How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?
Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation.
When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.
This effectively silences a large number of people and communities who can’t afford that privilege. Not saying that’s inherently bad. But it’s worth weighing in the moral calculus.
Straw man. Nobody in this thread argued it is.
Disadvantaged groups will already have less free time to share content, less exposure to the technical skills needed to do so, less attention, respect, and opportunity from doing so, etc. Advertising places a fig leaf over unequal access, but really makes the inequality worse by centralizing wealth and control in the hands of a few rent-seeking operations.
Yes, but advertisement showed that it wasn't a structural limitation and that other options were available. Even if said options themselves had downsides.
I'd argue advertising silences many more.
Any niche topic is already so SEO'd to death with keyword rich but contentless content that those with something truly relevant to say are unlikely to ever be heard.*
* Unless commenting in a niche subreddit, a web-ring indexed by small web engines, or the like, where the audience are like minds who've previously found the niche.
predatory lawyers and greedy creators is the reason I don't.
On dialup?
In addition to that, dialup was paid per minute where I grew up, so either option would have been prohibitively expensive.
Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by.
The content shared was mostly text and a small amount of images. Video and audio were largely non-existant.
> I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.
You're describing hobby content creators which didn't have the volume and quality of individual content creators nowadays.
There was also always a way to accommodate a large amount of users through mirrors and other channels, which people shared frequently.
With "the web" they meant their business idea for their specific platform isn't viable without advertisers exploiting user data to the largest degree possible. That is something entirely different. On if they just paywalled the content, people would probably again use alternatives.
Of course I didn't mean to say that infrastructure costs are negligible. On the contrary, it is the largest expense for certain platforms and services. But if a platform has advertising as a business model, it is not on my browser to accommodate that. Then they need to let someone else fill the space they cannot serve without manipulating my user agent.
I do even approve of platforms enabling some creators to make a living with online content creation. But I am still not interested to accommodate advertisers. It is a toxic industry that strives on exploiting users and their privacy. There is no sensible means of cooperation possible and I want my browser have realistic perspective here.
agreed
> and quality
filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...
There are some great movies out of Hollywood.
So if we were to move to a world where high quality productions were not feasible anymore for some reason or another then by definition most people would find this to be a problem.
Most "content" is "consumed" just to have something to do.
Quality is also a factor of time which unpaid people usually do not have enough of.
And that is simply touching the easiest problem to solve which is the storage part. Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.
> Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.
The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
I doubt it because a lot of this content doesn't exist outside of Youtube and because the content does exist on external drives has not internet connectivity or capacity to get it.
> No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.
It seems to currently have 220K users, not exactly what I would call representative or a success for that matter.
> The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
Only if they agree to themselves share the content they host which is not necessarily the case.
The Pirate Bay existed… huh, still exists, OK… without requiring any single person to have all the pirated content on any single system — the combined size of all videos on YouTube may be 10 to 15 exabytes or whatever, but no single video, no single creator, is close to that. Even LTT is about 3.6 petabytes for their entire working-archive backup system last I heard, and if they wanted to stream those as a torrent, well, the files are right there.
It may not suit the current way YouTube content is consumed, where you share a link to a specific timestamp and whoever follows that link can see that moment almost immediately, but that doesn't detract from "can people share videos, perhaps even ones they made themselves, using this system?"
It was better before the insane amount of advertising.
There was anything on it really before that. Wikipedia didn't start until 2001 and there were already pop-ups and banner ads everywhere. t was better before the insane amount of advertising. I seem to recall GeoCities having ads everywhere.
It never was free before modern internet advertising, the costs were just hidden somewhere else. I remember the time before that... IRC servers and a lot of code hosting (SourceForge, Linux distro repositories) were paid for by volunteers/donors/universities, newsgroup servers were ran by ISPs and paid for by ISP customers, forums, MMORPGs, general online game servers and the likes by donations or sometimes just the pockets of whomever in the community had some money to spare, and a lot of the warez scene was just plainly skimming off of others: STROs for hosting, phone dialer scams and credit card fraud. Additionally, some sites made small, direct advertising deals with relevant companies (say, a forum about car DIY could run banners from a dealership).
A lot of stuff that we take for granted today - especially animated content beyond short GIFs - simply was unfeasible because the amount of money you needed to cough up was so immense. The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place.
Also, times (and legal responsibilities) changed, driving up the cost particularly for anything involving UGC. Blog comment sections, guestbooks and the likes got impossible to moderate due to spam, and as that vanished, so did blogs in general. Forums had to deal with CSAM spreaders hiding out, and then came terrorists and the regulatory responses towards them requiring very strict timeframe for the removal of such content... it's a real effort to host anything beyond a static HTML site these days.
If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change?
BTW: Serious question, I really want to know what you think.
Oh of course it will, we're already seeing the first effects. Or rather, Twitter (now X) is - they lost pretty much all major brands as advertisers and the majority of their income as advertisers realized that appearing next to Catturd, porn spammers and dropshipping scams is not a platform that yields high returns.
The only platforms still offering decent ROI are Meta and Google's search results, and the real game for online advertisers these days is influencer marketing.
It was free to users, but the operators were paying hosting fees. Maybe the did that out of love or charity or simply because nobody knew how to make money with it. First gen ads came from companies buying banners directly with the host based on user metrics which ultimately landed with GoogAnals installed every where. Hosts used that to offset their out of pocket expenses. But the content was still the content. The wheels started wobbling when blogs started chasing topics for the metrics. The wheels came completely off the bus when socials introduced algos tweaked to feed your addictions.
It was never free. The form of payment has moved to unsuspecting users' data instead of money out of pocket.
This is already something they insisted on leaving enabled by default because they knew no one would opt into it. They knew full well that this isn't something people want. Mozilla is an ad-tech company now. Instead of improving firefox they spent a ton of money buying an ad company created by facebook employees. They're going to claw back a return on that investment and they're taking it from Firefox users.
They simply do not care about the privacy of Firefox users. There is zero chance that this is as far as Firefox goes in violating your privacy. Expect more anti-features, expect things you disable in about:config to re-enable themselves after updates, expect more tracking that you can't disable, expect more invasive forms of tracking, and expect your ability to block ads on firefox to get increasingly limited until it becomes impossible. It's all downhill from here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Ad_filtering,_ad_...
Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar sites advertising is part of their business model. But the primary reason here is foremost people creating content.
That Youtube has insane infrastructure costs is secondary and we certainly don't need Browsers to help advertising at all.
If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. Danger is that Firefox gets gimped because of bad business decisions, because other features regarding privacy aren't as good as they could be.