221–230 of 269 posts
What's the advantage for the end user of this, over an ad blocker which is a free ad removal pass?
You are paying to support sites you visit with money, instead of advertisers doing that, so you are still providing incentive to create the kind of content you consume.
This is terrible. This is where Google is trying to control the web even more than they do already. If this sticks around, if this actually happens, then this will destroy what so many have worked to achieve. Let's actually sit down and think about this. If this happened, there would be some big changes to the web. (Note- this is a quick response. I should write a real paper about this) First of all, now that people…
Basically: you seem to believe people have a right to view the web cheaply. I would argue otherwise. For most of history, humans have had no opportunity to obtain content for free - in fact, for the most part, books and literature have been expensive novelties for all but the most hyper-privileged.
The idea people should pay for content does not seem to me a violation of some inalienable right.
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And who pays for the investigative reports? Who pays for the academics who spend their lifetimes researching the field we're reading about? Who pays salaries so the best people can make a living doing what they're truly great at? Who makes enough money to get big and old enough to gain a reputation? Without which, the news is a hail of unsubstantiated bulletins from semianonymous writers, a wilderness of mirrors and…
I'm sure Putin will be very happy to subsidize lots of reporting for Americans coming from Russia Today! There all the content you want! It might not be good for our democracy, but that may not have been included in the problem statement. :-)
One has to mention the Brave browser for comparison: https://brave.com/ -- similar concept but using Bitcoin. The accounting at https://brave.com/publishers.html looks like you as the reader can DECIDE whether you want to issue micropayments to a particular site or not, and publishers don't have to explicitly opt-in beforehand (thereby instantly including all of the web). A publisher won't be able to charge different…
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Academics are paid with tax dollars.
Assuming this is serious: actually, no. Academics are ultimately paid by a mix of university tuition fees (paid by students) and research grants (which may come from tax-funded entities, but more generally come from charities and philanthropic orgs).
Whether it comes from Google, or someone else I believe this is the only way the web survives. Content creators need to be able to charge different amounts for different quality content. In depth, well researched reporting needs to be able to earn more than a buzzfeed article. That's not possible with a flat "per-eyeball" cost, where the revenue to the content creator is uncorrelated with the cost to create or the va…
>A model like this is necessary to support quality content online. It's totally not. People essentially enjoy creating and sharing, and love putting up quality content about things they truly give a shit about. The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines, and hosting their own websites where they ramble about conditional probability. Wikiped…
As someone who participated in, and helped build, this early vision of the Internet, I am very, very sympathetic to (and enthusiastic about) your statement and vision.
However, you can't look at something amazing like this:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/26/us/turkey-pro...
... and think that this, or some useful version of this, would come out of the amateur, self-published, enthusiast ether.
I am floored by what they've done here and how they have used static text and interactivity and video motion to present a story. This is amazing work and someone has to pay the bills for this.
I don't know how that happens but I know it's not happening for free.
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>A model like this is necessary to support quality content online. It's totally not. People essentially enjoy creating and sharing, and love putting up quality content about things they truly give a shit about. The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines, and hosting their own websites where they ramble about conditional probability. Wikiped…
> The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines You're skipping the birth of the internet and are talking about the teenage years. I was alive and on the internet in the very early 90s. Academics and Hobbyists created the barebones of the internet, sure, sorta. But the internet didn't explode in popularity until people started making money off…
I was on the Internet back them and I certainly came for the freely published content... So it's not 100% false.
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They already have my sign in information. When I say no tracking, I mean nothing other than that. Like what I search, which sites I go to, which videos I watch on YouTube, or mining my photographs for more advertising hints, and what not.
So, if I'm a publisher, I have a deal with Google to pay me for space on my website. You want to pay Google in such a way that they don't know you're visiting my website. Your payment to Google must make sure there are no ads on my website for you. So now Google can't pay me for the space on my website. Why would I even sign up with Google if they aren't going to pay me for the space?