Story time. About 20 years ago, when dialup was introduced where I grew up, my uncle called me to show him what this new internet thing is.
As soon as I opened "yahoo.com", he asked "how am I paying to view Yahoo?". I said you're not paying anybody, you're just paying for the Internet connection. He nodded.
I then showed him Hotmail. He kept asking "ok so now, how did they charge me to view this page?". I kept telling him, "that's the beauty of the internet, you don't pay for each site you visit, you just have access to this enormous body of knowledge".
He was thinking of sites in terms of making long distance calls, since he knew the Internet used the phone line, so to him it was normal to pay for each "site call" (if that makes sense), because that's how phone calls worked.
This interaction stayed with me for a long time, because it was natural for him to think about paying for each website visit, but to me it was all 'free'. As social media and user data became more monetizable in the years after, we found out pretty fast that there was no such thing as free.
At times I wonder what would the web feel like if it worked like my uncle expected it to work back then. Websites could support their existence without ads, since each customer would be a paying customer. Ads would still be around, but perhaps people would have demanded a nicer experience once they know they are paying for the visit.
In many ways, that's the lense through which I look at web3. It might be too late to switch to a pay as you go system. It might be too late to educate people about the importance of staying anonymous and preserving their user data. Nothing about this payment system requires a blockchain, but internet-money is a good enough excuse to introduce an alternative pay-per-click approach to the Internet, because, to be honest, I think the Internet ended up being a cesspool of abnoxious ads, paid content, ads disguised as content, dark patterns, etc, like the world's dirtiest third world country bazaar.
Maybe if we paid for each click, the experience of using the Internet could be more like a supermarket.
> In many ways, that's the lense through which I look at web3. It might be too late to switch to a pay as you go system.
In that regard, web3 is a solution looking for a problem.
Companies like Medium, Udemy, Spotify, Netflix, LinkedIn, etc already offer users pay-as-you-go services for higher-value content, and none of them required so many buzzword-driven technologies to pull it off.
Heck, even Amazon offers pay-as-you-go access to books.
Exactly what does web3 bring to the table?
> It might be too late to educate people about the importance of staying anonymous and preserving their user data.
Again, exactly what does web3 bring to the table with regards to privacy and "preserving user data"? Those examples seem too vague to have any meaning beyond scaremongering.
> At times I wonder what would the web feel like if it worked like my uncle expected it to work back then. Websites could support their existence without ads, since each customer would be a paying customer.
No one would bother with the web if they had to pay for every visit to every website, especially if they had to pay before any content got delivered. It's a certainty that as soon as the client is paying per byte or per transaction that pages will do everything they can to nickel and dime clients by bloating even more than they do today. For clients that's fees on top of what their ISP is charging for the privilege to be charged more money.
Pre-web services like Compuserve were pay-per-hour IIRC. Nowadays there is a very distant chance that Brave fixes this. I've always felt that micropayments are the best application for cryptocurrency, but because they aren't lucrative they're mostly ignored in the space. It seems Stellar is humming along, and I remain a (somewhat bitter) Nano holder, but otherwise everything is about "trustless protocols" and "decentralized platforms" and other hogwash that ignores the scaling issues inherent to digital ledgers.
Yeah, I think everything being ad driven and free to use will be incredibly hard to move away from because it's damn hard to compete with free but it causes incentives to be profoundly misaligned.
As soon as I opened "yahoo.com", he asked "how am I paying to view Yahoo?". I said you're not paying anybody, you're just paying for the Internet connection. He nodded.
I then showed him Hotmail. He kept asking "ok so now, how did they charge me to view this page?". I kept telling him, "that's the beauty of the internet, you don't pay for each site you visit, you just have access to this enormous body of knowledge".
He was thinking of sites in terms of making long distance calls, since he knew the Internet used the phone line, so to him it was normal to pay for each "site call" (if that makes sense), because that's how phone calls worked.
This interaction stayed with me for a long time, because it was natural for him to think about paying for each website visit, but to me it was all 'free'. As social media and user data became more monetizable in the years after, we found out pretty fast that there was no such thing as free.
At times I wonder what would the web feel like if it worked like my uncle expected it to work back then. Websites could support their existence without ads, since each customer would be a paying customer. Ads would still be around, but perhaps people would have demanded a nicer experience once they know they are paying for the visit.
In many ways, that's the lense through which I look at web3. It might be too late to switch to a pay as you go system. It might be too late to educate people about the importance of staying anonymous and preserving their user data. Nothing about this payment system requires a blockchain, but internet-money is a good enough excuse to introduce an alternative pay-per-click approach to the Internet, because, to be honest, I think the Internet ended up being a cesspool of abnoxious ads, paid content, ads disguised as content, dark patterns, etc, like the world's dirtiest third world country bazaar.
Maybe if we paid for each click, the experience of using the Internet could be more like a supermarket.
It would certainly be different.