Submitted 3 weeks ago by MCasq_qsaCJ_234@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.world
Link without the paywall
Such bullshit.
"AI is going to fix everything, so we need a new way to make money."
Who pays for your servers and static ip.
Just random people with their own money. Basic webhosting is cheaper than a netflix subscription.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Considering most of those technofascists are American’s who cannot even have proper payment platforms and proper bank connections I doubt they will actually succeed.
If it is only just them doing this AI movement (spoiler they aren’t), they would also stop at the US borders, because just like a huge part of the American businesses, they don’t care about anybody else
This is why it’s so important that people keep information completely free. (aka piracy).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Clickbait is one of the bigger problems on the net. I don’t want to pay for more of it.
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.
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?
There is this but it looks like its going very slowly. www.w3.org/Payments/WG/
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.
First of all, prices already go up for things like netflix. This isnt aimed at subscription sites like netflix its more for pages where you browse for free at the cost of viewing ads like blogs, youtube, substack, lemmy etc. Yes prices would go up over time no doubt but the idea is that the users providing the money should lower the cost. 1000 humans visting your site should be willing to pay more than an advertiser is to show an ad to those 1000 people. Google generally pays around 5cents to 30cents for 1000 views. I dont know about you but I can split 30 cents between 1000 people, hell i’ll even double it cause im generous. I think if 1000 people are viewing your website you should get paid for providing something interesting enough for 1000 people to enjoy. If everyone gave 1cent thats $100, if everyone paid double what the ad was they’d be paying $0.0003 each.
I dont want people who write a blog that is read by many people to need to subject their readers to ads all only to get a check from google saying heres a few cents bud. We can do better, and I dont think the answer is asking people to pay a $5 a month.
The web needs a new web. The internet was never created for privacy and security. People trying to plug the holes isn’t enough.
For a publication based entirely on brainwashed capitalist pseudo-science… every problem is solved by more capitalism.
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.
I despise subscriptions a lot, I also believe that the use of a search engine shouldn’t be something that is run for profit, see where it got us with Google? I also dislike Kagi (and other sites) who refuse to comply with the rules and regulations we have in Europe surrounding prices on sites. They are American iirc which doesn’t help for that and that also means they barely have to make any financial figures public.
I prefer Ecosia (or Qwant), which are making their own search engine together and while they are still funded by ads, it wouldn’t surprise me if in the future (if not already) they get money from the governments. I also prefer actual non-profits (not those American non-profit statuses that can be bough) compared to for profit businesses.
That’s fine if that works for you. My wife doesn’t want the subscription and she also uses Ecosia. Anything non-Google is a win, IMO.
Don’t put AI in anything and everything because it’s the new .com. That’s the business model that will work
AI bots use existing search engines to get results, it just that the results are now told to you like a conversation instead of a list of links. LLM bots are not search engines and these AI companies are not building search engine bots, they are LLM bots that generate predictive text based on already existing search engines that actually do the indexing. They wouldn’t work at all if it wasn’t for Google and Bing. The referral source may have changed but the SEO strategy is still the same.
Web use is hard to measure, but by one estimate monthly traffic from search engines has fallen by 15% in the past year. Some of the loudest complaints have come from the news media, an industry in which we acknowledge an interest. But the drought is a wider problem. Science and education sites have lost a tenth of their visitors in the past year. Reference sites are down by 15% and health sites by 31%. Some big names are being gutted: Tripadvisor.com, which recommends the best hotels or beaches, is down by a third; Webmd, which offers reassurance (or alarm) to the poorly, has fallen by half.
…
As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for ai to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with ai companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. (The Economist Group has yet to license its work for ai training, but has agreed to let Google use select articles for one of its ai services.) Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.
No one should expect the web of the future to look just as it does today. ai-powered search will rightly shake up some services: business directories, for instance, face disintermediation as answer-bots field queries such as “emergency plumber” or “houses for sale”. But the evaporation of incentives to create content presents a fundamental problem. If human traffic is drying up, the web will need a new currency
…
Bringing a new business model to the web is daunting; it may take a shove from regulators to get started. Yet everyone has an interest in making content-creation pay. Publishers may be the ones complaining now, but if the content tap dries up, ai companies will suffer, too. Some are more vulnerable than others. Whereas Meta can draw on data posted to its social networks and Google owns YouTube, the world’s biggest video vault, Openai relies entirely on others for its content.
If nothing changes, the risk is of a modern-day tragedy of the commons. The shared resource of the open web will be over-exploited, leading to its eventual exhaustion. If that process is not stopped, one of the great common properties of humanity could be gravely diminished. The tragedy of the web would be a tragedy for everyone.
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.
Just realized a whole generation of kids will have ai links to the web, so if they look for something theyll get the one sanitized link, think the whole skill of searching and sifting through links will be lost (it was thought in schools when I was a kid)
Most of the people I know now never really acquired this skill, can’t really lose what they didn’t have
lol. You’re not wrong that it’ll be way easier to rely on AI to do the sorting for you, but you’re implying Google didn’t sanitize information and only give you results they approve of…
There’s way more to the internet than you can find on search engines.
end of the day its showing you 20 results per page or whatever not just one link and a summary
Like what, why never use examples, why do people always refer to something but not say what it is? If there is more, what do you think I’m missing?
Newsletters making a comeback were the last thing I thought of that could come back.
I loved the idea of Flattr.
web 1.0 was the last good era of the internet
The intetnet isnt truly dead until Zombo.com no longer exists.
I should get into the model business
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.
RagingSnarkasm@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I liked the web a lot more when it didn’t have a business model.
YOU KIDS GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN!
umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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.
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 2 weeks 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.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Almost every website idea nowadays people are like but how will it make money?!?
And it’s like dude, keeping a website afloat is cheaper than pet rent.