Nick on Nostr: As you can see in my post to which you're replying, I don't like online advertising ...
As you can see in my post to which you're replying, I don't like online advertising and I think it's bad for that to the the basis of funding the web, so there's no point arguing about that, because we already agree there. However, what I'm saying is that it *is* the current financial basis of the web, and changing that won't be accomplished tomorrow or even next year.
So long as advertising is the life blood of the web, it won't really matter if we like it. We will either have to accept it in some form or kill the open web (by either driving sites to close or driving them to make most of their content available only via propriety app). Meanwhile Google is flirting with integrating features into the browser that will effectively allow websites to prevent ad blocking.
For the time being, a small minority can use effective ad blocking and privacy tools, so long as it's not enough to really hurt revenues. But if it remains a small minority then web technology can change to make it untenable, and if it becomes a larger proportion of people then sites will basically have to fight back against losing all their revenue, which won't result in any better outcome.
So the only sustainable path is to offer another option, which is what #Mozilla is trying to do. Maybe that option isn't the right one, but I think they're correct to try something in that area.
While I'm not crazy about crypto, one thing I liked about the idea of BAT in Brave is that it would naturally create the option of micropayments to sites in instead of having to get ads, so it could theoretically create more privacy-respecting ads and also a path away from ad-based revenue. Unfortunately websites didn't seem to pick up integration (to get the payments), Brave turned out to maybe not be all that trustworthy, and Brave is based on Google's rendering engine so it still allows Google a lot of de facto power over web standards.
So long as advertising is the life blood of the web, it won't really matter if we like it. We will either have to accept it in some form or kill the open web (by either driving sites to close or driving them to make most of their content available only via propriety app). Meanwhile Google is flirting with integrating features into the browser that will effectively allow websites to prevent ad blocking.
For the time being, a small minority can use effective ad blocking and privacy tools, so long as it's not enough to really hurt revenues. But if it remains a small minority then web technology can change to make it untenable, and if it becomes a larger proportion of people then sites will basically have to fight back against losing all their revenue, which won't result in any better outcome.
So the only sustainable path is to offer another option, which is what #Mozilla is trying to do. Maybe that option isn't the right one, but I think they're correct to try something in that area.
While I'm not crazy about crypto, one thing I liked about the idea of BAT in Brave is that it would naturally create the option of micropayments to sites in instead of having to get ads, so it could theoretically create more privacy-respecting ads and also a path away from ad-based revenue. Unfortunately websites didn't seem to pick up integration (to get the payments), Brave turned out to maybe not be all that trustworthy, and Brave is based on Google's rendering engine so it still allows Google a lot of de facto power over web standards.