centered around Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Youtube, and various commercial propaganda campaign sites known colloquially as journalism. That is a fucking desert, a wasteland.
That seems like a real romanticization of the early internet - comparing, essentially, Geocities to a forest and simultaneously calling the plethora of content-creator sites available today (sites like Substack, not 'influencer' brands on IG) a "fucking desert, a wasteland" seems sort of disingenuous.
Sure, if you never leave FB or Reddit, you're not going to see a ton of diversity. But it's still all there if you can get more than a page into search results, or put in literally the exact same level of effort you used to have to put in when AltaVista and Lycos were out giving horrendous search results.
Even on Reddit, if you spend your time on what used to be the defaults versus finding the niche subs, you're going to have a vastly different understanding of forest/wasteland.
>the plethora of content-creator sites available today (sites like Substack,
They all exhibit a tremendous level of "likethink" bubbling, I find everyone on a given platform to be more or less the same spewing the same crap over and over again.
Contrast Geocities, where you could find everyone and everything imaginable, short of straight up illegal stuff.
I do agree and disagree, yes there were more diverse websites for sure, but quite a lot of it were just copies of others (flash games is a good example of how many different hosts there were with almost nothing unique to it).
And two of the examples you brought up are social media focused, with one also being heavily focused on content discovery.
And the places you did find was very slow with new content being added and limited because as I said you could mostly only get the juicy stuff through piracy (as most things was still heavily reliant on offline distribution).
> Do I wish we had better money option back in the day? Yes.
I didn't. Digital content is the closest thing to a post-scarce resource that we have ever achieved. Ushering in a business model based on the limited resources of physical mediums was a tremendous mistake, and was only done so because media companies couldn't stop salivating at the notion of charging $10 for something they could copy infinitely at almost no cost.
It's pretty obvious that media companies are not ok with simply recouping cost plus a reasonable margin but instead all try for a recurring income stream with little recurrent effort to earn it. No amount of profit is enough if more can be had and with the current copyright regime they can legally get away with it too. Plenty of old games are still sold at prices way above zero even when the companies that originally made them have long since stopped existing. So no, digital content is not priced around recouping costs but around maximising profit.
And going back to the original topic, a lot of advertising infested sites on the web still have their content created for free by users and those profiting from the advertisement are merely the middlemen that handle the distribution.
There are other methods to recoup the cost that actually hand something of tangible value to the customer (the physical mediums I mentioned, for example.) Handing over a digital asset for the same price, and then lambasting those who choose to distribute it freely, is 100% the shittiest way to do it.
And nobody really cared.
People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now.
The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake.