I don't believe the problem lies in any technology. We don't need blockchain, it's not JavaScript minification, it isn't the centralisation of services that are the problem.
It's the business model.
No amount of tech is going to change that. If you want to change the situation, start social media businesses with a different business model.
It's not just social media, and it's not just ads, about which other people responded to you.
The root of the problem - or at least the trunk very close to the root - is Software as a Service. It's the trend of turning software into services. Sure, it's nice for the vendors, and it's nice for corporate clients who can write off responsibility to a third party. But it also makes you no longer in control of your data, and the code that runs on it. The availability of your work becomes completely dependent on business decisions of third parties, which can - and frequently do - disappear suddenly. It's what leads to proliferation of ads, surveillance and growth strategies like dumbing down software to the point of almost complete uselessness.
If technology is meant to be - or at least is capable of being - empowering to individuals, then turning everything into a service is an exact opposite of that.
>It's the trend of turning software into services. [...] But it also makes you no longer in control of your data, and the code that runs on it. The availability of your work becomes completely dependent on business decisions of third parties, which can - and frequently do - disappear suddenly.
Here's a thought experiment I'd like people to ponder: Suppose we had this decentralized hardware utopia where every homeowner had his own web server node ... such as a "FreedomBox"[1][2] or a hypothetical ISP smart router with builtin 16GB RAM and 10 terabytes of disk to hold Sandstorm[3] or whatever self-hosting app stack you can think of.
Even with those favorable conditions, I'd argue we'd still evolve towards Youtube centralization. I'd encourage people to think about why that counterintuitive result eventually happens. (As a hint, Youtube does things that localized technology installed in the home doesn't solve and can't solve.)
>If technology is meant to be [...] empowering to individuals, then turning everything into a service is an exact opposite of that.
To further explore if eventual mass migration from home self-hosted videos to centralized Youtube is inevitable, we have to be open-minded to the idea that thousands of people will conclude that "putting my video on Youtube instead of hosting it on my own server is what empowers me." Why would people think that opposite thought?
> Youtube does things that localized technology installed in the home doesn't solve and can't solve.
Are you talking about search and content discovery? Are you talking about replicating the most popular videos over many servers so that the system can efficiently serve all the demand to watch those videos?
Maybe existing, fully-distributed products don't solve these problems. But it isn't obvious to me that they can't.
Monetization is easily possible, we just need a reliable way to transfer small amounts of money electronically at a low fee. Right now the large credit card players have a stranglehold on digital transactions, we just need something new that makes it not awful to pay someone a few cents online.
Consider that the people watching the videos have repeatedly shown in no uncertain terms (even when given the option and it is made really really easy for them), that they don't want to pay.
Really? I absolutely will not pay 8$ a month to read the occasional NYT article. I will not pay 4$ per episode of TV shows I watch (I have tried this multiple times and it sucks). I would absolutely pay 5 to 25 cents to read an article. I would absolutely pay 1$ per episode. Unfortunately, no one is offering their content at these realistic price points. Nor could they with credit card processors taking 30 cents per transaction. We need a new model that makes costs realistic. I bet a lot of people would pay 1 dollar a month for social media to avoid ads and tracking.
Facebook had revenue of about $40 billion in 2017. Facebook has billions of users, so if every user gave Facebook a dollar a month, that could add up to about as much as they made last year. (I don't think every user would do that, especially the users who live in developing countries and can't afford to spend a dollar, but let's use the best case for the sake of argument.)
What happens when a startup decides to take on Facebook by offering a social network that focuses on protecting user privacy? We would want that startup to succeed, but how could it ever get there by charging a dollar a month? It would start with a small number of users, so the total dollars per month would be small. If Facebook was only charging a dollar, this startup couldn't charge more than that -- a social network that has fewer of your friends on it than Facebook and costs more to use is not a very attractive.
In other words, I think the subscription model would make it difficult for social media startups to succeed.
I think the lock in effect of social networks is orthohonal to monetarisation model. It is difficult for social media startups to succeed regardless of how they (or facebook) make money.
You are wrong. They won't pay to watch an individual video, and they won't pay to watch Latest Gigacorp Product Placement Hour, but they will pay the creators they care about. Many are making a living supported by their audience via Patreon while posting their videos to YouTube. Which is really the worst case apocalyptic scenario for YouTube... Kinda surprised they haven't made more overt moves to try to destroy that setup. Especially given Eric Schmidt's book 'The New Digital Age' and his views that since Google are rich they can and should take direct control of human culture to save the poor from themselves.
At this point it becomes clear to anyone interested in open but connected technologies that respect your privacy is that monetisation itself is the problem.
Where this comes into play with regards to your thought experiment... is how the larger the playing field, the fewer the large players are - they tend to get "concentrated".
Plenty of Facebook alternatives exist... but why go to them? No one uses them. Large chunks of friends/family/acquaintances aren't "there" - they are on Facebook.
Plenty of authors other than Steven King exist... but given a few spaces on shelves at kiosks, who's going to get those spots? You can guarantee King will get one of those few spots...
The majority of activity is going to condense down until a few spots. Why? Because that is where everyone else is. That's where the skilled "creators" are.
The question becomes... how do you make sure those spots are fair, open, balanced, secure, etc.
Data in the hands of a few companies? What happens when they all lean left - politically? What happens when one of them gets hacked? When a "foreign actor" learns how to game that system?
I've thought for the last decade that things will continue to get "worse" before they get "better". How much worse? How can we make it better?
I may be accused of nitpicking here but the Pareto Principle is, although related, distinct from the Pareto family of distributions.
I don't intend to derail the conversation so, rather than typing out an explanation of obscene length, I will refer all interested parties to the following:
> The root of the problem - or at least the trunk very close to the root - is Software as a Service
Once upon a time, to start a certain class of technology company, you needed to buy and provision a small data centre. There is a minimum capital cost associated with that. That cost presents a barrier to entry. Now, one spins up an AWS or Heroku instance.
Harvard economist Edward Glaeser argues the reason cities are more productive is they turn fixed costs into variable costs [1]. (The density allows for the expensive, fixed capital assets to be reliably distributed to variable payers.)
TL; DR It's complicated. Reducing all software as a service to being dis-empowering to individuals ignores the barriers to entry such models tear down.
> If technology is meant to be - or at least is capable of being - empowering to individuals, then turning everything into a service is an exact opposite of that.
What? No. Plenty of new companies are being built off these SaaS providers. Why should a company just starting out build their own infrastructure, host their own CRM, build their own AI models. Companies would move much more slowely if they couldn't rely on these services.
I imagine the point being made might be more along the lines of owning software versus renting it.
If you purchase software that your company relies on, it belongs to you. Regardless if that third-party disappears. You still have use of the software until you can determine if you need to replace it or if it'll still work out for your needs.
Now renting the software as a service is a different matter. If the third-party goes under, well then you have problems. Problems you may have to solve immediately.
As an individual who is trying to build something, a disappearing third-party may not be detrimental if you still have the software at hand. You would not be locked down by that third-party's SaaS.
Renting software as a service has made it possible for people who could _never_ previously have owned the software to own it in perpetuity, and receive product updates throughout the product lifecycle.
Letraset's ColorStudio cost $1,995 (in 1990 money), and Photoshop 1.0 cost around $1,000. And that didn't even buy you the upgrade, which was quite significant when layers were two point0 upgrades away.
Nah, you "own" it only as long as your rented keys are valid - what that means depend on implementation, and can mean anything from "you get to use the latest version for which you paid in perpetuity" (quite rare; notable example: Jetbrains), through "you can use only current software, as long as you pay, with forced upgrades, and only as long as we think it's not yet time to arbitrarily cut you off (and only as long as we're in business)" (the common way), to "software? what software. it's in the cloud, you have no say in anything, it's a service that works only as long as we care to provide it" (becoming the norm).
I suppose it's kind of like renting vs. buying a flat/house - the former is definitely much cheaper on a month-to-month basis, but you're subject to random landlord whims, and ultimately, you're just paying for a service - so when it ends, you're left with nothing.
As an Adobe customer, the software I use has become more “affordable” because it is easier for me to turn up $45 a month for software than the $X000 that it would cost up front. On the other hand, I am paying for software I don’t use, because to get the few programs I need I have to get the “everything” bundle.
My suspicion is that Adobe software is cheaper now because a) it has that new feeling of “affordability” (which could also be done through an instalment plan) and b) demand has gone up more than production costs have, which was already happening before they went SAAS (iirc PS CS6 was hundreds, not thousands).
Not to say that SAAS doesn’t sometimes work out the way you suggest—I don’t know enough to venture an opinion on that—but as an Adobe customer I definitely don’t feel like Creative Cloud is giving me a good deal. It feels like I am getting slowly soaked, according to some careful calculation of just how much adobe can get from me before they push me away entirely. Their CC software manager also gets a lot more cursing from me than it does appreciation.
Maybe my opinion is wrong, but if it is, I think it is a real marketing failure on their part...
The root of the problem is that the Internet does not intrinsically have a concept of genuine identity.
Yes, first amendment rights are preserved in the "real" Internet through anonymous posting. And information gets shared that otherwise would not if identity were revealed.
But that begets spam, fishing, scams, and a number of bad actors that drive people towards walled gardens for communications.
"It's the trend of turning software into services."
I don't see how any western capitalist society couldn't fall into this trend. It's all about making more profits, no different from say buying some land with natural water sources, close it to the public, bottling the water then sell bottles. All perfectly legal and fine, until the day there's no more competition and whoever owns that land raises the prices so that some people cannot afford water anymore. That day ten people dead of thirst or shot by guards while trespassing won't make a difference when a thousand of them still can pay for that water. Still perfectly legal although not fine at all, but capitalism as we know it has no moral limitations. It's not just turning software into service being dangerous, but also what happens next.
And of course the total loss of control of our data. Lawyers using cloud services and social media for exchanging sensitive documents and discussing them may seem crazy, but I've already seen some doing exactly that. Being ignorant about the implications of today's technologies misuse can have disastrous effects.
This part is blatantly wrong. Saas enable on demand consumption and lowers tco by a great deal, i.e. indesign used to be 700$ each release, that now covers you 3 years of subscription and you don’t have to fear obsolescence.
Same with many many other software. Once you factor in obsolescence and upgrade cycles it’s very hard to keep the position of saas being more expensive.
The other point about losing control of your own stack do remain valid.
> It's what leads to proliferation of ads, surveillance and growth strategies like dumbing down software to the point of almost complete uselessness
How did SaaS lead to all these things? Unless you're broadning the definition of SaaS from a revenue model and software deployment strategy to somethibg like "any software that you use that runs on remote servers". But that's the whole point of connecting computers together in a network!
But as a customer, relying on SaSS solutions is so convenient. You can't just preach to people about the long term collective harms caused by SaSS - in game theory terms, the strategy where everyone willingly endures the pain of non-SaSS solutions to avoid collective harms is not a Nash equilibrium
Agreed 1000%. Everyone wants unlimited high quality content that is also free but no ads and conditional privacy and "true" information and ... and ... and ...
The ongoing success of Netflix proves not everybody is a freeloader, and a report from Spotify made the news for their estimate that 2 million people are using ad-block software to get premium without paying for it - the bigger news should really be that they have 150-some million users that aren't cheating the system, and that 70 million people pay money to Spotify.
Everybody wants something for free, but there are some people that recognize things are worth paying for.
As a paying customer, I'm genuinely surprised that adblocking is possible with Spotify considering they control both the servers and the client.
That said, I started on the free plan and have friends who still use it and the ads really aren't intrustive at all - it hardly seems like it would be worth the effort?
Also as a paying premium spotify customer, I can say they still serve up ads, they're just incognito...
1.) I recently had a splash screen for a Hulu partner "free trial" membership. Turns out it's actually a bundle, but I don't want to pay more for Hulu so keep your "ads" out of my premium feed Spotify. Put it in a special offers section where I can peruse at my liesure.
2.) My email is constantly bombarded with ads like "[pick a artist] wants to say 'thanks' with presale tickets". I already get presale with Amex. Again, these ads can be placed in a 'shows near you' section vice shoved in my email face.
> My email is constantly bombarded with ads like "[pick a artist] wants to say 'thanks' with presale tickets". I already get presale with Amex. Again, these ads can be placed in a 'shows near you' section vice shoved in my email face.
Doesn't CAN-SPAM legally require them to have an unsubscribe button on anything like that?
IIRC they do have an unsubscribe button, or some other opt-out method, because I know I clicked it, and I don't receive any of the aforementioned ad emails.
Yes, the visual ads in the Spotify client are no big deal, it's behind other windows most of the time when I'm using it anyway. The interstitial audio ads are pretty bad; annoying, repetitive, and too frequent. But the audio ads still take up less "air time" than ads on Top 40 broadcast radio.
I haven't used an ad blockers for Spotify in a long time (because I'm a premium user when I can afford it), but when I was using one, all it did was mute the ads when they came on.
Not perfect, but it certainly didn't break the mood as much as a randomly placed ad.
I use Spotify web with uBlock. It doesn't mute audio ads, they just aren't there. Not sure how it works.
As a side note, the web app is hidden -- they want you to download the desktop app, from which you can't block ads. The thing is, the desktop app performs even worse than the web app
You can watch uBlock's logger when using the web player to see what it does. AFAIK the blocking rules are imported from EasyList.
However, as far as user experience goes, I don't share your experiences at all – the web player is almost unbelievably bad, with frequently malfunctioning (disabled) player keys, volume slider jumping all over the place and common problems when resuming playback after a while. (Also, the desktop application has more features, including the ability to select multiple tracks to perform an operation on, and naturally the support for media keys.)
You can definitely block ads on desktop Spotify: I did it by modifying my hosts file.
As for your first question, I think when it encounters what should be an audio ad in the queue, it attempts to play it, due to the host file, the ad request gets blocked/sent to a black hole and nothing is returned, so the application presumably assumes that everything was fine and continues on.
May be that's a consequence of poor society I'm living in, but if I learned any lesson about life, it's that most people won't pay a penny if they can get away with it. You won't make a profitable business believing that some people will recognize the need to pay, because they won't.
This is a compelling thought, but the evidence doesn't seem to back it up. What we actually see in the real world seems to be the opposite - people absolutely _will_ pay for things they could get for free so long as it isn't less convenient than not paying.
Given that the act of making a payment is an inconvenience in and of itself, this does suggest it's _harder_ to get people to pay for a service, but the success of things like netflix and spotify is a clear indicator that people really like the "pay a consistent amount of money and get access to whatever" model.
I've heard that in western countries there are people who track torrent users and threaten them with blackmailing letters. So people are afraid to use torrents to download pirated movies. If that's true, it can be a reason of Neflix success: fear, not convenience.
In my country nobody cares about torrents and I don't know anyone who's using Netflix. There are some people, who don't know how to properly use computer, I can imagine that they could pay for something like that, but that's because they have no other choice, not because they like to pay.
I think it's more complicated than that. At least in my (rich, western) country there aren't any actual concequences for that kind of piracy. I believe there is a system in place for sending emails, but not threatening ones, and not ones with any teeth at all.
The bigger factor might be that for a more well off audience, the cost of these services is low enough that it isn't meaningfully more expensive than piracy anyway, and can be much more convenient. `Search -> Stream` is a much smoother workflow than `Search -> Select well seeded torrent -> Initiate download -> Wait -> Play`.
In case you were curious, the Wikimedia Foundation has plenty of money to keep their sites running. Most of their funds are going to other projects, like conferences and "Wikipedia-in-a-box" type stuff. [1] [2]
[2]: Despite linking to "reasons not to donate to Wikipedia," I'd still prefer more sites run like Wikipedia and less sites run like YouTube, and I think you should donate to the Wikimedia Foundation if you're a power user. Do not donate to the Wikimedia Foundation unless you're heavily involved in their wikis, but if you are heavily involved and have the money, you should. Their donors need to hold them accountable, and that's not possible if they're getting tons of money from people who have no idea what's going on behind the scenes.
The idea that something in the commons should be funded by the majority isn't a new one. At this point the debate turns into an argument on tax policy and its peripherals...
I don't think that debate will end until we all create some sort of hive mind AI by networking our brains together.
>it isn't the centralisation of services that are the problem.
I strongly disagree. These giant monopolies on different corners of tech caused by centralization are the very reason we end up having to have these stupid discussions about how everything should work.
All of this crap tied up in walled gardens means we just have to cry on the outside with #DeleteFacebook hash tags and hope stuff changes.
You claim we need to change the business model. I claim the business model is irrelevant if we instead focus on open source and distributed platforms.
I agree... With centralization so pervasive in technology today its harder to carve out sustainable business models.
Google is largely pay to play for search, content creators are having to leverage twitter, instagram, facebook and pinterest to try and deliver traffic so 90% of our business is derrived from creating value for thse social networks and search engines in hopes of return.
It really blows when the majority of your day isn't adding value to the web but trying to play in the perpetual game of fighting for morsels of traffic from the giants.
and as we've seen, those with money can manipulate...
The alternative monetization schemes like Steemit are interesting. Overall, it will lead content that is, on average, better because of monetary rewards/incentives.
The reason why it's so hard to build a different type of business model within the web is because the business model precedes the web - and I'm surprised that this hasn't been mentioned already. The original post blamed the business model over centralization, but the whole reason the internet was built to be centralized was to protect profits in the already existing business model for media distribution.
> You claim we need to change the business model. I claim the business model is irrelevant if we instead focus on open source and distributed platforms.
I think the organizational model is relevant. Would we be having the discussions around the most popular social network selling our data and completely disrespecting user privacy if the most popular social network were a non-profit organization?
I have to think there is some middle ground between publicly traded megacorp and complete decentralization.
I agree with this. Everyone using the internet today can learn SQL and store all of their personal data in their own SQLite database, with blobs pointing to folders in their hard drives. Which sounds impossible, because it is.
The middle ground is instead of a few major players in a given market, we have thousands of players in a market that people can move between easily. Kind of like mastodon, but every node is a different community with different interests. It would be like if we “upgraded” all of the existing forums on the internet today.
So instead of Facebook, we should have 10,000 smaller “social networks” all competing. This sounds like a much better outcome than never trying to compete with Facebook or twitter or google.
How can these large tech companies today serve the interest of every “user”? They can’t.
Decentralization is nice, but you don’t even need it to solve this problem.
I don't really understand what the term "protocol" means in this context or how a protocol can provide the foundations of a social network. Can you elaborate?
Protocol is the thing that makes sure you can get email from anyone, independent of what client they used to send it and what client you used to receive it.
There's technically nothing to prevent sending messages from facebook to twitter etc, those companies just didn't want it to happen so they didn't agree on a way to do it, that is a protocol.
While Facebook and Twitter may not have collaborated on a protocol for distributed social networking, other interested parties have, and they've come up with standards like this:
Whether Facebook and Twitter end up supporting such a standard may well depend on how expansively the European Court of Justice interprets the right to Data Portability that is being introduced by the GDPR:
Certainly when read in the light of existing competition law (not to mention the bad reputation Facebook in particular has right now, nor any cynical political protectionist goals that an EU court might have), it is possible that large near-monopolistic American social media companies may end up being forced to allow automated pushing of user's posts to friends on 3rd party competing websites.
The problem is that it assumes that people in general understand and want to use protocol based services because they are protocol based services. Look at instant messaging as an example of where consumers/users vote routinely to choose features over the foundation of the service. I would love to chat with people on XMPP but I don't know anyone who uses it.
Sure, it means that there would be a set of rules for social platforms to connect with each other, or people to connect to each other. The implementation is open for debate, but the general gist of it is to allow competition by not excluding users that are on different platforms. Blockchain technology for example, is protocol heavy, and different software (wallets etc.) can be created for it without excluding users.
> These giant monopolies on different corners of tech caused by centralization are the very reason we end up having to have these stupid discussions about how everything should work.
NPR basically has a monopoly on public radio, and yet we don't constantly hear about all the evil stuff they're doing. Why? Because they're not being run as a loss leader to sell missiles and landmines or whatever.
Centralization isn't bad as long as the central organization exists to serve the relevant stakeholders in an equitable way.
NPR does not have a monopoly and it's answerable to the member stations so it's not a great example of centralization but I agree that centralization is not inherently bad.
I think you may be using "monopoly" in the colloquial sense of "dominant market share" and not in the more specific sense of "using dominant market share to prevent competition" which is the legal sense.
There is nothing about NPR that discourages other public broadcasters.
(I'm not sure I'd call Google or FB a monopoly by that definition either, despite their market shares.
> and yet we don't constantly hear about all the evil stuff they're doing
Totally agree. It's ads and the attention economy. They thrive on controversy - it's the psychological version of the banner ads in the 90s, but 10,000x more effective.
Is there a study on the (in)effectiveness of online ad campaigns? Is it or is it not a bubble that drives all this ad publisher to the ad platforms instead of buying ads more directly? I don't know the prices but I can bet buying an ad directly from a vlogger is cheaper and more effective than any ad platform out there. Is it really the dumbness of ad publishers that keep this system alive or is it me that I'm really ignorant when it comes to the economy of internet?
It's scale. Finding individual vloggers, making deals and tracking results would be to time consuming to scale up to $1M/day per company. An ad platform is a centralized management and spend system for large groups of individual sites, bloggers, vloggers and apps.
Some medium sized companies will test with an ad platform, find the best performing sites and make deals with them directly.
I haven't seen one of them advertise online. Online adverts are way different than TV adverts. For one the latter costs way more, if I'm not mistaken. And even if that's not the case, still, those companies have so much money that running ads is like a hobby for them. So I'd rather not follow them. Just like Google can get away with killing Reader, they can get away with many things which if a smaller company did would be suicide.
Remember that if you're not in an advertiser's target demographic online, you won't see their ads.
I've seen plenty of McDonald's ads online. Coca-Cola, usually around Christmas and the Super Bowl. P&G? Occasionally, but probably more often than I realize because it has so many brands.
> Remember that if you're not in an advertiser's target demographic online, you won't see their ads.
That's one statement I can not believe. But it might be the case that I have not indeed seen the ads from those companies, maybe because of where I am.
The business model doesn't need to be profitable. Almost every website is unprofitable in itself, and only exist to serve as a person's or company's marketing interface. Websites ARE the ads, because that's their point. The web is a giant marketing device to sell stuff, like your resume or your local plumber or your open-source software project.
The problem is the tech, and in particular, how a person can create a website from scratch, without going through any other gateway company.
Facebook/Twitter/Instagram makes it super easy to post your content online. Ebay makes it easy to sell. You don't need to write any HTML or any other piece of code, or build a server and find hosting or configure AWS. You just post content from an app, and that's it. Any elderly person can do that now.
There really is a huge technological barrier in making the usable - in particular, the entire UX ecosystem of creating content on the web. This difficult UX problem will be a hard limit to expanding creation of the web by the public, and should be a focus on anyone that wants to make the web open.
I would recommend that groups like W3C or WHATWG or hardware vendors like Apple or Cisco develop standards that not only display content, but also entry, storage, and distribution.
Why isn't there a default app, like SMS/MMS messages, on an iPhone that lets you post your own website? Think of all the infrastructure that had to be built to get SMS/MMS messages working... the web needs the same thing. Can you imagine if sending an MMS, you had to write your own software? Or build your own hardware interface?
>Almost every website is unprofitable in itself, and only exist to serve as a person's or company's marketing interface. Websites ARE the ads, because that's their point. The web is a giant marketing device to sell stuff, like your resume or your local plumber or your open-source software project.
This works fine for a business that sells direct on the internet, or a company that advertises themselves there (like my BigCo that has a website so people can learn about it, find people to contact, etc.), etc. It doesn't work so well for a company whose product is intangible, most notably news companies. How is NY Times going to stay in business if they don't make a profit on their website? In this age, people don't really want dead-tree newspapers any more. Also, sites that don't really have a product can't survive by selling stuff. Reddit, HN, etc. are good examples here; how is HN making enough money to operate itself? Basically, it isn't, it's run through goodwill by a VC company (though it might also be a form of advertising in and of itself). Smaller, more specialized discussion forum sites are also like this, probably to a greater extent: unless they're being financed by some sponsor (which is then likely going to advertise on it directly), they need a way to pay for themselves, and that usually means ads.
People want to give away responsibility. That's imo the core problem. So even another business model will either fail (it's not like there aren't hundreds of other social networks out there) or will turn centralized as well.
I've always felt that we need some kind of ubiquitous and low friction micro transactions for small time websites to succeed and to move away from the ad driven model. A niche blog could be successful with a small audience if each of them donates a penny or two to read new stories. That way people are directly supporting content that they find useful, rather than having to create controversy to drive ads and clicks.
The problem with metered schemes is that they inhibit users who feel they are burning money every time they touch a page. It's kind of like having to pay by the megabyte every time you use your phone on the Internet.
What about a general subscription model that gets you access to a wide range of websites? The point is to have a fixed price for consumers so they can read as much as you want. Distributing the money to sites you visit is a backend problem.
That's what the Brave browser is doing: "Set up automatic micro-donations. Brave will automatically divide a monthly donation among the top sites you visit." (brave.com)
The downside is the high entry bar of installing a new browser and setting up a cryptocurrency wallet (payments are made with Basic Attention Tokens).
I would look at implementing this using some sort of SSO (single sign-on) scheme. That gets around the problem of having to install new client software.
One obvious problem with all such schemes is how to prevent actors from gaming the system, e.g., to get free logins for self + a bunch of friends. I
Coase's transaction cost theory of the firm seems to imply that low cost, ubiquitous transactions would lead to a reduction in the size of corporations generally, which might do something to redress the imbalance of power between individuals and corporations as well.
There is (was?) a service that did this. I had it on one of my blogs a few years ago. People could use it to donate as little as a penny, and the donate button appeared on each article.
I was very surprised how generous some people were. 10¢, 20¢, or more. But in the end, even with tens or hundreds of thousands of views, the article that got the most donations still only racked up about eight bucks.
The projects emerging to build a P2P Web bring an additional non-monetary reward system to this, which is that in return for publishing good content, you get readers/viewers who are willing to help offload server costs.
The naive implementation might work by simply reseeding, say, the Wikipedia articles you've already got in your browser cache to whomever is also interested in them.
There are also UI concepts, however, to give you fine control over how much and how long you're willing to help seed. (Like [1].)
The latter might end up being the currency of low-friction microtransactions that actually stands a chance of taking off. The downsides here are that it only helps in offsetting distribution costs, but it's not good for turning a profit (i.e., funding the creator's real life living situation). It might be fruitful to create a more fungible currency on these principles, though.
Absolutely nailed it. Although I'd go further, and say this cuts to the core of human nature, and perhaps speaks to how fundamentally bad actors can lead to a general degradation of behaviour and standards across the board. So much behaviour in business is driven by the feeling that you have to do something because everybody else is, especially in industries that are in a downward spiral already (publishing!).
Technology was supposed to leverage human capacity, and not centralize it. The problem is a technology one in the sense that the paradigm for a different business model have been co-opted, and usurped by authoritarian corporations.
What in fact should have been a "protocol" based system has become a dictated, and law based one. That is to say the internet should have emerged as a means to distribute data by means of certain forms of etiquette, and agreements to communicate, but instead has emerged as means to centralize data where the protocol is obscured and dictated by a third party. To this day it is hilariously obscure, especially for the average person, for p2p communication, and so the driver for the "business model" is in fact the convenience that centralization brings, and the headaches/unreliability of decentralized systems.
The lever is a primitive technology but also an apt descriptor of it. I'm not describing technology, but rather describing the application of it.
>Do you think laws should not be applied to the Internet?
Depends. For now I think it depends on what your opinion on communication between people is. Are the laws to regulate, monitor, enforce, and use coercion to prevent or hinder people from communicating with each other, or to allow the freedom of expression with each other?
In long term, since we are in the infancy of such a tool, I think computers/internet will eventually rein supreme over the old laws.
I argue that blockchain technology enables the development of such a distributed network to succeed with much better odds, as monetary value and network effects are intertwined.
Traditional software products whose success relies on network effects often require enormous sums of money to get up and running, with the promise to somehow extract profit from the users at some point in the future.
Blockchain tech allows those kinds of products to succeed without the implicit agreement that your (as a user) data will be siphoned and monetized however the company sees fit. In fact, the owners of valuable content/contributions can be rewarded fairly.
I think Solid (https://solid.mit.edu/) is a tech that could change that (if only partly). Instead of the social media business holding all of your data and locking you in, you would hold your data and the social media site would serve as a platform to view that data. If you dislike what a particular company is doing, you could easily switch to someone else and not lose out on any of your social connections.
> If you want to change the situation, start social media businesses with a different business model.
There's a question of what kinds of business models are feasible in the current environment.
There's all sorts of business models that would be nice, if they were feasible, but which aren't currently feasible.
So actually, if certain types of business models are desirable, but aren't currently feasible, there's a deeper question of: are there ways we can change the environment the business models need to exist within?
It's brilliant, most people probably won't care about the extra workload as long as it doesn't make their computer "slow down" or get too noisy and it realigns the content providers incentives from "collect more/better data and pack in as many ads as possible" to just "keep people on the site as long as possible".
The cost is also just the price of electricity which, while not totally trivial, is cheap enough for this to work and something people are already paying for.
I found it intriguing enough that I actually let them have a go at it rather than disabling Javascript (my usual response to ad-blocker-blockers). So far it works "as advertised", the only way I notice is through the system monitoring I have on my desktop.
To repost an older comment of mine suggesting a new business model:
Mhh, why not go with a kickstarter style payment scheme? Have a campaign to fund the operating budget, another one to fund feature a and another one to fund feature b. You get user aligned prioritization for free while users are happy to be able to choose their level of support. Can’t believe I haven’t seen this model in action, yet!
I can see small services like SDF.org and Eskimo.com making a comeback. People who want to #deleteFacebook and who have woken up to the problems with FB's business model, but who don't have the tech skills to do it themselves might pay a subscription fee to get access to webmail, Diaspora, Mastodon, Riot, and other services.
One could argue the business model was tailored to prevalent tech when many of the giants emerged. Ads were perhaps a lot easier than data encryption, distribution, and secure payments back then.
There will always be ways to track and identify people. If all else fails, you build your profiles from the stream of keyboard and mouse events the user generates on your website.
Okay, it's maybe a bit cynic, but stuff like this will happen if the web browsers are twisted further to provide the appearance of privacy and security to the user.
I think the Brave Browser and associated Basic Attention Token (BAT) are a step in the right direction. It's hard to escape ad revenue if you want to avoid paywalls, but Brave at least gives users privacy, control, and revenue share.
technically, browsers can break the monetization incentives.
For example, Google found it a wise investment to sponsor an entire browser just to keep referrer header and 3rd party cookie enabled.
If all browsers disabled this (apple already got rid of 3rd party cookies) then the cost to monetize the web as it is being monetized today, would be too high to be effective.
It's more nuanced than that, of course. For example the technological barrier of "our payments infra suck, so credit cards charge a minimum fee" rule out some kinds of micropayment business models (other barriers like UX or cultural attidudes do too), but not models like Spotify's. I would consider a different business model necessary but not sufficient.
It's the business model.
No amount of tech is going to change that. If you want to change the situation, start social media businesses with a different business model.