A New Internet Business Model? • Hacker News Board

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#211

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:20 PM UTC

port11 wrote: post #202

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #66

"Let's give money to the content creators" is exactly what big incumbents want. They want to farm you, the viewer, for big profits, and give the content creators a few pennies in return. Meanwhile they hoover up the lion's share of the profit. We've seen this over and over again. It's rent-seeking. "Content creators" are part of the problem. Generating endless "content", which isn't very useful or valuable, and creat…

While I'm partial to your cynic interpretation — after all Cloudlfare is a for-profit US business —, the model isn't that far from what Jaron Lanier had proposed in ’Who Owns The Future?‘ (2010). In the book he explains how these micropayments would be sent out to all the websites you visit, etc. And you can have a built-in mechanism to combat the "star system" that tech automatically enables, where a few people get…

I don't think every website you visit should be paid. Who says this random website even deserves payment? This would incentivize people to use tricks to redirect traffic to their websites (which already happens..). Imagine a world where, in order to step into a retail store and browse the merchandise, you had to pay $0.25. Payment systems are already a nightmare, this would add headaches. And just because it's a non-profit or federated doesn't mean anything; show me a non-profit and I'll show you a hierarchical organization with a rich board, poor workers, and problematic outcomes.

People need to think long and hard about why they think there should be unlimited stuff on the internet. Have you looked around? It's mostly crap. Random scribblings by opinionated amateurs, exhibitionists shilling snake-oil, "products" like online games or unlimited videos designed to sell your personal information for a profit, "news" that is 100% gossip, and an unlimited number of echo chambers. We need less incentive for all this crap, not more. But ads are never going away, so it's moot.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#212

Post by reustle » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

bobajeff wrote: post #107

grahameb wrote: post #3

I hope that the next big shift will be to undo the asymmetry that crept into the internet quickly after it first became popular. Let us host stuff at home. Let us run odd and strange and great systems wherever we are. Undo the cloud, undo the capture of the net – I'm old enough to remember when we just had a bunch of boxen under a desk somewhere, and it was pretty great.

I've been thinking lately how nice it was when the Internet had lots of phpBB-like forums spread around. Each one ran by a different server with it's own rules. None of them required your ID or phone number to join. No one really knew who anyone else was in real life. If you got tired of the people one forum you had several similar forums on different sites you could go to. It was fun seeing the kinds of things peopl…

I too miss the days of phpBB an IPB forums. Circle.so has come the closest to replicating some of that interface / vibe, but as expected, their pricing has crept up beyond a reasonable point for small projects / communities. The answer seems to be something self hosted.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#213

Post by selfhoster11 » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 12:21 AM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #174

mg wrote: post #86

ads have been the only micropayment system that has worked Why are micropayments so hard? I wonder how the web would look like if one could click "pay 1 cent to continue". Maybe content would become better? Maybe it would make one think "Hmm... one moment, is this something I want to read or am I just doomscrolling?".

Micropayments aren't hard. Customers simply don't want to use them. Tons of newspapers and magazines have tried offering single articles for sale for $1 or 50c, and all have failed. People just don't want to use micro payments. They want to pay a monthly subscription.

$1 is not a micropayment. It's a regular payment.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#214

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 1:57 AM UTC

jrm4 wrote: post #171

nickysielicki wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? I should hate them for that? Cloudflare is really good at what it does. Nobody has to use cloudflare, but people who know what they’re doing choose cloudflare because the service they provide is worth the minuscule price they charge and it solves the massive abuse and performance problems that otherwise plague the internet. Bing/msn.com failed to displace Google because Google was simply better, not because…

Whenever anyone says "Oh so I should hate company X" you know you're in for a bad, stilted argument that's going to defend some very narrowly defined thing. Companies, by their nature, grow and take over things for the purposes of making money - tech companies moreso. We have seen companies overstep in the past. Please don't stifle reasonable concerns with this sort of inflammatory rhetoric.

[deleted]

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#215

Post by Canada » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 1:38 PM UTC

"With some things there's been clear progress: when we launched in 2010 less than 10 percent of the Internet was encrypted, today well over 95 percent is encrypted. We're proud of the role we played in making that happen."

Yeah right, most of it is now proxied in cleartext through them!

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#216

Post by AuthAuth » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 3:31 AM UTC

swed420 wrote: post #206

AuthAuth wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a token gesture. Ladybird is not a serious disruption.

How could you be so confident about such a thing? Are you implying it's going to fail in its goal as a competing browser, or that the competition is somehow irrelevant in a world that's forced to be slave to Google/Apple?

I'm implying that Ladybird will never grow to the size where it will have any influence on the internet. So this donation is a token gesture to making things better and will be unlikely to change anything.

I dont think Ladybird will ever surpass Firefox and to have any impact it would need to be at least as popular as firefox.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#217

Post by inerte » Fri, Sep 26, 2025, 12:05 AM UTC

mg wrote: post #203

inerte wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would like exactly how it is today. It's not hard to find someone not charging anything for the same piece of content, or not charging anything for another type of content that fills the same void.

If HN charged 1 cent per day and you could pay with a simple click, you would not come here anymore? Where would you go?

I really don't think what's stopping micropayments is the technical ability (or even business deals) to do so. Stuff like that have been talked about and tried for more than a decade, it never caught on.

Anyway, I don't know? I would go somewhere else. Maybe I would just walk outside? It's not like what I get from HN is essential to anything I do in life.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#218

Post by swed420 » Fri, Sep 26, 2025, 9:24 PM UTC

AuthAuth wrote: post #216

swed420 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could you be so confident about such a thing? Are you implying it's going to fail in its goal as a competing browser, or that the competition is somehow irrelevant in a world that's forced to be slave to Google/Apple?

I'm implying that Ladybird will never grow to the size where it will have any influence on the internet. So this donation is a token gesture to making things better and will be unlikely to change anything. I dont think Ladybird will ever surpass Firefox and to have any impact it would need to be at least as popular as firefox.

If the mere existence of Ladybird is enough to keep Mozilla's behavior in check, then that alone is worth it. It need not have major adoption to be useful in this sense.