Lichess: Block Ads and Trackers

Extremely good point, I don't really game outside of online chess so I can't say that I have a very wide sample pool. TBH the chat I used to see when my brother was playing League blew any chess experience I've had out of the water. I'd almost use a word beyond "salty" for that

Wikipedia has a somewhat unique architecture in that it's mostly text and most of that text can be cached. This is also true about blogs and sites like HN and Stackoverflow, but not social media sites, search engines, messaging services, video and image hosting sites etc.

Most Wikipedia visitors use an ad-supported search engine to find articles. All that Wikipedia itself needs to do is to find the URL in their cache and send the pre-rendered HTML page. For many requests, there are no SQL queries to execute and there's no PHP Wikimedia code to run, it's just finding some HTML in a glorified key-value store. There's relatively little code to run and relatively little bandwidth required, so the cost-per-user isn't that high. There's also very little technical innovation, the core problem has been solved and the community is just adding more content. Same goes for HN and Stackoverflow.

Not all websites can operate that way. Search engines need lots of compute for indexing and search, and lots of developers to fight SEO spam. Not all searches can even be cached, "nearby Sushi restaurants" needs to return results based on your location etc. Social media websites spend a lot of money on moderation, and all their users are logged in, giving them far fewer opportunities for caching. Pushing a Taylor Swift tweet to all her followers in almost real time is definitely no small feat. Messaging apps need to deal with a lot of push notifications and a much higher proportion of writes to reads (when compared to Wikipedia), also moderation, fighting bots etc. Video and image hosting websites need much more bandwidth and storage (and possibly compute for transcoding), and those aren't free.

The non-profit, no ads, free-for-all model just doesn't work that well for this kind of platforms.

There is nuance because the behavior around physical spaces is well established by law and social norm. This is absolutely not true for the internet, as evidenced by this very debate.

If you will indulge the hypothetical, and we step back from the established social norms (people know you are expected to pay), who is responsible for making sure customers understand the need to pay? The theater. If the theater doesn't secure their doors and doesn't say anywhere "you must pay to enter," then it's a completely reasonable behavior for someone to enter and watch until they are asked to leave or pay. If they refuse to leave, they're trespassing. If they are told to pay before entering and they sneak in, this is clearly trespassing.

But this is not really the same thing as online advertising. Online advertising is more like, you ask them to deliver a DVD to your house, and the agreement is "we'll deliver the DVD if you also let us place a camera and microphone in your home to watch your reaction to the DVD." Then you allow the DVD in but refuse entry to the spy gear. It would be very problematic to try and force people to accept the spy gear, or prevent them from denying entry to the spy gear. It would lead to laws purposefully designed to deny people privacy and control over their own homes. A much better solution would be for the company to just not allow you to take the DVD unless you also take the spy gear and to create laws around that behavior if necessary.

Did you know Lichess is built in Scala 3 ;-)

For the record, a lot of ads in newspapers are in separate inserts which easily be separated and tossed out. Grocery store bundles for example.