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Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

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Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#101

Post by austincheney »

XorNot wrote: post #49
austincheney wrote: post #27

The ideas expressed in this article should be applied to government. Everything in government should be a financial transaction. I should be able to see a list of what my federal income tax dollars pay for as a percentage of my tax contributions down to the 0.1% mark. Those assessments should be based on the real money government pays not the estimated funds that float around a bill or a budget. My thinking is that i…

The US federal budget's spending allocations, both upfront and actual, are publicly available ( https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/budget ). You know how much money you pay in taxes. This is not difficult to figure out if you were actually interested.

That is not an itemized receipt of what I pay. The accounting arithmetic to produce such is nontrivial. Asking any nontrivial calculation of the general public may as well be fantasy.

For example it would be great to receive a receipt indicating that I paid $10.12 for school meal programs (0.31% of my tax contributions) if I don’t have children in school.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#102

Post by Natfan »

ralusek wrote: post #47
bobwaycott wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ye gods, I haven’t heard anyone reference NetZero in ages . My mates and I got everyone we knew to use it. I still remember when, in the midst of us studying and discussing philosophy, we wondered if NetZero was really free or if we were just paying for it with something other than money. Thus began my unceasing hatred of the advertising-driven internet.

Would you look at that, you really do say "ye gods" a lot.

Looks like they have a keyboard shortcut for it.[0]

Which is fine. I think you're getting downvoted because you made their turn of phrase seem like a bad thing.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26938769

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#103

Post by meheleventyone »

asdff wrote: post #63

If only the web was supported by visitors contributing to hosting costs of a visited page directly out of their internet bill, instead of advertisement supporting the web, and visitors paying a flat fee to their ISP regardless of their use. Blogs could be sustained with little readership considering how cheap it is to host a lightweight website that sees little traffic, and larger websites like HN would pay for their…

Sadly by paying sites for views whether by advertising or directly from the user you encourage maximizing "engagement" so end up with all the dark patterns, click bait and tracking regardless. Free to play games are a great example of good and bad ways this ends up.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#104

Post by Natfan »

ivanche wrote: post #75
Taek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use layer 2 technologies like state channels to boost the efficiency of the market, you don't need every single transaction to happen on-chain. Skynet is a platform that does this already - every upload and download makes between 30 and 300 crypto transactions, including downloads that are only fetching a few kilobytes of data. It ends up being efficient enough to run at scale. Skynet currently has over 100,0…

Are you referring to this Skynet? https://skynet.co/index.html

The parked website with an invalid SSL certificate?

Unlikely.

They probably mean Skynet by Sia[0], which is (according to their website):

> Decentralized Internet for a Free Future

> Skynet is a content and application hosting platform bringing decentralized storage to users, creators and app developers.

[0]: https://siasky.net/

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#105

Post by mschuster91 »

krapp wrote: post #96
mschuster91 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS." > I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here. One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts . Given that modern social networks essent…

>One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts. Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space, a gateway between the digital and meatspace world, they should also be regulated by independent authorities. That would set a precedent that any site with any user supplied content must require intervention and appr…

> The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse.

I had not meant that every moderation action would need a judge, but that every person should have the legal right to appeal and plead their case in front of a judge instead of hitting stone walls.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#106

Post by ObserverNeutral »

There's a reason why the system is the way it is.

Who wants to pay for every transaction? Not the consumer! It's a wet dream of economists, libertarians and dataminers so that everything is deterministic , discrete and measurable.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#107

Post by tgragnato »

7952 wrote: post #95
at_a_remove wrote: post #21

The Internet as we know it was built on the back of someone else's free. I am older than most of the crew here and can remember when the majority of the telnetting and IRCing we did was against .edu domains, using the disk space of a Sparc 1, sucking up someone else's bandwidth. In February of 1993, someone very much like Don Draper woke, inexplicably but smiling, with the first morning erection in years as the tag w…

I think the current situation is a state of equilibrium brought about by technical limitations. A typical user has limited bandwidth, and limited storage. That makes the client server model very effective for something like video sharing or a social network and defaults to a particular economic model. But something like messaging can work more like a message queue. The basic storage and bandwidth requirements are low…

> A 1TB IPhone with a good internet connection [...] P2P possible

Battery life would be terrible. Personally, I'm still waiting for the coupling of mobile and "personal servers".

Micro servers at the exclusive use of one person, in an attractive form factor, made easy to use. Products that you can buy in an electronics store, such as a smartphone or a laptop.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#108

Post by lotsofpulp »

ganafagol wrote: post #90
krapp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the web, newspapers, magazines and other media could afford writers, editors and journalists, and the effect of the web was for print media to gut its infrastructure and budgets in favor of intern bloggers and clickbait because it couldn't be free and afford to compete with random no-budget sites and Twitter feeds otherwise. The news used to be worth paying for, and for some reason people seem to have convince…

"Destroyed" may be a too strong word. It may currently be a little hidden below the layer of all the crap out there, but good journalism is not dead and once reasonable payment models have beeb worked out, it can easily come back. Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.

15 to 20 years is long enough to affect journalists’ ability to provide for their family and save for retirement, and signal to other possible high caliber journalists that journalism is not a viable path for them.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#109

Post by [deleted] »

conception wrote: post #38
scarmig wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, large numbers of people pay little to no tax, and so the amount they "pay" for every service will be small, if not zero or negative.

This is partially true... for income taxes. A large number of people do not pay income tax, and this includes retirees, the disabled, students, the very wealthy, etc etc. There are many types of taxes. And just about everyone pays taxes of some sort.

[deleted]

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#110

Post by lotsofpulp »

kelnos wrote: post #79
guerrilla wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have paid an enormous price for the "free" Internet and that price has been hidden from us through layers of affiliates and misdirection and double-Irish. Rudderless algorithms decide whether your fame career has any kind of money associated with it and for precisely how long. When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS." I don't really think it would be any different if we paid. L…

That's the thing. Ads will always generate revenue. If you can also get people to pay for your content, great. So then you have two sources of revenue for the same product. But some services do manage to do without ads; Netflix is the big one that comes to mind. Hulu has an ad-free version if you pay more. Spotify has a free ad-supported plan or a paid ad-free plan. Then you have things in the middle like HBO Max: mo…

> But some services do manage to do without ads; Netflix is the big one that comes to mind.

There’s a metric ton of ads in Netflix, they’re built into the content. All the extra time in a car chase focusing on the car logo and the characters talking about a car’s feature are not part of the plot.

I find it even worse than ad breaks, since the content itself gets worse, and you waste your time. Although, I know TV networks were doing heavy product placement even before streaming came around, so they had ad breaks, ads in the show, and subscriber revenue.

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