@jreighly I still dont think you are seeing the issue clearly. I dont lose anyone on this either. There is a reason we hear people under 40 don’t click on ads. There is a reason short of collusion and sponsor driven content strikes (which should have been met with court driven monopoly break ups) that ad or ad plus subcription models never beat ad free models at scale.
If you have sponsorship in aggregate even over a small period of time you lose democracy and people lose their rights in a society ruled by bribery. Sponsorship is not about selling products it is bribery meant to allow censorship and laws and elections based on bribery.
Your attention defines you, it belongs to you, it is the basic means of self determination and self definition in the political sense and even beyond.
There are no corporate rights or any special rights given to people with money. Business doesnt even have a right to exist, because all rights are with the people and we contantly limit money business to prevent the slippery slipe dillution into tyranny that any concession on greed based activity would set up. There us nothing more basic than soveriengty over one’s attention and by extension time, and stress and agravation from interuption.
Honest unsponsored search is fine, manipulation of attention is an abuse, as is puffing and every other bribery assualt on attention and reason. I also dont think there is much of a balance. For instance a sign to mark the exact spot of a location is a safety aid, distracting drivers attention for profit needs to invite aggravated unlimitef liability for every accident it causes.
You think you can rent attention? Wrong. You need to respect my default global opt in, ask only where the flag is set to allow specific pre-negotiated and all monies out of the transaction should accrue to me at nothing less the the global ppp price for a second of attention. I think you will find in every case that distracting me from my voluntary attention to your cite idls not worth it and you’d rather just let honest search do the sorting, which it will with stupid attention gateway, toll road and walled garden fiefdom attempts.
I think you need to consider that unbribed unsponsored AI fueled search will reach a level of precision in the near future where no attempt at selling will have any attraction for seller or buyer, just mangage your wharehouse logistics as transparently and efficiently as possible.
But in that vein reverse auction and automatic novelty and sundry purchases on a recuring debit would be part if it along with, a special box or just not taking in or setting out what dont want for the automated billing system to deal with. And in the same vein Id like an even deeper relationship in that privacy abstracted black box voluntary sponsor bribe free system where I could tell the system about my personal preferences and it could with my permission ask me questions of a general sort. Naturally suppliers might want to pay for some of that abstracted data on their products relative to demographics and that’s a healthy feedback loop. But such search and provisioning may also be done by non profit DAO.