If I pay I want: No ads, no tracking, full access to my own data in sane export formats, schemas, no data mining, no data selling, no "sharing data with our partners", encryption options, no dumb hoops, no dark patterns, the ability to point a product at an API endpoint of my choosing, backup options that default to my infrastructure first and so on.

Actually let's add more: The data generated by my use of my data in the product. Non-canned support responses that don't ask for information I literally put in the ticket three weeks ago. Prominent indication of where (geographically and legally) data is stored and used. If/how often you do backups. If/how often you practice disaster recovery.

So really what I want to pay for is sanity and no bullshit.

Yet if I do pay, many services and companies will still do all of this shit in the background until midnight the day it's finally made illegal, all the while gaslighting me about "how much they value me as a customer" and how they "respect" our "relationship".

It's literally obscene.

A tracking free format would involve in you downloading the entire newspaper issue, then reading inside in ways of your own choosing.

Because you, a paying customer, are worth the most to the advertisers.

It is also worth noting that there is plenty of advertising in Apple products. Heck, the last time I used one they had at least two digital storefronts built in. They may not be as crass as Microsoft is (e.g. with the use of the Start Menu), but it is data driven. Whether the advertising is plastered everywhere or not simply reflects the target market, rather than how they collect and use data.

Yes, you are promoting Apple products if you carry around a Macbook with its logo, but you aren't being advertized to. The built-in stores might just barely meet the definition, but it is very different from a random ad during a TV show or on your desktop.

This is VERY different to letting third-parties advertise to you.

The have publicly discussed their plans to monetize that data.

That's not what the previous commenter was talking about at all.

Some platforms and services have been selling "no ads" as a feature. Say Apple or YouTube Premium or 100s of 1000s of applications on Android. This does not mean they'll never open up to ads in the future. Maybe a future "premium value" will just be "fewer ads". And when they do, they're more likely to generate sales because they're customers who are already paying for premium services.

The argument says "the more you spend the more you are worth to advertisers, thus eventually you will see ads". It doesn't add, "there are some categories of products for which ads aren't tolerated but for all the others this holds"

There's more than enough examples anyway where cheaper options have ads and more expensive ones don't, like airplanes or restaurants and bars.

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/how-remove-advertising-window...

If only...

Maybe one day these things will be standard. We have to convince the mainstream these are goals worth pursuing... As long as most people accept how shit the status quo is, it won't improve.

FWIW, I also share the GP's wishlist 100%. But we're a niche in our own industry these days. I'm not having hopes the market will deliver - on the contrary, all these points are things for unscrupulous vendors to control to extract more profit.

Like, I know it's a lot of work to jump into a codebase and make a change and that some projects are a pain to work with, etc etc, but still. This is what OSS is supposed to fix, and we're exactly the demographic who is supposed to be able to contribute.

Obviously, the above is even a bigger lift, but at the same time -- if a community of online hackers, many skilled, many experienced, many damn near independently wealthy from decades at FAAMGs, can't build an Internet 3.0 to fix the Internet 2.0 we all got rich building on top of Internet 1.0, who is supposed to?

Many of these things already are standard for EU data subjects.

The reason all of these things happen is because it's easy to slip into them in a tight financial spot and there's usually no instantaneous backlash.

A government?

Otherwise, why are there regulators for advertising or for food or government standards for anything?

I'm not talking about censorship or somehow evaluating the quality of content, I'm talking about if a company is delivering a service and I am paying for it, then the conditions under which they deliver that service should be regulated to ensure a fair and competitive marketplace.

Apple shouldn't be getting plaudits for making privacy a unique selling proposition.

All the other companies should be getting told that their business is unfair and exploitative. Privacy should be a right, the control of my personal information should be mine and consent to have it should be able to be withdrawn at any time.

Government requires thousands (literally) of people and political will in order to move any solution forward. In terms of cost and time, it is substantially less efficient than independent entities.

An independent entity could theoretically start immediately, with a small team, and focus explicitly on the stated goals of the team.

> Apple shouldn't be getting plaudits for making privacy a unique selling proposition.

Absolutely agree. The average citizen has no idea how hard they're being exploited.

> Privacy should be a right, the control of my personal information should be mine and consent to have it should be able to be withdrawn at any time.

Also agree, but the government has shown they have an interest in making that not happen. The ties between 3 letter agencies and large tech companies are just the tip of that iceberg.

In the UK the soil association is a private charity which mostly decides which food is "organic" and which food is not and it does a pretty good job. In the US, the USDA decides whether you can call your food organic and from what I understand it's kind of meaningless.

I think a private charity would work better here.

Businesses are much faster at inventing ways to abuse people than governments are to regulate them away, even if we ignore lobbying and corruption.

Such a hypothetical organization we seek needs to be both swift and impactful. This automatically suggests some ties to government, as it's the best way to fulfill the criterion of impact. Not sure how to handle the "swift" part, though. Can't do it through regular market mechanisms, because ultimately price trumps all on mass market. The government reacts slowly for (among others) a good reason - while an unscrupulous businessman needs to invent just one weird trick, the government regulates away whole classes of tricks by default, and they need to take care to not outlaw perfectly legit new ideas.

"independent" is doing a lot of work here. Government regulators are, at least in theory, independent because they're paid from taxes collected, and have no incentive . What mechanism is supposed to keep the new 'independent' entity, actually independent?

How it's designed is important, but even under the most elaborate schemes it would be less costly and human resource intensive than having the government directly take charge of it.

It's not that a private entity can't do it - I largely trust the TÜVs and UL and other NRTLs for example. It's that most auditors - especially once you leave the "ship a physical product with verifiable physical properties" sector - instead look like E&Y, which I trust less than most of the companies they have audited.

You eventually need to have someone who will be substantially at risk if the audit is insufficient - "skin in the game" to use the modern idiom - controlling the audit. In the case of UL that's insurances companies (which are highly regulated by... the government), for other NRTLs it's the government directly.

Unfortunately: - competitors use revenue from ads, tracking, selling data to their advantage and undercut your value based on price.

- and free users love free stuff. I had a user ask me to include ads in exchange for paid features.

- and yet people still distrust you. Once I proudly posted a new feature to Show HK and the first response was "How does this post not qualify as 'spam'?". Some people automatically think you're a bad guy since you sell something.

- without advertising, how do you get the word out?

I rely on word-of-mouth, since it carries much trust, and news articles. This means it's a slow game.

It is very hard to find mutual respect (both ways) between user and maker. Most relationships start with distrust or "what is in it for me".

I recently started a historical time-series weather data api based on ERA5/GFS and your story really resonated with me. Similarly, I don't come from weather background and initially built it for my work with building energy analysis, with service live but still at an extremely early stage.

Happy holidays. :)

You're going to trust them to have proper backups, proper disaster recovery, proper resiliency and scalability?

What you're describing works for small-time stuff like blogs, personal projects or other inconsequential things, but anything at the scale of Goodreads, where users are trusting years of data to someone just can't be hosted by random people.

I'm not saying I have the answer but "people should self-host this kind of thing on their Internet connections" is not it.

Symmetrical high speed connections allows for the option of self-hosting one's own stuff and being able to serve it to the Internet (or connect to it remotely), but it is not mandatory for people to choose that option. They may not feel confident in their owns skills so choose the option of paying someone else to be responsible for it.

I'm simply talking about having more options.

Nearly every time I contact customer services these days I'm fobbed off with obnoxious PR speak instead of just telling me straight.

GDPR's right to data portability provides much of the export functionality you're after. It must be structured, in a format that is commonly-used and machine-readable. The ICO's guidance suggests that CSV, XML and JSON best meet this requirement.

Tracking is something else that GDPR helps with. Tracking of personal information via e.g. cookies require active consent. Silence is not consent.

"sharing data with our partners" requires a lawful basis when dealing with EU data subjects. This will normally be consent where data is sold to third-parties for e.g. marketing, so data subjects will be able to make an informed decision and opt out of this. Again, silence is not consent - and burying data sharing in an unreadable legal document is not informed consent.

> the ability to point a product at an API endpoint of my choosing

The right to data portability includes this:

> Individuals have the right to ask you to transmit their personal data directly to another controller without hindrance. If it is technically feasible, you should do this.

> Actually let's add more: The data generated by my use of my data in the product.

This is in scope for a Subject Access Request.

> Non-canned support responses that don't ask for information I literally put in the ticket three weeks ago

This is difficult to solve with regulation but I think it's an entirely reasonable thing to expect for your money. GDPR does not help here

Hopefully if there are multiple competitors in the space, customer support is something that providers can compete on.

> Prominent indication of where (geographically and legally) data is stored and used

Privacy information already must contain a transparent list of data processors:

> This includes anyone that processes the personal data on your behalf, as well all other organisations.

What we really need is for other countries to start taking data protection regulation seriously.

Idea: Move all online businesses to a new digital-only currency. Let people earn that currency by donating the processing power/storage/bandwidth of their devices, like the @Home projects. Of course people could always current existing currency to the new e-currency.

Let's say an hour of donating an average laptop = an hour of using Google, Facebook, etc.

Yours is a great list of stipulations. I would just add: support for open + interoperable protocols such as activitypub and RSS.

All this crying about tracking - how else the owner of the place can make product better? If I own a store - I can see where people go, how they shop, how they walk around, which basket size they prefer, what they buy. If I don't collect data on my website - I can't THINK about how to make my service better. I can only GUESS. What about data collections for simple functionality - like, when you come back to the half-filled form and I remember the values you already submitted by matching your cookies. Are you against this as well?

Sorry, but if this is the alternative - I would rather have Google know everything I do online and hope that they honestly don't store data on my Incognito browsing. If they do - worse for them.

But that does not absolve the producer. They are still using ethically questionable methods.

The market doesn’t get to decide the rights and wrongs. It just allocates resources. That we have to do collectively if we want to call ourselves democratic.

> But that does not absolve the producer. They are still using ethically questionable methods.

Most people don't care. How can it be an ethical issue if the vast majority of people are unconcerned by it?

That food? Bad. Dead. That tool? Dangerous. Dead. That work on your house? Dangerous. Dead. That car? Unroadworthy. Dead. Those aircraft parts? Counterfeit and not to spec. 300 people dead.

Every single thing humans do is already regulated in some way. Why? Because humans in the end, like all animals, try to achieve the best least effort : highest reward ratio they can.

In the modern world, these regulations need to be extended to automatically cover modern technologies and prevent inherent harm. They shouldn't be overbearing. They shouldn't be pointlessly excessive. But they are required for all things.

Many people think capitalism is greedy because they have literally spent a lifetime experiencing greed fueled capitalism first hand, not because they sit on YouTube watching propaganda videos.

GDPR is quite decent as laws go; the problems you mention happen because the regulation enforcement is too weak. Displaying a cookie popup was never anything but an admission that you're doing something you're not supposed to. GDPR notices again mostly give the same evidence. A lot of them aren't even compliant. I honestly wish DPAs of EU member states would start beating these companies down until this bullshit stops.

> I suspect you are confusing corporatism (which is a form of fascism) with capitalism (which is a party of liberty).

Potayto, potahto. Capitalism structurally favors something resembling corporatism, because capital compounds - the more you have of it, the easier it is to get even more. The market is a dynamic system - what matters is what it evolves over time into.

All that sites will do is do a cost assessment of whether it is worth serving those in the EU and just block the IP range and people that want to use those services will just use VPNs anyway (which is what I do when I am banned by IP from a site because of the GDPR rules).

>Potayto, potahto. Capitalism structurally favors something resembling corporatism, because capital compounds - the more you have of it, the easier it is to get even more. The market is a dynamic system - what matters is what it evolves over time into.

No it doesn't. Corporatism is a collusion with government. If governments were smaller, buying influence wouldn't be effective. You don't even understand what you are arguing.

Yes the market is a dynamic system that why if you allow it to operate freely those companies that are abusing their position will start to lose market share when other competitors that don't will be more attractive to consumers. However once you involve regulation, then that mechanism doesn't happen because you just raised the bar higher for all the would be smaller players.

Again you always want to frame it in the worst light.

Anyway. Fuck this site, dissenting opinion is frowned upon here. So much for the hacker part.

Also, consumers on average do a bad job of managing anticompetitive behaviour and harmful externalities, even if they know about them. Convenience and habit are strong motivators. And we need regulation to disincentivize companies from outright lying in the first place.

Companies and people in a fully free market system won’t magically become rational automata that behave ideally. We’re only human. Our superpower is the ability to collectively leverage our individual specialization. Foresight for negative externalities is a specialization that needs regulation to be effective.

A sort of freedom. Not free from taxes, free from interference. But that's really never the case.

Say you buy something from a store, and you expect their use of your data to follow the terms on the loyalty card. They've got a bunch of commercial-code laws that protect them. You can't pay with counterfeit money, or give yourself a 2-for-1 discount. If you use credit and don't pay, men from the state with the right to use violence come and collect for the store. They're totally legally protected. But how are you protected? Only at the end of a hugely expensive court case in the best outcome, but probably not at all.

The potential risk to the store from you is limited to the cost of goods, the risk to you is almost unbounded. You might lose healthcare coverage, or your boss might buy your data and use the store to link your id to your pornhub usage and fire you. Minimal, limited risk for them, huge unbounded and unprotected risk for you.

But then you discover after buying your gallon of milk, that they (knowingly) sold your data to someone who then sold it to, let's say an insurance company, in direct violation of the words on the back of the card. Now, how do you get made whole?

So, no. I don't actually feel that the free market meets that description for 99% of transactions. Between two citizens over a used lawnmower, yes. Between Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, yes. But between you and the supermarket - not even a little.

Not really. My perception comes from thinking about the market as a dynamic system, and not a static picture described by pro- and anti-market propagandists.

> Capitalism is about free market trade. You provide something and people choose whether they want to buy it or use it.

That's a "motte and bailey" defense. Such a perfect free trade almost doesn't exist, and very few are privileged to partake in it. Market offerings aren't independent - they're in competition, which means a lot of possible products aren't provided, and those that are face competitive pressure to provide less value for more price.

The most important thing to recognize is that the market, as a dynamic system, optimizes for profitable companies. Not for maximizing value these companies deliver to their customers. Usually, providing value is the most straightforward way for profit. But there are other ways - ways to provide no value, or even negative value while still netting additional profit - and the market takes them as much as it can. Vendor lock-in and surveillance are just few ways of making money by providing negative value-add.

> People add greed qualifier in there so they can frame it as something illicit going on.

Not illicit. Immoral. Because after all is said and done, the market is still entirely made of people and their decisions, which get to be evaluated through the lens of ethics.

> The fact still remains that if people cared about their privacy (and there is no evidence they do), they wouldn't use these sites.

They care and they will use them anyway, because the market doesn't provide any other option.

> Store cards used to track purchases and spending habits in store in the same way that sites do today (however at a much greater scale) and customers were given vouchers in return.

In the store. Not across stores. And they gave vouchers back, not shoved extra ads in your face. And that's without touching the qualitative difference between a human clerk doing the surveillance and automated systems doing the same.

> Pretending otherwise is passing the buck.

I hate to invoke the concept of "victim blaming", because it's usually invoked very unreasonably, but - you can't expect individuals to be able to rationally make market decisions while working their asses off trying to make ends meet, having their attention DDoSed, and facing against compounding improvements in manipulation techniques (courtesy of the market). I'm willing to cut regular folks some slack, and instead focus on the people running these companies, who had a clear choice, and chose to engage in abusive practices. You don't impulse-adopt business models, so you can't excuse it as a moment of weakness either.

(But then I'm willing to cut these business folks some slack too; in many cases, it's the market pressures that force to choose the abusive option - which leads us back to my original point: the market is a capitalist greed optimization engine. It promotes business people who think that, much like your margin, your ethics are their opportunity.)

Nonsense. Your framing is exactly the same. Don't gaslight me on this. I am not naive.

> That's a "motte and bailey" defense. Such a perfect free trade almost doesn't exist, and very few are privileged to partake in it.

Yes the free market doesn't exist because governments stick their noses in.

>Market offerings aren't independent - they're in competition, which means a lot of possible products aren't provided, and those that are face competitive pressure to provide less value for more price

What a load of nonsense. It is because of the free market we have niche products (Amiga accelerators would exist and that is pretty damn niche).

> The most important thing to recognize is that the market, as a dynamic system, optimizes for profitable companies. Not for maximizing value these companies deliver to their customers. Usually, providing value is the most straightforward way for profit. But there are other ways - ways to provide no value, or even negative value while still netting additional profit - and the market takes them as much as it can.

You are speaking out of both sides of your mouth.

> Vendor lock-in and surveillance are just few ways of making money by providing negative value-add.

If vendor lock in a problem if the customer is happy with it? It is up to the individual customer to decide.

> Not illicit. Immoral. Because after all is said and done, the market is still entirely made of people and their decisions, which get to be evaluated through the lens of ethics.

That is splitting hairs. No you want them to be evaluated through the lens of ethics because it benefits to do so in this argument.

> They care and they will use them anyway, because the market doesn't provide any other option.

You don't need yourtube, you don't need facebook, you don't need a lot of this nonsense.

> In the store. Not across stores. And they gave vouchers back, not shoved extra ads in your face. And that's without touching the qualitative difference between a human clerk doing the surveillance and automated systems doing the same.

You have no idea if that data wasn't sold to anyone else. The vouchers are in themselves ads.

These store cards proved two thinds. The first being that people will willingly give up their details for some trickets, and two that tracking customers and optimising via that works. It was a stepping stone.

> I hate to invoke the concept of "victim blaming", because it's usually invoked very unreasonably, but - you can't expect individuals to be able to rationally make market decisions while working their asses off trying to make ends meet, having their attention DDoSed, and facing against compounding improvements in manipulation techniques (courtesy of the market). I'm willing to cut regular folks some slack, and instead focus on the people running these companies, who had a clear choice, and chose to engage in abusive practices. You don't impulse-adopt business models, so you can't excuse it as a moment of weakness either.

Yes I do expect individuals to able to rationally make decisions. People have been told for years and year and years on end what these companies do and they don't care. So it is their fault.

No customer is happy with vendor lock-in. It is negative value to the consumer, which was the parent's point.

Also, pedantic point, I think you were looking for the phrase en masse, of french origin. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/en_masse

One worry about the rising tide of anti-Facebook etc. sentiment is that it is driven by (a) a small number of vocal people who (b) say that x is horrible, but don't act like it. (I don't say whether this worry is always, or even mostly, correct. Just that it is worth considering.) The result can be problematic.

For example, like millions of people in the EU, before I use any new website, I now have to click "OK" on a GDPR button. I consider myself as caring about my privacy. But my behaviour tells me that I just click "OK" without even reading what they have to say. Obviously, my privacy is less important to me than the 10 seconds or 1 minute that it would take to read their policy and opt out from anything I dislike.

You can respond that this is a "dark pattern", and I agree. You could also say it would be better for me to be able to set my privacy once - say, via browser settings - and I indeed try to do that, having used various Firefox settings and plugins to manage my cookies. Nevertheless, the fact is that, as my behaviour reveals, I would rather get on with my life, than waste 10 minutes a day clicking on privacy policies. Given that, of course, I would also rather not be presented with the "GDPR OK button" at all. It's a fleabite of annoyance that I deal with many, many times, and every time I mutter to myself "screw the EU and screw the GDPR". I suspect I am not alone.

I also suspect I will be downvoted for this, by just the noble idealists about whom I am grumbling. Sigh.

The price of privacy sounds cheap. 10 minutes a day for privacy. How much cheaper do you need it to be.

I'd argue the term 'pay for the services [they use]' is too vague here to be meaningful - there are too many options that would drastically change the incentives.

Pay per API call? APIs start to need 5 calls to get all the info you'd need for one request. Subscription model? Consumers are going to have to juggle a different account for every provider they use. Subscription to aggregator who then pays content providers based on usage? We're back to the clickbait situation we were in in the early days of advertising and are arguable still in.

For me the insane thing is that there are no options. I can't universally buy any song I want DRM free from a range of providers. I can't pay per article for news from an RSS feed.

TV is an interesting one because the industry has convinced the user base to pay for content, but the subscription model is already showing some of the limitations shown above.

I feel like the biggest innovations in this space aren't so much new ideas or 'just convincing people to pay for things', it's a case of making the payments as easy and understandable as their previous counterparts.

Blame AML/KYC.

Frictionless, permissionless micropayments are illegal. On purpose.

This is not a social or technological problem. It is a legal problem. AML/KYC does not scale.

Bitcoin has turned out to be expensive to mine. Most other distributed ledger "currencies" have been launched to make money for the creators of the artificial scarcity.

Governments cannot give up control of the money supply but they are the only ones that can establish a form of electronic currency that works the same as cash does now.

Whether they're willing to make it as anonymous as cash or allow it to be exchanged for other government's electronic currency is part of the problem that needs to be solved.

The KYC stuff is still there at the exchange level of course.

Yes but to be frank if I had to pay for everything I use I would go broke.

We're not all on SV salaries here. I have about 100€ of disposable income per month. If I put it on online things, it means I would have to stay at home (I mean pre or post pandemic times).

Sure, for one site, that $3/mo will not break the bank.

But being limited to only $100/$3 = 33 sites a month would be quite constraining.

When I'm reading about a topic or searching for a purchase, I'll typically visit that many sites in one session. Over the course of a month it is normal to visit hundreds of sites (I have counted for auditing a job), sometimes over a thousand. That's without giving it any thought, just following links and reading linked content.

(Heck, when reading HN I sometimes read more than 33 HN stories in a single sitting, but to be fair I don't often follow the links to the articles themselves ;-)

If I had to monitor my usage to keep it down to 33 sites in a month, I could do that but it would be a very different reading experience than I currently have.

Like back in the days when we had to pay per minute of online access (outside the US, using audio modems). The change to a single monthly subscription with the freedom to read as much as you want, as long as you want, was liberating and transformative. It would be a little sad to go back to having to self-police reading in order to keep costs down.

Of course this is totally made up, so it’s impossible to argue about, but my point is that what you described didn’t necessarily seem out of line to me.

AFAIK, this is the "micropayment" problem, that people were hoping bitcoin would solve.

Compared to Visa, Bitcoin solved micropayments only if micro refers to the daily transaction volume.

To keep the comparison accurate, you can transact many times within an “accounting block”. Bitcoin has the shorter accounting block and tier 2 systems laid on top of it seem to scale Bitcoin well beyond any accounting block maximum transaction cap.

The GP is probably not referring to speed of settlement though. Bitcoin solves KYC and trust and allows frictionless micro-payment.

Unfortunately, advertising has also created an unsustainably high "standard of living", so to speak - you get so many services and applications for free these days that would realistically not exist or cost much more than you were willing to pay for them had it not been for advertising.

Personally, I don't think there's a way out of it until someone comes up with an alternative that brings the benefits of advertising without all the downsides it has, because individual consumer incentives are just not aligned. I'll gladly pay a one-time fee for some productivity app, or a small subscription for something I use almost daily. But if e.g. goodreads wanted to charge a subscription, community size would probably dwindle, and personally I'd just start keeping a spreadsheet of my books again.

If you ban ads and monetize only via affiliate links, I think you’ll see a lot more poorly written, often algorithmically generated content shilling for affiliate clicks.

People don't want to pay for content. If people pay for content and feel ripped off, they can ask for a refund. Then cheaters can pay to access the content then ask for their money back if they want to. This puts the content provider in a bad position.

If people pay for content, then they want to have that content themselves forever. In some sense, this is fair. But then they want to share that content with others. Then the other person/people don't need to pay. Now you have a problem where everyone can just get the content when one person has paid for it. This is a bad dilemma where content providers and consumers both seem to have a good case.

Since neither pay model seems to work, companies just show ads. Then people ignore ads, so the ad companies make them more attention-grabbing and intrusively targeted. So people use reader mode and ad blockers. Now no one is looking at the ads that pay for the content.

I wish I knew the answer.

> The second one should even be called piracy.

Sure, I agree. Piracy is a loaded term anyway.

But I think individual action isn't sufficient to get us over the hump. There are just too many things we use on a daily basis, and often those things use things that use things. "Free" is an illusion, but it's an illusion with a very low cognitive load. Manually supporting each and every thing I appreciate at the right level is a complex and taxing process. In practice, I'm sure I miss a lot.

In the physical world, we have some solutions for this. I don't have to subscribe to each park I use. I don't have to kick in for each sidewalk tree I walk by. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of street and alley murals, all community supported in various ways. I think the next step forward for the web involves finding ways for collective action with low individual cognitive load. It wouldn't be perfect, but it could be better than what we have now.

Switching away from ads will feel good until some do-nothing decides they'll hit their bonus targets by re-introducing ads in addition to the subscriptions.

This has happened many times. It's obviously going to happen again.

You do not want to normalize subscriptions for every old Web service, trust me.

Iow, I believe advertising is symptomatic of our current state of consciousness as a collective, and so it is not a cause.

Ofc, this could exist with actual paid services.

I’ve not used GoodReads before but it appears to be a book recommendation service. I’m surprised they can’t run the main site & API on Amazon referral links for the recommended books.

Makes me think there’s a different reason for closing the API, because Amazon could run the service for close to nothing on AWS.

Ads convince people to spend money on some product they wouldn't buy otherwise. This in term finances those ads which finances the service. I'm not convinced this is better in the long run for many than paying services directly.

I think that doesn't hold logical water.

If only 1% of people buy things of significant value based on ads, and 99% of people never buy what's advertised, it is still worth advertising while advertising is cheap.

A related phenomenon is the way online games make their money.

The vast majority of players never pay for anything. A few pay a little, and a tiny minority pay so much more than everyone else that it's the tiny minority that the game-maker depends on for their business.

Looking at the strain of our local delivery services right now, that cannot be just 10 per cent of people shopping.

I think in order for this to happen, there's going to have to be better payment models than $4-9 a month subscriptions.

Crowdfunding is probably the best solution, if it can be made to work - it would allow for some kind of monetization on a voluntary basis, while preserving free access for most users. But I don't know of any site that really uses it successfully, aside from Wikipedia.

Yes indeed. Right now news & opinion are largely limited to what is considered "advertiser friendly" - think short news cycle, and other problems.

The perspective of paying pennies for everything introduces a lot of friction. Luckily an alternative model is making roadway, mostly in Youtube circles: pay a couple of your favorite creators, and watch the rest for free.

The extension of the old "freemium" model, but this time based around stochastic balance between viewers who pay this or that creator. The paying subscribers often get access to additional material - one that's more geared towards fans or deeply interested viewers - while the regulars, free-to-watch, viewers get the general content just fine.

I've said it many times before but it's worth repeating...

The Internet survived just fine before all the ads and tracking and it will survive fine without it.

Today it’s run by people, standing on their shoulders, whose dominant motivation is making money or how to “capitalise” on something, something which they have no fundamental interests or passion for.

Obviously the outcome is going to be different.

If you allow the web to move to a model where you have to pay dollars for a service worth cents it turns into the same kind of market as the mobile phone operators market charging fees for sms messages: a total rip off.

Why does this needs to be a business anyway? The only reason is because it can be.

Is the Web a business model?

The Web really is machines serving HTML, JSON, XML,... over HTTP/HTTPS across physical connections. There are several ways of looking at this, but often enough the debate gets reduced into a dichotomy.

I'll put this into two simplified extremes.

The Web is a shared infrastructure seen as a "public commons". You can access that infrastructure, request/receive bits and bytes from other machines for free and if you want to host content yourself, you connect your own machine to that infrastructure and you share content via your own machine for free. You carry the costs of the usage of the infrastructure yourself, regardless of the direction of data traffic across the network.

The Web and it's infrastructure are commodities. Storage, maintenance, bandwidth,... are expenses that should be offloaded. The main goal of hosting and making information available on the Web is to, either directly or indirectly, make a marginal profit. You pay for the privilege of accessing someone else's machine to download data, and you get paid by those who want to gain access to information you host on your own machine.

The problem with the statement above is that it implies that both extremes are mutually exclusive, and only the latter one is viable.

This is false.

The Web is ultimately a decentralized network which is build on top of intentions and goals of humans. And those intentions and goals can be wildly differing. There are parts of the Web that operate according to the former idea, and there are parts that operate according to the latter. Both exist, and there's a spectrum in between.

In the analogue world, the same notion translates into private businesses, non-profits, cooperations, community initiatives, charities, public initiatives and so on.

Goodreads choosing to close down it's public API is just one case choosing to move towards one side of the spectrum. It's by no means an indication that the entirety of the Web and - more specifically - it's denizens decide to move towards that side.

That spectrum does emerge based on laws of economics, though.

Goodreads has always been a private business. public API's of private businesses are never truly "Public". They are either a courtesy or a business investment. And they will step away from such courtesy if the costs outstrip the benefits.

The Web isn't quite the same as public space though - parks, beaches, forests, streets, grasslands,... - because the vast amount of infrastructure is privately owned. In that regard, the notion of "The Web is a Commons" is only true to the extent that private people are willing to accept and support that idea, and are willing to carry a shared part of the costs.

It's that last part which makes all the difference. Operating a basic website with a limited number of visitors comes at a low cost, and so one could operate a small Goodreads like website with a niche of books. There are plenty of examples of people keeping freely accessible blogs and the like with their own book reviews.

Goodreads tries to turn that idea into a business model. The intention of generating a profit is very distinct in that regard. However, not only is it hard to sell the opinions of other people, it's even harder if costs generated by trying to cater to an audience of millions outstrip the revenue generated.

The Web isn't financial centre. Just like London nor New York aren't representative as to the entirety of human society. Big businesses are - ultimately - only a part of the Web, just as much as they are only a part of society. And if their business models fail to keep them operational, the Web, and society, will, ultimately, churn on without them.

As the infrastructure changes the dominating idea shapes it.

As an example there used to be (and stills is, but the change is evident) vendors selling music recordings. Vinyl, tape, cd. The market traded in tangible artifact that could change owner, could be copied (legally or not) could be put in a library and lent out.

In Sweden we even pay a special copy compensation tax when buying any device with storage capacity to tunnel some money towards “content creators” in support of this distribution form.

However as the technology has shifted, allowing for direct streaming, the trading of artifacts has disappeared. The laws and economic realities now promote a market with fewer vendors offering only a limited catalogue of recordings, and only in a form that can never leave their control effectively.

This is only an example. And I think this particular one is mostly about reviewing the legal landscape.

Another example might be how protocols like RSS, XMPP, SMTP was used for interoperability and allow different vendors to offer compatible services. As things shift, this time perhaps more due to economic realities, the dominating tendency is still to erode interoperability and dominating players shape the technology towards their more siloed reality. Perhaps we need more tax funded players, (public service?), simply competing and collaborating to tilt things back again.

In general, I doubt that the network effect can be overcome for consumer platforms. People want to share their book reviews. Why should they limit themselves to people who pay? Paying only works for those who want social filtering.

To compete with Goodreads, the data would have to be free like Wikipedia, for other competitors to emerge so that it is not just a village but a country with many villages. But then, it's a rtf reader situation where it is difficult to survive as an app creating company.

No, I don’t have a great solution other than the status quo.

The whole process doesn’t have to be expensive, but it’s certainly not free. You can build very cool stuff and give it away for free, but sustainability and scalability ultimately require revenue. The magic thing about a successful business is the ability to cover execution costs, support the development team, and still leave value on the table for users.

I think digital services have drastically different economics depending on (1) how adding a NEW user changes the value proposition for EXISTING users, and (2) something like the user’s start up/discovery cost relative to lifetime value

A direct payment model makes sense when your users’ value is independent from the size of the user base (assuming performance scales at least linearly). These services can tolerate moderate startup/discovery costs. For critical enterprise services, startup costs can be high because the lifetime value is still much larger.

If value scales with the user base, as in a social network like good reads, then startup/discovery cost must be pushed to zero to grow the user base as quickly as possible. A paywall slows user base growth and reduces value for those users that actually choose to pay.

So far, advertising is the only known way to monetize (and thus sustain) a digital service while maintaining near-zero startup/discovery costs for individual users. Micropayments, even with good UX and low fees, increase joining costs relative to advertising. Thus they will reduce the value of the service to paying users if value scales with user base size, but would benefit services where value is independent of user base size.

Federation is maybe the best way out of this dilemma IMHO. The value of the overall network grows with the user base, so adding new federation partners should be near-free. Each instance is small relative to the network as a whole, and thus can focus on individual user value rather than growing the network, which means it can charge users directly. This is why you’re willing to buy a great Twitter or Reddit client app, but would never pay for a Twitter or Reddit subscription. (Yes I know those are centralized services, but the model holds if you look at the business relationships).

As far as the media is concerned, everyone here under the age of sixty have always been the product. And it’s deeply naïve and idealistic to think that “paying for their services”—how will they do that? Oh well—will change something which is now completely fundamental to media as we know it.