One of my first blog posts in a while, I go over Google’s recent web proposal, and point out exactly why it won’t turn out well. Hope y’all have fun with it.
One of my first blog posts in a while, I go over Google’s recent web proposal, and point out exactly why it won’t turn out well. Hope y’all have fun with it.
I don’t want to see any ads either. Even unobtrusive ones. It’s just different levels of annoying and given the choice, I’ll pick zero annoyance. I also don’t want to be the product. Not just as a target for advertisements, but from information gathering for profit.
I do see the problem with this. Most sites are run with the expectation of profit. And while not explicitly my intent, I go out of the way to be as unprofitable as possible to these kinds of business models.
I do opt to pay for a couple of privacy respecting online services and I… rarely but not never donate to sites I use frequently that are privacy respecting and not ad supported. And that gives me some feel goods to support sites and services that align with my values but it’s not really viable for the internet as a whole right? Hoping for some spare change from a tiny fraction of your visitors.
I don’t know what the solution to this is. But I mirror OP’s concerns about this specific thing. I don’t want my browsing to be DRM’d, and I have zero trust for Google. If this happens, they will abuse it.
Edit: Changed organizations to services. Felt more accurate.
Why not? It works for kbin/lemmy instances. It works for Wikipedia. It works for Lichess.
Sure, some things like video hosting are going to require a lot more bandwidth / server storage so perhaps those need to be subscription based but I think large swathes of the internet could be turned into a donation/subscription model. it just isn’t done that way because it’s less profitable.
look at which video games are the most profitable - it’s always the free ones. fortnite, league of legends, etc.
My general cynicism of people as a whole drives my opinion, I suppose. While it can be successful sometimes as you point out, I don’t think enough people would contibute for a donation based model to work in most cases. And people already have subscription fatigue just from online streaming services.
But you know what would be awesome? If I was wrong. Especially about the donation based model. Enough people opting to donate for high quality content that it becomes a viable default? I want that kind of web.
yeah it’s still a sort of new frontier but the patreon model I think really should be the way going forward assuming it’s possible. everybody gets the content for free, but those who can afford to contribute do so. and to be honest, if you live in a 1st world country throwing a couple bucks here and there isn’t that much to ask. for the same price of a lunch at mcdonalds you can give $3 a month for nearly half a year to Wikipedia for example