How do we turn the web into something other than a horrible advertising machine?

How do we turn the web into something other than a horrible advertising machine? I’m not sure it’s viable, in the mass market. You’re basically asking people to pay for stuff they can get for free by enduring ads. I think most will endure the ads.

Most of the content on the web is garbage. But people are happy to look at it, but are they happy to pay for it? Probably not.

At the moment, we’ve introduced the idea that software, and especially web sites should be free to use. I think that’s going to be a hard thing to overcome.

I think we’d probably need a well funded company to make alternatives. Say if Apple made a Facebook alternative, no ads, no tracking, but charged a yearly fee for use, could it succeed? Maybe, with Apple’s marketing etc, I think it’s viable, but I think free products would prevail.

I think also paid-for services introduce a level of service expectation that a lot of companies would not be comfortable with.

I think generally, the content isn’t good enough to charge for in most cases, but if it was, we’d need to work out a good micro-payment system, with actual money, not Bitcoin. I’m a software developer by profession, and I don’t use Bitcoin, outside of tech, nobody does. We’d need a proper micro-payment system, easy as pie to use, secure as hell. So if I’m reading a good article, I can give the writer 10 cents as easy as I can open a new tab.

That might work, but we’d need to work out a way where ultra-micro-payments can work, a Washington Post digital subscription is $2.50 a week, that’s a lot of articles, probably values a small article at less than 1 cent.