The Internet worked just fine before advertising co-opted every interaction. In fact it was considerably better. Capitalists hijacking the Web has spelled the death of almost everything that was good about the 90s pre-corporatized Internet, which used to be a place where we just hung out and shared information with each other about whatever we were interested in.
There was no pre-advertising internet. Were you alive in the days of popup ads? Advertisers have spent Billions funding the internet all for some scheme that no one can even prove actually does anything.
Most news sites survive on a subscription model instead of or in addition to ads. How many of them do you subscribe to? People complain constantly about having more than 2 streaming subscriptions. If every popular website required a subscription, the internet would be a much less free place, reserved primarily for the middle class.
Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, etc. runs on donations.
The internet as a whole started out as an information bridge between universities and other institutions, dotted with hobbyists running servers from their homes. Facebook, Google, they started off as projects by university students. The fact that most traffic has coalesced into these major platforms is a tragedy.
Advertisements are a very small price to pay for a free and accessible internet, and the big tech companies provide incredible services completely free of charge.
It's almost cliche at this point, but they are not offering these services for free, you are the product. They make more money off of your data, your fingerprint, you than they expend. Maybe not on every basis (for example YouTube is run at a loss technically) but overall it is still more beneficial for them than it is for you. Hell, on top of that, you pay taxes yeah? Then you're already footing the bill when the government bails them out of bankruptcy. It's not like you can't see the effects of it, these big tech companies are very publicly worth billions of dollars. And you don't get billions of dollars without exploiting someone somehow. A good idea can make you millions, but it takes exploitation to make billions.
Do not think for a second that the profit driven company is going to do anything "out of the kindness of their hearts". There's a profit motive, plain and simple. Do not worship the vampires.
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u/dave_silv 2d ago
The Internet worked just fine before advertising co-opted every interaction. In fact it was considerably better. Capitalists hijacking the Web has spelled the death of almost everything that was good about the 90s pre-corporatized Internet, which used to be a place where we just hung out and shared information with each other about whatever we were interested in.