What economic model would you like to supplant the one which is currently serving a whole load of websites to us all for free?

Display ads. No tracking, no JavaScript, no analytics.

Ad-supported media existed before the Internet. They would target based on content rather than reader.

That would be fine.

- Stop existing -> many sites only exists for luring users into ads by suggesting value in search engines - micro transactions - Abonnements

One that has us pay for websites would be far better. Including services like Gmail and such. We would be paying customers, not eyeballs for sale, and only websites deemed worthy of that level of loyalty would survive.

Any websites that prefer it could still be free then, but the costs to host them would have to be paid by their owner (like most personal or business websites today), not sponsored by ads.

You know how you pay for cable, and Hulu, and Netflix, and still have to sit through ads? It would be like that. If I'm going to have to watch ads anyway, I'll decline paying for the service, thanks. And go on blocking the ads.

I never had any ads on Netflix when I paid for it.

I might be wrong about Netflix, I have not watched it in a long time. But certainly many pay channels, pay sports networks, and pay streaming services also have ads. Sometimes skipable, sometimes not.

>You know how you pay for cable, and Hulu, and Netflix, and still have to sit through ads? It would be like that.

Not if it was made illegal to show ads on paid services.

The unlikely proposition of the GP is that a grassroots movement with browser extensions would somehow manage to overwhelm and destroy the advertising industry by rendering it unprofitable and nonsensical.

Passing such legislation would be rather redundant at that point, wouldn't it?

You’re speaking from the position of someone clearly privileged enough to afford all the services you’d like to continue using. There are vast swaths of t people for whom an additional monthly subscription to watch YouTube, have access to email, read the news, browse social media, etc just isn’t financially tenable.

Especially in the year 2023 where technology and internet access is so crucial to survival, I’d prefer for a low-income family to not have to choose between a meal and renewing their monthly email subscription.

They wouldnt be very expensive. Advertising is very inefficient and the payment per view is already very low.

Yes things cost money. Why should the poor be subsidised in viewing a website when they arent buying the expensive products being advertised on it?

Well, keep the costs at the level that ads make instead of requiring to overpay 100x.

That's probably less than you pay more for your phone for more traffic and power to display ads.

More interestingly, where does all the money for ads (this for Google and the service showing ads) come from? It's paid by all consumers already.

>You’re speaking from the position of someone clearly privileged enough to afford all the services you’d like to continue using.

No, I'm speaking from the position of someone who believes we should use fewer (or even no) services, be it Gmail, or Figma or Spotify free tier, or whatever.

There's always FOSS software. There's also freemium (no ads, just reduced functionality to lure someone to the premium full-featured version), and of course freeware.

Ad-supported also has a cost: the ad-induced consumerist spending is one of the biggest expenses people make (disproportionaly so for poorer people). And there's also the jacking up of product costs to cover an ad budget. Plus the social cost in multitude of ways (from the advertisers having influence over the service provider, to personal data being harvested and sold).

This is a good thing. By requiring paid access to more websites, you might find there’s less people spewing garbage in comments sections etc, since they can’t really afford a bunch of accounts to just troll around.

Does it matter? The best stuff on the web isn’t ad supported anyway. I’d take losing a little good stuff to make it easier to find the rest of it.

Personally, I like pay-per-use and subscription models.

And I'm not entirely opposed to advertising; TV and radio have been ad supported for generations, but we've now added surveillance which is unacceptable. (The ads themselves are also more intrusive, but that's my secondary concern.)

TV ads are okay because you can mute it. Radio ads are obnoxious, always louder than the actual problems.

> always louder than the actual problems

hit the nail on the head with that typo

Wikipedia has been working just fine for decades now, without serving malware-laden ads to users. It's not our job to help trillion-dollar companies fix their business models.

> whole load of websites

I suspect that at least some of those websites shouldn't exist to begin with. I don't see why any improved economic model needs to consider them.

there are so many things that should have killed the industry by now, but it finds a way to keep thriving ...

> If everybody used it, it would kill the industry.

Fingerprinting and click fraud detection says NO!

Seriously, are we in 2000s where ad platforms couldn't detect malicious patterns and fake clicks and I could join a ad click group on facebook to make 100s of dollars?

Even in a case of everyone using an adblock, do you think they're not going to serve ads through first party domains making it very difficult to block? There are already ad companies who do this through their CDNs. why are the supposed users of "Hacker News" site oblivious to these things?

> why are the supposed users of "Hacker News" site oblivious to these things?

Because some people on this site aren't hackers and aren't even technical. They're from old media and are looking for "useful people" to help take down Google and Facebook.

Think Rupert Murdock browsing here globbing onto any anti-tech thread with the understanding of a typical 80yo.