> Note that lots of people won't (or mostly can't) pay, so how does a social network work in this case?

If there's not enough consumer demand for a service, and it's not a public utility that's worth funding through taxpayer money to maintain equal access for everyone, the logical, supply-and-demand-based, hundred year-old solution is to just admit it's not a good business idea and move on.

If their leadership teams can't come up with an offering worth paying for, well, tough luck, the list of neat ideas that just didn't atract enough customers is perpetually open.

> How will one fund the server costs for newspapers, social networks and search engines?

All of these currently exist without advertising. The problem is advertising sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, convincing you it's the only business model because it's so lucrative.

Look around at the businesses that are entirely supported by advertising and ask yourself honestly how worse off we would be if they disappeared overnight. Do you believe that the vacuum they left would never be filled by other business models? Sure, it would probably look a lot different, but that's the point. What we have now is horrible, and I don't think society collapses if we got rid of advertising.

Be careful what you wish for. I hate the current data collection paradigm but advertising allows media to pay their own way and remain independent.

I guess one other model that seems to beat out advertising is billionaire ownership for influence peddling. Still remains to be seen if this model will remain successful in the long term. We should probably eliminate billionaires though just to be safe.

It's not my place, nor am I smart enough to propose a solution. But if you ask me, I would start with much stricter regulations regarding company transparency, data collection, and data privacy. There are two things making this very unlikely, though:

- Governments and companies are in symbiosis. Companies can influence which laws are passed and how they apply to them, and governments depend on these companies both financially, and practically for their services. Nowhere is this clearer than in the US, where actual CEOs are now running the country.

- The general public doesn't really care about these issues. For most people their data and privacy isn't a concern, and even when it is, it's not a large enough of a concern that they would be willing to stop using these services, or use alternatives. Since advertising/propaganda works on a subconscious level, they're literally brainwashed to not see a problem at all.

So I realistically don't see a way out of this. It would require changes in deeply rooted sociopolitical systems just to get on the right path, and then years of effort to keep us there. And without unanimous public support for all of this, it will never come to pass.

As for alternative business models, that's the least of our problems. Technical solutions for this exist today, and wouldn't be difficult to expand and build upon, but the actual challenge is changing the public perception of what "free" means. The solution likely wouldn't be as profitable for companies as advertising currently is, which is why we would need regulations to force it. When weighing the success of another billion-dollar corporation against our society's mental health and stability, the choice is obvious to me.

If (under our current economic system) it is impossible to run generally useful services like that without subjecting their users to advertisements, then clearly, there's something wrong with the economic system itself and we should start investigating alternatives.

The current situation incentives advertising as the only way to monetize something so it's no wonder you want advertising to exist. The fundamental way is always going to be a peer-to-peer network, where you can contribute in so many different ways apart from paying. The majority of the web is filled with people who has no idea on what the original web stood for and frankly, they couldn't care less which is why we are in such a bloated mess

Businesses not being able to find a sustainable business model is not my problem.

Regardless, I block all of their ads anyway.

At low cost, like Craigslist?