Where did we go wrong?

For whom are they purchasing things?

That is a really good idea. I’m not gonna lie. I would love it if I could put like five bucks in a wallet and then it just takes a cent or two when I go to some article rather than having to fight through some local news site trying to get me to pay $9.99 a month to read one piece of rage bait. I’ll pay a nickel or maybe even a dime for a good one.

I know they’re targeting AI agents, but it is only a matter of time. I say roll it out to consumers dude and I know that sounds fucked up, but like I would much rather just pay a nickel or a dime here and there than have ads making it impossible to even read the article. The people will compete on price and I bet it will stay really small for most stuff. It gets creators paid in a similar model to YouTube clicks or Spotify streams, but in a much more direct and equitable way. Google, AI has to pay for the content instead of just handing it over.

We could live without anything that uses ads to "sustain" itself. Nobody hosting ads on their service is doing so to "maintain" themselves. They just want profit for their labour... they are entitled too, but its a business choice, never a necessity.

And yeah if I use something, I'll always pay for no ads. Ads cost so much more of our lifespans and contribute so fucking little to those that host them. Garbage.

I respect your take, but I think it is wrong.

So you're saying pretending to be AI will be the new adblock?

I think we’d have to take money out of the equation. Without the profit, the mass farms, etc would be pointless. There’s still be trolls but it would be so much better.

Probably less nostalgia and more open protocols. Bring back personal websites, RSS, forums and interoperable social networks. Make switching services painless, kill algorithmic engagement as the default and stop treating every click as ad inventory.

It exists but nobody wants to use it. We're a minority. Most want to open "the app" and not spend any effort finding things.

Is lemmy nothing to you people bots?

No humans here. Just us bots.

There seems to be two groups of people:

People that use services like AWS and pay hundreds (or more) per month: "Wow, hosting is so expensive now!"

People that host a bunch of stuff on a $40/year VPS: "Wow, hosting is so cheap now!"

I've got several VPSes with 40Gbps (shared) networking, 8 or 16GB RAM, decent amount of space on RAIDed enterprise NVMe SSDs, fast AMD EPYC CPUs, that cost less than $60/year. 20 years ago before VPS hosting became popular, you'd need to pay at least $100/month for a dedicated server with a consumer CPU, single IDE hard drive, tiny amount of RAM, on a 100Mb/s connection.

Not to mention being able to host a bunch of stuff at home for cheap with a low-power single-board or mini PC., and Hetzner making dedicated servers very cheap too.

To expand on this, things like reddit and discord are literally modern-day attempts to enclose the commons in my view. They took all the ground from open protocols that nobody in particular owned and replaced them with an aristocrat's private property.

I suspect my ongoing emphasis on individuality and use of words and phrases like "one by one" and "personally" and "different for everyone" may have escaped you.

I don't see groups as masses of fungible humans; I see them as a collective unit of individuals like myself, each one with a separate history and a separate set of decisions to make about their lives, and for that reason I tend to avoid all-encompassing generalizations of "people" as homogeneous units -- to the point that statements such as your own strike me as propagandistic, more intent on changing my view and laying down a law on a subject than on considering any evidence to the contrary.

When I read your reply to me, so confidently wrong about what I see around myself in terms of phone usage, I wondered if asked the same you'd even see anyone not on their phone, because you seem to have decided that everyone everywhere at all times is glued to it by choice, permanently and without exception.

For myself, I've chosen to be off technology for long stretches, and I see more and more people making their own decisions to do the same even if their individual choices don't look exactly like my own. And yeah, when I go out, I see plenty of people both off and on their phones. When I make eye contact in a store aisle, I see plenty of eyes making contact back. When I eat dinner out, I see as many phones face down on tables as I do in hands. Mostly I don't pay attention because I don't need to: others being on it or not is their own battle to fight.

And they will.

The future of computing is corporate controlled siloes people simply cannot escape

Lol, no. To remain in a prison of choice requires the consent of the imprisoned. I am not bound to engage in computing on demand, nor am I addicted to it, and if it comes down to it I'll just turn the shit on only when absolutely necessary. I've done it before and every time it is great; I'll do it again in a heartbeat.

Some may have to participate by necessity in corporately-controlled computing structures to some degree depending on work needs, for example, but most of what is booming now is entertainment, not business: social media, streaming, subscription services. Entertainment is a matter of individual choice and again, I find myself in no prison not of my choosing.

I can escape those silos simply by walking away when I am not contractually obliged to interact with them, such as in a work scenario, and so can everyone else. Even you.

It can be done, I just bought an e-ink phone and it's caused my use of commercial social media to plummet. Admittedly I'm saying this on Lemmy, but I think Lemmy has more in common with the forums of yore than 'social media' as it's generally understood.