Or is it? I have tried learning as much as i can on this topic ever since i read Jaron Lanier’s work.
So after about a year of thinking about the idea, i decided that payable content is the way forward. Jaron Lanier kinda persuaded me towards this idea of a payable internet as more viable than the free content, open for all libertarian version of the internet that i previously believed in. It just makes sense to me now, especially seeing what internet has become today.
So what i expect to see in the future is real pricing information for content. — all content, like twitter and google.
We will begin to see a radical difference between content that is free vs. payable content.
I would argue that: Content that is free tends to encourage spam. I mean have you seen twitter recently? Every comment on just about anything is spammed with anonymous hate spam. In the future this troll behavior will be disincentivized, because you will have to pay a micro fee in order to post a comment on an article, and secondly, you will be able to receive micropayments for the ‘upvotes’ that you receive on your comment, but if your comment is hateful, then nobody will upvote it (or actually in today’s internet they will)
Trolls will have to ‘Pay 2 Hate’.
What i’m talking about is fixing the broken internet we have today. Now that sounds like noble work to me. Let me pull a non-marketing savvy way of saying this:
To save today’s broken internet, i have to convince you that it’s a good idea that you pay for every single google search that you are now doing free of charge.
It’s not a lot, mind you. Maybe fractions of a cent per page search. The idea in economics that i won’t go too deeply in is that indeed everything is payable in some way, even if it seems free at first sight. I know many people will look at me with derision if i suggest people should pay per search. But what they don’t see is the underlying mechanism of add driven revenue which is degrading the quality and diversity of online content.
In today’s broken internet, we literally have search engines which for a search of say, Trump, yields the result: ‘Is evil’.
It’s all fine and good since you already hate Trump. But how about a search result of Veganism /is unhealthy/ (first 15 articles on the result Vegan….)
Or search ‘Islam’ /Is the most peaceful religion out there/
Then you dig deep and you find for instance (and this is a very plausible scenario) that google is wedded to the big meat and dairy industry, and that all they want is anti-vegan articles on the first page of google search ‘Vegan’.
This is mental, off course. I know what you might say: ‘We have Opera, and Brave, and DuckDuckGo’
The problem of free content is still there. Free is in bed with ‘spam’. There is no real way of qualitative distinction of internet content, unless we make things inherently valued. It’s an argument at least.
Another scenario. Say i have to pay you a micro amount of bitcoin in order to send you a message. So then, i can’t be a spammer because i will lose all my money spamming thousands with my business proposition. Instead, if i pay you to reach you, you can be sure that i have something of value, and so you respond to it with more trust.
Oh and this last example is kinda fun… (girls aren’t reading this anyway right?)
Imagine texting a girl on any app. If you have to pay to write her a stupid ‘how you doin’’ … will you do it? And what if you have to reach her paywall? her lowest limit is ten dollars. For that amount, you can send her a message on insta. Oh my, hypergamy in that world will just go out of control! Maybe i need to re-check this whole concept heh, this doesn’t sound too good.
But it’s really good for content creators, because the way i see it, you will automatically pay micro amount of bitcoin AS you watch a video, for instance. Not only that but you will pay per second, and not for the entire video. If you click and watch for 15 seconds and decide it’s not for you, then you only pay 15 seconds, which will cost you fractions of a penny, off course.
I have become convinced that this is the best way forward for the digitized human species. I have seen the ugly side of internet and with censorship it is only getting worse. I believe in the free market idea of payable content distribution. ‘Free stuff’ has many problems. Hey i am the beneficiary of free internet stuff, but i am growing up realizing that free stuff only comes free at a hidden cost.
My biggest interest is in the diversity of information. I am a crusader against the deletion of history. Once there is a ‘one correct narrative of current history’, i get gravely concerned, and cannot imagine my children growing up in such a world.
Let me offer a meaningful example from today’s world. Let’s say that Climate change has been decided on, and those 3–5% of world’s scientists who ‘dissent’ from the general consensus are, for the sake of ‘collective action’, silenced. These 3% of scientists, who are hundreds of highly educated individuals from major universities, are now de platformed, and their papers are not publicly available anymore since all you need to know on the matter is that ‘consensus has been reached by the scientific community’
You get my concern, right? If not climate change, then insert an example you actually agree and care about. Like for instance, we are not allowed to say that keeping puppies in cages until cooked alive in China is reprehensible, because it’s ‘Cultural discrimination’. I mean what kind of example will make people understand that censorship is really, really bad? If there is a bad idea out there, then the only way to silence this idea is to rebut it with a better idea. It’s called civilization. And it is barbarism when you ‘kill’ the opposing idea.
Anyway, payable internet at the protocol layer gets around some of these issues because nobody can censor something that people pay for. Not on Blockchain, at least. Because the information is not free, the government can’t simply say that ‘people were radicalized’ by the information. People chose to pay for the information, and that element of free will can then be respected in a legal sense.
This stuff is really complicated needless to say. We might have a decade or more of ‘internet as a sidechain’ with a parallel internet running on the blockchain in which futuristic minded people will indeed have all that we want from internet. We will support our sources of truth with micro payments, they will be incentivized to produce more truth, and better truth, because if they don’t they lose revenue, while the free version of the internet will continue to degrade in quality while producing sectarian radicals like we see in many universities today.
It’s an actual market economy of truth that works inversely, driven more by the individual avatar than an individual big business.
Because on the new internet (3.0) i imagine a giant corporation will still only be one single micro payment viewing the news anchor, and NOT a crony entity buying off the entire news anchor and feeding it preferred dogma.
I am thinking of ways to fix the internet in order to ensure the integrity of data far into the future. If anyone can completely shatter my reasoning here with a better idea i’m all ears. Thanks.
