How I Experience Web Today (2021)

What can you do as a publisher of web content other than compete with the big dogs on Display Ads (what this link is complaining about, that's why they request your data in the first place) or try to enforce paywalls (also what this link is complaining about, ironically)? Supposedly some parts of the internet work off of affiliate marketing, such as the few oddball companies that prop up the podcast space for the rest of us, but that seems A) terrible for consumers and B) incredibly hard to make a living with. For better or worse (worse!) we've trained ourselves to expect internet publishers to survive off of Display Ads alone, and act like we've been betrayed when someone links https://businessinsider.com, https://nytimes.com, or another paywalled site to Hacker News.

We're at a crossroads in history, my friends. We can, and must, change this. Substack is a beautiful step in the right direction, but real change must come with societal buy-in (AKA no more archive links on HN) and governmental intervention (AKA follow through on the US DOJ's recent threats to break up Google).

There's no way in hell that any of us would accept the business model of "we'll emotionally manipulate you into buying stuff you don't really want" if we didn't grow up with it -- for anything, but especially for something as vital as journalism. I sincerely doubt Paul Graham could defend it, yet here we are; any paywalled link is removed as a matter of policy, even the fancy new Substack ones that have a few paragraphs of pre-paywall content.

Other thing missing is "Your browser doesn't support ".