tikitaki

yeah it’s still a sort of new frontier but the patreon model I think really should be the way going forward assuming it’s possible. everybody gets the content for free, but those who can afford to contribute do so. and to be honest, if you live in a 1st world country throwing a couple bucks here and there isn’t that much to ask. for the same price of a lunch at mcdonalds you can give $3 a month for nearly half a year to Wikipedia for example

but it’s not really viable for the internet as a whole right? Hoping for some spare change from a tiny fraction of your visitors

Why not? It works for kbin/lemmy instances. It works for Wikipedia. It works for Lichess.

Sure, some things like video hosting are going to require a lot more bandwidth / server storage so perhaps those need to be subscription based but I think large swathes of the internet could be turned into a donation/subscription model. it just isn’t done that way because it’s less profitable.

look at which video games are the most profitable - it’s always the free ones. fortnite, league of legends, etc.

Users don’t use adblockers because they don’t want to see ads at all; they they use adblockers because getting a usable web experience requires it.

Users don’t block advertisements; they block annoying advertisements. They block trackers. They block malware. They block privacy invasion.

I block advertisements because I don’t want to see any advertisements. They are poison for the mind and I want to eliminate any form of advertisement I can control. Obviously you can’t avoid a lot of it - but I can definitely avoid it in my web browser.

I would prefer a subscription based model or a donation based model. For example Wikipedia or Lichess I’ve donated to because I believe they provide a good service and show no ads. Or for example Kagi which is a search engine that charges a monthly fee.

Imagine you’re Farmer Bob in a temperate region great for growing apples and I’m Farmer Fred in a tropical area ideal for bananas. We each like bananas and apples, so tried growing both fruits, each of us harvesting 12 of our specialty and 6 of the other, making a total output of 36 fruits.

But then, we learned about the power of trade. We focused on what our lands did best: I harvested 24 bananas, you 24 apples. We swapped half our produce, and like magic - We both had 12 bananas and 12 apples each, totaling 48 fruits, a 25% increase just from trade.

But what if we stopped trading due to trust issues? We’d revert to the less efficient system, losing out on the additional produce.

Now, think of this on a global scale. When countries specialize and trade, we all gain. But as governments decouple from global trade, they’re choosing to lose these benefits, making economies less efficient. It’s a dangerous path where everyone ends up poorer.

And for our governments to deliberately choose a path that makes us all poorer - that means there’s an unchecked growing tension. It’s almost palpable. We’re already living through a Gilded Age nearly a century after the last one… what happened after the Gilded Age?

Call me a doomer but this is alarming news, even if understandable from a national security perspective

it’s good in the short term but realistically this news is a canary in the coal mine moment

we are decoupling our economies from the global system - increasing the chances for cold and/or hot war

at least they’re honest about it

i’d imagine they have the same ability here in the states they’re just gonna advertise the fact