What would a post-ad-supported web looks like?
Only selling user data without a way to use it to target ads?
Consumer software that isn't free?
Sock puppet marketing run rampant?
It would sure be a different world.
Only selling user data without a way to use it to target ads?
Consumer software that isn't free?
Sock puppet marketing run rampant?
It would sure be a different world.
Probably a lot like the pre-ad-supported web.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857236
I remember talking to a friend who was trying out 21co's "bitcoin" computer and that 402+cryptocurrency payment seemed like something to evolve from that project. It seems to have changed focus a bit since that discussion.
21.co was an obvious scam with near zero sales.
I believe it's two relatively simple servers running the Arc code of HN, and Cloudflare as CDN.
HN does not need much processing power or bandwidth - 5 assets (cacheable+versioned CSS/JS, three tiny gifs) and thanks to gzip usually two-digit KB sizes of content. The only real expense is the manpower needed for moderation.
dang, who would want to do that as their job?
It was possible, even though most people disagreed at the time, to make open source thrive and write the largest, most complete encyclopedia. Stackoverflow filled with answers without pay.
An ad-free world would be ok, people are creative, we can make our own stuff. I, for example, read mostly comment threads, research papers and watch user made videos. We don't need their content and ads at all.
EDIT: Just to be clear, my own opinion is that online advertising is a horrifically ugly, cynical blight on the human experience, which causes huge amounts of unintelligent visual content to be put in front of billions of human brains. But an ad-free future is hugely problematic for the maintenance of a well-informed society, and we have seen where a dumb electorate gets us.
It's very broken though. The whole idea of paying a subscription for a newspaper is outdated -- it's based on the days when the head of household would select a newspaper and have it delivered to the house before breakfast. Most of the time when I'm reading news online I'm wasting time that I would prefer to be using productively, so there's no way I'm going to pay for that. Additionally, there's so much good free material on the internet that there's not enough incentive to pay for it. I think the major newspapers should accept that the days of a single cathedral-like website for their newspaper where devotees will spend hours are gone; if we could pay a small amount effortlessly on a per-article basis, choosing between many different sources, that might make sense.
I'm not sure that a subscription is outdated. It still makes sense for a bunch of editors to make a selection of what is news-worthy in their opinion. Leaving it to algorithms to tailor your newsfeed to your exact tastes risks leading to a feedback loop of reinforcing biases. I like The Economist, once a week, the most important news and a bit more in-depth than most newspapers. Their Espresso app seems interesting, but I haven't tried it yet.
I don't know if you can fund good investigative journalism with micro-payments. Maybe we haven't seen it yet because there is no good system for micro-payments, but maybe the market just isn't there...
My biggest beef with all those newspapers is that they never rethought their product when they went digital. It's just the same content as the print edition, only on a screen. It would be relatively easy to link to sources and more in-depth data supporting the main article, but you hardly ever see that. It's all boiled down to a few simple graphics and tables.
So I think that's where the core Patreon advantage lies; get around 1000 people to give you 1-5$ a month and you're living a middle class lifestyle with some reasonable assurance that next month you're not going to make 1/50th what you made last month. (It isn't perfect, but nothing is. There is not a single person reading this who can guarantee me with mathematical 100% precision that next month they're going to have positive income.)
In fact I'd point out that when it comes down to it, the incentives created by pervasive, automatic micropayments looks almost identical to what we have now. Clickbait, low-effort high-volume articles would rule. There would be fewer trackers, but that would be about it. I like what the Patreon ecosystem puts out waaaay better than that. I think you actually need that bit of detachment between the product and the payment, if you ever want to see a work produced with a thought other than "How many clicks can this exact article get?" Patreon artists are not severed from the need to make sure they stay popular with their base but at least they can go down tangents and be speculative sometimes without it instantly trashing a noticeable portion of their income.
That makes it pretty similar to ad-supported sites now. The difference is, the revenue comes from the user, who is more likely to incentivize good content.
> In fact I'd point out that when it comes down to it, the incentives created by pervasive, automatic micropayments looks almost identical to what we have now.
That's a really good point, and as you mention that's pretty much what we have now. I would think that in a micro-payment based world, where you have to pay a bit to read an article, publishers would gain reputation to protect against this.
If it cost a teeny bit of my own money to look at a buzzfeed quiz, I'd probably stop doing that pretty quickly.
But I do agree that it isn't the best model for all sites, and it would be nice to offer micro-payments along with Patreon-style subscription, for those who know they'll want content from this site a lot. Kind of like how newspapers used to work.
About cryptocurrence, maybe look at steem and steemit.
Maybe something like steemit