Dumb internet ideas
Hello people,
This is my first post, so if you have any tips, please tell them
For a number of years I've thought about the idea that the experiment of the "free" internet has failed.
Around fifteen years ago the only goal of social media was to grow and how to make money was an afterthought. Now that investment money is drying up and websites like Reddit and Twitter are trying their best to find a way to become profitable, I'm thinking again of the idea that the "free" internet doesn't exist.
Small niche websites are able to exist on donations, but they aren't reliable and people aren't willing to pay a random single access fee or subscription for a website they don't know. Streaming has found an audience, but that has become close to the tv model.
So I thought:
What if your ISP has to pay a website a fee everytime a user accesses the website?
Of course you have to think about how that payment works and how this system can be abused.
I expect the system to work like music streaming, where an artist gets a certain amount of money per stream.
I am curious how the internet developes with this system. If smaller websites can exist without having to rely on adverstisements or if it might even get profitable. How these websites get paid and how IPS's will handle this (I expect monthly fees to become 10 euros/dollars etc. more expensive).
What do you think of this idea or do you have your own (dumb) idea?
In my humble opinion, this is the difference between the internet I grew up with and the internet today.
Back in the day - circa mid 90s to early 00s - people spent hours curating content they found interesting just because they wanted to. They paid (or used advertising supported places like Geocities) and put a wealth of knowledge out there just because they wanted to share it.
It wasn't to make money or become famous, it definitely wasn't to go viral (mainly because the hosting fees would kill you back then heh). It was just a desire to let the world know what you knew so your knowledge could be used by others.
I did it myself - paid my ISP extra to have a few MB of hosting and had a website full of static HTML that was just steps and procedures for working on a niche type of unit no one else really touched. Lots of good info on brands and model names with specs like current draw / resistance of motor windings / control settings / wiring locations and labelling etc. The data came from hard copy manuals that I retyped or scanned so it wasn't as easy as Altavista'ing the unit to find a PDF hosted somewhere.
Also ran a blog of thoughts and activities in the local car scene which was replaced by forums in the 00s. Some things like firing orders for the cars of our various "members" (read: people we knew IRL) were useful references that weren't readily available at the time. Again, typed and scanned from hard copy workshop manuals so not really easily found otherwise that I know of.
The internet now is definitely better by every metric possible, but I do miss that the main driving force of content creation seems to have gone from hobby/enthusiast to popular commercialism.
Would you have any suggestions on how to find these corners of the internet again? I hate that the internet (and almost everything really) has become all about that money. Big corporations just trying to squeeze every little bit of information and attention out of their users and not even seeing that without the users they are nothing.
I'd love to get the old internet back, where people did what they've done because they wanted to and not for any monetary gain. Fosters a sense of community and offers a space to just exist.
Not OP, but one way to at least slightly improve the situation is to stop using Google. I currently switch between Ecosia and DuckDuckGo as search engines, and I definitely get a wider range of results.
Of course, this is still dependent on SEO and popularity, but at the very least it doesn't actively funnel you in the way Google does.
Again: Not entirely a solution by any means, just a small improvement.
I completely agree and I've actually stopped using Google a while ago. I've since been using Kagi which is a paid search engine. This allows them to put actual good search at the top of their priorities instead of maximizing ad impressions.
They have a bunch of really nice features, recently they added a feature to allow you to AI summarize basically anything, even YouTube videos and it works surprisingly well. I can also raise, lower or block results from specific sites like I want. They also have "Lenses" which are basically filters that allow me to for example only show results from forums or non-commercial sites.
Not OP, but here are some ways to "bring back the old internet"
There are actually quite a few rings these days, some are specialized, others are free-for-alls. Several are linked in this tildes post. Here are two more random rings that seem mostly geared towards personal sites:
retronauts
hotline
Internet in tiered packages is already happening.
Prepaid mobile data in the Philippines is currently sold in bundles of 5GB of Facebook, 5GB of Spotify and 1GB of anything or something similar. And of course it’s priced as if it was 10GB of data. It’s a nightmare.
Phillipines 🤝 Indonesia
Have tiered package mobile internet. Seriously, it's even harder to find a full on "internet only" package, and even if you found one is expensive as hell compared to the other bundled packages with apps that I never use.
It would also kill off VPNs - which are essenrial to the free internet (and journalism, whistleblowers, people in opressive regimes) in these surveillance times.
This already happens, to some extent, via peering agreements. Your ISP may peer with services like Netflix, in order to provide a direct connection to Netflix content for its users. However, your ISP (typically) pays for that. If they don't pay for peering services, the traffic has to go out over an internet exchange (IX). Connections to an IX are limited to 10 Gigabit links, so it is to an ISPs advantage to pay for peering. Another option is for an ISP to pay a large provider like AT&T or Comcast for access to their networks, and rely on that provider's peering agreements with service providers, but again that still involves money changing hands.
(If you have Comcast or AT&T as your ISP, these are generally considered "tier 1" ISPs, who don't pay for peering. They have effectively become so large that Netflix/Google/etc realize it would hurt their business to not peer with them.)
However, I don't know that a direct pay-per-view for every website would be practical or a good experience for end users. For one, what happens if you want to go to a website that you ISP doesn't have a contract with to pay them? Does your ISP just block you from going there? Do you have to petition your ISP to add that website to their service? Would the ISP be obligated to do so, or could they say it doesn't fit in their business model and say no?
So I don't think a model where the ISPs gate content in that way is really a good idea. I think that platforms should find their own way to monetize, but try to do so on a way that aligns their goals with their user's goals.
Brave browser allows this sort of payment to websites. In fact, I've received small amounts of money from the scheme. So, it's not so dumb an idea as it's already been done! https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
What's with libertarians and thinking that bringing more money into the mix would have a rats chance at making things more free?