4 ms·

This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad bl

This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks. There would need to be a way for ISPs to know which websites are getting my traffic in order to know who to distribute the money to, which I'm not a fan of. But I think something along those lines, with anonymized traffic data, would work a treat.

dotancohen 7mo ago
> distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking How would your ISP know to which sites to distribute the money, if there were no tracking?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- wing-_-nuts 7mo ago
  Oh ISPs are definitely collecting your browsing habits, and selling them to the highest bidder. It's one of the major reasons why I use a vpn.
  - lukechu10 7mo ago
    Well what makes you think the VPN providers are not tracking? You would have to either self-host your own VPN server somewhere (maybe on a public cloud provider) or if you are truly paranoid, use something like Tor.
    - wing-_-nuts 7mo ago
      They have been subject to warrant requests, and had nothing to turn over. There are only a few vpn providers that I genuinely trust. (Mullvad, airvpn, etc) Really though, I am not worried about 3 letter agencies performing legitimate law enforcement duties. I am worried about corporations hovering up more data about me than I'd want to reveal, and either using that as a basis to charge me more, or worse, they get hacked, and that data is used by bad actors to target me.
- abustamam 7mo ago
  Yeah that's the problem (and possibly why such a thing didn't exist). But I kinda see it like TV. Cable providers know what channels and shows people are watching. Obviously web browsing data is more personal and intimate so it's not the same thing, but it's a good starting point for a thought experiment.
CamperBob2 7mo ago
The ISP shouldn't necessarily be involved in this process, but some form of syndication does need to happen, and it seems crazy that it hasn't. The closest we've come is something like Apple News, which allows me to pay for a selected (by them, not me) subset of features on a selected (by them, not me) subset of news sites. Can't somebody do this right?
- Terretta 7mo ago
  Texture was incredible. Apple News remained fantastic until renewal of agreements when publishers demanded rights to insert additional ads. Apple can't not have premium sources in there, so...
- abustamam 7mo ago
  I've never used Apple news but something like that sounds like a great idea!
saghm 7mo ago
> This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks. The problem is that both the ISP and the websites would then go "Cool, we're getting $10 a month from them!" for about a minute before they started trying to come up with ways to start showing you ads anyways. With the level of customer appreciation ISPs tend to show, I'm sure they'd have no problem ignoring your complaints and would happily revoke your service if you stopped paying the now $10-higher price per month.
Terretta 7mo ago
content creator is new speak people with something to share, people with something to say, who share and say it because they want to that's how pamphleteers worked, that's how the Internet worked at scale, static (CMS-managed) information sites cost effectively nothing even for arbitrary amounts of traffic, and smoothed across a range of people sharing stuff, it approaches zero per person publishing used to be free with your ISP, and edge CDN used to be (and still is) free to a point (an incredibly high volume point) as well having people pay something nominal to say things instead of pay far too much in attention-distraction or money to consume things, would put this all back the right way round
- totallymike 7mo ago
  I couldn’t disagree with this more if I tried. The biggest benefit of the internet is to make it easier to talk to each other and share ideas. Putting financial gates in front of that ability is hot garbage. Also, I agree that the platforms and paradigms we have are fucked up, but do believe that people who put work into making something deserve to charge for it if there are folks who’d pay.

dotancohen 7mo ago

> distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking How would your ISP know to which sites to distribute the money, if there were no tracking?

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
wing-_-nuts 7mo ago
Oh ISPs are definitely collecting your browsing habits, and selling them to the highest bidder. It's one of the major reasons why I use a vpn.
- lukechu10 7mo ago
  Well what makes you think the VPN providers are not tracking? You would have to either self-host your own VPN server somewhere (maybe on a public cloud provider) or if you are truly paranoid, use something like Tor.
  - wing-_-nuts 7mo ago
    They have been subject to warrant requests, and had nothing to turn over. There are only a few vpn providers that I genuinely trust. (Mullvad, airvpn, etc) Really though, I am not worried about 3 letter agencies performing legitimate law enforcement duties. I am worried about corporations hovering up more data about me than I'd want to reveal, and either using that as a basis to charge me more, or worse, they get hacked, and that data is used by bad actors to target me.
abustamam 7mo ago
Yeah that's the problem (and possibly why such a thing didn't exist). But I kinda see it like TV. Cable providers know what channels and shows people are watching. Obviously web browsing data is more personal and intimate so it's not the same thing, but it's a good starting point for a thought experiment.

CamperBob2 7mo ago

The ISP shouldn't necessarily be involved in this process, but some form of syndication does need to happen, and it seems crazy that it hasn't. The closest we've come is something like Apple News, which allows me to pay for a selected (by them, not me) subset of features on a selected (by them, not me) subset of news sites. Can't somebody do this right?

Terretta 7mo ago
Texture was incredible. Apple News remained fantastic until renewal of agreements when publishers demanded rights to insert additional ads. Apple can't not have premium sources in there, so...
abustamam 7mo ago
I've never used Apple news but something like that sounds like a great idea!

saghm 7mo ago

> This may be a hot take but I'd be willing to pay my ISP $10 extra that they would distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking and ads. I use an ad blocker but I genuinely want to support content creators in a way that doesn't optimize for ads or clicks. The problem is that both the ISP and the websites would then go "Cool, we're getting $10 a month from them!" for about a minute before they started trying to come up with ways to start showing you ads anyways. With the level of customer appreciation ISPs tend to show, I'm sure they'd have no problem ignoring your complaints and would happily revoke your service if you stopped paying the now $10-higher price per month.

Terretta 7mo ago

content creator is new speak people with something to share, people with something to say, who share and say it because they want to that's how pamphleteers worked, that's how the Internet worked at scale, static (CMS-managed) information sites cost effectively nothing even for arbitrary amounts of traffic, and smoothed across a range of people sharing stuff, it approaches zero per person publishing used to be free with your ISP, and edge CDN used to be (and still is) free to a point (an incredibly high volume point) as well having people pay something nominal to say things instead of pay far too much in attention-distraction or money to consume things, would put this all back the right way round

totallymike 7mo ago
I couldn’t disagree with this more if I tried. The biggest benefit of the internet is to make it easier to talk to each other and share ideas. Putting financial gates in front of that ability is hot garbage. Also, I agree that the platforms and paradigms we have are fucked up, but do believe that people who put work into making something deserve to charge for it if there are folks who’d pay.