First of all, prices already go up for things like netflix. This isnt aimed at subscription sites like netflix its more for pages where you browse for free at the cost of viewing ads like blogs, youtube, substack, lemmy etc. Yes prices would go up over time no doubt but the idea is that the users providing the money should lower the cost. 1000 humans visting your site should be willing to pay more than an advertiser is to show an ad to those 1000 people. Google generally pays around 5cents to 30cents for 1000 views. I dont know about you but I can split 30 cents between 1000 people, hell i’ll even double it cause im generous. I think if 1000 people are viewing your website you should get paid for providing something interesting enough for 1000 people to enjoy. If everyone gave 1cent thats $100, if everyone paid double what the ad was they’d be paying $0.0003 each.

I dont want people who write a blog that is read by many people to need to subject their readers to ads all only to get a check from google saying heres a few cents bud. We can do better, and I dont think the answer is asking people to pay a $5 a month.

You could never have a city where no one pays maintenance and service fees.

Yes things were different back then. It wasnt a national forest, it was forest in a world where no cities existed anywhere. Nothing had been built on the internet back then. You didnt have websites that served userbases in the 100s of millions. You didnt have to serve images, videos, live streams and other dynamic content. You didnt have the same security overhead now required. If the internet were only text chat over irc I wouldnt be sitting here worrying about internet funding.

I dont go to the cbd of my city and think “I wish they replaced this with a forest” because I know there are plenty of forests outside the city, and people choose to live in the city over the forest. Same for the internet and so we need to think about solving the problem instead of wishing to tear everything down.

IRC doesnt fit the requirements though. I cant send pictures or videos, I cant make little icons to react, I cant quote reply, I dont get push notifications when pinged. You may think these arent nessesary but to majority of users they are and I dont think IRC is going to adapt to include them.

That immediately makes the Internet basically free for the rich and only partially accessible for the poor. Maybe you’re OK with that, but business models like that are partly what’s wrong with the world. In fact the Internet already has this problem. This would almost certainly move the boundary between who’s relatively rich and who’s relatively poor in the wrong direction.

Fine have government subsidies that give people $50 credit a month. Or give people the option to opt out. I dont NEED to to exist, I want it to exist. I want an easier way to pay for my internet usage rather than ads. If ads are going to pay someone 0.0014cents for my attention id rather overcut the ad and pay the webhost 0.01cent for no ads.

There’s also the question of what constitutes “a page”. What if only part of the screen refreshes? What if you refresh an existing page because it didn’t load properly, or just because? Is that a new payment?

This is the details and it can be worked out in more detail. At the moment I dont think that is relevant to work out. Just provide a way to opt out and then it can be between the hosts and the users how they set up their payments. If the hosts have prices to high or a scammy model users can switch to paying based on domain vist or choose to not pay at all. Its no different to users choosing to use an adblock when visting a website.

20 years

Please god let europe and the asian countries pick the chinese standard and leave the US sitting on its own it would be so fucking funny.

There is this but it looks like its going very slowly. https://www.w3.org/Payments/WG/

Idc about corporations but the internet costs and you cant get away from that. Servers and the infrastructure around them has to be paid for. And I’m happy to pay my share when I vist someones website. My issue is that my share is a few cents not a few dollars like a lot of these newpapers try and charge.

Maybe you could do it as the website sets a suggested price and the user either agrees or chooses their own. I think if the process of paying was seemless enough most people would be happy to pay and the few people putting 0 for everything probably need the money more anyway.

Can we please just pay a cent or half a cent for each page we vist. Its like 50x what the website would get from our view with ads and its not much. I’m sure it would encourage others to start their own website as well if you could get $1 from 100 page views.

There are so many things like this news article where they want to charge me a few dollars. Bro I cant afford to pay $5 a month for every single platform that would close me 1000s.

Old reddit would have annihilated that post.

Is blindsight worth a read? It seemed interesting from the brief description.

I really dont like “I asked AI and it said X” but then I realise that many people including myself will search google and then relay random shit that seems useful and I dont see how AI is much different. Maybe both are bad, I dont do either anymore. But I guess both are just a person trying to be helpful and at the end of the day thats a good thing.

IRC is dead simple. You cant compare something like matrix to it in terms of resource usage thats not fair. 1GB of ram usage if fine for a server application that does messaging, pictures and video.

Often, the problem is that projects get to a point where they’re happy and the maintainer doesn’t want to add any new features. So people then are forced to build a new project to get those features.

Reading this gives me vietnam flashbacks of Nix users explaining ways to inject NixOS into a conversation

That HN thread was such a shitshow lol. Also I dont think there is anything credible to suggest this increase from 4.6% to 5% is due to ‘non linux users’ or steamdeck. Steamdeck has contributed sure but desktop linux is growing but every single metric (steam hardware survey, PH Desktop user survey, US Gov traffic, tech youtuber trends, etc).

useless antidote: My friend who is a non techie gamer and she plays a lot of anti cheat type multiplayer games ASKED me to help her switch to linux mint and even when I said thats a bad idea she shouldnt switch she still wanted to. She ended up loving it even though there was a few pain points (fucken nvidia dual screen config on x11) and i think a few of her other friends have even switched after hearing her say it works well.

How is it not a desktop? My steamdeck is as much of a desktop as my laptop.

I cant commend on the first 3 but im a huge rimworld enjoyer and i’ve had 0 issues modding on linux. Steamworkshop works as expected and even RimPy launcher workers natively on linux.