[kirillcool]

Dear whoever worked on Xanadu ever ever ever. You keep on saying that you went around the world, talked to anybody who would listen, and nobody got it. Maybe, just maybe, the problem was the message, not the listeners.

I just re-read Wired profile of Xanadu from 1995, and it's the same thing over and over again. It's not the world. It's the message. I mean, once anything is published online, it can never be edited because you link to "start character"-"end character" integer positions as the supposedly immutable snippet? What kind of a universe does that online world live in???

[abecedarius]

> What kind of a universe does that online world live in?

One that you're misrepresenting. It's like complaining that nothing in a git repo can be edited because commits are identified by long hex-encoded hashes.

[Animats]

Having known that crowd back then, the message was the problem. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. Wrong business model. They were mostly libertarians, of the "meter everything and let the free market sort it out" persuasion.

Also, they were way too text oriented.

I mean, once anything is published online, it can never be edited because you link to "start character"-"end character" integer positions as the supposedly immutable snippet? What kind of a universe does that online world live in???

The part of the world that has Github, shared Google Docs, and wikis. You can edit, and it's all trackable. It's a poor mass distribution system, but a reasonable approach to collaboration.

[dredmorbius]

What's your preferable, workable, alternative to pay-per-view / micropayments?

Largely agreed that Git + Wiki is the actual Xanadu.

[Animats]

What's your preferable, workable, alternative to pay-per-view / micropayments?

Ad-supported "free" seems to have won.

There was a brief enthusiasm for tacking small payments onto mobile phone bills, but that never really caught on.

The trouble with micropayments, I used to say, is that all the enthusiasm for them comes from people who want to collect them, not pay them.

[dredmorbius]

Thanks.

How about either:

- Tax-supported.

- Rolled into broadband / mobile service.

Both all-you can eat, apply to any publisher, and some sort of (waves hands) standard pro-rata scale. Probably scaling down with higher volume (RMS suggested a log-of-views basis, because reasons).

In both cases, I'd like to see the reader/viewer fee scaled at least roughly by income/wealth.