> The key thing that most people in tech don't appear to grok very easily is that the overwhelming majority of web services like search engines, social media, ad-driven news websites, etc are all things that users place practically zero value on. People accept ads because they're a way of paying for things without really thinking about it. If you start asking users for actual money they suddenly decide that all these services represent no value and they'll live without them.

Imagine a world where the only content that survives is the one that people value enough to pay for.

What a wonderful catastrophic disruptive event that would be. Imagine no more SEO spam which are essentially devoid of information. These which are already so plentiful and sophisticated that they are threatening the core value of online search. No more vacuous blogspam, low-quality trash "newspapers" that only survive because they trick people into giving them a few morsels of attention.

Imagine a human-curated web.