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A rant, with useful information, about the ‘Web Environment Integrity’ proposal by Google"
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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Technology
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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.
My personal rule is that I seek out a product/service, not the other way around. And ads really annoy me because they're not useful, they're just trying to sell me something, or get me to sell myself (looking at you, TikTok).
Non-obtrusive ads will always be the best :)
Or make them interesting if you want to be the focus. I can definitely say I've stayed and watched a few interesting advertisements.
I'd argue your viewpoint here is along the lines of opt-in telemetry - nice in theory, but not practical for the ones that need the information. And you can have respecting telemetry (as you can advertisements, just that nobody does so).
And they inevitably turn every service into an ad delivery service. Thus, enshitification. Subscription services directly convert the utility of the application into revenue. It will always make a better platform, but it might not scale as well.
I don't want to see any ads either. Even unobtrusive ones. It's just different levels of annoying and given the choice, I'll pick zero annoyance. I also don't want to be the product. Not just as a target for advertisements, but from information gathering for profit.
I do see the problem with this. Most sites are run with the expectation of profit. And while not explicitly my intent, I go out of the way to be as unprofitable as possible to these kinds of business models.
I do opt to pay for a couple of privacy respecting online services and I... rarely but not never donate to sites I use frequently that are privacy respecting and not ad supported. And that gives me some feel goods to support sites and services that align with my values 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.
I don't know what the solution to this is. But I mirror OP's concerns about this specific thing. I don't want my browsing to be DRM'd, and I have zero trust for Google. If this happens, they will abuse it.
Edit: Changed organizations to services. Felt more accurate.
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.
My general cynicism of people as a whole drives my opinion, I suppose. While it can be successful sometimes as you point out, I don't think enough people would contibute for a donation based model to work in most cases. And people already have subscription fatigue just from online streaming services.
But you know what would be awesome? If I was wrong. Especially about the donation based model. Enough people opting to donate for high quality content that it becomes a viable default? I want that kind of web.
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
Coming from someone with an unstable source of income, and that can just barely get by: I'll take advertisements over a subscription/donation based model. Just don't flood your website with them. Or use shitty ad services. And don't make it an unusable experience cough britannica cough