I can't help but feel like these things sort of exist already in imperfect forms, so the question that comes to mind is one of costs, specifically what costs does interacting with or using such a network impose that makes it not worth it for people to engage with it in bad faith
Which immediately raises the question of what constituents bad faith interaction?
I think the author is at least saying that content created for the express purpose of pushing products is a bad faith interaction they don't want to engage with, cool, I'm not exactly a fan of ads myself
So what are different kinds of ecosystem that are resistant to bad faith interactions and why?
Academia is one to a degree, that's one kind of space where doing this kind of bad faith interaction would receive pushback, so it becomes not worth doing, that's one kind of negative feedback cycle, I think to a degree HN has a similar dynamic of the censor backed with moderation, the cost here would be the space constantly working to keep itself "pure"
My understanding is 4chan and it's like are another, their strategy is to create such a hostile environment that capital has limited interest in engaging with it, all you get are "authentic" interactions, though I'm not going to pretend I've spent much of any real time on there, so this is at best based on second hand experience, the cost here is more interesting, how hostile an environment are the users willing to bare and perpetuate in order to create their safe haven?
Then there's non-standard technical spaces, I'm less confident than the author that you can create a real alternative web without paying a tax on some level, what I mean by that is if you're building a protocol, it has on some level to be hostile or it's going to get co-opted, what comes to mind is something more like a multimodal protocol, you don't send text, you send media the vast majority of the time, VNC for example might work, your clients register click and hover states in 2d space and your servers are basically game engines, it would be very technically hostile, however until AI tools get a lot better, there's really little for them to work with and taking and remixing content is now fully on the authors terms, the downside is this might be worse, because it is very limiting and completely against the principles of what the web was built on, so if capital ever decides that they value this new space there's a lot they can do here
Am alternative tax is going fully into the p2p world, we build a network based on caching and p2p sharing and tracking anonymous metrics of how much content has spread, or who in the network has
S it, that would at least indicate if it's something widespread or if it's something people who you trust engage with, this will make a network of gaps, where the cost is potentially even more fragmentation, however you can at least trust that some people who you know are on some level vouching for the content you see
It's a hard problem, I'm interested if this reframing on costs gives people a better way to think about it?