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kleinbl00  ·  1943 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.

Absolutely. Positively. This was one of the driving arguments behind Gilder's Life After Google: "a ridiculous number of subscriptions" is an excellent blockchain application.

Let's say I'm browsing with Mist and I've got it loaded up with 1 ETH. In order to browse pages I need to pay fees - positive or negative. eBay might find it effective to pay me a tenth of a cent for every page I click on - they might not. The New York Times might find it effective to hit me for 25 cents a day every time I land on one of their pages and then maybe a tenth of a cent for every article beyond that. Obviously my prices are actually in szabos or gwei or brindlestiffs or whatever we measure fractional cryptocurrency in but a conversion factor to realpeoplemoney is only a couple more lines of code and for now realpeoplemoney is how we operate.

I could set my browser to:

- automatically pay any site fee of .01 penny or less

- require approval for any site fee of 1 penny or more

- warn me if I try to browse to any site on a blacklist I subscribe to (for 5 cents a month)

- automatically allow me on any site that is a member of EthicsNet, the certification platform that controls for malware and clickbait

...and so long as all my browsing is connected to that wallet all the rules apply. At that point blockchain basically becomes "cookies" except since I'm the direct investor rather than the target of investment, the content becomes arrayed to suit my wants and needs rather than that of the people paying for my eyeballs.

For that matter I could pay Mother Jones 50 cents a month to let me onto their content network and let them curate for me. They could try out new sources of content and allow them onto their network for negotiated prices and then I could maybe score a discount for allowing these un-vetted sources access to my eyeballs. Robert Mercer could give out 50 cents to anybody who spends ten minutes on InfoWars. Bias doesn't go away but the perversion of incentives does. If I'm willing to spend $15 a month on journalism I'm going to get better journalism. Maybe George Soros gives out journalism grants to spend on anything you want while Sheldon Adelson gives out journalism grants to certain websites. Will the public start to smell a rat?

Pay for the CPB with a subsidy. Pay for The National Enquirer with NRA money. Pay a penny a month for a funding tracer so you know who's behind your journalism. Everybody gets paid, everybody can throw money in the pool and it becomes direct rather than tangential.