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Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

In 1995 the Internet existed, it was basically great, and basically no website was ad funded.

I cannot think of a single essential service I use on the Internet today which is ad funded. If it's essential I'm paying for it because the free, ad-funded version is shitty and unreliable.

We could ban Internet advertising tomorrow (give people time to migrate to paid services) and I genuinely don't think it would have much negative impact on society. Social media like Twitter and Meta would take a big hit and that would be very good for our society. Less teen girls would commit suicide, and less hate would be spread.

I'd start paying ten bucks a month or whatever for Google (already pay them a pretty penny for Workspace) and can't think of much else that I'd lose that would matter. Subscriptions to a couple sites of professional interest like Stack Overflow? Small price to pay for ending Internet ads.

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I'd also add that personally motivated hosting is basically what gets small sites through the day. I worked on a MUD for quite a while where a small portion of the playerbase was working professionals and the majority of the playerbase was broke college students with far too much free time. The working folks would shell out a completely inconsequential 30 dollars a month between ten of them just so they could have fun playing the game - there was never any serious discussion of adding a paid requirement to join because 3$/month is very little for a steady stream of entertainment and because the "leeches" actually contributed immensely to the activity in the MUD. The workings folks contributed money, the college folks contributed time and everyone had fun.

If you're an independent reporter running a blog you can easily cover the hosting costs by just writing an occasional article for a major organization. If you have a fun hobby that hobby is probably worth the cost of hosting a server to attract other hobbiests.

Really, the only thing that would possibly die forever might be services like YouTube which have absolutely absurdly weak monetization potentials when compared to their infrastructure costs. Losing YouTube would suck, but if it meant I'd never need to see another internet ad I think the cost is worth it... and more curated services like Nebula have proven that purely subscriber funded video content can work - but it'd be hard to enter that market with no free hosting platform like YouTube.

> If you're an independent reporter running a blog you can easily cover the hosting costs by just writing an occasional article for a major organization.

I agree with most of what you wrote except for the above. Unless you're an independent reporter in things like gardening or motor sports, the major media organizations see you as an enemy and would prefer to shut you down.

> In 1995 the Internet existed, it was basically great, and basically no website was ad funded.

Sorry, but which parallel universe is this?

Advertising was definitely less intrusive, but I would say that an even larger proportion of websites was ad-funded than today.

A shitton of content is (and was) on platforms which are entirely ad-funded. Think geocities, the various blogging platforms, and twitter et al. today. You remove ads, you force the authors of this content to pay for their publication (a ridiculously cheap amount sure, but the large majority of them won't pay a dime).

I have paid for hosting my personal/hobby websites since approx 1993, but I know very well I'm a 1 to 10000 exception, based on the ratio of people who participate on my website.

Ads were of course common in 1995, but monetisation in general was rarer. A greater proportion of the web was hobbyists writing and collating information about subjects they were interested in, not because of financial incentives.

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