Old guy checking in. When ad blockers first became a thing, my then-teenaged boys started using one and were trying to talk me into it. I was pretty dubious. I said my concern was that the model most of the web was built on was ad-supported. That is, people created content on the web to try and get visitors, and made money by selling ads on their site, or used monetized links. If everyone started using ad blockers, I said, that model would break down and either people would stop creating content or they’d go to a new model, like subscriptions. I figured few people would take time equivalent to a full time job to create content for free.
I think that largely came to pass. A lot of great online publications have closed their doors, and the are lots of paywalls now. The things is, the sites are just as much to blame. Most people wouldn’t have been driven to use ad blockers if the ads hadn’t gotten so untenable. A banner or a box here or there is one thing, but when there are a giant number of pop-up windows, autoplay videos, windows you can’t back out of, and all the other hellish stuff, people are going to be highly motivated to find a way to stop it.
That whole arms race was one of the things that ruined the internet, in my opinion.
I think it is worth mentioning that patreon also surfaced as a means to provide income for creators. Whether this was a direct result of ad blockers may be debatable. However, patreon certainly provides creators with an avenue to generate income that is not dependent on ads services.
Then there are also creator focused platforms like nebula and curiosity stream, which aim to provide creators with a fair share of generated revenue.
All in all, my take on the developments over the past ten years or so is that ad revenue sharing (with creators) provided an important impulse to establish the field of online content creation, and that shortcomings of this model are now being addressed. Mainly to funnel more money to the content creators rather than platform owners.
I think the last really big hurdle to an actually democratized internet is that we need to make it easier to host at home.
Asymmetrical download upload is such a fucking pain. I would rather have 100 down and 100 up then 400 down and 5 up like I currently do.
On top of that, there aren’t a lot of good systems in place to enable me to host a website from home. If IPv6 were common it would be easy for me to secure a static IP address and to point that to my DNS resolver and attach my domain, but since I’ve got to be on an ipv4 system since no provider in my area provides an on-ramp to IPv6 and even if they did the Grand majority of Internet users cannot resolve IPv6 addresses, it’s dead in the water.
If every person in America had symmetrical upload download and a static IPv6 address for their home, we could get rid of the grand majority of the content provider and hosts and instead use democratized systems like bluesky and Kbin and Mastodon and free tube without having to worry about these multi trillion dollar companies’ bottom lines.
The asymmetrical internet speeds are intended to keep hobbyists and small businesses from self-hosting, thereby driving traffic to larger companies. I wonder if ISPs get any kind of kickback from large companies like AWS, cloudflare, or digital ocean. Like, reduced hosting costs for their websites and internal cloud services.
Takes tinfoil hat off
The reality is that it’s probably a lot cheaper for ISPs to make connections asymmetrical because it effectively lets them pump up their download speed numbers for free. However, ISPs really should give customers the option to custom allocate bandwidth. Instead of saying X upload, Y download, you get X Mbps maximum and can choose the upload/download split.
I also think a lot of people who grew up on the internet have completely and totally forgotten about how bad it really was. They had ads that would take over your computer, ads that would download viruses, ads that would use your modem to dial 1-900 numbers, ads that would open 800 uncloseable web pages full of porn and start playing loud screaming music and moaning sounds to gather the interest of every other person in the house just a shame you for using the internet.
And dear Jesus don’t forget about the fucking toolbars. Dozens upon dozens of toolbars installed in every browser, everything from bonzi buddy to AOL email, detecting that a picture would be loaded on your screen and replacing it with one of theirs as an ad link.
Ad blockers have been necessary to use the internet for the last 20 freaking years.
If you’re not the kind of person who would go to the STD clinic and fuck every person there without a condom, you should never use the internet without an ad block.
Going to my parents house to help fix why their computer was “running slow” and like 6 inches of their browser was all toolbars that they had no idea how they got there nor knew what they did.
Old guy checking in. When ad blockers first became a thing, my then-teenaged boys started using one and were trying to talk me into it. I was pretty dubious. I said my concern was that the model most of the web was built on was ad-supported. That is, people created content on the web to try and get visitors, and made money by selling ads on their site, or used monetized links. If everyone started using ad blockers, I said, that model would break down and either people would stop creating content or they’d go to a new model, like subscriptions. I figured few people would take time equivalent to a full time job to create content for free.
I think that largely came to pass. A lot of great online publications have closed their doors, and the are lots of paywalls now. The things is, the sites are just as much to blame. Most people wouldn’t have been driven to use ad blockers if the ads hadn’t gotten so untenable. A banner or a box here or there is one thing, but when there are a giant number of pop-up windows, autoplay videos, windows you can’t back out of, and all the other hellish stuff, people are going to be highly motivated to find a way to stop it.
That whole arms race was one of the things that ruined the internet, in my opinion.
I think it is worth mentioning that patreon also surfaced as a means to provide income for creators. Whether this was a direct result of ad blockers may be debatable. However, patreon certainly provides creators with an avenue to generate income that is not dependent on ads services.
Then there are also creator focused platforms like nebula and curiosity stream, which aim to provide creators with a fair share of generated revenue.
All in all, my take on the developments over the past ten years or so is that ad revenue sharing (with creators) provided an important impulse to establish the field of online content creation, and that shortcomings of this model are now being addressed. Mainly to funnel more money to the content creators rather than platform owners.
I think the last really big hurdle to an actually democratized internet is that we need to make it easier to host at home.
Asymmetrical download upload is such a fucking pain. I would rather have 100 down and 100 up then 400 down and 5 up like I currently do.
On top of that, there aren’t a lot of good systems in place to enable me to host a website from home. If IPv6 were common it would be easy for me to secure a static IP address and to point that to my DNS resolver and attach my domain, but since I’ve got to be on an ipv4 system since no provider in my area provides an on-ramp to IPv6 and even if they did the Grand majority of Internet users cannot resolve IPv6 addresses, it’s dead in the water.
If every person in America had symmetrical upload download and a static IPv6 address for their home, we could get rid of the grand majority of the content provider and hosts and instead use democratized systems like bluesky and Kbin and Mastodon and free tube without having to worry about these multi trillion dollar companies’ bottom lines.
puts on tinfoil hat
The asymmetrical internet speeds are intended to keep hobbyists and small businesses from self-hosting, thereby driving traffic to larger companies. I wonder if ISPs get any kind of kickback from large companies like AWS, cloudflare, or digital ocean. Like, reduced hosting costs for their websites and internal cloud services.
Takes tinfoil hat off
The reality is that it’s probably a lot cheaper for ISPs to make connections asymmetrical because it effectively lets them pump up their download speed numbers for free. However, ISPs really should give customers the option to custom allocate bandwidth. Instead of saying X upload, Y download, you get X Mbps maximum and can choose the upload/download split.
I also think a lot of people who grew up on the internet have completely and totally forgotten about how bad it really was. They had ads that would take over your computer, ads that would download viruses, ads that would use your modem to dial 1-900 numbers, ads that would open 800 uncloseable web pages full of porn and start playing loud screaming music and moaning sounds to gather the interest of every other person in the house just a shame you for using the internet.
And dear Jesus don’t forget about the fucking toolbars. Dozens upon dozens of toolbars installed in every browser, everything from bonzi buddy to AOL email, detecting that a picture would be loaded on your screen and replacing it with one of theirs as an ad link.
Ad blockers have been necessary to use the internet for the last 20 freaking years.
If you’re not the kind of person who would go to the STD clinic and fuck every person there without a condom, you should never use the internet without an ad block.
Going to my parents house to help fix why their computer was “running slow” and like 6 inches of their browser was all toolbars that they had no idea how they got there nor knew what they did.