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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

#151

Post by idiotsecant »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #108
ganafagol wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

We have dramatically fewer journalists now, but a great deal more news. There's more noise now but there's also more of what journalists traditionally did. It isn't great if you relied on journalism specifically to pay the bills but the rest of the system doesn't seem to have suffered too bad.

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

#152

Post by veltas »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #140
veltas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably there would be some kind of limited public or charity service.

Ah yes, let's rely on the mercy of strangers because the system deemed you unworthy of participating on equal footing. How delightful.

In case it's not clear I'm not advocating for this system, just predicting based on the hypothetical.

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

#153

Post by lotsofpulp »

idiotsecant wrote: post #151
lotsofpulp wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have dramatically fewer journalists now, but a great deal more news. There's more noise now but there's also more of what journalists traditionally did. It isn't great if you relied on journalism specifically to pay the bills but the rest of the system doesn't seem to have suffered too bad.

How are fewer journalists accomplishing more journalism? It’s a very time intensive, travel intensive task with high risks.

The idea that a system is fine in which the creators have little means to earn money is crazy to me. Lots of places will just go without the deep, investigative journalism we might have benefited from in the recent past.

Replaced by noise, as you say.

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

#155

Post by karol »

hnbad wrote: post #148
karol wrote: post #117

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.

It's the logical conclusion to neoliberalism though. We're already coerced to view our personal time as a finite resource we "spend" on activities and to constantly consider our return on investment, to optimize our leisure time for maximum enjoyment and recovery. Even friendships and relationships are thought of as transactional and talked about in terms of how much you get out for what you put in. And anyway how is…

I understand this perspective. To me your example clearly points out where neoliberalism has its limits. What strikes me is how linear this thinking is. In real life we need to receive a mixture of good and bad examples to truly advance our experience, whereas this model seems like it would be a stream of mini pseudo-advancements packaged in transactional wrapping to maximize creator's benefit. Saying that, I am also aware that many existing ways of monetization already work like that.

I think existing internet contains both the commercial and benevolent 'free, no strings attached' models and to me it strikes a good balance.

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

#156

Post by cjcole »

kortilla wrote: post #94
m463 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I remember folks setting up peering agreements. What if that model had taken over? How about a neighborhood hub where you pay someone to put in a small fiber run from your house and choose a vendor who can run your traffic back and forth from that hub? Or maybe there's a citywide ring network everyone hooks into and you pay for out-of-city data? Or what if most cellphone data defaulted to wifi firs…

Most of the stuff people do online is non-local though. If any non-negligible amount of traffic was just staying in your local city, ISPs would have already optimized for it with direct local peering. As it stands though, it’s so little traffic that it’s not even worth a circuit in a local IXP.

This is true. We are being psychologically manipulated by extraordinarily skilled operators to redirect our attention from our family, friends, and local community toward these non-local (more lucrative) concerns. This makes the manipulators a vast amount of money.

Maybe we should think about the associated negative externalities and act accordingly.

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

#157

Post by kodah »

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 may be in this age group or I may have just used the same technologies around the same time period. When people say the internet is "free" it carries, typically, one of two meanings:

- Free from control. Governments are a tricky thing. You trust them until you don't; especially if your country has a history of distrust for authority.

- Free as in beer. This was always more of an illusion than anything. The IRC servers you spoke of had to be networked and hosted. The services had to be developed and reworked over the years. People had to staff the network to keep it free from abuse. The networks were never free, but they also never had aims to monetize.

Our friends in marketing and the people who run dubious spam businesses recognized that people are drawn to free and made a business case out of it. You can't fix people being drawn to free, but you can fix the definition of what it means to say you offer a "free" service. For instance, what Facebook and Google provide isn't free - they broker your data in exchange for nifty services. What if you had to say that, and weren't allowed to use the word free?

I don't think the future lies in non-freedom, I think it lies in gatekeeping what it means to be free.

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

#158

Post by kodah »

m463 wrote: post #77
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…

On the other hand, I remember folks setting up peering agreements. What if that model had taken over? How about a neighborhood hub where you pay someone to put in a small fiber run from your house and choose a vendor who can run your traffic back and forth from that hub? Or maybe there's a citywide ring network everyone hooks into and you pay for out-of-city data? Or what if most cellphone data defaulted to wifi firs…

Peering agreements (and the eventual imbalance of them as the internet reorganized) is largely what led to the situation that we call "net neutrality".

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

#159

Post by pixl97 »

cjcole wrote: post #156
kortilla wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the stuff people do online is non-local though. If any non-negligible amount of traffic was just staying in your local city, ISPs would have already optimized for it with direct local peering. As it stands though, it’s so little traffic that it’s not even worth a circuit in a local IXP.

This is true. We are being psychologically manipulated by extraordinarily skilled operators to redirect our attention from our family, friends, and local community toward these non-local (more lucrative) concerns. This makes the manipulators a vast amount of money. Maybe we should think about the associated negative externalities and act accordingly.

>Maybe we should think about the associated negative externalities

Narrator: "They didn't"

If we had that much foresight pollution wouldn't be an issue that is attempting to destroy us.

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

#160

Post by qudat »

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 gemini project is trying to remove all financial incentives from a new web of content: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

The key idea for me is 1 request for 1 page. It's a stripped down markdown with no images allowed.

Although even then some clients are trying to support embedding images which goes against the protocol.

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