The current ad model of the internet is built on some assumptions that were true in the 1990’s which are not true today:

1) people won’t pay to read good information in this emerging web medium
2) we have no internet native money

So systems like Google, YouTube, and Facebook were built where they optimized their product/business architectures around those assumptions. 

Free information and content were being created by many people on the web and free tools to help people search/discover relevant information would go on to win. Search/discovery aggregate attention which, when paired with data-oriented ad targeting tools, can be profitably sold to advertisers. Note: advertisers buy targeted attention, not data.

It may be that in the future we invent new models of how information gets published (shared) and how consumers are assisted in discovering/searching/evaluating the quality of information.

A new approach to publishing is what we’re doing right here, right now on Nostr. If you zap this note, more people might trust it as a good source of information. If 50 people who you follow all zap this note it provides an even stronger signal to you and future people like you who might like to discover or search to find information on the topic I’m writing about here.

So we’re in a mode where we’re publishing new information and pairing that with small “zaps” or proof-of-work. Bitcoin ecash is an area with a lot of experimentation that might help organize the proof-of-work pairing with information.

The protocols, platforms, systems, and tools that make an ecosystem of information pared with cryptographic-identities/PoW are vastly different than the ecosystem that makes Google, YouTube, and Facebook work. So we’re really at the frontier of building a whole new web/internet. The act of writing/reading/zapping here is a small step towards an entirely new structure of information on the Internet.

I think we’ll get there. To me Nostr feels a lot like using the web in the early 1990s. It could take some time. But the ingredients are all there and developers keep showing up every day contributing to this future — this is why I’m optimistic.