The internet has, in many ways, been a terrible thing for humanity.
This isn’t to say it’s all bad, or even a “net” bad. There are plenty of things I love about the internet, but it can be easy to ignore how many things have gotten worse.
For example, while streaming has made consuming media more convenient, physical media that you can actually own has been disappearing rapidly, and many new films do not actually get Blu-ray releases anymore.
Additionally, the surveillance state has enabled terrifying Borg-like companies like Palantir to build profiles on nearly every person in the United States has enabled quasi-militias to do unprecedented warrantless searches to an extent that would be unheard of even forty years ago.
This latter point is often justified by explaining that these services are “free” and as such the only way that they can make revenue is by making increasingly targeted ads.
Targeted ads are a cancer that weaponize our psychology against us to buy products and services we don’t actually want or need, and the only way that they can be effective is collecting large quantities of personal data and correlating it to created profiles to show ads that are likely to lead to clicks, and the clicks likely to lead to conversions.
It’s easy to blame targeted ads for everything horrible, and you wouldn’t be completely wrong to do so, but the “free” parts of the internet have been an issue for nearly as long as we’ve had an internet. People do not want to pay for things on the internet, and as such we have to just accept that the only way for these companies to provide these services is to figure out better forms of advertising
This the common knowledge, and it’s so compelling that it’s generally not interrogated. We don’t generally pay for things on the internet, and as such it’s easy to get into the mindset that this is the only way that the internet can exist.
However, and anyone who has talked to me any significant amount of time will hear me go on about this, I think this notion can be challenged with two words: Something Awful.
Something Awful is a website formed by Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka in 1999. It was initially just a website for Rich to showcase his comedic writing, but eventually a forum was built. The forum in itself was not terribly special; it was a garden variety forum based on VBulletin. The two bits of genius, and I do mean that, is that Something Awful requires a one-time ten dollar fee to buy an account, and they were willing to low-quality posters. You were allowed to buy a new account if you were banned, but that would cost another ten dollars.
This might seem insignificant, but I conjecture that there is a hidden brilliance to the fee. Ten dollars is cheap enough to not be exclusionary towards anyone, but it is expensive enough to make frequent shitposting or botting prohibitively expensive. Posts were generally higher quality than other forums on the internet, primarily because it was literally too expensive to not be high quality. Also, importantly, it became a way to support the site. People paid ten dollars for an account, and that ten dollars could be applied to hosting and staff or any other expense required to run a website.
Something Awful was where a lot of early internet culture was born. The famous All Your Base Are Belong To Us is probably one of the more notable examples, but there were tons, like Web War One, Impact Font Memes, and Over 9000 were started on the forum. It’s fair to say that, along with Newgrounds, without Something Awful, the internet would be a very different place.
I bring up Something Awful because it was a successful website that people paid for, and they paid for it because the content didn’t suck.
Something Awful has mostly fallen out of favor, and Lowtax was not without his share of controversies, but it is still around, and as of the time of this writing has about 2600 active users signed in right now. I personally believe that Something Awful’s downfall came more out of Lowtax’s unwillingness to maintain the business and eventual drug addiction than any inherent problems with the idea
The rise of popularity of Kagi reaffirms that people aren’t wholly opposed to paying. Kagi is the first non-Google search engine I’ve been able to stick to, and I’ve been using it exclusively since February 2023. The search results are genuinely better than Google’s, the interface is intuitive, and the ability to control my own page rankings is a breath of fresh air.
No one reads this blog, and even if they did it wouldn’t change anything, but I really think that we should really reconsider the notion that no one will pay for services on the internet. If you make a product genuinely worth paying for, then it’s not inconceivable that people will pay for it.