a glob of nerdishness

You are paying to read this post. In some way, quite direct if you’re on a cell phone and rather indirect if you’re in a public library, you paid money so that you could view this Web page on your screen. This seems fair enough, especially if you are finding valuable info or entertainment [infotainment?] here. But did you know that I am paying for you to read this post, too? To make matters worse, as I continue to make this website more valuable to more people, the cost for me to give them this content will go up. On the Internet, we pay proportional to how much we’re being served, but also how much we are serving others. It wasn’t always this way.

Last fall, I was watching a Cringley interview with Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive and other endeavors. He revealed that just before the Web really started taking off, “in the ’80’s and [early] ’90’s…, AOL would charge people about $6.00 an hour to be on their service, and 10% to 15% of that gross revenue went to the publishers that were making the experiences that the people wanted.”(1) He called this a “royalty model” — just like a book, the more popular a site was, the more money it earned its creators. But eventually, those in power realized that they controlled access for enough “eyeballs” that they could start charging the content providers for the attention they attracted. And so today’s Web model was born: guests pay for access, hosts pay for guests and we need to somehow raise enough money to host over 65 million websites.

In addition to the cost of bandwidth, spam has further raised the price of hosting a website. Why should, say, a game company have to take time from answering user questions to fix the tool they use to do so, just because spammers have moved into the boards? Multiply that by countless others, who each put up a website allowing user-feedback and a month or two later are frantically searching for a solution that will keep the crap at bay. The only reason it is affordable is because every single community-oriented site has a share in the snowballing(2) costs.

There are two problems that face community-oriented endeavors on the Web and on the Internet: how to make money, and how to keep the service from abuse. Typically the former is solved by advertising and the latter by advancing technology inspired by artificial intelligence research. I’ve discussed the trouble with the AI-based technology approach in my last two posts, and I intend to discuss the problems with advertising in my next. After that, we should be all set to look at a solution.

1. A written transcript is available of the entire interview, which is a good view if you’ve got the time.
2. Someone thinks of new way to have the computer decide whether a chunk of data is spam or not, hundreds have to figure out how to implement the idea in their respective contexts, and thousands, sometimes millions, in each context have to figure out what’s the best blog comment plugin, what login/captcha system will best serve their guests, and what e-mail program or filtering service won’t junk too many of their friends’ random emails. Add some old-fashioned hand deletion of the ones that still get through, and we’re finally back where we wanted to be, only with an added annoyance or two. There aren’t many people whose time is best spent on this particular problem, but there are plenty who must deal with spam anyway.