> distribute to sites I visit, if it meant zero tracking
How would your ISP know to which sites to distribute the money, if there were no tracking?But I kinda see it like TV. Cable providers know what channels and shows people are watching. Obviously web browsing data is more personal and intimate so it's not the same thing, but it's a good starting point for a thought experiment.
You would have to either self-host your own VPN server somewhere (maybe on a public cloud provider) or if you are truly paranoid, use something like Tor.
The problem is that both the ISP and the websites would then go "Cool, we're getting $10 a month from them!" for about a minute before they started trying to come up with ways to start showing you ads anyways. With the level of customer appreciation ISPs tend to show, I'm sure they'd have no problem ignoring your complaints and would happily revoke your service if you stopped paying the now $10-higher price per month.
people with something to share, people with something to say, who share and say it because they want to
that's how pamphleteers worked, that's how the Internet worked
at scale, static (CMS-managed) information sites cost effectively nothing even for arbitrary amounts of traffic, and smoothed across a range of people sharing stuff, it approaches zero per person
publishing used to be free with your ISP, and edge CDN used to be (and still is) free to a point (an incredibly high volume point) as well
having people pay something nominal to say things instead of pay far too much in attention-distraction or money to consume things, would put this all back the right way round
Also, I agree that the platforms and paradigms we have are fucked up, but do believe that people who put work into making something deserve to charge for it if there are folks who’d pay.
The closest we've come is something like Apple News, which allows me to pay for a selected (by them, not me) subset of features on a selected (by them, not me) subset of news sites. Can't somebody do this right?
Apple News remained fantastic until renewal of agreements when publishers demanded rights to insert additional ads.
Apple can't not have premium sources in there, so...