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by kccqzy 1089 days ago
The open web has deteriorated to such an extent that either information is paywalled or free but has commercial motivations behind it (affiliate links, sponsorships). It turns out there's little free, non-commercial, high quality content on the web.
4 comments
chongli 1089 days ago
It turns out there's little free, non-commercial, high quality content on the web.

I disagree. I think there's a lot of it out there, in the form of blogs and small forums. It's just really hard to find, like mining for gold in the Super Pit [1]. You need to sift through mountains of rubble to find tiny amounts of gold.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pit_gold_mine

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shadowgovt 1089 days ago
> turns out there's little free, non-commercial, high quality content on the web.

Well, sure. Who pays for it?

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kccqzy 1089 days ago
No one. That's why I commented to make the point that Google should not refuse to crawl commercial content.
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pipo234 1089 days ago
True. There is some great content (blogs, OS software, books, p2p networks, public libraries, academia, government), but by and large that wasn't created with monetary incentives.

Could there be a way to sustainably make enough money from visitors without making it all suck?

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kccqzy 1089 days ago
I think there really needs to be a micro-transaction mechanism on the web, but unfortunately it was needed ten years ago and there still isn't one.
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golem14 1089 days ago
Yes but the crypto folks didn't do that, they were busy chasing nfts.
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chroma 1088 days ago
There have been a lot of ridiculous things in cryptocurrency land, but what's wrong with Basic Attention Token? It has been around for six years and seems to solve the problem of paying content creators via microtransactions. The only wrinkle is that finance laws force everyone to verify their identity with a government-issued ID before transacting BAT.[1] This is a problem for all microtransactions, not just cryptocurrency.

1. https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...

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pipo234 1088 days ago
...And then we're back with the underlying conflicting interests surrounding governments guarding their citizen's privacy. Yes absolutely we want all our citizens to always use unbreakable and untraceble communication channels. Except when law enforcement needs to surveil and pry on the bad guys.

And where it's impossible to tell difference from a (pseudo) random stream of numbers.

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whywhywhydude 1088 days ago
It’s certainly possible. Wikipedia is free. It won’t be too hard to replicate wikipedia’s model to create a Reddit replica.
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