[renonce]

A social-first Internet makes sense but this is not going to be the way people do it. Let’s consider some models for rewarding content authors:

1. You are asked to pay before viewing the content. This incentivizes content owners to display clickbait titles but does not incentivize content quality. People will click through lots of interesting titles and have a hard time finding out the valuable ones.

2. You are asked to pay after viewing the content. This is similar to a donation - just look at the state of open-source software. Only a few geeks who understand the value of donation will pay.

3. You are asked to pay a subscription fee upfront, and the fee is split between all content owners that you did read. If you view YouTube, have you signed up for YouTube Premium? Why not? Do you trust YouTube not to hold your videos hostage and pay only a tiny bit of revenue to uploaders?