Link without the paywall
I liked the web a lot more when it didn’t have a business model.
YOU KIDS GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN!
To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model
Submitted 21 hours ago by MCasq_qsaCJ_234@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
RagingSnarkasm@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
And that was back when hosting, storage, and bandwidth were expensive. Those are basically free for text-based content now, and getting cheaper for audio and video. Nowadays, anything made by amateurs shouldn’t really need a “business model” at all, and anything made by professionals could be damned cheap, if there were no middlemen taking the majority of the cut.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 9 hours ago
remember when we met people from around the globe and it was fun instead of frustrating?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I’m still fucking ashamed, I was 9 and me and my sis had an ICQ friend. He was the same age as our IRL friend, had the same name, except it was a different guy someplace in Germany. Yet somehow the friendship a bit transcended that little nuance.
And I wrote such horribly idiotic stuff.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 hours ago
For a publication based entirely on brainwashed capitalist pseudo-science… every problem is solved by more capitalism.
swordgeek@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
Such bullshit.
"AI is going to fix everything, so we need a new way to make money."
- AI is nothing but a delusional and unwanted waste of energy.
- The web doesn’t need a business model, period. Money-grubbing billionaires are the only ones who need a business model.
Zexks@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Who pays for your servers and static ip.
swordgeek@lemmy.ca 12 minutes ago
The premise of a web business model is that websites must make a profit - either directly or indirectly.
That’s utter bullshit. Some of us are old enough to remember when the web (or for that matter, the pre-web internet) was there for sharing of information, social interaction, and community. Schools, the government, and nonprofits provided hosting for free.
Later on, ISPs started to add hosting as part of their internet service - along with usenet access and an email address. The cost to them was negligible, especially vs. the benefits of being able to say “switch to us and create your own website!”
Nowadays you can run a site from your home PC in a VM, punch a hole through your firewall, and pay a modicum for DDNS to a custom domain for under a hundred bucks a year. If you’re a bigger site with more traffic, maybe you spin it up on AWS and pay ten or twenty bucks a month.
The very idea that “The Web” is a homogeneous, for-profit entity is a profound and fundamental mistake that is made by every money-obsessed organization around - not just the financial rags like Forbes and The Economist, but essentially corporations as well. Take a look at the support site for your favourite product and try to convince yourself that they didn’t just put the minimum required effort in to send customers into the arms of their competitors.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 12 hours ago
Just random people with their own money. Basic webhosting is cheaper than a netflix subscription.
Humanius@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Not op, but I pay for my own server, domain and IP (though it is not a static one).
I’m not sure what you are trying to get at?
digitalnuisance@infosec.pub 7 hours ago
AI is fine, what is at issue here is the unnecessary scaling up of AI. There were great strides being made in making models as small and efficient as possible before OpenAI fucked up the entire market by becoming a for-profit company.
WatDabney@sopuli.xyz 20 hours ago
Amusingly enough, The Economist illustrates what I believe to be the new business model that’s already waiting in the wings for the internet.
With admittedly no direct evidence to support it, my theory at the moment is that the “AI” players plan to consolidate and to continue to expand their reach and continue to gain users who rely on the “AI” for information rather than following links to the originals, then, once the "AI"s have killed enough clicks to collapse the ad model and drive the websites out of business (and give them the opportunity to buy up the remains of the businesses, and more importantly, their databases), they’ll put all of the information of which they’re now in sole possession behind paywalls.
Broadly, the goal is to apply the most lucrative if least popular business model to information ,- to monopolize ownership of it in order to sit back and collect money as rent-seeking parasites.
Dogiedog64@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
See, that’s a reasonable take I agree with for the most part, but I think it’ll play out a bit differently. Because these AIbro Technofascist dipshit Billionaires are so fucking stupid, instead of just pulling the plug on AI and sitting on the wealth of information like metaphorical dragons, they’ll continue pumping billions into larger and more complex models to try and “automate everything”, all the while fighting each other viciously, until they all run out of money when their AI-Powered techno-utopia where autonomous robots run everything never comes to pass.
Meanwhile, instead of paying for the information hoards of the TechnoFascist Elites, people will begin self-hosting again, like with the Fediverse, because it’s just simply cheaper and more effective at letting people learn as groups and connect with each other.
WatDabney@sopuli.xyz 19 hours ago
On the first point, I’m not sure. I definitely agree that left to their own devices the AIbros would just keep expanding and battling each other and chasing ever more pie in the sky. But I don’t think they’ll be left to themselves. I think the MBAs will move in and take over, and it’ll shift to standard corporate tactics of buyouts and mergers and bankruptcies and liquidations, and inevitable consolidation.
On the second, I agree. I think the web is actually going to effectively split into a commercial system of monolithic corporations and subscriptions and fixed hardware and a much less formal true web of small servers and self hosting and ad hoc networks.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 hours ago
This is why it’s so important that people keep information completely free. (aka piracy).
WatDabney@sopuli.xyz 5 hours ago
Yes.
Data hoarders are going to really come into their own after the corporations start trying to paywall information - pretty much no matter what it is, there’s somebody out there who has it squirreled away on a drive.
puppinstuff@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
Kagi’s model is working well for them. A traditional search engine where AI results are limited and optional, and they actively try to filter away slop, images, clickbait, and other low quality results.
I’ve been paying for 3 months and I’ll never go back. I hope they increase their market share as others ratchet up their enshittification cranks.
Auth@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Can we please just pay a cent or half a cent for each page we vist. Its like 50x what the website would get from our view with ads and its not much. I’m sure it would encourage others to start their own website as well if you could get $1 from 100 page views.
There are so many things like this news article where they want to charge me a few dollars. Bro I cant afford to pay $5 a month for every single platform that would close me 1000s.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
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Clickbait is one of the bigger problems on the net. I don’t want to pay for more of it.
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I am much less opposed to being tracked than some people here. But the complete and unavoidable surveillance implied by such a scheme takes it a bit far.
Actually, given Lemmy’s usual knee-jerk reaction to tracking and commercialization, I can only assume that people aren’t thinking through this proposal.
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al_Kaholic@lemmynsfw.com 17 hours ago
Don’t you already pay to use the Internet? Why does anybody have to make record profits every quarter, fuck all ads. The Internet was much better when corporations were not involved.
Auth@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Idc about corporations but the internet costs and you cant get away from that. Servers and the infrastructure around them has to be paid for. And I’m happy to pay my share when I vist someones website. My issue is that my share is a few cents not a few dollars like a lot of these newpapers try and charge.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
You don’t pay for the services in it. Storage, computation, bigger channels.
So yes, I think it should be possible to make paid connections to a service, like a paid phone call.
Or to buy storage.
There should be a new stack of web-like (application-layer and up) protocols. To separate requesting storage (put, get), computation (submit a task, get a result) and search (get from index by keywords) into technically different tasks and to make them paid on technical level. Probably make some procedure for aggregated payment for accessing a service. Then the service itself should be on the next level, and probably built from these services on the client.
It should be a client-side decision to “continue to a paid service for N monies”.
People who’ve built the Internet - they were an academic bunch, or in case of Sun founders, an economically inept bunch (yes, I can repeat that ; their period of huge success was mostly when they were making workstations ; though to be honest I liked Bill Joy’s interview on climate and externalia). They didn’t consider this important. They made a library system for a community of peers.
That’s an intermediate version of what I’m dreaming of, except what I’m dreaming of would have uniform infrastructure completely separated from content, so services would serve many applications in a uniform way, storage and computation and search and maybe message relay to another user. The applications themselves would differ from each other, and their differences would exist locally on user machine.
Dindonmasker@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
And then the new meta instead of making you scroll through a million ads to get to the content it will make you go to page 2 then 3 then 4… to get to the content to get many more cents XD
But yea i do agree that if the websites aked us to pay the same amount that they get from ads to not see them it would cost us a fraction of a penny. Just needs some kind of wallet that either the website or ad provider can take from to delete the ads.
Auth@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Maybe you could do it as the website sets a suggested price and the user either agrees or chooses their own. I think if the process of paying was seemless enough most people would be happy to pay and the few people putting 0 for everything probably need the money more anyway.
reddig33@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
You do that and the prices will just keep going up. See Netflix/streaming as an example. Enough $ is never enough. Line must go up.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 17 hours ago
This could unironically be an OK use case for crypto and NFTs on a low energy usage blockchain?
Website asks you to pay a paltry sum, you get an nft that allows visiting for X days
NFT over cookie because then you can keep using the site on your other devices as long as they’re connectes to the wallet too, and you don’t need a user account for every site.
Not a perfect idea but not the worst?
Auth@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
There is this but it looks like its going very slowly. www.w3.org/Payments/WG/
x00z@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I loved the idea of Flattr.
WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
The web needs a new web. The internet was never created for privacy and security. People trying to plug the holes isn’t enough.
PattyMcB@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Don’t put AI in anything and everything because it’s the new .com. That’s the business model that will work
SlartyBartFast@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
I should get into the model business
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
To survive the AI age we will need a completely different capitalism model - which I honestly think will happen, but the transition period is guaranteed to be extremely difficult.
tomatolung@lemmy.world 27 minutes ago
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As others have commented, the economist is presenting this as a capitalist issue that requires a monetary fix. The most ironic element to me is that one of the elements of the tragedy of the commons is that is indicates the requirement of a public interest and it’s regulatory interest so the commons can work. So another way to perceive this is that we need a non-capital framework to allow the web to persist. Say perhaps like roads are created as infrastructure to allow the free movement of it’s citizens in a “safe” and organized way, perhaps we should change our perspective on the utility of the we and it’s content. I’m not suggesting that we copy the transportation to the internet as it obviously breaks down, but the need to think outside the capitalist box is apparent. Libraries have been funded both publicly and privately as public interest, and have the capacity to work both for and nonprofit. This adaptation need not just be ‘free’ market driven. Especially as we do not actually live in a free market, but I’ll let others drive down that hole.