The internet wants to be fragmented

The reason surveillance capitalism will always win out is because with direct payments people only have to pay for something once.

Even if (and I hope this never happens) we had some "perfect system" where every website was automatically paid some fee every time there was a page view, the companies behind those websites would lose money on that deal.

If I own example.com and you click a link to www.example.com/somepage.html and after I serve you that page your bank account automatically transfers some small fee to me, that's the end of the transaction. You'd be done paying! Why would I want that when with surveillance capitalism you will continue to pay for the rest of your life?

If I collect huge amounts of your personal information, then sure, I can make money by using it to push ads in your face (and I will), but after I do that I still have all your data. I can leverage that later in any way that benefits me. I can use it manipulate you into loading more pages on my website, I can use it to safely increase the prices of things you buy from me, I can sell and resell that same data, in whole or in part, over and over to anyone who wants it. Combined with data about others it becomes even more valuable too.

You. on the other hand, will deal with the consequences of that data being used against you for your entire life. It will be used by scammers to try to trick you. It will be used by the state to control and monitor you. It will be used by other companies to take more of your money. It will be used by advertisers to manipulate you. It will be used against you in courts. It will be used against you by employers. You will never stop paying. You'll pay in ways you never imagined and in ways that aren't possible now, since your data will still be there when they become possible later. When consumers spend the rest of their lives endlessly paying for everything they have and everything they do it means more wealth and power for the few at the top.

Unless your new universal micropayments system can do all that, why would corporations switch to it?

> People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many.

The Internet is simply following our current Globalist trend, where yes, there may be different physical towns, but there is only one acceptable way to think about the world, one acceptable form of government, and one acceptable set of morals.

Cities are becoming harder to distinguish since every new building looks the same. The same shops and chains are available. The clothing is the same. These aren't different town squares. These are the global monoculture made manifest. The Internet is simply another small part of this larger trend.

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"doesn't matter" to you. Who are you to judge what does and doesn't? You can say the same thing about pretty much anything and yet, calling corruption and conflicts of interest in any business or organization is absolutely relevant for anyone who interacts with it.

There's also the fact that journalists switch topics and industries and the behaviours are not limited to one industry. The problems I mentioned and access journalism are absolutely prevalent in politics journalism, which I doubt you'd say "doesn't matter"

So your argument is just a poor attempt to dismiss a subject in a disingenuous way. The dismissive and rude label applied is just the cherry on top.

I think there is a spectrum of social behavior. The extreme bubble or silo is in my opinion just as toxic as the extreme toxicity of fringe ideas. There is probably a balance in there somewhere so that people can stay clear of social warfare and at the same time people can feel comfortable to be themselves and not have to wear a mask or have highly measured speech.

I honestly do not know how to achieve that balance. I think platforms that come close to having a balance still end up with people having to know their audience and have measured speech to some degree. Even HN is an example of that. It's probably the best balance I have seen but I have no idea how it could be made better other than having millions of small stand-alone self hosted platforms but then we move closer to those echo-chamber bubbles.

This is just my personal preference but I would not want to be in an echo chamber. If everyone just agreed with me all the time I would start to feel like I am in a room full of NS5 robots iRobot movie reference. "One of us..." That to me would be just as dystopian as being in a room full of fighting tribes. But that is just my own take on things. Perhaps it is a generational + personality tainted preference on my part.