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by hardwaresofton 3848 days ago
Yes, except the most useful content out there is available largely for free (or would cost a crazy small amount to keep funded, if the userbase contributed as little as $1 or $3).

In particular, I'm thinking of:

Wikipedia

Google

Also, maybe it will lead people to start putting trust in offline archives of information, which wouldn't be terrible either.

Honestly, a lot of the "content" on the internet is garbage/not productive. I can at the very least argue that lots of bandwidth that's being used on the internet is just watching shit that's usually not educational.
1 comments
pyython 3848 days ago
Google runs the largest ad network on the planet. It's absolutely critical to their business model. Wikipedia is great, but they produce no content of their own and lack any sort of curation. Of course there's a lot of crap on the Internet, but I personally find many types of well-curated, professional content extremely valuable. I personally would be willing to pay for much of it, but I'm in a better position to do so than many - which is exactly my point.
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hardwaresofton 3847 days ago
My point was that if Google decided to change it's business model, and charged something like a $1 for a monthly subscription to using it's search services, it would be more than safe.

I don't think the fact that wikipedia produces it's own content is relevant, and whether it lacks curation being relevant either. Regardless of those two facts, it is immensely useful. The majority of articles, especially on highly technical/useful topics (like farming techniques) are mostly accurate.

Just because some may not be in a position to buy/afford something doesn't mean that everyone should endure inefficiency. Also, depending on the price, the truly important information would still be worth it. I don't think what's going to keep the less fortunate from using web services is a reasonably priced web service.

Currently, you can get a VPS for roughly $10/month, and a domain name for something like $70 (a .com usually costs this much I think). If you had monthly subscribers who were asked to pay $1 a month, the amount of subscribers to keep you in business (nevermind that today's tech can easily scale up to thousands of users on one box), is not high at all.

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