The fact that there is no recourse or viable competition, strikes me as an injustice. Maybe the biggest injustice on the web currently.
Maybe it's time to not let it stand anymore? I know, we're just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make/play video games. But we're the ones who could truly disrupt online advertising and get the web back to how it used to work 20 years ago, where the average person could earn residual income online with a few clicks. Get back to building a positive, thriving future together, instead of whatever all this is.
Of course I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Or how to protect people from exploitation. There's a website that pays you tips for your traffic, it's a synonym for gratuity but for the life of me I can't remember it at the moment. Google and even DuckDuckGo are so SEO'd that I can't find it. Imagine a nonprofit Adwords that paid out near 100% of proceeds in an egalitarian way, instead of using a winner-take-all algorithm that dumps more money than God on people who are already rich. I guess that's just not possible?
> I know, we're just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make/play video games.
I mean, many of the people on this website are the people who work for and enable these very companies in their injustice. The first step is to accept that, if you work for one of these companies, you are the injustice. "But I only work there, I don't make decisions!" people will claim; yet, at the end of the day, they are not only directly enabling these injustices but are very directly benefiting from them! We need to stop talking about these big tech companies as if they are abstract all-powerful gods acting from afar... somewhere, there is a software developer--with a human name--who built this automatic ban system.
At the very least, if you have any friends who work for these companies, and if they aren't actively working from within to make something better--or like... don't have some pretty epic sob story about how they can't get another job and really really need the money for some reason (I'm going to leave this exact line up to the reader, as it is frankly negligible: the vast majority of the people who work at these big tech companies are not hurting for the money and are often part of a whole host of other problems in localized inequality)--it should be made clear to them that you are not OK with their moral tradeoffs.
>somewhere, there is a software developer--with a human name--who built this automatic ban system
They built it because someone in Product or AdTech dreamt it up, sold it to some VP or directory, and got some project + product managers to run with it. That's like blaming irresponsible mining practices on the miners and not the people who are actually deciding to mine in the first place, or even where exactly to mine. Even in those cases, if you try to take some ethical high-road that doesn't maximize profits or serve some VP's ego, you'll likely find yourself relieved of your responsibilities in short order.
Chain of command, but also investor pressure to do everything even remotely legal to maximize profits is more to blame. If devs push back, they get replaced with devs who don't. The money is too lucrative and there are too many qualified people to really have much power to "do the right thing" in most big corps. Sure, you can voice concerns and try to change things, but if the decision is between "do a thing users will hate but will make the company 2% more per year" vs "don't do this thing and hope people will like us more for it"...yeah, they're gonna find someone to get it done.
Chain of command is a weird argument. If you don’t believe in war, then don’t work for a defense contractor. Engineers are a super-powerful enabling force.
In my most recent startup we had many hard days, but I would often say “hey, at least we aren’t designing tactical nukes, we’re helping people get jobs”
Engineers can and should take responsibility for what they work on.
Yes, evil power hungry CEO-types (I’m an eng turned CEO) will work hard and possibly succeed anyway, but that doesn’t mean engineers are absolved of responsibility.
Your proposal seems to me to put socio-economic problems on the back of individuals. Imagine what they would have to do. For every line of code they would have you predict all the socio-economic consequences. I rather think such problems should be solved politically.
At the end of the day we need to pay our bills, take care of our kids, and have something on the side for retirement.
If I don’t implement this system, someone else with less foresight or less alternatives will.
I agree with you for clearly evil stuff. But the system we’re talking about seems in a grey zone.
> For every line of code they would have you predict all the socio-economic consequences
This is like saying for every step you take, you would have to predict if it would kill you or not. This is not how humans generally function. You make simplifying assumptions, such as thinking, "If I go for a walk at night in the jungle, would that kill me or not?" and then take action based on the overall planned trip.
The same logic applies to shon's argument: if you write code for a tactical nuke manufacturer, would that contribute to harm in the world? You can then decide whether to work at that company or not, rather than analyzing if the "int count = 0" you just wrote brings the company closer to its (likely) destructive goals.
OK, so I actually happen to be an elected government official, and I additionally have spent a lot of my time working on attempts at getting legislative relief from DRM. And, you know what kind of sucks? At the end of the day, democracies reduce back down to personal responsibility, as you rely on people to vote, lobby, and even donate.
So like, here's the question: if we are going to give the people we know at Google a pass for their injustice because "don't hate the player, hate the game"... are we also going to give them a pass when they don't get involved in the attempt to get the laws changed against Google?
Most of the people I've known who work for Google seem to like Google, in no small part because of all of those benefits they receive due to all of the injustices they are enabling. Even if they feel a bit bad about what Google is doing, they still refuse to get involved because they claim it will get them in trouble at work... which is just the same problem, just shifted around a bit.
At the end of the day, all we have is "personal responsibility": if you keep shifting the blame for the things that happen in the world to the system and keep waiting for other people to come up with a solution, you've done nothing but become a demonstration for the tragedy of the commons.
Capitalism demands that companies do things that aren't good for consumers in order to maximize profits. Through the lens of game theory, a lot more corporate behavior makes a lot more sense. Until regulation makes it more expensive for a company to do user-hostile things than not, they'll keep making those decisions as rational actors. Developers are a fungible commodity. I'm not saying that change never comes from developers, just that when it does, I've found that it was because it was wrapped in a pitch of how to do something another way to make even MORE profit. So long as a thing is legal, or legal enough (risk of getting caught * negotiated penalty amount vs potential profit), what motivation would they have to not do it?
Alternatively, if you allow a legislative environment where bad behavior is rewarded, then—shocker!—bad behavior will be common.
Most people and companies engaging in bad behavior aren't doing it because they're evil, they're doing it because they don't care about good/evil as much as they care about money. If you just change the rules for how to make money (and not end up in jail), they will change their behavior in an instant.
Changing laws may be difficult, but your proposed solution involves changing the brains of a large number of people. Harder, not easier.
If legislation helps the big players so much, why do they spend so much lobbying against certain legislation? Why do big time CEOs complain about regulation so much, if it's such a boon?
The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Which is why micropayments aren't a thing despite us having had the infrastructure for decades. There's no reason PayPal can't support sub-dollar transactions now, or ever before.
Nick Szabo and I disagree on probably everything else in this world, but we agree on micropayments. Nick's paper is worth a read and does a great job of explaining the issues [1].
tl;dr: around micropayments is that in reality users/customers don't actually want them. They run afoul of our fundamental human behavioral costing model.
The reason ad-supported is so prevalent isn't because it's being forced on us by a shady cabal or anything, it's just the least-worst option we've compromised on.
Consumers do not want a micropayment system built on the same idea of "shopping cart" where you have to click 100 times and enter a bunch of info to may a payment for 30 cents..
That is part of the problem, Visa and mastercard nor the banks want to make an easy friction free micropayment system because their systems are soooo terrible they could not stop the fraud, and they love the $0.30 per translation fee that makes them the bulk of their money.
The systemic issues finance systems prevents anyway from making a viable micropayment system
> That is part of the problem, Visa and mastercard nor the banks want to make an easy friction free micropayment system because their systems are soooo terrible they could not stop the fraud, and they love the $0.30 per translation fee that makes them the bulk of their money.
What on earth gives you the idea their systems are "terrible." They seem to be quite capable and do an excellent job of all the world's commerce. In Europe card networks charge 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit, as required by regulation, so it's clearly not an efficiency thing. Heck an ACH payment costs 1/3 of a cent in volume, and that's going to instant/real-time next year with FedNow. It's been that way for 10 years in the UK, EU, AU with Faster Payments, SEPA and NPP respectively.
However my point is that you just need a stored balance wallet, like Cash App, Venmo or PayPal, and we've had at least one of those for decades.
Literally all a micropayment is, is increment(A) and decrement(B).
There's never been a technical reason that isn't possible with pretty much any dollar amount.
Do you have any reason to believe this is the case? I've seen a pile of dead bodies in the startup space over decades trying to do exactly this and nobody wants it. But every cycle people seem to convince themselves that there are no bodies, and Visa can't process payments, etc etc, and they give it a go. Only to end up in the graveyard with everyone else.
What is it that all these failed startups missed? I'd love to know because intellectually I want micropayments too. I just don't think it's actually something people really want IRL.
The problem isn't the technology, it's the regulatory environment. If you're the payment processor who accepts Visa/Mastercard, the customer can do chargebacks.
Now you have some scummy site that scams a million people and uses your service to accept payments. By the time the scam is uncovered, the scammer has already withdrawn the money or paid it to someone else on your service. Holding the money in escrow for long enough to prevent this will piss off legitimate sellers and some jurisdictions prohibit it. The amount per user was like a dollar but in total it's millions of dollars, so you can't just eat it. But if you don't, the users issue mass chargebacks against your service and you get banned by the credit card companies.
To make it work, transactions for small amounts have to be caveat emptor, but the existing system doesn't allow that.
Then you have the opposite problem - users who make a micropayment to watch your how-to video or whatever, and then two weeks later decide "nah, not gonna pay for that" and cancel it.
Even if it were seamless, I think many people would rather just scroll past some crappy ads vs paying even a few cents to read an article. A monthly sub works better, but the content that I'm actually excited to pay for comes from folks like YouTube creators with Patreons. I don't HAVE to pay, but I like what they do enough to support them, and there are enough folks who feel similarly that they're able to sustain a decent living from it. Of course, this model only works for fairly successful creators, and greedy content companies would still run as many ads as possible even with paid subscriptions, e.g. Hulu / Comcast.
Every model, except paying individually for what you want, has big-picture problems that eventually surface.
Collective subscriptions are terrible. You don't a voice to ask for the things you like. Ads brought us private surveillance, as if we don't have enough with nosy governments.
Even if it were seamless, I think many people would rather just scroll past some crappy ads vs paying even a few cents to read an article
Every time I hear about micropayments is about people trying to sell, not people trying to buy. And most often it's people trying to sell articles and quickly giving up and using ads.
A monthly sub works better, but the content that I'm actually excited to pay for comes from folks like YouTube creators with Patreons.
All of Substack blogs I've seen have a minimum paid option of something like $4/mo and it's all literature or opinion. I want something that's useful for me and needs works and yes, it's more likely to be found on YouTube.
Then you have the opposite problem. Customers are shy about giving out their bank routing info if large transactions aren't reversible. You don't want it withdrawing against the full balance of your bank account.
It has to be something that puts a reasonable amount of the risk on the user, rather than either none or an unlimited amount.
All of those services accept credit cards. Because there would otherwise be too many people unwilling to give up their bank routing number.
What you need is something that has irreversible transactions but also has a monthly total transfer limit and a "routing number" which is unique to the merchant and can be revoked for further transactions at any time. Ideally also something that allows people to make purchases on credit and earn "points" so it's competitive with credit cards.
That way people would actually be willing to use it, instead of having to give a startup with no reputation (or a company with the foul reputation the likes of PayPal) access to their entire bank balance.
> All of those services accept credit cards. Because there would otherwise be too many people unwilling to give up their bank routing number.
That's not actually true, they allow both ACH and debit cards.
But either way it's irrelevant, revocation risk can simply be offset with a fee.
The system doesn't suddenly stop working if you can only pass on 95% of the deposited amount. Or even 90%. Or 80%. If people want it, they'll use it anyways. The thing is they don't.
There are many possible reasons why something doesn't work. You surely know some technology that few people used until a little seemingly inocuous obstacle is removed.
Or maybe they didn't start with the right customers set. I mostly hear about microtransactions related to media, press, blogs... What if the application that can ignite their use is nothing of the sort?
>>What is it that all these failed startups missed?
The United States..... because I can assure you the rates you indicated are no where near what we have here. Card Present transactions are 1.5% + 0.15 cents per transactions Card not present it normally 2x that, ACH takes days and is not a fraction of a cent for the normal person, etc.
Doesn't really matter. You load up a wallet like you do today and have for decades then pay people from that. FedNow unequivocally solves this problem, and I guarantee you, it won't lead to micropayments because payments infrastructure is not now and has never been the blocker.
After all it's also not something people in countries with lower interchange or instant payments want.
I don't disagree with that at all. However, micropayments have come out before, many times, in many different iterations. It never got any traction. Again, I'd love to see a different model of monetizing the web too, I just don't have any reason to believe this is it.
With iPhones, nobody wanted it until they got it, but then they couldn't get enough of it - even though it started out only doing a fraction of what people wanted to use it for.
With micropayments they've had it several times and each time they said "no thank you please."
I 100% agree that customers have nothing against micro payments. I don't think the reason we don't typically encounter them is banks having bad systems.
In my mind, the issue is trust.
If I pay for something on the web, I need to trust I'll receive what was promised. How can I?
Micro payments have no room for refunds.
Without any system to refund bad purchases, fraudulent actors will run wild.
By their nature, small transfers don't produce large value, of their small value is offset by relatively larger chance of being scammed, what's the point?
No one is going to pay for a random website. Even if you visit that sites daily it's a hard sell.
With the inflation people don't have money laying around to spend on non-essential things.
You seem to be head through wall determined that it's just matter of accessibility. It's not.
Ads are ok. 1 company dominating the ad scene is what's wrong.
There should be an open alternative to Adsense. Without shady dealings. A public ad marketplace that keeps 1%, which should be enough to pay for the cost of running it and maintaining it. A non-profit.
> The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day.
Indeed. I wonder if something like Brave's idea of just creating a pot of money per month, and then paying that out is workable. As a user I'd love to throw $10 into my pot and not have to worry about cost exceeding that and not having to see ads. The network effect is a beast though. You need participation before you can get participation.
The collective value of your View/Clicks is far higher than $10 to advertizers per month. Most people wouldn't pay that amount.
This is just like insurance. Old people are subsidized by young. A rich person's View in the developed country is subsidizing Google just being available to a poor person elsewhere.
Don't assume that (a) people are ready to pay the true cost of running a site like Google without ads or (b) that it will even end up being a good thing for humanity overall.
We should just let the market sort it out. If people don’t want to pay as much as a website needs to be run, they should just not use the website, it can go out of business if necessary, and space can be opened up for a more efficient service provider.
I mean we’re basically allowing for an information asymmetry here, right? Which messes with supply and demand. Economists should be pissed.
The juiciest model is to make content that people go nuts for, like sports, then charge $100/mo for access to it, then run ads on top of that, i.e. what Comcast / Hulu do. You want the sports, so you have no choice but to pay what they demand and watch all the awful ads. They won't sell the rights to anyone because it's such a cash cow, and they know they don't even need to offer an ad-free experience, because the whole thing is just a gimmick to shove ads and marketing down throats in the first place.
Also why scammers in poor countries are so dedicated; they can make many times what they would from working a legit job just by scamming your grandparents over the internet. They might only need a few successes per month to make it worth the time.
Google actually used to offer this. I forget what it was called, but you put money in your account and it would big against other AdSense ads for display on websites. I think I remember being able to replace the ads with cat photos or whatever photos you wanted.
This would be really interesting in combination with some zero knowledge proofs, so you can allocate your subscription fees to sites without the payment processor (or the site) knowing who you in particular are patronizing.
zcash's shielded pool is probably the closest to a solution for that that exists today, and at the very least a bunch of the cryptography/math/overall model should be re-usable in a more traditional setup.
(I remain basically a crypto skeptic but zcash appear to at least be -attempting- something focused and interesting enough for me to continue to pay vague attention)
That's explored in section 5.1 of the Szabo paper.
tl;dr: you basically have to cap how much the sites can charge to avoid the pot getting drained by a bad actor, but that just creates an incentive for every site to charge the maximum - why wouldn't they? There's no human deciding after all. So then you're basically deferring to, and trusting, a central actor to set the price for all this content. Then premium content makers have to demand a higher price to make the economics work, which in turn, means everyone sets their prices to the new upper tier.
That has its own serious implications, and comes with much of the same hazard as Google has today, IMO. By eliminating the agency in making that purchasing decision you eliminate much of the benefit of a market for content.
So you need to give the site a reason not to charge the maximum.
Suppose the user can choose their monthly fee, but so can the site. Anyone paying $5/month can use any of the cheapest sites. Some sites require you to be paying $50/month. The sites that require a higher monthly fee get paid more per user, but they also lose out on any money at all from users paying less than that (because they don't have access).
Mass market sites will choose low rates and make it up on volume. Specialized sites with premium content can choose higher rates and still get paid with a smaller number of users.
But the user is still not getting nickle and dimed, because if you're paying $50/month, you get all the $50/month tier content.
This sounds reminiscent of the Kindle Unlimited model, and author opinions as to its usefulness to them are ... varied.
Then again my brain keeps generating what it's convinced are fairer ways to do it ... and all of them so far also introduce sufficient additional friction for the user that they'd be dead on arrival.
Why would micropayments require users to make "a hundred purchasing decisions per day"?
One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream.
The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built.
> One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream.
Sure, maybe. But different content producers are going to demand different pricing tiers. HBO isn't going to stream The Last of Us for the same per-second rate as a YouTube game streamer. Now if the "wallet software does the rest" and you have variable pricing, why wouldn't every content producer pick the top pricing tier? Without explicit decision making you lose the pricing signal.
Ditto The New York Times and BuzzFeed.
Suddenly your ecosystem fractures into a million pieces like Netflix did.
> The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built.
I suspect that's got a lot to do with Nick's motivations in publishing this, yes, but I think it's still correct regardless.
> The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day.
I wouldn't want to help hundreds of sites I visit every day to track me (with the payment system help). I have no doubts they will sell this info for some additional cents.
It's not fear of lack of privacy. It just feels not fair that if I pay them, they will instantly get more money from advertisers.
And I will just get more ads. Better targeted ones.
you do understand to do targeted ads they have to track you, and google is already buying all of your transactions from your banks, and credit card companies and matching that to your online profile
I would think it would work better in some kind of system like how I believe Youtube Premium works.
You pay $10/mth, and then that $10 gets split into $1 overhead and $9 allocated to the sites you tip/visit/use during the month.
So you visit 100 sites, each site gets $0.09, you visit 10 sites, each site gets $0.90 and if somehow you only visit 1 site, it gets $9 from you.
So you're not paying hundreds of dollars a month without realising, you don't need to go through payment processing for every site it's just invisible.
It could probably be tracked the same way ads are, so instead of an advertisement the section is removed (or the first ad block in the page is replaced with "thanks for the tip" and the rest are just removed).
So technically you're not paying the site, you're paying for "ad-free browsing" on those sites.
You also have URL shortening services that could trick users into visiting a page that is charging per page view. Unless there were a way to authorize the payment, the system could be abused. Then we're back to managing 100 clicks per day.
Charging per page view would only work for pre-approved sites and have many of the downsides as ads, not sure I like that idea at all. Also micro-transactaions are not necessarily about payments like we are used to them now, but could completely transform how donations worked.
And also paying after the fact, did you like the content? Pay. Not have to wade through ads "paying" for something that turns out was only clickbait, tracking and garbage.
Maybe also the legal framework does not exist (yet). Doing a payment, no matter how small, may require to first accept some legal terms - depending on jurisdiction.
If we weren’t beholden to payment processors, we as users could simply set our browsers to pay $0.001 or $0.000001 for every website we visit with an additional button for “give this site more right now” or “send $ every month“
That would be transparent, cheap, and sustainable.
But the vast majority of people don't want that! If there was a cost every time you visited a website, however small, there would be a constant mental load of evaluating whether each click was worth it. It would be a huge drag on the best aspect of the web.
Not to mention that coordinating it internationally would be next to impossible. Sure, you could add it as an optional feature, and a tiny percentage of people would use it, but it wouldn't make any material difference to websites' bottom lines.
Every time you turn a light switch on or use an appliance, you are being charged for the electricity used to run it; this cost is extremely difficult to track, is different for every device you own, and adds up such that at the end of the month the cost is non-negligible (at least to the point where you probably are paying more on utilities every month than streaming media services)... and yet, while people, in the abstract, care somewhat about reducing their usage of such things like water and electricity (and thereby put in at least a bit of effort to prevent the most egregious of wasted costs), almost no one is crippled by the "mental load of evaluating whether each" time they flip a switch or turn on a faucet is "worth it". It is kind of ludicrous that this argument against micropayments somehow holds as much traction with people as it does when essentially all people experience not only experience the obvious counter-example so often as to be nearly every waking minute of every day, it makes up a significant fraction of their overall expenses.
That's a good point. Obvious in retrospect, but I hadn't considered it. So clearly "micropayments" can work in some situations. That said, I still think when people are used to something being completely free, it will be difficult for them to adjust to paying for it; I do still expect it would add stress for a lot of people in the web context.
I believe if the incremental cost is small, the mental load would mostly fade into the background, just as I am aware that there is a cost every time I turn on the lights or the faucet, but it doesn't have a large impact on my usage except that I remember to turn off the lights when I leave a room and don't leave the faucet running when I soap up the dishes.
(I guess the advertising industry, including Google, lobbied hard against a potential competitor, especially already at the time owned by an adblock company?)
Heck, already Flattr 1.0 did that with its Flattr buttons on websites, but it got pretty much killed off by the 2013 Twitter APIpocalypse...
given the context of this article, if you ever get the chance to study the economics of private torrent trackers, i think you’d find it interesting.
every private tracker ends up with an economy of some sort: users have to upload so many bytes if they want to continue downloading bytes; certain content might be gated to users who have only uploaded so many bytes… but there’s always a way to get those credits without actually uploading bytes: submitting new torrents, reviewing new torrents, seeding inactive torrents to keep that content alive, etc.
naturally, many trackers frequently run donation drives. you can be sure the hosting costs for most trackers isn’t really $50,000/year. yet any successful tracker can bring more than that in via “donations”. the trick, of course, is that these “donations” serve to tie the internal economy to the global economy: you can expect to get some form of upload credits in exchange for your donation.
but the point here is that this is exactly your micropayment ecosystem: only it’s seamless enough (and at certain key points obscured by plausible cover stories) that casual users might not comprehend that they’re making micropayments every time they download a file.
> The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day.
Sure, that's why there should be a model like Flattr, but automated: you pay a flat subscription, say 5 or 10$ a month, and that is divided by services/content you use, weighted by time spent.
Upvotes and downvotes have zero real-world stakes.
Imagine if your upvote button was wired directly into your wallet and extracted some amount of money with every press.
Even if you control the amount, even if it is fractional cents per upvote, you now have to figure out how much it is costing you in real world dollars to upvote people each day/week/month whatever.
Also "I liked this" is different from "This is worth $value to me"
> Imagine if your upvote button was wired directly into your wallet and extracted some amount of money with every press.
Every press? Nobody has ever proposed that. All I want is a button in my browser (not on websites) that I can configure ahead of time. Perhaps I'd set it to $0.10. Then, when (and only when) I want, I can click on that button, knowing it will attempt to send $0.10 to the website I'm currently viewing, if that website has set up the ability to receive money in this way.
Maybe I won't click it for a week, but then click it ten times on one article (or website) to send a dollar to that site.
I was just using it as an example to illustrate why a micropayment button press is a different and more difficult decision than an upvote, because you asked why those decisions were different.
If you would not use them interchangeably, then of course they are different.
If I remember correctly from reading those who tried, the problem with 'viable micropayments' is compliance. If you cut on it and make transactions cheap, your service will be heavily abused for fraud and laundering. Preventing that makes transactions cost nearly as much as traditional card payments, thus not viable.
I disagree. Ads are fine as long as they're actually just passive ads. Sometimes they even show me things I want to buy! It's the surveillance and general impunity around responsibility with people's data that is problematic.
IIRC the problem was is that their network wasn't universal. While it works on some ads on some websites, there were still non-Google ads that it didn't work on.
The fact there is none is because humans are inherently heuristic and ads are the non invasive answer to being around and letting business models happen as any manual micro payments just wouldn't happen. What's our closest buy me a cup of coffee? And that's niche and really only adopted by those who have thought about this problem.
Wikipedia for example gets generous donations from all kinds of people. So paying freely for beneficial services is also known in non nerd circles. Micropayments would really help, spread that to smaller projects/sites, that cannot afford to also build a foundation structure.
> The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads.
A better candidate for "biggest injustice" would probably be the RIAA/MPA and the copyright laws they paid for and continue to abuse for profit and control. It sounds like that was even what actually finally made this torrent site more trouble than it was worth (assuming that's why his site was null-routed by the host).
It threatens every single user, no matter if they deal in copyrighted material or make money doing so or not. The industry continues to push and push for more power and control over what we're allowed to see and hear.
They already have the power to force ISPs to kick people offline and never provide service for them again over nothing but unproven accusations that never see a courtroom.
They want the ability to force ISPs to block any website at any time within minutes - again because of unproven claims. They already have this ability in several countries around the globe, and until recently all of their attempts to enforce this in the US have failed. (https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/who-needs-sopa-judge-ord...) but while they haven't been fully successful in the US yet, they keep trying.
They want the semi-anonymous access to the internet we have via VPNs and TOR eliminated
They want to eliminate or restrict any devices, technologies, components, and services that might facilitate the circumvention of DRM or allow the copying of content including things like youtube-dl, debuggers, and decompilers along with any site offering them or even just instruction on how to bypass DRM.
They want to force website operators to automatically filter uploads and remove content at their request.
They want to make streaming copyrighted material (like a song or video game) a felony punishable with imprisonment and they want some acts of piracy to carry life imprisonment as well as harsh criminal penalties for "attempted copyright infringement"
They want increased use of wiretaps and police resources for piracy investigations.
They've argued that ISPs offering faster internet speeds makes them liable for severe penalties under copyright law since it encourages pirates to use their service to commit infringements.
They have spent millions every year on lobbying. They have judges and lawmakers in their pocket. They've had their lawyers installed throughout the US justice department and they chip away every year at our freedom. There's basically no push back against them from anyone other than ISPs which have been losing in courts badly, and a handful of people on the internet who are even aware all of this has been going on and escalating.
Well no. Micropayments imply you pay authors. Adsense and other platforms do not require that. Apples and oranges, fyi.
Micropayments are suffering because most folks aren't willing to pay for content. Paywalls have shown that depending on the few is a viable strategy.
You say that an ad supported web needs to die, but I will point out that such a move would even kill Wikipedia, as they rely on their ad-driven donations to keep them alive.
The amount of just totally irrelevant ads we get these days blows my mind, like never before in history have we had this much info about consumers, and yet Hulu chooses to run pharma ads for us all day for conditions that no one we know of have. That, combined with all the ridiculous mobile ads plus complicated cookie BS on the mobile web make it almost unreadable even with aggressive pihole on our network plus adblockers on every device. I don't mind paying for content, but publishers still find ways to punish anyone trying to get any kind of a deal, e.g. Apple News+ subscriptions don't work to log in to actual sites, so you can ONLY read most of those via the Apple News app which of course doesn't allow commenting, and doesn't integrate with my feed reader or browser in a way that lets me actually view articles I come across on those publications via other means, so I must find the name + publication of an article, switch to Apple News, try to browse to find that, and usually by that point I just stop caring and go do something else. Another workaround for places like Rolling Stone is to just switch to private browsing and use the however many "free" article views per month...again as someone who technically does pay for access to this content via Apple News+. I feel like I'm slowly arriving at the conclusion that any in-app browsers should be considered harmful on mobile due to the integration and UX headaches they pose. What's so bad about opening the system browser instead of your app's awful skin on top of mobile Safari, with a window that takes up most of the screen but doesn't have all the features of the normal system browser and might close at any point for $reasons....
Is this really the best we can do in 2023, after investing trillions in ad tech over the decades?
> The amount of just totally irrelevant ads we get these days blows my mind,
> even with aggressive pihole on our network plus adblockers on every device.
Please don't take this as snark but these two statements are not uncorrelated. You're basically saying, "don't send targeted ads" and you're getting what you asked for.
I've put out some feelers for an alternate ad network that I think could do some good, and one of the first traps I ran into is that incentives are not there for the ad network to show us relevant ads. They only care about what the advertiser is willing to pay - Hulu probably COULD show you ads relevant to your life, but the irrelevant pharmaceutical ads pay them more.
I don't know how we get around this. My idea involved an adblocker that tries to let through ads that align with the consumer's long-term goals, with the consumer having the ability to update their preferences in real time, but that's pretty close to facebook's ad model and that's still crap.
So many thoughtful replies, thank you all! After reading them, it sounds like we currently lack a way of paying into an internet commons where funds get distributed to the sites we visit most. Something like a water utility, where its very existence is priceless, but we don't have to think about it each time we turn on the tap, because the unit price of rinsing dishes is almost too cheap to meter. Cryptocurrency has potential to power something like that, but concerns around privacy and having too much money pulled from bank accounts have not been entirely addressed yet.
To flip this on its head, some suggested that we're only looking at internet ads from the supply side. Looking at the demand side might show that people want to actively pay to support websites they enjoy. Especially if that suppresses ads where it's implemented. But there's currently no mainstream way to donate perhaps $5-30 per month to provide a kind of internet universal basic income with zero fees.
Off the top of my head, one of the most popular recipients might be something like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to lobby against dystopian legislation from the RIAA/MPAA, for example. The first legislation to target might be to ban bans and enforce transparency, so that all customers have a guaranteed right to dispute any ban and be restored within say 2 weeks, or be refunded any proceeds from before their account was suspended. Which might get ad companies to do their jobs and stop fraud internally, as well as cultivate competitors who advertize a lower ban rate.
Some good starting points:
Patreon
ACH
FedNow
Faster Payments
SEPA
NPP
Cash App
Google Contributor
Brave Rewards
Zcash's shielded pool
Flattr
Kindle Unlimited
Youtube Premium
Venmo
PayPal
Tell everyone you know about Firefox, uBlock Origin, and SponsorBlock. Get them to install and use it. Work an IT job? Push ad blockers out to any customers who don't outright refuse 'em.
If everybody blocks the ads, advertisers will run them elsewhere and we'll get the Internet back. We might see some collateral damage, like ads embedded into works themselves, but this is easy enough to remedy with SponsorBlock and its ilk.
Adsense had become an abomination.
I have 400GB of content that made over 300k € . After the main domain went offline, now 3 years later I'm putting it back up, they denied everything validation of the new domain.
for laughs i tried to recruit people to make a FOSS banner rotator (or actually multiple formats of it) I imagined it funny to plaster website with advertisements pointing at actually good and free things. I made some banners but this takes time and using names and logos without permission makes it hard to make funny things however noble the effort.
Thankfully no one was interested, more like the opposite. The FOSS community is full of people who passionately hate promotion. If they see it on the horizon they explode in rage.
Meanwhile I cant find things I know must exist and no one knows what I've made. There has to be an answer to the riddle but it takes better men than me.
Maybe it's time to not let it stand anymore? I know, we're just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make/play video games. But we're the ones who could truly disrupt online advertising and get the web back to how it used to work 20 years ago, where the average person could earn residual income online with a few clicks. Get back to building a positive, thriving future together, instead of whatever all this is.
Of course I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Or how to protect people from exploitation. There's a website that pays you tips for your traffic, it's a synonym for gratuity but for the life of me I can't remember it at the moment. Google and even DuckDuckGo are so SEO'd that I can't find it. Imagine a nonprofit Adwords that paid out near 100% of proceeds in an egalitarian way, instead of using a winner-take-all algorithm that dumps more money than God on people who are already rich. I guess that's just not possible?