I'm happy to pay for content, as soon as sites provide me with a remotely reasonable way of doing that.
Advertising is not a reasonable way. A separate subscription, with a credit card interaction, for every site I happen to hit once a year, is not a reasonable way. Demanding a bunch of personal information is not a reasonable way. Trying to lock me into an "ecosystem of partners" is not a reasonable way.
Globally accessible, ungated, anonymous micropayments, with one or two universally used protocols but no central gatekeepers? Sign me up. Extra points if I get to see how much of my payment is going to the actual content creator and how much is being eaten by the "platform".
The core technolgies exist. All the pieces have been available for many years. What appears to be missing is will.
Meanwhile, I'll use an ad blocker. If you prevent me from accessing your site using my ad blocker, I will go elsewhere.
You don't want advertising, you don't want to subscribe, and you don't want a network of sites using the same subscription. What possible solution exists that satisfies your criteria, which are way more demanding than "remotely reasonable"?
This is just an excuse you've fabricated to justify your own convenience, stinginess and/or laziness.
I said what solution I wanted. Micropayments have been researched for 30 years. Anonymous crypto payments have been deployed for maybe 10. Yes, there are scaling issues. No, they're not that hard. The real problem is getting everybody to agree on what to use.
... and if a site directly tells me it doesn't like my ad blocker, I leave. I haven't gone to the ad-blocker-blocker level. I don't think that's unreasonable.
The hard problem with micropayments is that if your site sells access or content to individual users for micropayments, and you have users in multiple countries or multiple states/provinces within a country, you might have to deal with VAT or sales tax on those payments in multiple jurisdictions.
For direct micropayments to work for sites that have users in multiple jurisdictions and do not wish to find themselves on the wrong side of the law in those jurisdictions one of these approaches is probably needed:
1. Some sort of international agreement to either make it so online sales of digital content is just taxed in the seller's jurisdiction.
2. Some sort of international agreement that makes it so that even if the seller has to collect taxes for multiple jurisdictions, they can report and remit all of the collected taxes to one jurisdiction and that jurisdiction's tax office will deal with divvying it up to the others.
Europe does something like that for VAT. You register with one EU country (Ireland is a good choice for US companies). Then you just send them a quarterly report with a list of how much you sold in each country and pay them and they deal with it. You don't have to deal with tax authorities in any other EU countries.
Another approach, which does not require any new international agreements to be made, is for sites to sell through an intermediary. You structure this so that the end user actually buys from the intermediary, and the intermediary buys from your site.
If the intermediary is handling many different sites they might be big enough that they can afford the cost of dealing with sales/VAT taxes in potentially hundreds of different jurisdictions. Your site is only transacting with the intermediary and so only has to worry about at most two jurisdictions, the one you are in and the one the intermediary is in.
I did not know that, and I suspect that having found out is gonna make my life much less happy than it presently is.
For anybody who's interested, I just posted a question in uBlock's Reddit forum about how to stop using such ad-blocker-blocker-blocker features while still getting most of the rest of the features of the extension. https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/171rorw/optin...
Then I'll have to find out if I can survive like that...
I don't want advertising tracking me. I don't want advertising introducing products I don't want. I want advertising to let me choose what advertising I want to see.
I want to see advertising promoting environmental friendly products. I want advertising to promote cleaning up litter, but you don't see that do you? We have the tech.
Advertising, a blood sucking evil exploitive parasite.
I would turn off all blockers if they didn't play with PsyOp strategies of evil manipulative social exploits. Exploits that are replayed on kids, you and us. Of such that Google promotes on their network.
If advertising was clean, did not impeach on my privacy and just kept advertising to "just this video" I wouldn't block advertising. But they don't, wont.
They are vermin, evil parasites. But you don't see that do you?
> I would turn off all blockers if they didn't play with PsyOp strategies of evil manipulative social exploits.
That'd be a bad idea, actually, because advertising is a massive security problem as well as being bad for your brain.
Just a week or two ago they announced a WebP library bug that allowed simple images to own any of the major browsers. It's just not a good idea to let hundreds of random sources stick content on every page, even if you think you've somehow sanitized it.
Advertising is not a reasonable way. A separate subscription, with a credit card interaction, for every site I happen to hit once a year, is not a reasonable way. Demanding a bunch of personal information is not a reasonable way. Trying to lock me into an "ecosystem of partners" is not a reasonable way.
Globally accessible, ungated, anonymous micropayments, with one or two universally used protocols but no central gatekeepers? Sign me up. Extra points if I get to see how much of my payment is going to the actual content creator and how much is being eaten by the "platform".
The core technolgies exist. All the pieces have been available for many years. What appears to be missing is will.
Meanwhile, I'll use an ad blocker. If you prevent me from accessing your site using my ad blocker, I will go elsewhere.