The internet is broken because it is free
Actually nothing in life is free
Everything in life is constraint bounded including time and attention and computer capacity. When you have free email, you get spam. When you have free video uploads, you get low quality advertising funded content, when you have free search, you get SEO blogspam.
Microtransactions for everything would fix the internet. It should cost a small amount of money to send an email. It should cost a small amount to use a search engine or upload a video.
Advertising is a racket and it distorts incentives without actually producing much if anything in the way of economic good.
An effective search engine that has advertising as its revenue model is an oxymoron.
30 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 73.5 ms ] thread- Would forcing micro-transactions also force law abiding people to provide a real ID for all transactions?
- Would criminals be able to use existing methods of stolen and fraudulent funds and identification for these transactions? If not, how do you keep them from gaming this system?
- Would large corporations be able to afford these micro-transactions and if so to what volume? e.g. Fox News or CNN buying up a few million transactions per day on Twitter. Or put another way, would these transactions give large corporations a more dominate control over public opinion?
- Would poor people and impoverished nations be able to participate in the internet and if so, how?
- If I want to run my own forums and chat servers would I be obligated to charge these micro-transactions? i.e. Is this legislated?
-criminals use the free internet now and use the free real world too. Crime is crime regardless whether it costs money to engage in or not. If gasoline was free do you think crimes would increase or decrease? I'd say probably increase.
-sure large corporations would be able to afford a large number of micro transactions but it seems that is better for society than a bunch of manipulative or irrelevant ads and user tracking.
-no
-poor people would still exist just like they do now. Watching the latest meme video is not a human right. Almost everywhere on earth internet service costs money. I don't see how it is different for content to also cost money.
-no you would not be required to charge for forums but it would be kind of stupid for you not to if most other people were doing it. Just like it would be stupid for restaurants to give away free food. Creating content takes time. Time equals money. Right now the surplus goes to mega advertising racketeers like facebook or google. I would rather see the returns to content creation go more to the creators or moderators.
Also, right now, we have problems, but do get both types of free (beer and speech). I'm afraid we'd lose both once finances are attached to basic activities.
If people were invisible in real life do you think shoplifting and violent crimes would increase or decrease? Sometimes too much privacy is a bad thing.
Maybe laws that limited the radius online tracking in space and time would be effective at balancing privacy desires with transaction logging.
As long as the items people shoplifted were still visible, I think shoplifters would be more cautious than they are now, especially as they'd have no idea if their actions were being watched and followed by a squad of invisible security guards / police.
Similarly, if people were invisible, then violent crimes would be harder just because potential victims can hide better, and potential criminals wouldn't know when they are really alone with their target.
Anyway, anonymity doesn't mean invisibility. A better analogy would be wearing a mask. It's true that criminals often choose to wear one, but I'm not sure if bans on masks have been proven to reduce crime.
The capacity for processing microtransactions exists now. And the ever growing discussion around privacy, and profit driven attention trap platforms has added pressure to find a better solution.
What would it look like? Because I don't see the current platforms every adopting microtransactions.
For those of us old enough to remember, there was a time when people created things for fun on the internet. It cost pennies (relatively speaking) to do it, and it still does, and there was no worry that we were being exploited in the process. And there was no expectation that when I visited your web page about the electronics behind purple Beany Babies that you were trying to monetize and data mine the shit out of me.
Plus, the website owners didn't give a shit if they knew who I was or not: if they really cared (and I really cared) I could sign the guestbook.
Some of them eve had ads. Nothing wrong with a banner ad that relates to the content. Nothing at all. But that's not enough. The ad companies want to run javascript to figure out every single data point that they can about me and everything on my home network.
It's not my job to validate a company's business model on the internet. If they need ads or microtransactions to survive and all ads are blocked and no one pays for their content, then they die. End of!
No, I do not want that kind of internet. We used to have a perfectly functional internet without mega-corps wanting to fuck me over constantly. We used to have a perfectly functional internet without SEO spam. We used to have a perfectly functional internet without constant monitoring and having to prove who I was etc.
We can have it again too if we really want it.
Without search, nothing can be found. With it, we still have to crawl things, somehow. Maybe with AI? :)
As for microtransactions, we technically have a way to pay with Bitcoin using Lightning and 402 responses: https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture
And who decides how much that should be? How do you price out the spammers (who have access to stolen funds) without pricing out the hobbyist or the NGO in a low income country?
If you want to use economics to block spam, then require that any newly registered (or newly email-sending) domain put up a cryptocurrency bond before it is allowed to send email. (All existing domains would be grandfathered in, meaning they would have an incentive to adopt this system).
If a domain is found to send too much (DKIM-signed) spam, the bond can be forfeited (slashed or donated to charity), triggered by N-of-M validators agreeing. The validators could be some mix of the biggest email providers, and non-profits like Mozilla and the ISRG. They would also be able to adjust the bond price according to how much spam they still see.
The recipient. Right now I can't stop you from sending me spam if you know my email address. Spam filters work somewhat, but I should be able to say: block everyone except these 100 people on my contact list or transactional emails I have opted into. Everyone else needs to pay me $0.50 before the subject line even hits my inbox. And maybe I can even set up tiers for times of the day or days of the week, or charge more on days when I get a lot of email.
It's worth pointing out, though, that having per-recipient prices would require a change to the protocols to allow the sender to know in advance how much it will cost for them to have their email delivered (and thus whether it is worth them writing the email in the first place), which breaks the "store and forward" architecture of email.
If we're going to break the architecture of email like that, in a backwards incompatible way, we might as well just switch everyone over to Matrix, or try some other protocol changes which are just as invasive but don't have the extra complication of money changing hands.
For example, recipients could indicate to a prospective sender whether they are on their spam whitelist or not, and if not, they could indicate what sort of email they would accept, such as "20 UTF-8 characters only", which is enough to receive a password reset code or friend request but not enough to explain why a Nigerian prince needs your help.
Not necessarily...people are already writing emails on spec because there is no guarantee that I will read it. It's just that they send it to thousands of people hoping that the fraction who read it will make it worth the time spent writing the email.
Without changing the architecture of email you could reject emails (e.g. 550: rejected, unsolicited emails require $0.50 payment). Or you could passively ignore emails that don't meet criteria (you could piggyback on the read receipt functionality to provide confirmation).
All of this is backwards compatible with existing email
Search engines funded by advertising seem to me to be a rare example of online advertising working for all parties. What makes you say it’s oxymoronic?
My understanding is that adding micropayments to every click online would greatly reduce how much people used the internet (because they have to work out how much each click would cost, and whether it would be worth it). This does not automatically seem a win.
And people still do stuff for free. There was never times in out history you could literally amass so much knowledge for free. Are you disturbed by ads? Go amd download wikipedia mirror. Thats just being rude.
Some people some times spend a lot of time on providing. Its just just that the can drop a banner or two.
ppl who want everything for free, free, free are just lazy/unfair. Especially if they dont give back for free themselves. Think about time and effort others put to provide you with content.
Dont like it? Instead of doing google or other search engine go and buy yourself a library or two. And then spend hours looking up toc's. Ohh you say you cant afford it? Ups, then do strike and never google anything again.
Once people realized PageRank existed, the algorithmic arms race destroyed any semblance of user friendliness remaining on the Web, and severely detracted from actually useful communication of information.
We've got a semantic split of the Web, one for for comms, one for mercantilism, one for info prop, content hosting and streaming, the surveillance web.. but each is indexed in the same bloody index. So your Web to learn is obfuscated by the noise of people trying to sell you on one thing or the other, or places with terrible advice that just try to score ad bux off common how-to queries.
Try searching for the name of an old niche hand tool on the Net when all you've got is a physical description.
Used to be able to do it. In recent years though, I've found success rates have plummeted.
Its not internet's fault that you cannot find something, go and complain to google about their algorithms or even better, go work for them to improve it instead of complaining.
Btw. Pagerank doesnt work since ages and positioning in google is waaay harder than it was some time ago (i wont even say some years ago).
Here you go, someone just posted it in here: https://github.com/opsdisk/yagooglesearch
Maybe spend some of your free time to contribute to this free project given on free internet.
I also grew up at a time where observing actual signal and seeing the difference between "the good stuff" and "marketing woo" didn't even require half of it. I also spend a lot of time sweating how to leave behind a learnable system as good as the one I grew up with and getting frustrated because younger people and other adults can't get consistent replicable results because every damn search provider has more "personalization hooks" or agenda driven weight functions to result display that search queries for the neophyte are many times the length of ones not even a decade or so old; with better results getting hidden under the stuff that someone has a fiscal interest in getting SEO'd to the top.
The Internet does have a problem if we can't rear Internet savvy youth, which face it, the majority of parents can't because they aren't.
And no. The entire practice of SEO basically poisons the well for everyone. Any information under that type of evolutionary pressure is going to become garbage to anyone but someone who is versed in the more arcane aspects of searching, which is not the bloody thing I'm looking to perpetuate, justify or otherwise make more tenable.
So you're left with either curation, building your own search index you never share with any significant number of people or you capitulate to the market and the perverse regulations and perception management from <insert government here> that do nothing but perception manage anyone unaware of what is going on.
We live in a digital world separated from the actually extant one by multiple layers of entrenched players tweaking levers to determine what we do and don't see.
That ain't cool. We can't fix problems no one can see and come to a consensus on.
Maybe ask Khashoggi? Ahh, shit his dead. Or maybe Navalny? Damn, he was sentenced for hard labour and prison because he was aggainst dictator and i believe you wont get visitation.
Or maybe ask reporters and politicians in Poland (my country)? Public tv is already nationalistic and racist propaganda tube and they used Pegasus on opposition during election. Im sure they will love your idea, everyone who says and write everything on the bill, yuppie! Seo spammers can use vpns so lets block them too, just like in mother Russia! Good old heavy hand rule and censorship! Or tell that to basic human and then especially woman rights defenders in Afghanistan, im sure they will appreciate your idea as well!
Lets control everyone because we have problem with seo spam, thats a brilliant solution!
And so selfless, ahhhh, I just miss the words to describe and glorify your outstanding attitude towards freedoms and privacy! I mean you rule, you should be the next president of US and make sure that everything everyone does on internet is in neat and of course fast access database!
Because we know all people and politicians are good and they wont abuse it! Such a humanism, im full of admiration.
But if you make it please let me know. So we can warn people to run and hide before theyre locked away after smearing campagins or simply killed because they speak the truth about dictators!
Because you cant find stuff because of seo spam, i mean... Just grow up and stop being egoist thinking just about your own comfort. Youre not alone on this planet and people have bigger issues than not being able to find old app on internet!
Look, i wont be a dick, here's solution: Use js for webpages extension or write chrome extension and then some javascript that'll let you easily add spammy domains to ban list. Or autodetect certain words or keywords density and then block them. Set search results to 100, then use that js so on everysearch these spammy results are removed from your page.
Want to make it more efficient? Make a server where everyone can add this (u know, like public spam servers blacklists). Then we'll all use it and maybe some smart people will even write machine learning assisted stuff to autoprospose bullshit results. If you know seo you know most spammy site articles are done using spinners and synonyms. That can be detected.
And then we wont need to pay for free internet and risk people lives.
Then why isnt there such an internet? People have been saying this for 20 years, and there is no technological barrier.
To me, there are currently at least three "internets". One I pay for, mostly for work, that includes paid email, cloud storage, and office suite, as well as AWS and other tools.
The second is "the good internet" - things like documentation, open source tools, some kinds of discussion forum, and other community stuff that is there as part of a community and not really because someone has profit as a motive (I know that open source is increasingly being invaded by corporate interests, but anyway for now there is still lots of unencumbered stuff)
And then there is the cesspool that it the attention economy. Outside of rare forays to try and get some information snippet, or check news, I try and stay away.
A pre-streaming television analogy might be HBO et al, PBS, and something like history channel that last time I checked cut to commercial about every 5 minutes and only played low budget reality crap.
Just because there is a bad part doesn't mean that's all there is
Solution - Charge more $$$ for it and it will fix it?
Oxymoron - See above!
Otherwise, getting rid of idiots would fix the internet. But poverty, not winning the genetic lottery, and tyrants cause idiocy. So, it is hard to fix the internet. The rise of Orwellian online surveillance, elite-owned media platforms with dehumanizing censorship, creepy phone verification systems, brainwashing social credit scores, and so forth will cause closed-minded idiocy for most people rather than open-mindedness. This is what happens when cut-throat idiots get involved in monopolizing the internet. So, it is harder to fix the internet now.
Independent journalists are literally getting attacked on the internet for exposing terrifying things that the ruling class is trying to hide with oppressive censorship, banning websites, blood money, etc. It is to silence victims while the ruling class lives in luxury during this COVID pandemic.
Most North Americans, South Americans, Africans, Europeans, and Asians do not have much money nor power. They are more powerless and less rich because of taxes, tax evasions for the ruling class, dumbed down education systems, dehumanizing censorship disguised as political correctness, social credit scores, Orwellian online surveillance, elite-owned media companies, government-tracked devices (like smartphones or Windows 10 computers), abusive international trade policies, occupational licensing, child labor laws, etc. The ruling class has successfully turned most people into dumbed down serfs internationally. They do this by monopolizing the internet for example. They monopolized the internet by making websites prey on people who are not part of the ruling class through anti-adblockers, V.P.N-blockers, geoblocking, dehumanizing censorship disguised as political correctness, and luring idiots into buying things from oligarchical businesses that keep them drowning in impulsive consumerism. Unconventional art, intellectual music, black comedy, investigative journalism, serious debates, and other things have been increasingly replaced by a false sense of security on the internet from this oligarchical monopoly.