this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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The reality is that the internet itself is at a tipping point. Advertising platforms know their service is basically worthless as most people use an adblocker, and most companies have idiotic marketing teams that don't know how to properly sell their product/service in the first place. Companies are seeing less and less ROI on their marketing budget. Without ads, the internet goes bye-bye, or it turns into a subscription model for every website.
Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don't forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.
Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.
A problem I see is scalability. For example on Lemmy once an instances hits a high enough user count the costs far outweigh donations and moderation becomes a full time job. It’s ad-free for now but costs are going to keep increasing as the demand for storage and constant moderation increase with the userbase.
most people aren't tech-savvy enough to do that
Anecdotal but I don’t know anyone, including old people who don’t use Adblock. Sure I installed it for half of the ones I know, but the others found it all on its own. The ads are just insanely disruptive so one could see why it would happen naturally.