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137 points bradt | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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kleiba ◴[] No.45084334[source]
The argument seems flawed to me: by "killing the web", they refer to the example of a company adding SEO'd information to their website to lure in traffic from web searches.

However, me personally, I don't want to be lured into some web store when I'm looking for some vaguely related information. Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers: wikipedia, forum users (e.g. StackOverflow), blogs. (Sure, some people run blogs as a source of income, but I think that's a small percentage of all bloggers.)

Have you ever looked for a specific recipe just to end up on someone's cooking website where they first tell your their life story before - after scrolling for a half a day - you'll finally find what you've actually come there for (the recipe!) at the bottom of their page? Well, if that was gone, I'd say good riddance!

"But you don't get it", you might interject, "it's not that the boilerplate will disappear in the future, the whole goddamn blog page will disappear, including the recipe you're looking for." Yeah, I get it, sure. But I also have an answer for that: "oh, well" (ymmv).

My point is, I don't mind if less commercial stuff is going to be sustainable in a future version of the web. I'm old enough to have experience the geocities version of the early web that consisted of enthusiasts being online not for commercial interests but for fun. It was less polished and less professional, for sure, but less interesting? I don't think so.

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1. dmortin ◴[] No.45084419[source]
> Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers

The question is: is there content which is useful, but not provided by volunteers? We see more and more content behind paywalls, and it is a loss for many people who can't pay, because they won't be able to access the same content for free supported by ads.

So the result is poor people are going to lose access to certain contents, while well to do people will still have access.

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2. pixl97 ◴[] No.45085018[source]
As the world always has been. There is no human right that we must have free content supported by ads. And ad supported content has tons of its own issues.
3. carlosjobim ◴[] No.45086466[source]
The answer to that question is absolutely yes. Investigative journalism, which is some of the most useful content in existence can not sustainably be provided by volunteers.

> many people who can't pay

Everybody is already paying for Spotify and for Netflix. They can pay for mass syndication of textual content. But it needs to be like Spotify or YouTube, where everything and anything goes. Poor people always had access to read newspapers.