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Free web is a bad idea

While I can understand why people enjoy online services being free, I don't believe it's something that's sustainable. Reasons for that are...

It encourages manipulation

Services may be free, but they requre money to operate and resort to ads if they want to survive. Which wouldn't be that bad on something like TV, as you would just display ads from time to time and that's it. This is different though from computers connected to a network, as you can get info about what kind of ads are most effective. So you get a race to who can most optimize ads to get you to buy their products. Which in the end makes society way more materialistic than if we all just paid for a service and had no ads in the first place.

An other thing is that to earn the most money, whoever puts ads on their site/app/service/whatever has to find a way to make you watch them as much as possible. Which turns the game into optimizing the experience as to lobotomize and enrage you. That's why you see all the braindead political videos of people screaming and wishing death to each other. It's why everything is filled with sexual imagery nowadays, as seeing a pair of tits is something that can distract you very quickly. No matter your sex or age range.

It's free labor

An other thing is that things being free increases inequality. Because people still put in work into online services. Youtube, facebook or whatever you think of wouldn't be used if there was nothing to watch. But the money you earn from that is none. Take a picture. Lot of people post pictures, but after the software and hardware for taking the pictures is made, the costs of taking a picture and storing it are next to none. In the past you had a whole industry for photography which employed lot of people. Close to where I live there's actually was an abandoned filmrolls shop. Because the industry was so big, it had to employ lot of people and split the profits around them.

Nowadays, you take a picture, post it on some service, and that's it. And that still generates profits because of ads, but outside of the phone manefacturer, and the service which hosts these pictures, no one earns money on this. Now this example talks just about photography, but it applies to more industries. Something like being a translator isn't viable nowadays. And no maps can compete with google maps.

But notice the work for these things never really did stop. Someone still has to update google maps, store what kind of restaurant is on that street, update the routes from time to time. Yet that is done by people for free. Restaurants themselves go to google maps to write where they can be found. And when it comes to translating, digital translation is only possible because people translate things on the internet all the time. Otherwise where would be the data be to train the translations on?

Some examples of paid services I recommend

With all that, I want to give some examples of paid services I enjoy quite a lot. And maybe you can find something for yourself here. All of these I am paying for, or have paid for in the past.

Neocities

A web hosting service where this website is hosted on. This site is supported by a premium function, which allows you to get a custom domain, 3000 GB bandwith and 50gb storage.

I think it's a good deal for like 5€, seeing you get lot of storage space and you support a good service.

Bandcamp

Place to buy music. It's made for buying albums digitally, but I have bought physical copies few times from here. It allows you to support the artist who made the song and it's nice place to find new music.

Substack

Made for blogging. A nice place to find high quality blogs. Is everything here some written masterpiece? No, but compared to your average internet article, the ones found here blow them out of the water.

Kagi

A paid search engine. This is something I stopped paying for, as I don't use search engines that often. But I had good time here and even found an other cool sites because of this. One of them was chord.pub, which isn't something I would use, but I doubt I would have stumbled on something like that using google.