The horrible reality is that even if the web had effective and popular micropayments infrastructure it would have micropayments and adverts on top.
Just look at how advertising is creeping into premium streaming services.
Subscriptions and ads have gone together like peanut butter and jelly since the print age.
If you subscribe to The New York Times or Cosmopolitan you have qualified yourself as being interested in the subject, attached to the brand, and not hopelessly penurious. An advertiser would rather pay to get a message in front of a paid subscriber rather than anyone else.
One time I rented a unit in working-class neighborhood for 6 months and not surprisingly the amount of junk mail was half what I was used to.
Or the fact that (nearly) every premium TV channel still has ads, when the original point of paying for cable was no ads.
There's even a HTTP status code for Payment Required. I wonder what happened to that. I think we need to go back to one time purchase model.
Re:Are we wrong about Web3?
by pcthrowaway on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @02:46PM
(#30846735)
> It not only fries the planet
Just to point out, "Web3" usually is talking about smart contract executions; All the smart contract platforms I know of are (or will soon be) proof of stake, so no burning the planet required
I think Etherium has been talking about going to "proof of stake" for a few years...
(1) I'll believe it when I see it, (2) "proof of stake" is not proven to be effective against takeovers to the extent that "proof of work" is.
Re:Are we wrong about Web3?
by pcthrowaway on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @03:58PM
(#30847593)
To (1), it has, but the actual switch over is slated for the next few months.
Ted Nelson described the Xanadu system in the 1970s which anticipated the web, he recognized a need for creators to get paid and planned to have a micropayments system built in. Practically the web got advertising instead and then the patron and subscription models but somebody could make the case we need something better.
Web3 has the particular horror that simple calculations that could be done on 1% of a cheap VPS instead get replicated across 100,000 nodes. It not only fries the planet but it is fantastically expensive and somebody has to pay for it… and they wish it was you!