Comment of the Day: Graydon: "You get what you reward, an...

Comment of the Day: Graydon: "You get what you reward, and the present mechanism of reward is advertising, fundamentally aligned with increasing people's insecurity so as to increase their likelihood of making a purchase to address that insecurity. Addressing the insecurity by reducing it with free information is something the advertising revenue stream is actively against. If you want this to work at a means of improving the cross-product of information and people, so that the area under the 'could make a sound decision if they wanted to do so' line on the distribution-of-access-to-knowledge graph is maximized, you need a public mechanism of reward and to align it with people's belief in the utility of the source toward reducing their insecurity. If the post office ran it, you could have a single standard blogging platform, a per-reader token distribution system, and a cash payout based on assigned tokens. But this can't be done with patronage or with advertisers, though patronage comes closer. (There's much greater diversity of patrons than diversity of advertisers.)...

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