You seem to be assuming I don't consume a bunch of content that could be replaced with Snake Game or Solitaire at ~0 loss of enjoyment, because it's incredibly low-value entertainment, so am somehow looking down on others. What do you think this is? That I'm doing right now? The value, in every sense, of nearly all online activities can be found next to "marginal" in the dictionary.

[EDIT]

> if all you have to contribute is moralising about the worth of other people's preferences

Definitely a complete characterization of my views on this, and of these posts. You've looked carefully, considered thoughtfully, and discovered the entire thing. Very good.

> It wouldn't just be 'non profit', it would be 'considerable loss'. You can't provide a service like YouTube or Google without incurring enormous expense, even if you're only counting the infrastructure costs.

I'm not a bit worried we'd go without capable search engines, without ads. Very likely there'd be donation-supported ones that are at least as good, and maybe better for some purposes (IMO Google's utility peaked around '08).

The free side of Youtube is a UX problem to be solved by something like torrent clients (maybe plus some RSS). Or probably a dozen other ways. It's far from insurmountable, there's just no motivation to fix that now (because there's no demand for it). That's the story for most of the services that could be replaced by [two or three existing protocols] + [some not-exactly-rocket-science UX effort]. The commercial side of it is solved by... hosting videos. Yourself, or paying a service to do it for you (these services already exist, despite YouTube's dominance, all the way from simple video-hosting to full white-label video streaming services).

> Anything that's used by someone is valuable to someone. I don't like paella, but I don't propose to eradicate all paella restaurants for that reason. Again, this feels like a hand-wavey and not very wise answer to dismiss problems with your idea.

It's plain that a huge percentage of online content could be replaced with Snake Game on an old Nokia with ~0 loss of enjoyment for the consumer. A perfect replacement for them is a book of Sudoku puzzles. People look at the stuff but the value is extremely close to zero, in that nearly any other time-wasting activity is just as good. And that's after dismissing the ~75% of the Web that's spammy garbage of negative value (because it drowns out better material covering the same thing).

> You may have your own wishes and preferences, but it's not a good idea to let those invade the rational, evaluative part of your mind.

Beats accepting the wishes and preferences that created the bad situation that exists now, right? Why should that be privileged over what I'd prefer? Has zip to do with a lack of rationality on my part, though it's easier to dismiss ideas if one first paints them as irrational.

We can have useful, widely-used open protocols or we can have spying (ads may or may not also be on the table, but take away the spying and there goes much of the advantage of the huge tech companies, anyway). The two very clearly cannot co-exist. I'd prefer the former.

> It came out the summer before 9/11. It is petty and weird and, maybe I’m pilled, but it’s pretty good.

I remember thinking it was OK when I watched it when it came out. I watched it again just a few months ago, for the first time since then, and found it to be about as bad as a movie can be. Not even accidentally entertaining, like some bad movies are.

> This is all well and good, but then we need a serious alternative funding model for websites.

Why?

Without competition from free-but-funded-with-$billions ad-supported services, most of the valuable stuff would probably be replaced by volunteer and non-profit efforts.

Others would survive by charging (more) money.

Some would be replaced by protocols (several social networks would be among those replaced). Clients & hosting may be paid, or not. It'd work out fine.

Most of the rest isn't valuable.

> is more experimental protocols to enrich the web,

New protocols are DOA until we significantly nerf the incentives to "own" the user.

IOW it's not gonna happen until we outlaw anything that resembles spying on users. And maybe also ads generally.