The viagra ads were a product of a time when the goal was to immediately and directly sell things. Now the era has shifted to one where the goal is to sell your information to people that want to sell you things (or otherwise use that information to further their ends). So instead of spamming you with viagra ads you're spammed with requests to divulge information at every turn you make. Register for this, register for that, give us your email address, let us access your location, let us send you an SMS (aka let us have your phone number), login with your facebook account, talk about yourself, and so much more.
Think I preferred viagra spam.
I think we're being blindsided by just how bad the side effects of the advertising model are for media. In general, not just for the internet. It's done unbelievable damage to our culture, but it's slow and indirect and difficult to predict or quantify. Like asbestos, tetraethyl lead, carbon dioxide, etc. Those are the technologies you have to watch out for.
today we essentially define our culture and personal identities with advertising demographics and terminology. We've commoditized ourselves so thoroughly that any alternative is unimaginable and sounds silly to us.
What still sounds silly, and has always sounded silly, is micropayments.
But between its user base and Gold, Reddit is well situated to evolve the Internet just a bit further, and implement micropayments. Charge users an optional $5/month, and for users that do pay, take their upvotes and give money to recipients of upvotes from those users.
They could also pay subreddit moderators, and of course Reddit itself from that, plus Stripe Connect makes the backend payments platform stuff easy.
We are going to have to get creative or settle in and prepare for an eternal reaming.
You have to pay the bribes.
June 7th, 2000:
"A federal judge today ordered Microsoft Corp. split into two companies, prescribing the biggest corporate breakup since AT&T while harshly rebuking the software giant for stifling computer-age competition. "
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000607/aponl...
Then Microsoft and the DOJ made a deal on November 2nd 2001. Bush won the Presidency November 7th 2001. It's very likely the Clinton DOJ made a deal to ensure all of their hard work - indeed their victory - couldn't be easily reversed by the dramatically more business friendly Bush Administration if he were to win.
(*at the time, when the sector was much smaller)
This was a bit of an accident really.
Maybe one day big companies with monopolistic tendencies will be broken-up. But it will be a long and hard process.
Look at the Standard Oil monopoly of the late XIXe/early XXe century, it took decades to break it up, even with laws against it.
When the break-up will happen, I see two ways this could happen:
* either break by activity (separate AWS and Amazon, Gmail, Youtube and Search in Google, etc)
* break each service in a way to form a distributed system shared by several companies
For example, split Google Search with part of the search index and engine distributed across several companies, and each companies having their own offer in term of UI design, data privacy, additional functionalities, plugged on this shared index.
They remind me of the internet I remember from 1998-2006.
I wouldn't say it's the 'old' internet, because I wasn't alive for the supposed glory days of arpanet, but it definitely has the sleazy, probably illegal, never say who I am irl vibe I remember and miss.