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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

And this is the real difference between him and Ted Nelson.

Nelson fantasizes about being the media mogul of a publishing empire under his technology. It's ultimately a proprietary format play.

This is the significant difference. I tried to explain it to Ted, personally, in Sausalito about 10 years ago over a lunch, as politely as I could.

You need to blow it open, as much as possible and make it as easy as possible without necessitating others to opt in. Information networks can't be built by an authoritarian conquer and covet strategy.

It's been tried countless times and history has zero successful test cases to study with that strategy. From DIVX to Flexplay, dvd-d to any format war ever, crippleware rent-seeking is a death knell. It will firebomb the most successful thing into oblivion overnight.

I failed to convince him this was the key difference. Ah well.

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What about MP3, MP4, H264 etc? Aren't they good examples of successful formats despite the necessary licensing fees etc?

They're successful mostly because (many) end users ignore patents; at least the ones that don't work at large companies with dedicated legal departments (and targets on their back because they have actual money).

Further, that's why Vorbis, VP9, AV1 etc, show less adoption, even though they're free, for end users the other formats have been baked into hardware that only works with the closed ecosystems and the average guy can ignore the patents and continue to work with that non-free ecosystem.

Those technologies aren't examples of formats succeeding purely on their merits, so much as being established safe paths through a legal minefield.

They're established even in places that don't care about U.S. legal minefields, which seems to prove the parent's point.

Their are private copying levies - essentially blank media has a royalty paid to lobbying groups. Here's the US version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#United_St...

I don't know if this counts though. It's not crippleware or control, it's a pretty modest nominal tax on a physical good (between 2 and 3%) that otherwise already costs money.

You could say the market pivoted away from things covered by the law into the area of the exceptions but that's a little too neoclassical for actual human behavior - I'd need to see significant direct evidence to support the idea that a 2% cost increase was both passed on to the consumer and the consumer made significant purchasing decisions from that price signal delta.

I'm going to guess that in practice, the 2% difference was absorbed in, for example, cheaper packaging, scaled manufacturing, permitting larger margins for QoS failures or by placing on cheaper areas of the distributor's shelf space as opposed to being directly transmitted to the actual consumer price of say $9.80 versus $9.99.

Even if it was directly transmitted, the majority of consumers aren't that discretionary with such small deltas. But this is another topic entirely.

Regardless, that's the only thing I can find that disputes my initial claim.

I was thinking about this as well, but in a more broad sense: Tim was able to execute on his vision so that he get the project going and useful very fast, postponing parts of his original vision (like editing, link and page discoverability ...) for later if necessary.

and it's the same reason why i believe micropayments in general will not be the disruption that many expect. sure some people may actually make an income that way, but many others won't. (just like some people make money through ads and many don't.

I claim it's in practice done.

I know Ted's model here is a giant royalty ponzi scheme where you distribute things in rolling waves of fractional attributions but let's do something he hates and ignore that.

Instead it's people getting paid for content in the digital era.

You have substack, bandcamp, patreon and onlyfans - a similarly spirited but more simplistic version of Ted's system. His steps are just too big.

Glad to have him around though, he's a true gem.

I have a draft book "when brilliance goes awry" about half a dozen or so of these people I knew personally. I abandoned it after about 2 years or so because I couldn't figure out how to say, talk about John Draper in a way that I'd be comfortable with him reading it (I've been off and on acquaintances with him for about 20 years) and also me being as brutally honest as I want to be.

There's also so many brilliant engineers from the homebrew days that never made it out of the shadows like Steve Inness, who sadly took his own life. It's a palpable dynamic that needs documentation from somebody less autistic than myself

I mean hell, I was sitting a few feet away from John Warnock just last month at the University of Utah who talked about Steve Jobs #1 and #2 - a dramatic task of self reflection as an example of someone who came back from the wilderness. The talk is somewhere on youtube, it was run by IEEE for the 50th anniversary. I can't find his talk right now.

substack, bandcamp, patreon and onlyfans

but these are subscriptions, not pay-a-few-cents-per-view where the payment is so small that you should not care. it's like paying per sms. i think except maybe for high earners, people do care and prefer services that don't charge in an uncontrollable way.

pay-per-view for movies works because it contrasts with buying the movie on a dvd or going to the cinema. but the same is not true for reading webpages like news articles (which is the most obvious use for micropayments)

the idea behind micropayments is that everyone out there gets paid for every view they get to their site.

but i really can't see myself paying eg 1ct per webpage view. even if it only adds up to $1 per day thats $30 per month, just for browsing the web.

my fear is that most people will vastly overestimate the value of their content, if they are allowed to decide how much visitors should be paying. we would have to lock the price to 0.1ct in order to make webbrowsing affordable, but at that price you need 1000 viewers per day if you want to get any return for your efforts. you'll need 10-20 times more if you want this to pay your salary.

for most people it's not even worth the trouble.

payments only make sense for specialty content where i am willing to actually pay a premium to get it. which is what we have now. without a general micropayment system.

(btw: your book project does sound very interesting and i hope you may find a way to complete it, but i can see the challenge to talk about the less positive sides of people without being hurtful)

What was his response ?

He disagreed that the difference was materially significant.

You need to be able to believe in a positive vision of constructive property-less mutual-aid Proudhon style anarchy to hop on board.

I'm totally willing to accept this is like <1% of people when it comes to their magnum opus.

But heck, you're never going to achieve exceptional things by behaving like everyone else. Embrace the spectrum.

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