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.

This could unironically be an OK use case for crypto and NFTs on a low energy usage blockchain?

Website asks you to pay a paltry sum, you get an nft that allows visiting for X days

NFT over cookie because then you can keep using the site on your other devices as long as they’re connectes to the wallet too, and you don’t need a user account for every site.

Not a perfect idea but not the worst?

I literally sent a message to google in the ads part of my google account since google is one of the biggest ad provider, about a wallet that would pay automatically to not see the ads. Idk if anyone reads these messages there XD

unfortunately google gains a lot more from getting our data and selling us as potential clients to businesses and would most likely not want to get on that.

Maybe paypal wich already have wallets and widespread addoption could try to replace ads provider.

Don't you already pay to use the Internet? Why does anybody have to make record profits every quarter, fuck all ads. The Internet was much better when corporations were not involved.

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.

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

You don't pay for the services in it. Storage, computation, bigger channels.

So yes, I think it should be possible to make paid connections to a service, like a paid phone call.

Or to buy storage.

There should be a new stack of web-like (application-layer and up) protocols. To separate requesting storage (put, get), computation (submit a task, get a result) and search (get from index by keywords) into technically different tasks and to make them paid on technical level. Probably make some procedure for aggregated payment for accessing a service. Then the service itself should be on the next level, and probably built from these services on the client.

It should be a client-side decision to "continue to a paid service for N monies".

People who've built the Internet - they were an academic bunch, or in case of Sun founders, an economically inept bunch (yes, I can repeat that ; their period of huge success was mostly when they were making workstations ; though to be honest I liked Bill Joy's interview on climate and externalia). They didn't consider this important. They made a library system for a community of peers.

That's an intermediate version of what I'm dreaming of, except what I'm dreaming of would have uniform infrastructure completely separated from content, so services would serve many applications in a uniform way, storage and computation and search and maybe message relay to another user. The applications themselves would differ from each other, and their differences would exist locally on user machine.

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.

Also, hosting providers would immediately crank up the prices so that they get as much of that sweet page-visit money as possible ensuring the site owner doesn't.

The prices would find a level eventually, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as low as half a cent. We'd be lucky if it was a dollar.

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?

Data caps and charges would be the "better" way to handle all this, but let anyone tell you who's on a plan that has those, that they're awful and the money never goes where it needs to. Good luck getting legislation changed so that some of that money goes to the sites that the data ultimately comes from.

1. Clickbait is one of the bigger problems on the net. I don't want to pay for more of it.

2. I am much less opposed to being tracked than some people here. But the complete and unavoidable surveillance implied by such a scheme takes it a bit far.

Actually, given Lemmy's usual knee-jerk reaction to tracking and commercialization, I can only assume that people aren't thinking through this proposal.

This is closer to the idea: https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-Micropayment-Markup-19990825/

You do that and the prices will just keep going up. See Netflix/streaming as an example. Enough $ is never enough. Line must go up.

How long have you been using the Internet if I may ask?

You're the guy they created 8 dollar bottled water for. A capitalists dream. They gonna milk you and your kids and grind up the remains lol.

20 years

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.

I wish I could take you back 10 years further. It's like a national forest that someone build a parking lot and strip mall over, and everyone cheers because they finally tore the mall down and put up a giant fence water park with cameras everywhere.

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.

Like a functional city made to serve the populous or like a typical American city that only works for the rich?

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

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.