"The adversarial web has characteristics we all know and hate — pervasive surveillance, fake news and disinformation (most egregiously from established media outlets and self-styled ""disinfo researchers""), a moderation crisis, SPAM, advertorial, and the list goes on."

"My thesis is that most, or maybe even all, of web2's negative characteristics arise from a misalignment of incentives that's ultimately rooted in the quirks of how money flows around in it."

"The second point I made, following on the first, was to describe web2's innate orthogonality. Web 2.0 has its own interests, agendas, metrics, and goals, and her personal and spiritual development is nowhere in that expansive picture."

"The goal is to cultivate in her a set of feelings and behaviors that support commerce, and that shape her into a biddable consumer — it is not to either destroy her morals or to build them up."

"Unique visitors X Conversion rate = Customers"

"Content is uniques. Content is distribution. Content is the opening of your conversion funnel. Content is king."

"But the cost of content distribution is not zero, and it's never going to get even close to zero."

"No matter how many times I repeat it on the internet, most people still do not seem to grasp that the physical landscape of the planet is dotted by industrial content distribution centers that are every bit as capital-intensive and location-dependent as Amazon's distribution centers for physical goods."

"The first aspect of this diagram I want to highlight is the complexity and indirection — users are paying for all this messaging, but they're paying for it via this indirect, circuitous route."

"The other thing I want to emphasize in this picture is that central to the whole thing are literal actual physical servers that run on electricity, are made out of raw materials, and are maintained by paid humans."

"The other great thing about the aligned web is that everybody can see who's paying for what."