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Comment by no_way | Hacker News Reader

Web needs to make money. Giving tools to advertisers while making sure user privacy is preserved is better than free reign of tracking we have before, no?

I myself do not like ads or tracking, but we need to be realistic and there needs a way to make web sustainable.

How to do that and making sure that monopolies like Google are in check is a valid concern though, but in these conversations is the only point I hear. Ironically Google does not even need these apis because it already has so much data on users, it is primarily for smaller companies.

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>Web needs to make money.

No, it doesn't. I have no issue with it making money, but that was neither the original purpose of the web nor is it an end goal for everyone using it.

> Giving tools to advertisers while making sure user privacy is preserved is better than free reign of tracking we have before, no?

This statement is unconnected to the first. The way people just link "web", "money" and "advertising" without even stopping to think that there might be alternatives is exactly why everything online is in such a sad state of affairs.

> make web sustainable.

I'm old enough to remember a day when the "social media" that I used was a set of phpBB forums paid for by one or more of the members because they wanted to host the community. Nothing on the modern ad-supported web comes close to the dynamic of friendship and camaraderie of those community-supported forums—if anything the new platforms are a great place to ruin real-life friendships rather than create new ones.

So, no, I don't think the web needs to be made "sustainable" in the sense you seem to mean. Things were better when people sacrificed a bit to keep their communities alive.

> Web needs to make money

I don’t think this is true. No one “needs” to make money. Museums don’t need to make money. OSS doesn’t need to make money.

The web has value without making money.

But even if it does make money, it doesn’t need to maximize profits at the expense of user privacy and joy.

I'm certainly in favor of free software projects making enough money to be sustainable.

It could be zero in some conditions, but in the other cases, I'm also against ads. Fortunately, there are other ways of making money, without compromising the "open source" / "free software" part:

- consulting (including prioritizing new features and fixes)

- support

- providing an actual paid service

- selling free software extensions (and yes, that means someone can recompile the extension and distribute it gratis - that's what happening with OSMAnd+ on F-Droid, but they are still doing fine)

How do OSS devs support themselves without money?

I have an employer who pays me to do thing X. And they don’t care that I also work on thing Y a little bit.

I think there’s lots of software written by people who have jobs and code because it’s fun.

For example, Linus Torvalds made Subsurface [0] as open source. He had a job while he made this. He didn’t get paid for it directly, but it’s not like paying him extra would make it better.

[0] https://subsurface-divelog.org/

The same way you can make model trains and not make money.

Usually they are supported by donations, therefore they don't need to sell their user's data or their software.

The Stardew Valley gambit - quit programming and take up subsistence farming.

Good luck. Farming is a hard business if you want to make money. And you'll need money for electricity, fuel, medicine, etc.

Maximising profits and being sustainable are 2 different things. Museums do not need to make money because they are funded externally. It is like saying artists do not need to make money. You seem to go to the very extremes.

Museums do get money from somewhere.

Where do you get them for web?

Same place as museums. Benefactors.

Check out Wikipedia for an example of a huge site that doesn’t make money and just runs on donations.

I run my crappy blog and a bunch of other sites for “free” because I just pay the fees.

> Web needs to make money

Absolutely, but as long as adverting is allowed to finance the whole bloody thing we're not going to improve anything. Advertising should be limited as to not influence content and that's currently not what's happing. As it stand, outside of "the small web" ads are the main attraction and any content that may be provided to us is done so to enable advertising, or at least not upset advertisers.

I want privacy pushed so far that the majority of the web is going to have to find financing outside of advertising, be it micro-payments, donation, subscriptions or benefactors. People should pay directly for software, service, like social media, news, email and possibly even search. If we as a side-effect uses these things less I see that as an absolute benefit.

I agree somewhat, but what about poorer regions of the world like parts of Africa or Asia, what is the solution for them? Most of the people there would not or could not pay for every website to use. It would be unfortunate if the web is inaccessible for most people.

> what is the solution for them

Locally produced, given the cheaper labour cost they should also be able to compete in the EU or US by offering a cheaper product, due to cheaper production cost. At least in some areas.

I don't think the current state of the web is doing poor regions any favours by granting the free access to western products, compared to encouraging or even forcing them to build their own infrastructure or products.

Donating Europe's discarded clothing to Africa killed pretty much all of Africa's textile industry. Free access to the online services from the west (or China) is just as much of an obstacle to growing their own technology and media companies.

Edit: Free access to general knowledge, open source software and learning material is clearly a bonus, but it also takes little away from local industry and can help kick start companies.

General knowledge, FOSS, and learning material are also generally freely given without expectation of or often even asking for compensation. The most valuable "content" on the web is generally not monetized[0].

They wouldn't be losing a lot if they lost out on TikTok and Instagram. It would be no great loss if affiliate link blog spam went away.

[0] e.g. https://axler.net/ has multiple free books on advanced mathematics written by a well-regarded author. This kind of thing (and/or lecture notes, syllabi, and homework) is not at all abnormal to find on professors' home pages if you want a free education.

> Web needs to make money.

Commercial use of the internet was banned until 1991, it worked perfectly fine until then.

When I think back before big monetization, the web was better.

An example, look at TikTok or YouTube. 99.999% garbage, essentially clickbait farms, with zero valuable content.

Influencers? A plague. Political click bait videos? Harmful to democracy. Nutty flat earth, perpetual motion, conspiracy videos? Same.

The rest of the web is the same. Affiliate links are vile, evil things. And endless pages copy pasted to steal hits.

Monetization has destroyed the internet.

I'd much prefer people setting up their own small webpages, their hobbies, etc, with no monetization incentives.

Agreed but it shouldn't be the problem that a browser should solve. The browser is a user client. It really doesn't make sense for browsers to try and enforce or help a certain business model. It's great if the web and web browsers help businesses make money, but it should be a side effect, not a goal for user clients.

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