You can run your own ingestion algorithms, and one of the things you can do is set up inbound rules that incorporate micro transactions.
We have to build a lot of infrastructure to make this work, but it seems ideal for a world full of agents and autonomous systems acting on our behalf.
And who besides a spammer would pay more than $0 to have their message read by you? If I wrote a blog post about vulnerabilities of blockchains, or how I ran Doom on a pregnancy test, and you don't read it because I'm not paying you, you're losing value, not me. You guarantee an inbox of only spam — but at least you get paid for it.
If someone wants me to ingest something novel from far outside my network, one way to gain reputation might be to pay a microtransaction fee. I'd be free to choose to set that up as a part of my ingestion algorithm. Or maybe my peers do it, and if they "upvote" the content, I see it.
If my peers start acting poorly and sending spam, I can flag disinterest and my algorithm can naturally start deboosting that part of the network.
With such systems-level control, we should be able to build really excellent tooling, optimization, and statistical monitoring.
Also, since all publications are digitally signed, your content wouldn't have to be routed to me through your node at all. You could in fact never connect to the swarm and I could still read your content if you publish it to a peer that has distribution.
Perhaps you could consider toning down the absolutism. This is true in many or most cases, but certainly not all cases. Let's take, for example, video games. I can afford to purchase any game that interests me, and do. However, I often go several months between new game purchases, because I am not aware of any games that interest me that I do not already own. An advertisement for a game does not need to convince me to purchase it over an alternative product, it simply needs to make me aware of its existence and broadly convey what the game is about so that I will know whether it matches my specific game interests closely enough to investigate further.
Particularly in the modern world of hyper-specialised interests, it's quite easy to get into a niche of a hobby where you have found and already purchased all of the things you are aware of. As another example, there are hyper-specific novel genres where there are at most a couple of dozen entries in that genre and you are able to read every single entry in it. You are still interested in that genre, and will likely purchase anything else in it, should you become aware of it. Enter the benevolent advertisement, which makes you aware of its existence in a mutually beneficial way wherein you get more of the content you are interested in consuming and the creator gets money.
I agree that it does not need to do more than inform you - but that doesn't mean it won't do more. Please show me a single advertisement for a game that doesn't use bombastic language, show highly selective graphics, or appeal to a sense of nostalgia. I for one haven't seen one, even ones for the niche indie games I respect the most. Sure, not all commercials are equally deceitful, but they are all meant to be persuasive more than informative.
Still, I think this is such a tiny minority of real advertisment that it's barely worth mentioning. For example, here is a trailer for the original The Binding of Isaac, which (while being an interesting piece of art in itself, which many ads are) is stil clearly not just meant to inform consumers about the game, but instead is meant to sell a certain image of the game that it may or may not invoke in you:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iDFnMfJnI7s
I'd also note that advertisments for artistic products such as games are some of the most ambiguous about the line between informative and persuasive, as the "feel" (atmosphere, tone, persuasive storytelling etc) of the final product is an intrinsic part of its value in a way that is not relevant for, say, produce, or consumer goods. It could be argued, for example, that the Story trailer for Elden Ring captures a real and important part of the appeal of that game, despite it including 0 details about the gameplay, and despite it being entirely original footage and dialog that is not in any way part of the game itself. The same ambiguity doesn't exist about an ad showing the glamorous lifestyle of someone who gets a mobile phone plan from company X, in contrast.
Nice in theory. In practice spammers will plant malware to steal microtransaction money from random people and push paid content down your throat for almost nothing. When you propose a novel model that will fix all the current problems, the first thing you need to think is how a bad actor would exploit it.
If you make everything explicitly transactional, you will be left with only people trying to make a profit.
There are so many heuristics and models you can use to filter.
And this disregards the simple fact that the only people willing to pay to have their words seen are people who are getting more money out of this - i.e. spammers (and yes, advertising in general, including "influencers", is spam in my book).
If you're a real person, then yes, it is valuable to show you things.
Want to know how I'm right? Because fingerprinting browsers and tracking people is how we establish that they are real in the current advertising world. Advertisers pay for that. Thus it has value.
In fact, judging by the Exodus of non-scammers, only scammers will pay to send you their messages—which makes sense, since they're the ones who expect to turn a profit.
Yeah, but I'm not. It's spam. And the people whose messages I do want to see are overwhelmingly not going to pay $20 to show it to me.
This is a system that selects exclusively for advertisements. Nobody would want this.
No one would want this? Again I don't think you understand what I am proposing.
It isn't a a system that selects exclusively for ads. It selects for people you know, then people they know, and so on, and fades out how often posts show up the further away you get. If someone pays more, then more people will see their message in their network as it compensates people for their attention, starting with the people who value their attention the least.
No one would want this? You think people don't want to get paid for their attention? This is essentially what a job is.