The reason all of this exists - the reason the entire Internet turned into an unusable amalgam of horseshit - is because we built the entire commercial side of the internet off ad revenue. It might be a death spiral at this point - I can’t imagine anyone actually being willing to Pay for whatever the fuck Google or Facebook have become, so there’s nothing left to do but keep inventing new ways to generate bullshit and new bots to view it for you.
Whatever model of the internet you have isn’t going to disrupt affiliate links. And as long as you have affiliate links, you will have websites trying to game the rankings to get their affiliate links in front of eyeballs. It’s not just a Google problem.
> someday we'll sell the edges of our peripheral vision for ad space in lieu of a universal basic income
Meta and RayBan are working on that and not far: the RayBans "Meta take a picture" / "Meta take a movie" are a thing. And I doubt very much that it's done with good motives.
No HUD yet but they've already got a microphone to analyze your voice (for good reasons, we're sure) and speakers.
I write really detailed content for a living. So long as no one pays for it, I must live through other means. Fortunately, I don’t need to peddle stupid products, but I can’t disentangle myself from affiliate partnerships without state fundi, and that presents its own challenges.
I pay for Kagi and I have to say it's so worth it. Very fast and no more trash result, a lot of customizability, filters, lenses, etc. They even have an incentive to make my searches worth while since I pay a flatrate.
> is because we built the entire commercial side of the internet off ad revenue
The root problem there is it's not practical in today's world to pay the small sums individual bits of content are actually worth. The smallest practical transact-able value is about a dollar. With service fees you can't go much below that value before you make no money or lose money. Even then it's really only practical for large scale players.
A single news article is not worth a dollar. A tweet or HN comment is worth nowhere near a dollar. Even if I found some HN comment worth money...how is my payment going to get to you and not eaten by HN?
Crypto bullshit is not the answer at all. It's worse for transactions in every way than regular money. It pretends to be a solution to micropayments by ignoring the very real and very onerous transaction fees and deflationary nature of the currency. There's been efforts to deal with micropayments but it's a hard problem. Paying individuals is difficult and transacting in practical (sub-cent values) is extremely difficult to do.
Ads are an imperfect but working-ish solution to micropayments. They allow the customer to "pay" with attention (though now with intrusive tracking) rather than currency. AdTech has gone bonkers with tracking and targeting and has gleefully participated in facilitating the Dead Internet.
