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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

#121

Post by christophilus »

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…

I think the incentives would still be similar in that world. Your goal would be to maximize payment. It you’re paid per view, you’re incentivized to maximize views. Low-grade clickbait would possibly be even worse. If you’re paid by duration of time on a page, you’d maximize engagement/ addictiveness, etc.

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

#122

Post by austincheney »

minikites wrote: post #112
austincheney wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

The premise is transparency. People can do whatever they want with that transparency as more informed voters. The only benefit of decreasing transparency in government spending is corruption.

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

#123

Post by ysavir »

esperent wrote: post #91
kelnos wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish micropayments would take off, but psychologically it seems they just don't work. There's a huge chasm between spending $0 and spending even $0.01. The mental effort involved in "taking out your wallet" vs. not doing so is huge. Meanwhile it seems that most people consider viewing ads to have zero cost to them (whether that's true or not), or use ad-blockers.

There's a huge chasm now, for sure. But only when it comes to online spending. In the real world, if someone offered me something useful for 0.01 I'd pay it without a thought (except for wondering why it's so cheap). If we can get over the initial weirdness and make it completely seamless (as easy as dismissing a cookie banner) I'm sure people would get used to paying a cent for every blog post they read. On the othe…

> In the real world, if someone offered me something useful for 0.01 I'd pay it without a thought (except for wondering why it's so cheap).

In the real world, though, you won't be getting 247 such requests per hour. And that's the crux of the issue: quantity vs quality.

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

#125

Post by johbjo »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #113
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…

Content creators are not the beneficiaries of the current copyright legislation, which enables accumulation of large catalogues of old works that can be used to strong-arm central platforms to act as gatekeepers (for lack of a better word.)

Living independently from patreon and youtube is the dream of most content creators. Whether it is currently viable isn't an argument in favour of current copyright legislation.

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

#126

Post by lotsofpulp »

johbjo wrote: post #125
lotsofpulp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Content creators are not the beneficiaries of the current copyright legislation, which enables accumulation of large catalogues of old works that can be used to strong-arm central platforms to act as gatekeepers (for lack of a better word.) Living independently from patreon and youtube is the dream of most content creators. Whether it is currently viable isn't an argument in favour of current copyright legislation.

> Content creators are not the beneficiaries of the current copyright legislation

On average, they seem to be doing better than people trying to earn money from Patraeon and YouTube. They might not be the intended or primary beneficiary of current copyright legislation, but they are a beneficiary of their employers earning money due to the copyright legislation (however disproportionate).

> Whether it is currently viable isn't an argument in favour of current copyright legislation

Yes, that’s what I was hoping to convey by ending my comment stating current copyright lengths are a separate issue.

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

#127

Post by CaptArmchair »

mschuster91 wrote: post #86
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…

> 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…

> Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space

But that's the thing: they aren't public spaces. The number of people which have their content hosted on a private platform is inconsequential to the legal nature of the platform. Social media are very much subject to legal regulations and lawmaking.

Calling a space which is governed by a private entity that doesn't represent you / answer to you, as "public" is a contradiction. The worst you can do is persist this notion to a point where enough people believe they are public spaces. That's the most direct way of legitimizing their dominance in modern telecommunication networks.

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

#128

Post by naturalauction »

ysavir wrote: post #123
esperent wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge chasm now, for sure. But only when it comes to online spending. In the real world, if someone offered me something useful for 0.01 I'd pay it without a thought (except for wondering why it's so cheap). If we can get over the initial weirdness and make it completely seamless (as easy as dismissing a cookie banner) I'm sure people would get used to paying a cent for every blog post they read. On the othe…

> In the real world, if someone offered me something useful for 0.01 I'd pay it without a thought (except for wondering why it's so cheap). In the real world, though, you won't be getting 247 such requests per hour. And that's the crux of the issue: quantity vs quality.

I mean I'd assume it would work similar to pay as you go data, in that you just get charged in the background. Not sure how you'd deal with sites trying to bill their users a ton without the users finding out though - maybe they need to click a button to continue every certain number of requests or amount of data used.

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

#129

Post by walleeee »

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…

The internet was born as a military R&D program and remains one today. What is the "free" web? What is the "free" structure of the internet? I assume "free" is not used here to mean "fault-tolerant" or "capable of routing around failed nodes"

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

#130

Post by selfhoster11 »

minikites wrote: post #112
austincheney wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

> The problem with this idea is your premise that you shouldn't have to pay for school meals if you don't have children.

Nothing about what parent wrote indicates that they are unwilling to pay for school meals, just that they want to know how much it cost them. Much like most people would want to know how much they are paying for socialised cancer treatments or food banks, but generally wouldn't oppose to paying in the first place.

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