I think that the lumbering hogs we call publication web sites these days are making sure that you as a reader are paying a cost to use their otherwise free web site; paying a subscription is better, but no one will do that. People on mobiles pay a tax that people on desktops don't, and people on bad connections in poor areas pay a tax that people in rich fibre-wonderlands don't, and yet energy and money is wasted on transferring garbage that nobody wants.
I seem to get dismissed whenever I suggest this, but these web sites could instead try another approach: remove all the garbage, have a beautiful, clean web site, and implement artificial rate limiting on all connections to it. If you want a super fast experience, pay a subscription! What are the upsides?
* Less bandwidth and energy and mobile phone battery is wasted.
* The site will still load in the same time that people are normally used to anyway.
* Rich people and poor people get the same experience; you don't pay a poor people tax if you are poor. Equity!
* Mobile phone users don't pay a tax, either.
* Meanwhile, Rich people have disposable income; they should be spending money on magazines and newspapers that people are producing anyway, to show their support, but they don't, so here's an incentive. They also indirectly support the poor people with news/media, who can't afford to pay a subscription (or wouldn't benefit anyway).
I don't think this would work for a simple reason: Google. It's a large source of traffic for news sites, it punishes sites ranks for being slow and it can cache pages and preload requests, rendering throttling shenanigans somewhat useless.
For this to be a tax someone has to collect--as it is, it's just a straight up degraded product to nobody's benefit. At least taxes get used for something.
Use logarithmic decay of speed down to the rate limit, the first bit of browsing is a fast preview. As you continue browsing a pop up explains that you're being rate limited and that you can pay if you wish to resume unlimited browsing speed.
if you make the website simple enough that it loads quickly on a bad connection and it loads the same content on a fast connection, why would anyone pay extra for it to be even faster?
I think the idea suggested is that the website could load quickly but doesn't, instead artificially loading very slowly regardless of connection speed.
I seem to get dismissed whenever I suggest this, but these web sites could instead try another approach: remove all the garbage, have a beautiful, clean web site, and implement artificial rate limiting on all connections to it. If you want a super fast experience, pay a subscription! What are the upsides?
* Less bandwidth and energy and mobile phone battery is wasted.
* The site will still load in the same time that people are normally used to anyway.
* Rich people and poor people get the same experience; you don't pay a poor people tax if you are poor. Equity!
* Mobile phone users don't pay a tax, either.
* Meanwhile, Rich people have disposable income; they should be spending money on magazines and newspapers that people are producing anyway, to show their support, but they don't, so here's an incentive. They also indirectly support the poor people with news/media, who can't afford to pay a subscription (or wouldn't benefit anyway).
Isn't anyone trying this model?