You mean the internet you pay to access and which was around before the ads were even on it? That internet?

I'm not trying to be mean I'm just trying to historically parse your sentence/belief.

Because for me this is a simplified analogy of what happened on the internet:

a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs

b) a few years later a new guy called commercial business turned up and started using our club house and fucking around with our stuff

c) commercial business started going around our club house rearranging the furniture and putting graffiti everywhere saying the internet is here and free because of it. We're pretty sure it might have even pissed in the hallway rather than use the toilet and the whole place is smelling awful.

d) the rest of us started breaking out the scrubbing brushes and mops (ad blockers, extensions, VPNs, etc) trying to clean up after it

e) some of its friends turned up and started repeating something about social contracts and how business and ads built this internet place

f) the rest of us keep crying into our hands just trying to meet up, break out the slop buckets to clean up the vomit in the kitchen and some of us now have to wear gloves and condoms just to share things with our friends and stop the whole place collapsing

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pixl97 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ya, back when 'we' were fucking around on BBS's there was the equivalent of 10 people online at the time.

Quantity is a quality in itself. Your BBS was never going to support a million users. Once people figured out the network effect it was over for the masses. They went where the people are, and we've all suffered since.

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chasd00 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> a) we opened a club house called the internet in the early 1990s, just after the time of BBSs

"we" is doing a lot of work here. No clubhouse got optical switching working and all that fiber in the ground for example. Beyond POC, the Internet was all commercial interests.

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mech422 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"we" paid ISP's ... which in turn, paid for infrastructure. Some of "we" pay cable providers for internet service, which in turn paid for (in my case) fiber-to-the-curb. Advertising basically supported social media, search engines, etc.

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kibwen 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No. The internet was not a commercial enterprise, it was first and foremost a military enterprise, just like GPS.

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JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> it was first and foremost a military enterprise, just like GPS

This is sort of like arguing cutlery is a military enterprise. Like yes, that’s where knives came from. But that’s disconnected enough from modern design, governance and other fundamental concerns as to be irrelevant. The internet—and less ambiguously, the World Wide Web—are more commercial than military.

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kibwen 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This is moving the goalposts. The commenter above is talking about the enthusiast-populated internet of the late 80s/early 90s, at which point it still wasn't even clear if it was legal to use the internet for commercial purposes. If all you mean to say is that the internet is currently commercialized, yes, that is obviously true, in much the same way that a disgusting ball of decomposing fungus may have once been an apple.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> commenter above is talking about the enthusiast-populated internet of the late 80s/early 90s, at which point it still wasn't even clear if it was legal to use the internet for commercial purposes Source? Not doubting. But I have a friend who was buying airline tickets through CompuServe in the late 80s/early 90s.

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jmuguy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is ignoring things like newspapers that were made obsolete by the internet. At some point someone does need to actually pay for the content we see online. That is if we want that content to actually be good.

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fl4regun 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

not sure why you're talking about "commercial business" being the one inserting ads everywhere when even niche community run forums from the 2000s also had ads to help pay for their server costs. At the end of the day all this costs money. Whether its paid by ads or direct subscriptions. IMO the problem is more about concentration and centralization of the internet into a handful of sites than advertising.

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brokencode 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean yeah, you pay for the internet. But many sites are free to use only due to ads.

Such as news and magazine sites, many of which are actively dying due to a lack of revenue.

I personally wish these sites could all switch to paid models, because I also don’t like ads.

But absent that, I’d like to support the sites I use so that they don’t go out of business.

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bookofjoe 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I have expensive online subscriptions to New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Nevertheless they are FILLED with ads/popups/videos that run automatically/dark patterns. Just saying: there's no refuge.

	▲	brokencode an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		True, but that doesn’t invalidate what I said about the vast majority of sites that aren’t globally known, prestigious news companies that people are willing to pay an expensive subscription for. Most publishers of content online are ad supported and struggling, and I want to make sure I’m contributing to their revenue somehow. I don’t feel bad about blocking ads on sites I pay for though.
	▲	fl4regun 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		here's an idea: don't use those sites.