You're talking about the internet when it was tiny and inaccessible, and you're acting like that was good. That's a position to take, but I don't think it's a good one - again, I would not have been able to write my blog for free, the sites we take for granted today would not exist.

The only way to actually publish would be to have technical skills and money, which I don't think is good.

There a plenty of non-ad-driver services that allow hosting blogs for free. Github, cloudfare’s free tier, and many others - and you can certainly find a one-click vm deployment of a blogging platform for less then 5$. I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy.

All of those businesses subsidize their sites because they're billion dollar companies. Is that better than just... using ads?

> I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy.

I'm saying someone has to pay for it.

Hosting a static cheap is cheap. And even something powered by a CMS can be hosted on a cheap droplet. No one really expects you to share contents like video and music for free (and even that can be done cheaply if you’re only loking at a few TB of monthly bandwith). So yeah, someone should pay for it, but the internet itself isn’t free and everyone is paying for it.

It was NOT inaccessible

Look up geocities maybe, most providers gave you some free space anyhow

My experience was that it was incredibly accessible. I easily set up a web server on my home internet connection because my line was synchronous and static IPs were easily available.

> My experience was that it was incredibly accessible.

> I easily set up a web server

I can't believe you can write one after the other.

And yet you believe that the current status is necessary

I don't see how one has to do with the other. Saying that the internet was accessible, and showing that by saying "I just had to set up a server" is insane.

He didn't say he had to, he just said he did it

It would be very healthy anyhow if setting up a server (or any kind of self-hosted service) were less fraught upon, it really is much simpler than many people imagine

As a teen and complete novice it took me 8 ours on a Saturday. What's contradictory about those two statements?

Other than the hurdles that the giants have put in the way it could be incredibly fast today.

Geocities had ads for most of its life. It also ended up dead because it wasn't profitable anyways. Not the best example.

Providers didn't offer free space, you paid for it with your subscription, and you would lose if you changed provider.

I think that it died because of the dotcom bubble, the purchase by Yahoo and it being overall crappy...

Yeah it had ads but without much targeting

Providers: you still pay for internet subscriptions; you used to get several services included for a fair price

The problem with provider supplied services like hosting and email is that people understandably don't want to tie cloud services to their home internet connection. What if you move, or find a provider that offers better/cheaper internet service.

As a result, few people use them, and because they stopped being a competitive advantage, providers stopped offering them, and when they do, it is usually not free and a borderline scam. A way to add fees to unsuspecting users for something they won't even use.

I think that they stopped offering them (when they did) mostly because there are so many cheap, or free, good other services now

Geocities had a tiny fraction of the users that forums attract these days and was not free for a major portion of its lifetime.

All of that, and worth noting still that Geocities was extremely unique in what it offered when it offered it. It's not a very compelling model for the entire internet, at best it was an experiment that ultimately failed.

I think forums these days attract three or four people

It arguably failed because of Yahoo, and it was just one hosting service, not a model

We didn't blog. We posted on USENET — for free.

OK so are proposing that we shift the internet to a completely decentralized system somehow? And we'll just kill ads in the meantime while the entire world switches off of the current infra?

If you're asking me, I don't have a problem with that at all. I know full well it will never happen though since big money is now involved.

It was good, and you probably would have been to write your blog for free.

Yes a lot of crappy sites would not exist; very expensive ones such as (ads-filled) YouTube probably wouldn't either, but YouTube was the beginning of the downfall; we'd definitely have been better off without it.