Decentralized payment culture

Marketing
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I’d like to be able to pay after-the-fact and only offer the payment for encouraging future works. Further I’d like it to be a one click Safecoin micro payment. Let it be a right click drop down with micro amounts all the way up to amounts that would constitute a donation. Think of it as crowd source, meets micro payment meets, Safecoin.

This would seem compatible conceptually with the % of Safecoins that will go to developers from farming. If the %covered development to a degree or completely this might augment to provide a return where appropriate but without strings or undue expectations and in the spirit from very start of preserving a fair use approach.

My least preferred method would be anything that had a suggested price. And I always try to avoid anything with ads etc. I think we need minimum coercion and minimum frictions systems and culture, also that minimum coercion aligns with minimum friction. The alignment wouldn’t allow any undermining sponsorship type arrangement. Anything that’s push and I am gone. In that context I think Maidsafe will need sponsor/ad free search and trending.

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Disregarding philosophical beliefs, I don’t thinks any of this applies directly to Maidsafe as a network. If I want to build a system on top of it that distributes content and generates revenue through commercials and advertising (and oh my will I…) then that’ll go on top of the network. And you can build the one you described!

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Oh @russell, and I thought you were such a nice guy, in spite of being based in LA n all that ;-). Advertising is pure evil IMO, so I’m hoping you were joking, but I see no smiley.

My reasoning is simple enough: advertising is a way the wealthy control the desires, and options of everyone else. I can imagine something that informs objectively, and can replace advertising without being evil, and it looks a lot like WikiPedia.

If I thought we could outlaw advertising in apps on SAFE I would push for it. @dirvine what’s your take on this?

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Ouch! This is not the way to push for freedom :wink: I get your point but I would rather just have a way to opt out from having to see advertisements. It really should be a choice. I have a friend of mine who supports himself with ads and I don’t mind. Here is a post he did about it. He checks for ad blockers, makes his pitch about how he runs his sites, and then asks for donations in BTC if anyone wishes to support his efforts.

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We’ll have to differ on that one @chadrick :-). I have no wish to hurt good people who are making a living dependent on advertising, but it is IMO one of the reasons our democracy is so screwed and our culture so ill. I take your philosophical point, but sometimes things have to be outlawed, though I know not everyone agrees with that either I think it is a necessity!

There are ways to deal with this beyond outlawing it of course, and I would support those - outlawing it for businesses/individuals above a certain size/wealth/income for exmaple. The problem I see is that it is currently the means for a massive abuse of the many by a few, and I take a strong stance in such instances.

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I’m a pretty firm believer that donation economies are fatally flawed and just produce deeper, more severe wealth divides and classism in societies already structured around capitalism of physical goods. I think the idea should continue to exist and attempt to generate revenue under that model, but I think it’ll fall embarrassingly flat and I’d rather not be a part of it if I don’t have to.

So, to make money in my industry, I need to consider the other choices.

Ads are annoying for consumers, but it’s the counterbalance to paying for content. They’re good dualities. And as society evolves, there will be less and less reasons for people to pay for content. So there needs to be incentives for entertainment to be ad-free.

I’m also firmly against the idea of “all information of every type should be free.” It’s a dangerous model that we’ll regret in the future (my viewpoint being abundantly clear on this forum). Information needs to be monetized as more things become information. And we need a distinction between art / entertainment / information. To treat them equally is a black and white viewpoint, and inaccurate.

Whether or not ads are evil is questionable. I sure don’t view them as evil. And honestly, they’re not going anywhere. The model just makes too much sense for content distributors and the system has too proven a track record. Impression advertising works too well. I was pretty convinced the 30 second spot was going away, but YouTube has convinced me of quite the opposite. And expect to see advertising baked into torrents soon, too. Folks can cut them out and reupload as “Barf-The-Burger-Hunter-lol-NO_ADS-xvid.avi” but that’ll become it’s own war, no doubt.

I think folks put too much faith in donation economies. People selling physical goods will have more control and make more money causing a higher concentration of wealth among an even smaller group. They’ll know people are spending less on the digital goods because they have the choice, and that they have more disposable income. They’ll start raising prices on other things that have actual scarcity.

I feel like the point of technology is to lessen friction in services, not to be constructed for political agendas that put up barriers.

EDIT: @happybeing I don’t tend to use emoticons/emojis very often, except for the poop one. I like the poop one.

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Just have to quote this because… well, because I do.

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I think the key is that we would opt in rather than opt out, and what we opted in for would not be something that was negotiated into a system like Maidsafe My sense is ads should never be the default option. That is also where personally I think we need to push for a culture that understands the end user must retain absolute control over the end user interface and also one that reject modal ads. The modal ad is the most most dangerous, especially in terms of conditioning. Even modal windows are too much. Again just my personal sense of things is that we want to be rid of supply side media because that leads to supply side society which will naturally end in revolt. Hence the birth of Maidsafe. There is almost an issue of reinfection.

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I just don’t see how this is feasible. The same way I can’t tell people to stop downloading and distributing my creative work without my consent, I don’t how anyone could (or should) tell people to not distribute their work with advertising.

I think what we’ll start seeing with television and movies is banner ads baked right into the image, like what they do on television shows now. Then they treat the advertiser more like sponsors. Not saying its a good future, but it’s the most likely one.

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To me there is a deep conflict of interest here that destroys the power sharing of democratic society and replaces it with enclosure. Free info doesn’t frighten me. I’d prefer there were no access toll roads. I think we want to be free of the society of rent seekers. They can be on the dole too if need be. In my hopefully humble opinion we don’t need dukes and earls of the internet who profit from restricting access. And it starts with the ad. Any medium that will allow the level of coercion that the ad requires will not be an end user owned and controlled medium. I don’t think the “on top of approach,” is something that can’t be stopped. It will take culture and tools- comment in last paragraph.

As I’ve understood things it seems that we allowed sponsorship and sponsored media and that captured media (in sponsored media we are not the customers, the sponsors are) has lead to no real firewalls and captured government and hence captive society. The progression of cable is instructive. They came promising freedom from ads. Now we have a situation where the cable companies will be paid by us to elect the politicians their sponsors have pre-selected and that trickles down to judges and regulatory bodies. We get law as money, hence all the talk about money as speech vice a from of coercion or coercive speech. It doesn’t work. Its failed as we now have Comcast trying to pitch a separate but equal internet where they will be paid to discriminate us or censor us. Note they take the money we give then and ague against our rights.

So my sense is the point of sponsorship especially on the mass aggregate scale is censorship and with it comes secrecy and spying and eventually the loss of rights and quality of life. Its a very slippery slope. On the other side we have a potentially open internet that if left in tact with neutrality will counter secrecy and spying with the kind of transparency that makes governments and business more transparent and will enhance privacy.

Besides the puffing that goes on with ads there is the push. With cable we paid to be free of ads and ended up paying to be force fed an addicting variety ads, many aimed at our children. Its a model where A pays B to exploit C through the theft of time and attention. If we had honest ad free search and trending we could align the interests of buyers and sellers and that could bring on a revolution in value and quality. There would be an element of word of mouth involved. I don’t see a donation economy being involved with what is being proposed but just a way to keep it a pure buyers market or keep the power with the end user, the build the understanding of fair use into everything. Call Linux an public domain economy.

To me legitimate media platforms and organizations only take money from their legitimate end users. They don’t do interlocking boards or even externally funded pensions. They are likely end user owned and controlled.

In a video game it may be hard to get rid of subtle product placement but as far as embedded ad sequences I think a lot can be done with culture and people rejecting this and going with open tools like HTML 5 vice flash. But even with Flash, if it were allowed, there must be a way to tap and advance by 15 seconds or 5 seconds even if it just blacks the screen and shuts the volume at a tap while 15 seconds of real time elapse. And I think at some point we stop using taxes to subsidize advertising, although the development of high quality product info could still be a business expense. I hope also that sponsored media will incur a tax penalty prior to an enforced outlawing of it.

And finally we do need an end user owned and controlled net. That may be composed of mesh phones and consumer free space line of sight optical and PCs with mesh nics and of course Maidsafe. But along the way I think people push to revoke outright all these deals local politicians signed to municipal internet out. This last mile stuff is pure enclosure. I think also rights groups need to start directly working to dismantle the business models that allow cable to exist- it a paid off menace as the RIAA was. To me it doesn’t matter how much risk capital evaporates, they people should have had the sense not to invest in what undermines society, their lack ethical diligence or disinterest justifies the loss.

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Can you tl;dr that? I read it but I don’t quite understand what you’re getting at. There were a lot of ideas in there, but I was having trouble following a cohesive line of thought. I’m genuinely curious what you were trying to get at though.

EDIT: God that sounds condescending… I genuinely was having trouble dissecting it.

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Adverts are free to ignore. If people are being brainwashed by them, you have to ask why people are so receptive to such propaganda. Could it be because we have been conditioned by the state for generations to accept , without questioning, whatever they tell us?

Advertisements are passive. They are not an act of aggression. If you start banning arbitrary broadcasts on the grounds that you disagree with the content, you are heading down a slippery slope.

Edit: ofc, paying to remove ads or going to sites without them is fine too. Let’s just knock off the talk of banning (read: using force to prevent) stuff.

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Ads just aren’t a very profitable way to do things when you can do micropayments or issue your own currency. The only reason ads became so popular was because the web couldn’t fund itself any other way at the time. Credit cards weren’t even an option at the time and there was literally no other way.

Now with micorpayments there is no reason to ever use ads again. You’d just pay for exactly the content and level of access you want from any site. You could set it up so when you click on a link it charges you.

You could also pay people for certain tasks on that same site so that if they moderate the site they could make enough of a profit to actually pay for certain things. You could have the users of the site generate content for the site and give them free access.

The site could have it’s own token to pay employees and charge viewers.

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Advertising is aggressive and increasingly so. It is a power relationship. Ads are crafted to manipulate people without their realising it, and designed to remove the opportunity of consent.

Every person has their own level of autonomy. Some can ignore ads. Some can watch them without being manipulated. But to be honest, I think those numbers are very few. Most people say and believe they are not influenced by advertising, but that is IMO delusional.

Ads are becoming ever more intrusive and pervasive. People are so used the the creeping tide that they don’t realise how sophisticated and powerful it has become. Google, facebook are the new advertising platforms. TV and film spot ads and banners are nothing by comparisson, and with the mobile tracking, internet of things, freedom from that money based influence and control will I hope be one of the major benefits to humanity brought by SAFE. It won’t be enough on its own though, because every consumer device will be turned into a spy that collects data on a completely new scale, which those with the understanding and money, will use to manipulate people into providing more of their creativity, profit and energy for the use of those in charge of these powerful psychological tools.

Just my 2c :wink:

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Everybody is influenced by advertising, influenced insofar as either being swayed for or against.

Sure, but that’s your/our fault. Look at the majority mindset about consumption online. People believe they’re entitled to content. That they should be able to consume and then make a personal judgement call on what they believe the value was of what they consumed. It’s demand without scarcity. And the value just gets closer and closer to zero because there’s no cap on supply. We don’t live in the fantasy of a donation economy and people need money to create the content, and to live. After all, the vast majority of the best content come from people who are doing it full time. And the other stuff is either made by white men with family money to support them or college students subsidized by their tuition.

What we’re seeing is how the content creators cannot function under these schemes and require additional income. So they turn to ads. The public makes their own bed and are equally at fault for things. And we’re the public.

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@russell I understand you see advertising as valid, necessary, even good (?), because it provides a way for some people to make a living in a market that is awash with content. Whereas I focus primarily on the harm that I believe advertising, and other forms of influence that empower the rich (corporations and the very wealthy) over everyone else (any company or individual that can’t get better, more creative, more useful, more beneficial, products to market because they can be drowned out by the wealthy).

I guess really this is where we differ: on how harmful advertising is to society as a whole, versus how helpful to a tiny fraction of people in society.

I choose to not support advertising based business models, and to avoid advertising and tightly controlled media as much as possible (I now watch virutally no TV for example, mainly because it is shite though - not to avoid ads, which I used to just turn off).

If no-one supported ad driven content revenue generation, another business model would emerge: to start the product would become scarce, but if people really wanted it, they would start to pay for it more directly. And if they didn’t want it, great. It was not only part of a harmful business model, but unwanted.

In the days before advertising, yes, they exited! Marketing was a passive social process. Products became known by word of mouth and recommendation. When no-one was on commission, people learned to trust recommendations and reports. The whole thing worked, whereas now we have this reliable social sharing drowned out, distorted and manipulated by those with the money to do it. An advert can cost as much as a movie. Why? Because it makes money for the product owner, even if their product is not as good as alternatives which don’t get exposure, placement, distribution etc. You know this better than I! That is bad on so many levels, and does great harm to people, creativity, economy and society.

We can’t shift the mindset without shifting the mindset. I see you (again) stuck in a mindset, so naturally you see advertising as necessary. (BTW. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant, I do seem to get into trouble with that but I don’t know how else to say it. I hope you accept it is meant honestly and not meant to be offensive. If it does offend, please let me know.)

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Yet, you can mute adverts, turn them off, ignore them, watch them but not act on them, etc. This isn’t an act of aggression, it is just an attempt to influence your behaviour.

People are adults. They are capable of making their own decisions. Censorship takes away this freedom and replaces it with threats of physical violence. Why do you think anyone has a right to do this? What makes your opinion so superior to theirs that you wish to remove their freedom to freely engage or dismiss the words of others?

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Anyone can shoot a commercial or design an ad campaign. More money gets you more eyes, sure. But more money gets you more everything. It’s a blanket statement.

If people like your product, you get more money, spend more on ads, which is then a reflection of your success. Advertising legitimizes your product and your company. Then, the consumer researches the product further, knowing which are and aren’t successful. We do additional research. My problem is when people assuming the majority is stupid and see themselves as the purveyor of knowledge and forward thinking. Those people are more dangerous than corporations to me. At least corporations are a mirror of our culture. We build them and feed them. They’re feedback loops. Do you know how massive the review industry is? It’s because people are pro-active and do research. There wouldn’t be such a large review industry if no one was using it.

I also don’t mind the commercial advertising world because it gives people the opportunity to exercise a creative muscle and get paid for it. Most brilliant independent films were made by people who had success in the commercial world. A lot of novelists were copywriters.

I consider myself a realist. If something better comes around that replaces it, great.

This doesn’t offend, but does come across as arrogant, as I mentioned above. I think one of the biggest problem with “Let’s Change The World” groups is that they assume they know something other people don’t. I think that’s equally as dangerous. The only thing more dangerous than government is people who firmly believe they know things.

We are not smarter than other people. We not beautiful and unique snowflakes, to quote the late Tyler Durden. All people crave knowledge. We seek it out, and the internet has given us that outlet. The internet’s success was almost entirely contingent on this. It’s also why the conspiracy theory market has boomed. People love consuming information.

I’m not stuck in a mindset. I just don’t agree with you.

You are missing out on by far the greatest era of television right now. Like, universally acknowledged, by and far unrivaled. The number of smart television shows on is outrageous. The list I could make would be so long… A lot of the good TV is subsidized by the bad TV (sitcoms, reality, and sports). But goddam, shite is the last thing I would use to describe mainstream television at the moment. Mainstream movies are a different story.

EDIT: This whole thing is hijacking the thread a bit. My apologies. tl;dr - Advertising and sponsorships will happen. I’d be shocked if it were ever stopped.

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This is my war against statist thinking. People always think they know better than others and try to compel people to live as they think they should. This is the opposite of freedom. But I’ve come to really enjoy your post @happybeing and our sometimes lively disagreements. I’m glad free speech (which is really what advertising is) is not illegal or we wouldn’t be in these types of debates :wink:

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Russell,

This is about enclosure. Under this situation some people see other people’s existence as a trespass and seek to slap a toll on them. Its rent seeking. Rather than systems that exploit people and make excuses for exploitation we need systems that directly empower people. Attention really is the end currency and it tends to end up defining us. We literally become defined by what we place our attention on. Having freedom over our attention ultimately allows us to get over ourselves but without that freedom we don’t even get the chance. Think of the loud video billboards. We are not supposed to talk on the handset while driving but people but sponsors are supposed to be allowed to distract us while we drive to the point of causing rear ends, deaths and of course aesthetic property devaluation. These bill boards do not denote a physical destination that could serve to get people off the freeway and improve safety. And some jurisdictions shut this disturbance of the peace.

At best this is a kind of noise, but its also a coercive speech that in aggregate is worse that shouting fire in a crowded theater. Its more like blood money or telling someone that a loved one died when when know it isn’t true. And its coupled with puffing. This kind of push or demand creation just causes the impulse sell of which successive iterations tend to impoverish. The idea that its free speech is akin to saying that taxation is free speech, but at least taxation can be the result of democratic deliberation.