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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2560 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 9, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm coming around to the idea that the free+advertising model was the internet's original sin. A site like Reddit, maybe the largest and second most trusted repository of human text on the internet, apparently can't make money.

Reddit must look at third party clients scraping "their" data (especially LLMs training on it), using "their" site, then reselling it at an actual profit and feel like they should get a cut. Meanwhile the mods have a good argument that they're providing much of the value, and of course it's ultimately the users' generating the content in the end.

I wonder how the net would have evolved if something like Brave's basic attention token was around back in the day, with users paying in proportion to what they consume, with mods being compensated and ultimately the site not being beholden to advertisers like it is now.

I'm also surprised that there's nobody who has been able to implement true 'microtransactions' where you can pay a few cents to view a piece of content once, rather than having to subscribe to a full service you may or may not use.

Like I would pay for news articles if I there was an ability to pay 25 cents per article with 1-2 clicks.

I can imagine a version of Reddit where the 'main' subs were free to access but if you wanted to subscribe to the niche subs you could pay like a buck to unlock them for a month. Or maybe even less for a 'day pass.'

Of course, that won't stop someone from scraping the content to publish elsewhere or use to train up an LLM.

I can’t agree enough, advertising has ruined so much in the last few decades.

I think more websites should've tried harder to monetize around a subscription model in the style of Spotify and Netflix. The trouble is finding some meaningful way to make an actually better experience beyond no ads, which is no easy task, but I think if they focused a team on it they could do it. Personally I think a feature that could be worth paying for is better search and sort tools.

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