> I don’t find the idea of a microtransaction every time someone visits a site to be repugnant at all. It costs me money to send my site to people requesting it. Why shouldn’t I be able to say that my sending it to them is conditional on them compensating me for that cost?
Charging a fee to visit a site, even a very small fee, is a dark path.
First, there is an ethical dilemma built in because you are charging users for an unknown quantity; in order to know what you’re selling visitors will have to buy it from you first. The cost of those initial visits is traditionally a cost of business accepted by the seller.
Let’s frame this with an analogy to a retail store. I business owner accepts the cost of leasing a building, and the cost of staffing it. When you visit the store you make no promise of purchase, and the owner accepts that they have an obligation to demonstrate a value proposition which visitors will accept.
Websites are effectively the same: owners accept the cost of the lease (domain, hosting) and have to provide a value proposition worthy of purchase. If the value proposition isn’t there, the business fails.
You may be thinking now of strip clubs and music venues, where you have to pay a cover charge to enter. This seems analogous to web3, but it has a key difference: you are provided a lot of information before you pay that cover charge. You can see how many people are there, if the place looks clean and well maintained, maybe you can hear the music from outside and you get to decide if the cover is a decent value. Web3 is blind, you get charged a fee before you have any information about what the value is.
Secondly, there is a question about the fairness of charging a secondary fee to use the internet. You are already paying an ISP to access the internet, and web3 wants you to pay a new fee to also simply use the internet.
This may be a trivial question for many people, but what about the impoverished? Poor people exist everywhere, and one of the beautiful parts of the internet is that we find ways to connect even the very poor. Governments and philanthropies around the world find ways to overcome the architectural cost of providing connectivity to even the poorest, and adding yet another burden to them is, to me, unquestionably wrong.
Thirdly, there is the question of what happens to innovation when people have to decide blindly if they want to visit a new site? If I know that clicking a link will have a real cost, will I?
Another beautiful thing about the internet is that it provides a platform to so many to pitch their… whatever. Anyone can put up a site and try their luck on the market without the requirement of loans and staff. This is why network neutrality is so important, we can’t allow the big players to control the flow of traffic and stifle innovation from new faces.
Web3 violates this by making you question the value of a click. Are you going to click on the link from the new guy? Maybe, but maybe not. Without transactional visits the question doesn’t exist.
It may seem simple from your perspective, but charging per visit in the web3 fashion has real sustainability questions we need to address, and crypto bros really want us to just not worry about it.