3 ms·

Perhaps advertisers could pay the gas for users? Could users pay for their own costs and have an ad-free experience? Could users give gas to publishers in res

Perhaps advertisers could pay the gas for users? Could users pay for their own costs and have an ad-free experience? Could users give gas to publishers in response to content they enjoy? There’s room for a lot of economic incentives! Could users sell 70% of their tweet revenue for 7 years to another entity that gives them cash up front? Like existing music publishers? https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish

weego 4y ago
There's is literally zero public appetite for anything that poses any of those questions, let alone attempts to answer them. The intersection of technology and people to define a usable product cannot also be defined as a technology.
- vntok 4y ago
  Users regularly do "pay for their own costs and have an ad-free experience", for example on Youtube, Netflix or The New York Time (5 million paid subscribers in Q2 2021). Users regularly do "give gas to publishers in response to content they enjoy", for example on Patreon, Twitch or Medium. The appetite seems there all right.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  There’s a public appetite for all sorts of intellectual property. Popular music is funded by artists who sell parts of their rights to their profits from music and recordings. As opposed to a patronage model, intellectual property allows for people to engage in the market with their published works. Intellectual property has lots of problems of course but it is also the model that replaced patronage as we transitioned from the ancien regime into our contemporary politic-economic system.
ShamelessC 4y ago
That all sounds kind of nightmarish. Keep in mind, many live paycheck to paycheck. The prevailing VC-minded attitude that the economy needs market-makers, micro-transactions and “decentralized digital rights management” is just not at all what people need or want currently.
- vntok 4y ago
  You are in no position to decide what people need or what they should spend their money on. On the contrary, micro-transactions is the ideal way for regular folks to support content creators in a way that does not take too much from them. No one struggling wants to pay a platform's minimum support level of $5/month times 20 people whose videos they like. Paying $5/month to 20 people whose videos they like though, that's much easier to handle.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    > On the contrary, micro-transactions is the ideal way for regular folks to support content creators in a way that does not take too much from them. In your idealized theoretical market conditions*, and assuming the tech works currently as I mentioned (it doesn’t in my opinion but that debate has already been had). You might be right, but not until (another) significant engineering effort is established (unlikely given the state of the economy) and not without the blessing of various nation states.
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      One of the reasons that I stopped working on such a system [0] is that I realized that there was no way to bootstrap such a system from scratch. I would like to see the involvement of nation states to facilitate such a system but the political will for having a truly republican system that expands upon copyright, patents, trademarks, et al, for the digital age seems decades away. People are too worried that their political opponents will abuse such a system when in power, even if such a system is probably inevitable. [0] https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish
KaiserPro 4y ago
Why would I, as a publisher, pay for tweet futures, when I can just scrape them for free? Why would I pay for futures on a platform that encourages people to make ill-informed context free pronouncements, with an incredibly short half life?
- williamcotton 4y ago
  Why are music publishers paying for future profits from a given work being recorded and distributed on Spotify when people can just go on BitTorrent and get the recording for free? Is there a lower bound of a market for published works? Are tweets below that bound? Are tweets of video content or photographs below that bound? Perhaps! Does the current socioeconomic system of Twitter have in impact on ill-informed context free pronouncements? Would a different socioeconomic system encourage different content?

weego 4y ago

There's is literally zero public appetite for anything that poses any of those questions, let alone attempts to answer them. The intersection of technology and people to define a usable product cannot also be defined as a technology.

vntok 4y ago
Users regularly do "pay for their own costs and have an ad-free experience", for example on Youtube, Netflix or The New York Time (5 million paid subscribers in Q2 2021). Users regularly do "give gas to publishers in response to content they enjoy", for example on Patreon, Twitch or Medium. The appetite seems there all right.
williamcotton 4y ago
There’s a public appetite for all sorts of intellectual property. Popular music is funded by artists who sell parts of their rights to their profits from music and recordings. As opposed to a patronage model, intellectual property allows for people to engage in the market with their published works. Intellectual property has lots of problems of course but it is also the model that replaced patronage as we transitioned from the ancien regime into our contemporary politic-economic system.

ShamelessC 4y ago

That all sounds kind of nightmarish. Keep in mind, many live paycheck to paycheck. The prevailing VC-minded attitude that the economy needs market-makers, micro-transactions and “decentralized digital rights management” is just not at all what people need or want currently.

vntok 4y ago
You are in no position to decide what people need or what they should spend their money on. On the contrary, micro-transactions is the ideal way for regular folks to support content creators in a way that does not take too much from them. No one struggling wants to pay a platform's minimum support level of $5/month times 20 people whose videos they like. Paying $5/month to 20 people whose videos they like though, that's much easier to handle.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  > On the contrary, micro-transactions is the ideal way for regular folks to support content creators in a way that does not take too much from them. In your idealized theoretical market conditions*, and assuming the tech works currently as I mentioned (it doesn’t in my opinion but that debate has already been had). You might be right, but not until (another) significant engineering effort is established (unlikely given the state of the economy) and not without the blessing of various nation states.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    One of the reasons that I stopped working on such a system [0] is that I realized that there was no way to bootstrap such a system from scratch. I would like to see the involvement of nation states to facilitate such a system but the political will for having a truly republican system that expands upon copyright, patents, trademarks, et al, for the digital age seems decades away. People are too worried that their political opponents will abuse such a system when in power, even if such a system is probably inevitable. [0] https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish

KaiserPro 4y ago

Why would I, as a publisher, pay for tweet futures, when I can just scrape them for free? Why would I pay for futures on a platform that encourages people to make ill-informed context free pronouncements, with an incredibly short half life?

williamcotton 4y ago
Why are music publishers paying for future profits from a given work being recorded and distributed on Spotify when people can just go on BitTorrent and get the recording for free? Is there a lower bound of a market for published works? Are tweets below that bound? Are tweets of video content or photographs below that bound? Perhaps! Does the current socioeconomic system of Twitter have in impact on ill-informed context free pronouncements? Would a different socioeconomic system encourage different content?