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Comment by occultist_throw | Hacker News Reader

Long and short of it, it's a form of bidirectional links (so if you update one side, the other side automatically updates). This prevents link-rot.

The second is putting a payment processor on EVERY query. You want Internet for the Richies- this is how you get it. Of course, there's hand-wavey garbage that says 'everyone would contribute and nobody would owe anyone anything'.

Seriously, IPFS is the best way forward here. Links never change its content (but can still die if noone has the content). And no payment processor is there unless you want to pay other people to pin (read: seed) content.

(To see this post, please pay $0.02)

Edit: Seriously? multiple -1's in a row? I'd love to hear rebuttals if I'm wrong, or a further discussion. If you've read the Xanadu documents, then you'd know that the basis of this is a "Secure Environment and Secure Identification" of computers. AKA: DRM.

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> Internet for the Richies

Isn't that what we effectively have, with so much of the Internet's value either locked in Facebook's garden or beholden to Google?

I understand where you're coming from with the DRM criticism, but IMO the primary fault in Xanadu's version is that it's an attempt at naïve mom&pop capitalism in a digital world that already is owned by plutocrats wealthy and powerful beyond Rockefellers' dreams.

> Isn't that what we effectively have, with so much of the Internet's value either locked in Facebook's garden or beholden to Google?

No, because you can download the entirety of Wikipedia, including its edit history and discussion.

Also, you can download a not insignificant number of primary sources through both sci-hub and various other sources like Project Gutenberg, IMSLP, etc.

Add to that all the things that swell to prominence on Bittorrent trackers whenever the Streisand effect is in play.

I have a hard time seeing that content disappearing any time soon. But I also have a hard time seeing how that content would have been aggregated in the first place if you had little micropayment barriers between all the things.

When I was much younger and more naive about how the US and capitalism works, I thought that it would be a splendid idea to be able to make money on my thoughts, experiments, and doings. And I thought that it too would be a great idea to be able to leverage others' works, pay them, and build on them.

And now, I do just that. Except there's no money changing hands. That's open source for you. Now, if Xanadu's ideas did come to fruition, then I would expect everything to have a paywall on it. And the worst/regular experience would be pages of pages of aggregate sentences, with each few words being a cent or 2. The pages themselves would be >$1 each to download. Instead of trying to trick browsers and people into spyware - it would be tricking people into automatic slow-reloading links that would cost a few cents... And would continuously reload treating unsuspecting users like a piggy bank.

Instead, the world we have is free by default. Only if something is deemed to cost a lot is there a paywall. Things under that threshold use advertising, which is slowly beginning to fail at the seams. That's because content is expensive, but copying isnt.

(BTW, my points on the main post are still yoyo-ing around 0 and 1. I wish people would respond rather than try to hide my commentary.)

Regarding payment processing etc -- the Xanadu proposal dates from the mid-20th century so it includes a quaint assumption from that era: people expect to be paid for the work they do. What, people are supposed to spend hours typing at a computer for no payment in order to make some billionaire even richer? Who would do that? It's nuts.

No, it's because the rest of us trying to monetize content would be drowned out by the advertisers and scammers and such.

Yeah, we'd make our fistful of dollar bills, and simultaneously owing 5 to 10x that.

At least for the most part, getting hit with malware just means bitcoin miners, DDoS, adverts, or the like. If we were in Xanadu-Universe, then malware would be real cash.

It saddens me that W3C approved a DRM standard for the web recently.

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