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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

#111

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

> Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.

We're all impatient, though. 15 years is about how long I'm an adult. 20 years is about how long I'm able to make use of news. If the way out of this mess is going to take another 20 years, it's not going to be of much use to me :). "In the long run" is good, but "within the productive lifetime of people concerned about it" would be best.

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

#112

Post by minikites »

austincheney wrote: post #101
XorNot wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with this idea is your premise that you shouldn't have to pay for school meals if you don't have children. Paying for school benefits everyone, even the childless, because it's good for society. The idea of itemized taxes reduces your interaction with others and society down to a capitalist transaction, which is not a healthy foundation for civilization. People are more than their productivity and your system has no way of accounting for that.

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

#113

Post by lotsofpulp »

johbjo wrote: post #82

No. The reason d'etre for the centralised platforms is that they are accountable to the major rights holding companies. That's all. One can speculate why this is so important for society, but ostensibly it is to protect the rights of Universal, Disney, etc. Accountability becomes impossible with decentralization, and small decentralized distributors can be easily intimidated with copyright-related legislation. This i…

> One can speculate why this is so important for society, but ostensibly it is to protect the rights of Universal, Disney, etc

It is not difficult for me to speculate that it is due to people’s desire to get paid for their time and effort. The people working at Universal (Comcast) and Disney have the option of doing their own thing and trying to get people to pay for it outside of centralized platforms. That they do not seems to indicate it is not a viable option.

That is not to say anything about unnecessarily long copyright terms, that is a separate issue.

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

#114

Post by ratww »

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…

You answered your own question in your opening paragraph. People will keep pushing ads as long as they can get away with it.

Despite what marketeers say, having no advertisements is a huge differentiator for a service, and people is willing to pay extra for it. But it won't happen in markets where it's difficult for new players to enter. I'm not familiar with sports broadcasting but I can bet this is the case.

It's the same with Apple's current shift to privacy, or Microsoft's doings in open-source. Sure, they know privacy and OSS is the ethical thing to do, but they're not doing it because it's "right". They're doing it to gain customers. If either Apple or Microsoft became monopolies you can bet they would cease doing privacy/OSS it overnight.

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

#115

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

mschuster91 wrote: post #105
krapp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

What the civil court system desperately needs: more lawsuits from people who got banned from web forums.

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

#116

Post by lotsofpulp »

dash2 wrote: post #58

Never mind all this NFT waffle. It’s 2021 and I still can’t pay someone 50 cents from my browser with one click. Why not?

Because there is no widespread electronic equivalent to cash for any currency that does not expose the receiver to expensive issues such chargebacks, disputes, and the legal systems in various countries.

Maybe the Fed’s new system will allow for it:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...

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

#117

Post by karol »

I hate the idea of wrapping all interactions into transactions. It flies in the face of an idea that might I want to give something away for free. I would then presumably need to package this into a transaction for 0 cents. Economy is part of life, but we also interact on biological, spiritual and emotional planes which may be driven by different economies.

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

#118

Post by guerrilla »

ratww wrote: post #114
kelnos wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You answered your own question in your opening paragraph. People will keep pushing ads as long as they can get away with it. Despite what marketeers say, having no advertisements is a huge differentiator for a service, and people is willing to pay extra for it. But it won't happen in markets where it's difficult for new players to enter. I'm not familiar with sports broadcasting but I can bet this is the case. It's t…

> I'm not familiar with sports broadcasting but I can bet this is the case.

I wasn't thinking just broadcasting but also venues, jerseys and everything. Look at a typical NASCAR or football game, ads are everywhere at the event.

I think you're right though. There has to be competition or regulation, otherwise they can get away with it and as you both say they will.

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

#119

Post by Ygg2 »

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…

If web was supported like that, you'd still earn extra for having ads. On top of that.

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

#120

Post by gverrilla »

joe_the_user wrote: post #50
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…

The free structure of the Internet was the only way it could have appeared and is still the only way most of it can operate, for good or for ill. Even more, people attacking the free part tend to evoke an image of all the other manipulative parts of modern media vanishing if people somehow pay. But the Wall Street Journal and to a lesser extent the New York Times, do their best to be paid but it's the same sort of pr…

Debord was not worried at all with the "problematic of modern media"
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