this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
569 points (94.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43912 readers
846 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but without ads get ready to start paying for things. You go to a news website, sorry you need to login and hand over your credit card to access anything. Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can't sell you data to advertisers anymore.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
I brought this up the last time I talked about this, but to be clear, if we must choose between advertisements and paywall, then we should choose advertisements as the lesser evil. However, we must never accept the fallacy that advertising or paywalls are the only possible choices! More generally, we must never accept the fallacy that a market is the only acceptable way to distribute goods, a corollary of which is the idea that any acceptable solution needs to compete on equal terms with existing products in a market.
Well the first part at least would be a welcome change. The issue in my view is the very fact that poor people are treated as second-class citizens in information access or any other field of endeavor.
I very genuinely want those sites to fucking die so I don't have to coexist in a world where they dominate the internet. I would be literally thrilled to join a group of like-minded people who have to reimplement the conveniences of the modern web from scratch for free.
Still end of the day the server bill has got to be paid.
Why on earth is a paywall an evil and worse than ads? This idea that everything on the Internet needs to be free-as-in-beer is the toxicity that has resulted in our entire world corrupted with ads. A News organization needs money to pay journalists and to send them to where news is happening. A video service like YouTube needs to pay for massive amounts of storage and servers. If you want quality professional content, and not just fake blogging thinly disguising advertising, you need to pay writers.
The alternative is that is it all corrupted with ads, or by the "rich uncle" of the day like a musk or a zuckerberg or whatever with an ulterior motive.
If you want the provider of a service or product to be beholden and at all responsive to you, as a user, rather than someone else, you need to be a customer, a paying customer. That's your only real leverage. If someone else is the real source of their revenue stream then their every act is geared to please them and not you. That's what we have now.
If you want to socialize it all instead, like a PBS, I'm fine with that, but good luck.
And who is to be blamed for setting up this system ?