On: Google has sent internet into 'spiral of decline', claims DeepMind co-founder

[mycologos]

> Kill advertising and the web will be fixed automatically and permanently

Is the implicit logic here "kill advertising and the web will be like what it was before widespread advertising: mostly for and by nerds"?

[beej71 → mycologos]

Yes! Not just computer nerds, but nerds of all kinds.

I want to read things by recipe nerds, not people trying to make money on ads.

I want to read about cars from car nerds and home repair from home repair nerds and writing from writing nerds.

I want to read things from people who share them for the pure joy of sharing them.

[mycologos → beej71]

I want that too! But things need to be easy to use if we want to hear from the people who are just X nerds and not X nerds and computer nerds. I think that's something ads enabled, because it made it valuable to just have a lot of people show up, which paid for all the work that went into making showing up easy.

[beej71 → mycologos]

I think this should be a paid site that hosts, i.e. the nerds should pay a small amount per month to cover the ad-free hosting, like $5. Demand could drive that price down quite a bit.

[jjulius → beej71]

Give me this internet, please.

[matheusmoreira → beej71]

Completely agree.

[matheusmoreira → mycologos]

The implicit logic is to have a web for people who actually have something to say, not something to sell. If we end up with a small web by and for nerds, I'm okay with that too. Better to have that than this endless flood of negative value ad-funded SEO spam websites we have today.