Comment by bonesss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bonesss | Hacker News Reader

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> It baffling that people claim that the web requires ads and trackers to survive when [obviously it can]

It's a question of the content you put in the word "web". As a corrolary: I believe that "TV" would not exist without advertising.

I know that electomagnetic radiation, signal processing, and ray tubes are wholly orthogonal to Kelloggs selling cereal. But the modern television media landscape and its dedication to Brave New World style audience-capture is unfathomable without people splashing money at it to sell things.

So what is "the web"? Telnet, TCP, and HTTP? We don't need your stinking banners! We have oodles of excess server bandwidth and our websites are rarely more than 10K (of gorgeous hand-crafted fully-accessible HTML, natch).

But is "the web" your advertiser-supported newspaper? Your advertiser-supported searches? Your advertiser-supported social media news feed? Your advertiser-supported free phone app? Your advertiser-supported image host? Those things are, so far, only sustainably available through advertising.

Crack the micro-currency and micro-valuation code for everyone online and maybe that "web" can live without ads... we're not there yet though :)

> Those things are, so far, only sustainably available through advertising.

Really? Then I guess sites and creators that are sponsored via donations never got that memo.

We have plenty of money coming in via ethical channels. Sure, not as much as with asdvertising, but IME, most sites have severely bloated budgets compared to what they actually need for sustainability, and thats why we have the problems that exist today.

You've moved goal-posts ;)

Sorry, but there are no donation based major national news organizations or donation based search titans with historically large market caps or donation based social media empire whose CEOs political whims shake national elections the world round. Facebook, Google, PictureHostOfTheMoment, and the media giants with traditional business models are the essence of what most people are using their time on online. That's "the web" for most people most of the time.

I mean... Grab a random high-schoolers phone and see what percentage of services they're using are (in)directly funded by advertising and advertisers.

Your observations about the economics of the bulk of web-development are probably correct, but relatively minor compared to the mega-billions in suboptimal efficiency in every other aspect of those organizations... And the issue is always that "sustainability" is not growth, and growing frequently requires actions that are unsustainable in the long-term to achieve. Businesses grow, transition, and reshape themselves within the context of new revenue streams, and acquiring those new revenue streams is how you make owners richer and secure any desired financing.

So yeah, really, as of todays date "the web", a la "TV", is a pure advertising apparatus to capture audience and move product with peripheral benefits in political manipulation. Other models have not been validated by the market, nor consumers. Remember we all want ads, in the abstract.

> You've moved goal-posts ;)

> Sorry, but there are no donation based major national news organizations or donation based search titans with historically large market caps or donation based social media empire whose CEOs political whims shake national elections the world round. Facebook, Google, PictureHostOfTheMoment, and the media giants with traditional business models are the essence of what most people are using their time on online. That's "the web" for most people most of the time.

Actually, I think you're the one that's moved them. I don't think anyone can claim that we'd get a clone of today's web if we took tracking and advertising out of the picture. However, that doesn't mean we wouldn't get a different web that was good and valuable. We might even get something that's more valuable than today's. Projects like Wikipedia prove that extraordinary valuable things can be built online from volunteer labor and donations. If you personally need every idea to be validated by the market, then that's your validation.

You went from "isn't sustainable" to "has to be a worldwide major economic and political powerhouse" and claim that I'm the one that moved the goalposts?

lol, ok

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