That's a bit too simple. There is way fewer people producing quality content "for fun" than people that aim or at least eventually hope to make money from it.
Yes a few sites take this too far and ruin search results for everyone. But taking the possibility away would also cut the produced content by a lot.
Youtube for example had some good content before monetization, but there is a lot of great documentary like channels now that simply wouldn't be possible without ads. There is also clickbait trash yes, but I rather have both than neither.
Not to be the downer, but who pays for all the video bandwidth, who pays for all the content hosting? The old web worked because it was mostly a public good, paid for by govt and universities. At current webscale that's not coming back.
So who pays for all of this?
The web needs to be monetized, just not via advertising. Maybe it's microtransactions, maybe subscriptions, maybe something else, but this idea of "we get everything we want for free and nobody tries to use it for their own agenda" will never return. That only exists for hobby technologies. Once they are mainstream they get incorporated into the mainstream economic model. Our mainstream model is capitalism, so it will be ever present in any form of the internet.
The main question is how people/resources can be paid for while maintaining healthy incentives.
It costs the Internet Archive $2/GB to store a blob of data in perpetuity, their budget for the entire org is ~$37M/year. I don't disagree that people and systems need to be paid, but the costs are not untenable. We have Patreon, we have subscriptions to your run of the mill media outlets (NY Times, Economist, WSJ, Vox, etc), the primitives exist.
The web needs patrons, contributions, and cost allocation, not necessarily monetization and shareholder capitalism where there is a never ending shuffle of IP and org ownership to maximize returns (unnecessarily imho). How many times was Reddit flipped until its current CEO juiced it for IPO and profitability? Now it is a curated forum for ML training.
I (as well as many other consumers of this content) donate to APM Marketplace [1] because we can afford it and want it to continue. This is, in fits and starts, the way imho. We piece together the means to deliver disenshittification (aggregating small donations, large donations, grants, etc).
(Tangentially, APM Marketplace has recently covered food stores [2] and childcare centers [3] that have incorporated as non profits because a for profit model simply will not succeed; food for thought at a meta level as we discuss economic sustainability and how to deliver outcomes in non conventional ways)
> There is way fewer people producing quality content "for fun" than people that aim or at least eventually hope to make money from it...But taking the possibility away would also cut the produced content by a lot.
....is that a problem? most of what we actually like is the stuff that's made 'for fun', and even if not, killing off some good stuff while killing off nearly all the bad stuff is a pretty good deal imo.
Agreed. The entire reason why search is so hard is because there's so much junk produced purely to manipulate people into buying stuff. If all of that goes away because people don't see ads there anymore, search becomes much easier to pull off for those of us who don't want to stick to the AI sandbox.
There's a slight chance we could see the un-Septembering of the internet as it bifurcates.
Yes a few sites take this too far and ruin search results for everyone. But taking the possibility away would also cut the produced content by a lot.
Youtube for example had some good content before monetization, but there is a lot of great documentary like channels now that simply wouldn't be possible without ads. There is also clickbait trash yes, but I rather have both than neither.