Maybe we should ask users for money because the alternative has become some kafkaesque hellscape where people think it's totally normal to have a dozen ad trackers when attempting to buy shoes. These trackers have an enormous costs and maybe their externalities should be taxed and regulated.

Maybe by the end of the century we will slowly realize that online advertising is the "lead" paint that was rightfully eradicated.

Imagine a world where the only content that survives is the one that people value enough to pay for.

What a wonderful catastrophic disruptive event that would be. Imagine no more SEO spam which are essentially devoid of information. These which are already so plentiful and sophisticated that they are threatening the core value of online search. No more vacuous blogspam, low-quality trash "newspapers" that only survive because they trick people into giving them a few morsels of attention.

Imagine a human-curated web.

Somewhere, somebody is saying, "Maybe we shouldn't sell drugs to children?" And somebody else is saying, "Won't somebody think of the wages for chemists?"

One leads to the other easily. For example taking advertising money for television commercials or magazine adds leads to "Native Ads". Native ads are sort of like product placement except that it's pretending to be a news story or whatever.

Like when people on CNBC or CNN start talking about Taco Bell menu items or new type of drug that might fight cholesterol. That's paid-for propaganda that is pretending to be television news.

Pretty soon you have a entire industry based on not telling the truth about drugs or food or other products they buy because that will piss off their advertisers.

This is the basis of the modern web. It's not a good thing even though it makes a lot of people a lot of money.

That's as may be, but little of value would be lost IMHO.

Well, except by those supporting (in a myriad of ways) the cesspit of advertising online and elsewhere.

I'm sure many will disagree with my assessment, but advertising as it's done today is invasive, obnoxious and alarmingly ubiquitous.

I'm not sure what a better model is, but this is not the way.

N.B: Advertising paid for my food, clothing, housing, etc. for the first 18 years of my life. And a couple years later for another five years as well.

> If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.

So what you're saying is if we use ad blocking technology to kill off the advertising business model, we can also kill off social media and its addictive algorithms, clickbaiting sites that generate and monetize outrage and numerous other cancers on society that the advertisers enable.

Ad blocking is now a moral imperative.

Ads are keeping the whole IT industry as a hostage. Even Startpage, the last ad-free search engine I used to use (and one of the oldest on the market), has recently been purchased by an ads company. They've put their filthy hands everywhere, innovation today only happens if it benefits ads revenue, and most of the bleeding edge innovation in AI comes to solve the problem "how can I maximize the odds that users will click on an ad I put in front of their eyes?". What's worse, a lot of development time nowadays is spent either to develop new ways to block ads, or new ways to evade those blockers, instead of focusing engineering resources on things that are actually useful to society.

Ads are a curse to the industry and they have to die. And I really don't give a fuck if it will cause developer wages to go down. They'll go down only in companies that have relied only on ads and data surveillance to build their revenue, and I've always stayed away from those. Developers will have a chance of moving to companies that can pay them better and have more sustainable business models, once Google and Facebook will no longer be the coolest kids in town. Two decades down the line, and not only we haven't yet figured out a better way to make money through the Web, but the ads industry HAS BECOME the Web. We need a fucking reboot and we need it now.

At some point people will start to understand that they need to either pay for services, or host them themselves, and maybe they'll be more selective on what they use and who they send their data to. If I want service A, I pay for service A (like things work in every other industry), or I run it on my own server. I don't rely on someone who allegedly provides me service A for free, just to scoop out as much data about me as possible and resell it to opaque 3rd-parties so they can place more targeted ads in front of my eyes that I'm more likely to click. How the hell did we end up so tangled up in this grotesque and creepy shit that now we are unable even of conceiving an IT industry that doesn't rely on ads?

If the ad-supported model fell apart, people would eventual change their understanding of the value of those services. They'd probably pay a decent amount for it.

But its a race to the bottom since someone will always offer ad-supported. It'll take an outside force (like ad-blocks by default or bans by governments) to actually kill off the ad-supported industry.

Good. Things would be rough for many of us here but it is the better outcome for wider humanity. Advertising and adtech normalise abusive psychological manipulation.

I wonder if that’s the truth or if it’s this way because there are free alternatives.

If one search engine starts charging a monthly fee, users will just go to another one that pays for itself with ads and data.

But if the prevalent model for search engines is monthly subscription, then people will start paying for it and the value for the user won’t be 0 anymore.

Why would you pay for ice cream from the ice cream stand if you can get it for free next door for the “cost” of them keeping track of how often you come to the stand and what flavors you like, and selling that info to others?

I think there's chicken and egg problem here -- users aren't going to use micropayments until there's a widely used micropayments platform that is also privacy protecting. I have no desire in using a micropayments platform that's really a cross-platform analytics engine that's even more invasive than Google since they can positively identify me through my payment method.

I have no problem paying for content, but don't want to pay through intrusive ad views, and don't to use a micropayments platform that tracks all of my browsing throughout the web.

Well, the problem is that there are no rules, morals, or code of conduit telling when it's too much, except for users leaving. In theory. However, unfortunately, most users adapt very easily to being thrown at their face more and more advertising every day, so we can't count on them. Just look at what advertising became since the late 90s until today: the number of ads and wasted bandwidth/storage/cpu cycles employed to send and show them grows every damn day, why should I think it's going to stop? For a while we thought that flashing banners were the root of all evil, but what about short articles ridiculously split in multiple pages so that they can show more ads at each 5 sentences ..er.. page change? Or articles altered (possibly by AI) so that they use like 3 times the necessary words so they become longer and can be split like the above? Or unskippable ads during videos, user profiling that is becoming so dangerously close to digital surveillance, etc. Just no thanks.

I wouldn't mind opening my adblockers if sites kept advertising to a reasonable minimum in which I can get some information about where to purchase a product I'm interested in: actually I want good non invasive advertising, but every time I tried to do that I quickly had to get back in disgust and set them tight closed again for almost all sites, save for the very few ones that still do the right thing: what once was a short blacklist transitioned over time to a nearly empty whitelist.

I have no trust in the system anymore. Until the day there are well defined and enforced rules, it will always keep choosing what brings more profits, that is, more and more advertising. Not holding my breath for that day.

Also, I think the current economic system would need some heavy modifications to adapt it to micropayments on a large scale for every service one could access to. What would be the expenses of a micropayments system that, say, charged one cent for daily usage of every now free or ad supported service out there? (Google, blogs, social media, etc). I mean, that would produce a huge number of extremely low value transactions; are we sure it wouldn't cost more than the profits it should produce?

Then why did we build them? This seems like a massive waste of effort.

Please cite sources backing up your original claim.

There was a short period where it seemed like it would happen - context aware ads, links and affiliate products, each page was served different ads or none at all, with no privacy stuff it could also be very effetive.

Alas general ads won, and they do make more money for the platforms since they can show the same ads for stuff you have already bought/installed.

You say that like it's a bad thing. If an industry relies on the abuse of their "customers" for survival, that industry needs to go.

Or, more likely, change their business model to be less abusive.

Google et al in adspace winning is mankind losing. Not hugely, but its clearly there. But the amount of mental gymnastics elite devs have to go through every day to keep feeling OK about their jobs just because of huge paycheck or working on 'cool' problems' is staggering (ignoring how screwing fellow human beings isn't cool in any way for now).

A little sidenote - not an expert on psychology, but it seems to me practically every human being, including psychopathic mass murderers have this desperate desire to feel OK with their actions, the need to justify them so they are at peace with themselves. If I kill, I follow the word of god. If I burn jews and minorities alive in concentration camps, I am just following orders and doing it for greater good of my nation. If I work in amoral company, 1 man doesn't matter anyway, there are tons of others that would happily pick up the job, and look at what open source and cool free apps we give to the world for this little cost of privacy and annoyment. Or I just do it so my kids have better starting position, I am great parent and that s above anything else. Whatever the mental tool, always aiming for the same destination.

Unable to profit from online advertising, what do "tech" companies do next. Are there any other commercial uses for surveillance and data collection.