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It's tragic that the author's highest desire [is to be able to pay for content].

We already pay for [network connectivity].

Meanwhile, the right answers to the cost of content creation are [a form of social welfare].

Meanwhile, the right answers to the cost of content creation are [a form of communism].

Indeed, those dirty reds and their communist system of... voluntary patronage.

But, then again, maybe you're right on UBI. It has been espoused by known communists like Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman and F.A. von Hayek.

You are correct. I've corrected it to socialism. Its a forced redistribution of wealth. My point is the gaping logical flaw in the original post. How is this the top comment?

Socialism defined as the "forced redistribution of wealth" is a highly revisionist view, and makes little sense. It would retroactively make almost all governments throughout history and in the present be socialist (via land laws and taxation), in addition to most political ideologies, even ones firmly right and capitalist.

In fact, it is completely devoid of meaning. You're going to have to make an actual case, rather than just engage in red-baiting.

I was defining UBI as a forced redistribution of wealth. For your benefit, i've corrected socialism to social welfare.

That is nominally correct, but it's not a "socialist" policy in the slightest. What's interesting about UBI is actually how syncretic it is, being supported by elements coming from all sides of the political compass.

What precisely is the logical flaw? My line of thought was that it's productive to delineate the costs borne by those who wish to create and share digital objects into two categories: costs of designing/making the thing and costs for producing copies.

The latter can easily be defrayed with appropriate network technologies, which is along the lines of the original intent of the Web as a platform for sharing information; the former requires some change in how we fund creative work.

I think it's productive to address them separately, as their relative scales are vastly different for digital objects compared to physical ones. Since the incremental costs of producing additional copies of physical objects are so high, it's easy to absorb design costs into the price paid for each copy, but for digital objects this makes much less sense.

I am advocating a humanitarian system of patronage of the arts, yes. I think it's worthwhile to have faith in the ability of people to self-actualize when their basic needs are met, and I'm hoping we can thereby support creative endeavors of modest scale, like writing articles for the Web. A coercive system like communism has been shown to not work for various reasons, but socialist basic income on top of a relatively free market seems viable.

You are creating a delineation to in order to obfuscate that you want to deprive content creators the option of charging you directly for their work. The unit costs of digital copies are irrelevant when the alternative, patronage, doesn't covering the fixed costs of designing/making. Instead, you want society to bear that cost because ... anything on the internet should be free.

"What precisely is the logical flaw?"

That instead of having the people who are consuming and enjoying the content pay for it, that the entire economic system needs to be overhauled.

I'm not opposed to UBI, but that is clearly not the solution to the problem here, especially because there is no way in hell that UBI will be even close to reality in most nations, let alone the US.

I accidentally liked it. I wanted to press the dislike button. You are right, I can't believe he suggests universal income as a way to solve the ad problem. Absolutely ludicrous. Problem: Content creators struggle to monetize their stuff and people are sick and tired of ads. Solution: Socialism. No, that's not how economy works. Either more valuable content should be created or else some sites will die, it's economic evolution if you want.

Which is not bad – it’s a desirable system for a civilized society.

It is already fucked up situation that I have to pay for a movie, which ends up being complete crap, but with millions spent on ads, and I have no way to get my money back.

As soon as I see random site asking for money before I even see a content, I just close the page and find another with roughly the same content. Just ask nicely and maybe I'll disable adblock or donate if I feel like the content was worth it.

"Just ask nicely and maybe I'll disable adblock or donate if I feel like the content was worth it."

No you won't. You'll think, "Maybe I'll do it tomorrow," or, "You know, I didn't really enjoy it that much," as you go back to the site every day.

Your statement is just like the people who put a rating for one star on an app, and say, "I'll change it after I've used it if I like it," or, "One Star until Feature X is implemented," when Feature X was never promised as part of the app. And then when the change is made, the rating is never changed.

I've disabled adblock on some sites, that are really useful to me, like TV series calendar and donated to some sites that I read often, I bought indie games I liked, but I'm not going to pay to some random blog I accidentally landed from some random link once and never came back again.

Proposed micro transaction model won't make me pay for it anyway. Why someone feels entitled to my money, just because they facerolled their keyboard for a half an hour? Sometimes it feels like authors should actually pay me for reading/installing that pile of garbage they call "content".

"Why someone feels entitled to my money, just because they facerolled their keyboard for a half an hour?"

They're not the ones feeling entitled. You read their content. You used the product of their labor. Isn't the entire basis of Capitalism that you pay for the product of other people's labor?

"Sometimes it feels like authors should actually pay me for reading/installing that pile of garbage they call "content"."

And yet, you're still reading it.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but if your plan for dealing with content creation on the web includes overhauling the economic system of the world, then you may have a mismatch between the size of the problem and the size of the solution.

"Wikipedia-over-IPFS"

Interesting example. I have Wikipedia as a local database on my own secondary storage.

As long as there are mirrors of the data dumps, I only occasionally need an internetwork. (To download data dumps.)

I can't imagine why the right answer to content creation is universal income, but I can certainly recognize a dogmatic statement offered as a conclusion when I see one.

> It's tragic that the author's highest desire for what was envisioned as a global hyperlinked information system is to make it into a more efficient virtual-reality strip mall.

That has basically been the dream of every exec out there since the .com boom.

Cory Doctorow touch on this: https://vimeo.com/10457689

Like code, sometimes you have to make things work before you can do them right.

That's definitely what we're going to have here. Voluntary sponsorship relies on communism which, supposedly, does not work ^TM.

Universal Income would be fantastic but we're not there yet.

We need something in the interim, because conservative values will never allow for a universal income.

"We already pay for every byte of data that moves across the wire"

You're paying for that byte to get from Point A to Point B. You haven't paid for the creation of that byte, though.

"The right answer to the current problem of asymmetry in communication pairings is peer-to-peer content distribution"

Again, that helps with the cost of sending that byte somewhere. It does absolutely nothing for the cost of creating that byte (writing the article, drawing the cartoon, creating the song, etc) in the first place.

"Meanwhile, the right answers to the costs of content creation are universal income and voluntary sponsorship, not DRM, paywalls, and moneyware."

Are they? I mean, why do you feel entitled to read someone's content without paying for it?

> You're paying for that byte to get from Point A to Point B. You haven't paid for the creation of that byte, though.

I don't know why you were downmodded but this is absolutely correct. Just because I bought a car and paid for its gas doesn't mean when I get to the theater, the movie should be free.

Better yet, it's like buying a TV then expecting all the stations, including pay-per-view channels to be free. You bought the TV, not the content that gets displayed on the TV. You can watch the free channels but guess what pays for those free channels? Yep, ads. Ads subsidize (pays for) your free content. That content isn't actually free at all, the ad companies paid for it. And they're allowing you to see it in exchange for seeing their ad.

> Are they? I mean, why do you feel entitled to read someone's content without paying for it?

Amen. Why is everyone suddenly so entitled? Makes my skin crawl to see people so naive about how the world works.

"I don't know why you were downmodded but this is absolutely correct."

Because nobody likes to talk about actually creating things. They feel like everything should be free, because costs of replication are low.