I am fucking scared of the mass surveilence nightmare direction that the internet and the world as a whole is going towards… C2PA, france hacking itself into citizen phones, the UK anti encryption law, EU’s chat control, etc. Im also sick of and hate the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality that corpos try to push. I dont wanna know how the world will look like in 5-10 years.
I feel like I’ve explored very deep edges of sound alternatives. I’ve tried replacing my phone with consumer friendly alternatives and they just weren’t as good unless you can get a fair phone in the US which is hit or miss. The Internet itself lending itself to subscription based models is because servers and data storage costs money.
I hate to say it, but even if you remove power through solar investments and using lightweight servers you still have ISP to pay. Everyone’s got bills and overhead, because nothing is free.
My advice is to ground your logic in that everything requires resources to run and rejoice in community wins like Lemmy or mastodon or Graphene OS. It’s not all bad. Find the good in the bad and move towards what works for you personally. I’ve been off of windows for like a year now and I think that alone is impressive despite Xbox for example costing an arm and a leg.
The internet as we knew it was based on something that doesn’t exist anymore.
Back in the '90s the internet was a million small companies all posturing and juggling for position. The great late capitalism push means that everybody needs to make 20% more every year which is completely possible to do when you’re tiny.
The advertising fire hose back then was enough to expand small companies year-over-year. The return on investments from some well placed static ads, and then later on YouTube ads was more than enough to oil the gears of commerce.
Now the only thing that’s left are the mega corporations, They can’t sustainably expand at 20% per year, but they sure do like to buy up those tiny corporations.
Advertising is no longer sufficient, so subscriptions are going to creep in. At some point subscriptions will no longer be sufficient.
Nothing was ever free, we were the product. In the current economic situation we’re no longer as profitable a product. Interest rates exist again venture capital is drying up.
At some point everything we use that’s not private community funded is going to end up being paid for by both a subscription and advertising
I was honestly kind of hoping more web 3 peer-to-peer stuff would be the final answer but all those projects seems to be fizzling out.
Yeah agreed. I’m working on a solution but it’s going to cost the consumer. According to Zuckerberg the first sin of the Internet was making everything free. If you’re doing things in the dapp space it’s harder since every person needs a server not just an app in an ideal world.
These monolithic websites have a lot less of an excuse imo since they run on a shared server though.
He’s kind of right in a way. If advertising is your model, you can never get bigger than the collective sum of your advertisers. That’s scales well until you are one of the biggest companies in the world, and then there just aren’t new sources of advertising dollars to build on. You need other monetization channels, and those can frequently be in conflict with the advertising mission.
A subscription based service, in theory, directly converts your specific utility as a good or service into cash flow, rather than the utility of the service for pushing ad impressions.
This is the rub though - so many people think that there is a giant conspiracy to make tech conform to some nefarious capitalism endgame, but in a lot of cases, this shit is legitimately just consumer preference.
Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of kleptocratic fuckery afoot as well, but there are also plenty of examples of consumers wanting something that actual experts think is dumb or unsafe.