[extropy-chat] A nickel and dime economy?

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Hal Finney <hal at finney.org> wrote:

> Kevin Freels writes:
> > I was wondering if anyone had followed this through to the future.
> Does
> > anyone here see a possible future where nearly everything is fee
> based?
> > Will we be able to get rid of taxes entirely and instead have every
> trip
> > down every road deducted according to that road's "value". Will
> that $75
> > payment for 500 worthless channels in TV become a thing of the
> past,
> > instead allowing us to pay for each program as we watch it? Will
> the
> > subscription services fall to the wayside as we are able to
> conveniently
> > download the news directly to our phones...at a cost?
> 
> It's an interesting idea, and variants have been around for a while.
> The pre-web Xanadu proposal envisioned an Internet publishing medium
> based on micropayments, where authors could link to and include other
> pages but there would be royalty payments and commissions involved.
> A number of payment systems have been proposed to make micropayments
> (defined as payments too small to be handled efficiently by existing
> systems like credit cards) work better.  But generally these concepts
> haven't succeeded.

I've been proposing similar solutions to the build-out problem that
social network sites have, but in using peer-judged user content as
currency to purchase greater access to the system. The problems that
social network sites have are but a few:

a) a tendency to explode in use in countries with poor consumer
economies. Users from these economies do not have as high a Q factor
for internet advertisers and thus keywords they generate are not worth
as much.

b) a tendency for users in some countries to treat building a social
network as a sort of contest that needs 'winning', thus seeking to
become 'friends' with many people that they not only do not know at
all, but do not socialize with online at all either, do not know people
they know, etc. Brazilians on Orkut, for example, or southeast asians
on Friendster.

Both of these behaviors result in a lot of users who a) do not generate
original content, b) do not build social networks that reflect reality,
and thus use up the capacity of the servers of the network without
giving value to the provider in the form of marketable keywords,
sellable network behavior, or sellable demographic data. Because of
this, social networks tend to have a lot of difficulty building out
their server farms and bandwidth to provide quality service to users,
which is why intermittent site quality is a recurring problem. 

One solution I've proposed is for such sites to pay users who generate
content with invites or other desirable features based on a) the number
of sellable keywords, b) the amount of traffic that reads those
keywords, and c) the ratings that that traffic might give for the
content that contains those keywords.

=====
Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=Sadomikeyism


		
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