> This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet.
No, they'll be relegated to the charitable internet, the advocacy internet, the nerdy obsessive internet, the public science internet, the FOSS internet, the public domain internet, and the piracy internet.
And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.
> This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.
I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them. The US seems like it's on the verge of state licensing of speech and journalism, and that sentiment is easily moved to any sort of internet hosting of any service.
> And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.
They absolutely will have to since they won't have the means to serve the content to the community otherwise.
Niche websites won't stay niche for very long if they are the only free option.
> I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them.
I don't see most of these free alternatives even existing in the first place.
For example: free news reporting (not even talking about foreign correspondents & co).
The issue is our government doesn’t function anything like that. We don’t build roads. We write checks to for profit contractors to build our roads. What would government internet look like? A massive check to meta and more or less the same environment we have today.
You used the word monetization, everyone else in this subthread is talking about advertising. HN is funded as a piece of content marketing for a startup accelerator.
I suppose you could call the Launch HN threads ads, but only just, and they're of the absolute least objectionable sort—on topic, clearly labeled, unobtrusive, first party, with no tracking.
Surely HN doesn't require the existence of YC as a startup accelerator to exist, right? HN has to me survived because of its community and shared values wrt discussion. The moderation probably plays a role in it, but that's also easily decoupled from big money.
No, but I also believe that it's not so expensive that someone couldn't cover it if it was their hobby. This is doubly true if it's something like HN where it's not trying to scale to infinity.
If it weren't for YC and the network effect of of SV startup culture (remember it started as "Startup News"), HN would be just another niche forum from which most people would have migrated to Reddit ages ago. It might still exist, but only as a withered shell of its former self.
The only reason HN still persists at the scale that it does is precisely because of its association with YC and "tech bros," because the billion dollar venture capital firm running it has made it a part of their identity.
Also most people don't want to pay for content.
This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.