This sounds very reasonable on paper. The elephant in the room, however, is that most people and even those who claim to want to move past ads don't want to pay that much for what they consume. The barrier between consuming something for free and paying even a tiny sum towards supporting the author is an enormous psychological chasm. The internet would definitely be much more restricted if the ad-financing model was not doable. There would be less crap as per Sturgeon's law, but the good parts would shrivel up too.

The case of HN is particularly enlightening because the community is very hostile to ads and for the most part has the technical ability to avoid them with a higher degree of sophistication than just installing Ublock. But there is also the majority of the focus and admiration placed on SWEs and companies that are directly and indirectly tied to the ad ecosystem. The energy given off is similar to McDonald's executives yelling at their children if they see them with a processed patty in hand.

I feel like it's only a psychological chasm because ad-supported content exists at all. If such sites did not exist, I feel like people might have to pay more, they would be more choosy, but then sites would also have to really put more effort into their content. That would eliminate the phenomenon of a thousand sites writing an SEO-farmed article on every possible topic imaginable, and bring it back to 1-2 sites that really put in effort because they care about the topic. Honestly I think the internet would suffer a bit for the first little bit but it would actually stabilize into something a lot more useful.

The internet is already useful in the way you are imagining it to be. The educational and practical resources are there, and are not that hard to find assuming you have gained minimal technological literacy and a certain understanding of internet culture and critical thinking relating to the content available.

There is a ocean of addictive distractions to wade through, but at the same time we know the following things:

- We have to be constantly mindful of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect

- News sources and journalism have always had significant quality problems when they venture beyond just reporting basic news, even in the case of business-oriented publications that as Chomsky has pointed out have a vested interest in delivering quality reporting

- Understand topics requires delving into the academic literature in many cases. In this scenario, the internet becomes the line towards that literature or those long-form articles but most of the users' time has to be spent reading and thinking instead of just browsing

- Identifying skinner boxes and addiction traps is easy. You usually know when you are in one. We have to just be honest about what our goals in life are and how much progress we are making towards them

What this does not solve is the problem of focusing on the wrong things in life or embarking in a career or interests that are ultimately deleterious to your life. But the internet at least makes it far easier to pivot and refocus as long as you let it do so and use it towards a conscious goal. This mindfulness is easier said than done but it's far from an impossibility.

Good point, I agree. I did not think of that. However, it's a bit hard to find certain things now. To take one example, sometimes I like to read reviews of camera equipment. I like to read reviews written by individuals who just use it rather than the SEO junk by most major websites. However, even if those small-time reviews are usually much more informative, they are VERY hard to find in search engines. The SEO junk just overwhelms page after page of search.

That's why I think the internet would be better off without a lot of the intense duplication that is out there today.

> The internet is already useful in the way you are imagining it to be.

Sort of. Many of the useful (not ad-driven) sites of the 90s are still around. Mine are. So in that sense, yes.

But they are drowned by the flood of ad and SEO-driven junk. Finding the good parts, if you don't already know, is becoming harder. Search engines no longer return most of the useful sites on any given topic.

It depends on what you define as useful. 90's style personal websites/Usenet/BBS forums can be useful. People certainly gathered there to make significant things happen and to create useful resources. That said they're still pretty infotainmenty, the signal to noise ratio is still pretty low compared to a focus on an actual topic of interest that comes through deeply engaging with the literature and/or delving into making or building things with it. We have to keep to the logic that the internet is a conduit towards real life actions and the internet of the 90's already cut into that. In a sense, being bothered by the SEO means you are still in an infotainment mindset anyway or at least surfing the shallower waves.

Today's internet has astoundingly accessible resources on all sorts of things. A motivated person can still sidestep all of the crap with relative ease. Or to put it another way, if they get lost in the shrubs, they weren't gonna make it in any case. Motivated people now have many more tools and platforms at their disposal to gather alongside one another and make things happen. The pre-September internet was more private, yes, but that was actually a massive flaw in an absolute sense. Now you can have a bright middle class Mongolian kid become an electronics expert on his own and the greybeards aren't barred from finding their watering hole either.

> The internet would definitely be much more restricted if the ad-financing model was not doable. There would be less crap as per Sturgeon's law, but the good parts would shrivel up too.

The web in the late 90s was in most ways far more pleasant and useful place than today. Content was a labor of love, not driven by advertising.

I wouldn't hesitate for an instant go back to an internet which bans advertising. It would be far better than what we have today, not just the ads but all the toxic data collection and spyware that those fuel.