zlacker

The same way businesses have always been funded - by selling things people think are worth buying.

>>mkolod+(OP)
Reddit for example has nothing to sell me directly unless it was subscription-based which is a nonstarter. There's no other model for sites like that besides maybe browser-based crypto mining.

>>mkolod+(OP)
That's not going to work for plenty of services. Most people (if not everyone) are not going to pay for search, social network, instant messaging, maps, mail etc.

>>jimmas+C1
It wouldn't be a non-starter if no other site could do the same thing without also charging for a subscription. Services like Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram all provide a service that many people find valuable. Let people pay for it.

>>rafi_k+l2
Why would they not? If someone wants to be able to use a social network, do you really think they wouldn't pay $5/month for something they use as much if not more than Netflix? You can't do it now because other services can undercut you and rely on advertising but there is no reason it couldn't be the standard.

>>jimmas+C1
Reddit can sell you virtual coins: https://www.reddit.com/premium

>>rafi_k+l2
That seems like quite a big assumption. Younger generations today think nothing of spending $xx/month on their phone/data plans and another $x/month on each of Netflix/Spotify/etc. It's not hard to imagine the same people paying real money for social networking sites they value. Search could obviously still do advertising even without any personal data mining, since it knows exactly what you're interested in at that particular moment. Useful informational sites could run ads without the privacy invasion and tracking as well, since they also are aimed at specific target audiences. Plenty more sites would continue to run without a (direct) goal of revenue generation anyway; I see no ads on the free-to-use discussion forum that we're all reading right now.

This idea that the only viable business model on the web is spyware-backed advertising is baloney, and it always has been. There is little reason to assume the Web is a better place because the likes of Google and Facebook have led us down this path, nor that anything of value would be lost if they were prohibited from continuing in the same way.

>>mkolod+(OP)
Media businesses have been funded by advertising for hundreds of years (since the start of regular newspapers in the 1600s at least)[1]. Many internet businesses are more like media businesses than shops.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising#16th%E2...

>>jimmas+C1
I wouldn't be surprised if a high percentage of reddit users use something like uBlock. I think universal ad blockers are going to slowly become more ubiquitous over time, too.

People have been trying to find ways to skip TV commercials for decades. It's going to be the same with ads. When it comes to our own personal devices, advertisers can't really win in the end. They're going to have to stick to things like billboards and other things put up in cities, but even those are being protested and banned in many places.

In theory, what about reddit can't be decentralized? All it stores is text and URLs to other content. There isn't all that much actual processing or computation going on, as far as I know, besides some rank calculation stuff. Am I wrong about this?

In that case, it comes down to figuring out how to pay the developers and some kind of election process for admins. But with a site with hundreds of millions of monthly active users, surely they'd be able to figure something out. Like each user who donates $10 or more gets a little perk.

And even without decentralization, micropayments and premium perks are already a much more promising model. Lots of people are buying reddit's silver/gold/platinum/a bunch of others awards. Tinder is free by default and manages to make loads of money without showing any ads. I don't think ads are going to be a sustainable model in 10, 20, 50 years from now. I think service providers are just going to have to figure out ways to provide value to users in exchange for money, like most "meatspace" companies do.