but look at the internet now. maybe they had a point.
Meh. The guy wanted to integrate micropayments in HTML as soon as it took off. Would you like that better?
It was a distributed way to fund media instead of banner ads. I think it would have been a tough sell, but imagine if all the 30% stakes that PayPal, Apple, Patreon, take were direct to creators?
This of course would all depend on a reliable search engine that could actually find things worth supporting.
Instead we had Geocities and Live Journal jamming ads all over to make it a “free” service, until it wasn’t. Now we have Google, TikTok and Facebook to replace them but that could turn it all off whenever they want.
maybe? it’s impossible to predict what effects that would have resulted in but what we ended up with now isn’t exactly great.
your options now are either full subscription only, with little audience and a huge barrier to get users as you have tonconvince them it’s worth a full size payment.
or convince someone else to pay you, e.g referral links and sponsored posts. this leads to low quality ‘reviews’ where the best affiliate program wins.
or put advertisers content in your site…and deal with people blocking it, and all the seo spam to get viewers onto those ads…
or…monetize your service by harvesting data on your users to then sell to whoever is willing to pay you for that data…also not good.
maybe if we figured out micropayments early we could have avoided some of that. or maybe we’d just have all of that on top of micropayments. or something even worse to maximize micropayments.
That’s wild!
Also, what’s bluesky? Any good? Worth signing up just to see it??
It’s a python library for controlling experimental hardware and managing experiment data and metadata at large scale research facilities such as synchrotrons, free-electron lasers, and neutron sources. It’s pretty great, but there’s no need to sign up to anything.
It’s like Twitter, but self-righteous rather than filled with Nazi screed. Still run by the old Twitter founder tho. So…
🤷♂️
To each their own.
He should have posted it to r*ddit and started a kickstarter to hype it up.
5000 dollarydoos and you get first dibs on domain names 10000 dollarydoos and you can choose a top level domain
reviewer’s comments probably:
I don’t see much application potential for this and the claims that this could be used world-wide are not convincing
To be honest, I wouldn’t have been much impressed by the HTML specifications, either. An open source alternative for gopher? Oh, how cute. Be sure to tell all your geek friends.
In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server.[11][9] Users became concerned that fees might also be charged for independent implementations.[12][13] Gopher expansion stagnated, to the advantage of the World Wide Web, to which CERN disclaimed ownership.[14] In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU General Public License.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Decline
It’s probably not quite right to call it an open source alternative, though. I don’t think that gopher or anything was established in a monopolistic way, but that was before my time. Besides, the internet was all universities back then.
Gopher itself is spec’d out in RFC-1436. It’s not a particularly difficult protocol to implement. It’s easier than HTTP/1.1 (though not necessarily pre-1.0 versions; those are basic in an under-designed way, and I’d say the same about Gopher). I don’t know if that licensing fee claim holds up. People may have been worried about it at the time, but UMN never had a patent on it or anything, and RFC’s are public. If there were fees charged, it’d be the creators themselves charging them.
It’s true that Gopher never really went anywhere. It was convenient for what it was and it had Veronica (a basic search engine) which made it useful. But hyperlinks were a killer feature.