Dollarnomics on Tyler Knows Nothing

Teetering on the edge and reaching back for helping hands

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 17:30:52 -0700

I don’t believe anyone relishes the idea of having to ask for help from strangers. We like to feel personally empowered, in control of our fates, and capable, but reality has a tendency to care little for our personal desires. While we have been blessed for many years to be able to keep a roof over our heads, we’ve come close to disaster a few times. This is one of those times.

I will neither embellish nor sugarcoat. We need to raise around $7,000 to wipe our debt clean with the mobile home park we live in, and I need to ask for that help from strangers in order to raise that much. We’ve been able to pay our mortgage, car note, and bills, but have fallen behind on the lot rent. I have asked what little family I have remaining, but they aren’t in a position to help much. With the message I am also asking my friends to pitch in, and a few already have in the way they can.

But here’s the thing. I’m not willing to ask people to give what they can. In fact, I’m not willing to ask people to give more than $1. There is a fairness to this, I believe. It levels the playing field and eliminates the imbalance of imposing a burden on others to save my family. So, that’s what I’m asking, for you to go to my Ko-Fi page and grant to me $1 a month. If you send more, as there is a facility to do so, I will return it. I’m not asking for more money from individuals. I’m asking for more individuals to give one, simple, plain, uncomplicated dollar.

The more who do so, the more we’ll have. If those who contribute their $1 ask others they know to do the same, and that continues outward, then with a few thousand contributors, we’ll have the funds we need to save our home and my little family without burdening anyone. That is my goal.

We’re a simple family. My wife and I have been writers for decades and we were blessed with a daughter whom, after discovering she is Autistic and has epilepsy, remains an only child. And despite her challenges she achieved her Associates Degree at a local college and is an accomplished artist. And yet she still faces difficulties, so we have dedicated our lives to protecting her. And at the same time, we deal with our own issues. My wife has had all of one and most of the other adrenal glands removed for benign tumors, suffers from Cushing’s Disease, and has had various other surgeries with complicated names I can never remember.

I am a structural mess having been diagnosed with degenerative disc disease in 1988 and having a motorcycle accident in 1990, I’m starting to feel it in at 56 years old. I have had a knee replaced and will likely need to get the other one done, a cervical spinal fusion, and will need to get an arm bone shortened to relieve intense wrist pain. And we all caught Covid in February 2020 when I was still driving for Lyft in LA and Orange County. I had Shingles at the time, as well. That was fun. And I now suffer from a range of Long Covid symptoms and have been going through rounds of testing to for my own Cushing’s Disease. Fate can be cruel.

There are additional societal and political issues at play in 2025, but I won’t bother going into those. Suffice it to say that we may face additional existential challenges in an uncertain future. Our need is simple. Our request for help is simple. Again, all I ask is that you go to my Ko-Fi page and agree to contribute one, single, solitary dollar to us on a monthly basis and share this plea so that others might do the same. If enough do so, then we will have what we need to survive.

And again, if you send more, I’ll send it back. If we get a lot more $1 subscribers than we need, then we’ll donate the extra to others who need help or organizations that benefit those whom are othered or deemed less worthy. We are all human beings. We all deserve to have a place to call home and a little recognition, regardless of who we are, what we look like, what language we speak, who we love, or what we think or believe.

I thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Tyler

PS: You might note that my Ko-Fi page is named Dollarnomics. I have written two articles about this concept. The first one is here and the second one is here.

$15 a month for a single newsletter is unsustainable

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 20:41:25 -0700

#journalism #dollarnomics #editorial - Tyler K. Nothing reporting.

DATELINE INTERNETOPIA - #Substack has created a mythology in the form of the $15 a month newsletter. The claim was that it would help support independent writers who have been driven out of organized news gathering by capitalist greed’s desire to “trim the fat” (meaning people who cost money they’d rather have in their Cayman bank accounts), but the model is unsustainable. In reality, all it does is net Substack more revenue.

Of course, they need that larger cut to support the now far more bloated model that appears to include completely free hosting of a blog, unless you want to use your custom domain, and then you’ll have to cough up $50… and then do it yourself. Yeah. You pay them to then do all the legwork. Liberating, indeed.

Whinging about fees nobody else charges aside, most newsletters are asking for $15 every single month. That doesn’t get you an entire newspapers worth of content, but the words of one contributor. And Substack doesn’t offer discounts for subscribing to multiple newsletters, so if you pay for three newsletters you will be forking over $45 a month.

That comes to $540 a year which is more than double what we pay annually to heat our water and dry our clothes. Imagine floating an entire newspaper’s bullpen at those rates so one person could stay up-to-date with the news! Not that I would, but I can get a subscription to the Pasadena Star-News for $3.50 a week. That’s an actual newspaper with lots of contributors, sections, resources, and whatnot and it’s still a buck less a month than that single newsletter.

We can’t do this. It won’t work. We cannot continue to rely on insanely wealthy oligarchs owning all of our local and national news, whose collective bias against a free press has become increasingly clear over the past few years, to transmit that bias into our consciousness on a daily basis.

If there is one thing we can do as, and I’ll use the word yet again, a collective, it is to subscribe to an organic virtual bullpen of writers to produce open source news that everyone could benefit from, regardless of how deep (or shallow) their pockets are. Several such collectives would be even better. And let’s start it at $5 a month with a sliding scale so readers can select a contribution they can afford.

The mainstream media, popularly known as the MSM in various circles, and the internet as a whole, has been slowly and methodically subsumed by the rich and powerful and turned into outlets for their increasingly unhinged desires to terraform society into something better suited to their wants and needs.

Look no further than Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and its rapid descent into madness. More recently Mark Zuckerberg has announced the end of fact checking on Facebook and other Meta platforms for reasons that are plainly disingenuous. X is much smaller than Facebook, but Facebook and Instagram represents 5 BILLION USERS.

If Mark is able to influence a mere 1% of his global userbase, that’s 50 MILLION people.

That’s just insane.

A solution requires two parties, creators and readers. We have the creators, but readers need to step up and be willing to pay a small monthly fee knowing that it will go towards the production of quality, reliable, fact-checked news gathering. Getting everything on the internet for free is a zombie shambling around a china shop, smashing everything and making a chaotic mess of things and we need to put it down, for good.

After all, you get what you pay for.

For more on my concept of Dollarnomics, read here and here.

Save The Web: Advanced Dollarnomics

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 14:47:23 -0700

In the first part of this series I started last year, I spoke about the idea of Dollarnomics, describing it in some detail. If you want to get the basics of the concept, then you should go read that first. It’s not a long piece and I’ve linked it below. I do outline a few ideas there, but there needs to be some additional context so that you might fully understand the power that I believe resides both in the $1 bill and in the people who are tired of always being on the bottom of the economy, even if you only have a few million dollars in the bank, an amount that is nowhere near as comforting as it was a decade or two ago.

Saving the Internet for Humanity: Dollarnomics 101

Here in this second part, I will be outlining how certain groups and/or organizations would pay benefit from $1 a month per subscriber revenue, and attempt to show how that would be significantly transformative to said groups and/or organizations. Note here that by ‘groups and/or organizations’ I am referring to developers, services, brick & mortar stores, entertainment, and most anything else. There are some limitations that would manifest for certain organizations that need more substantial infusions of capital, for instance space programs, governments, and large multi-nationals, but this is a concept designed for regular, every day folk and groups which have organic communities. It will become clear through the following examples.

A Twitter Clone - I think this particular case would be an easy choice for most people, aside from those who are giddy with joy that the service formerly known as Twitter is now a hot mess. Twitter, for all its faults, was a powerful resource for local, regional, state-wide, and national news. I would happily pay $1 a month for a Twitter clone that did not have advertising of any kind and did not collect and sell my personal data. To make it even more useful, I’d leave reactions, but remove interaction, which is a significant cause of conflict on most social media platforms. I’d also add UP/DOWN voting so the users democratically decide what gets floated to the top and what doesn’t get traffic. It may not be a perfect solution, but it would be a damn sight better than Elon Musk’s combination train wreck/dumpster fire. Based on Statista numbers of Twitter users worldwide in 2022 before Musk bought it that October, the service that popularized the term “tweet” had amassed nearly 397 million users. If only 10 million users pay $1 a month, that would be $10 million dollars in monthly revenue.
The LA Times - I am a native Californian. I was born in Pasadena. Aside from the years I spent splitting time between parents, and thus to and from Pasadena and Knoxville, TN., I’ve lived the vast majority of my life here. I find local news to be critical, and while the LA Times is a local paper, it has global reach. I would, and I believe millions of my fellow Angelenos would happily pay $1 a month for the news. That doesn’t mean the LA Times needs to stop selling ad space, but the venerable newspaper wouldn’t need to lean on it as a crutch, and it also relieves the pressure from said advertisers. For instance, if LA Times investigative reporters were to produce a powerful article unveiling a dark side of some corporation that is harming citizens and they pull their advertising, the LA Times itself would likely not feel the effects of the loss of revenue. In fact, I believe it would increase the public’s trust in them as a news organization, and also increase $1 subscribers. According to the LA Times About Page, they have ₄₀ million website visitors, 1.6 million Sunday Edition readers, and a combined 4.4 million weekly readers. If all digital subscribers were switched to $1 a month plans that would likely draw a lot more paid subscribers. A current digital subscription is going for $98 a year, 53% off the normal $208 rate. How many people do you think are willing to pay that? With 14 million peeps in the LA Metropolitan Area, 10% of them would net them 1.4 million a month. I imagine the subscribership would be a lot larger.
Far Too Many Musical Acts To List - Ok. I’ll list a few. Bruce Hornsby, Rush, Level 42, Toto, Progger, Big Wreck, Jason Falkner, Rob Fetters, MUTEMATH, Simple Minds, Echo & The Bunnymen, Simon Phillips… oh dear. I’m gushing, but I think my point is made. Who do you love listening to and would also love to contribute to their continuing ability to make more of what you love? That’s a lot of love, I think. While I don’t have any statistics on any of these bands, you likely know that Rush and Toto are huge North American acts, and the rest have sizable followings. Let’s say, for example, that the extraordinary Rob Fetters (The Raisins, The Bears, Psychodots, and five solo albums) that you seriously need to listen to, has 25,000 fans who are happy to pay $1 a month to help him put on his live shows on YouTube. That’s $25,000 a month of consistent, reliable revenue. I’m willing to bet he has far more fans. Rush and Toto alone could likely count on millions of fans each. Could you imagine what Taylor Swift could do if her fans contributed? She could likely set up her own tours, handle her own ticketing, and get out from under the yoke of Big Media. Without the so-called ‘middle-peeps’ involved, groups could define their own fate instead of relying on the “good will” of record labels, agents, ravenous ticketing monsters, and other blockades to their creative freedom.
Independent App/Game Developers - One of the first indie game developers that comes to mind is Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya who single-handedly created the legendary freeware game Cave Story over a period of five years. Another well-known solo developer is Robert “Toby” Fox, the creator of Undertale and Deltarune who, despite being a prolific creator, suffers from hand and wrist pain. Both of these creators and many, many more solo and small team developers who have fans around the world would benefit from some baseline stability in the form of $1/mo. support from those fans. On the software side, Gary Rosenzweig, the founder and principal contributor of MacMost.com and developer of the freeware ClipTools for macOS is able to do what he does without serving ads because of his Patreon supporters. He currently states he has ₁,500 subscribers, but if he were to switch to $1/mo. I believe he could multiply his subscriber count by several factors.
Open Source Application Developers - The vast majority of open source apps are developed in the spare time of the developers and, as is standard practice for open source, available for free. Making an open source project successful is far more difficult than starting a rock band and getting a record contract. These developers often ask for donations, but very few people donate as the expectation is for more substantial sums. The reality is, however, that lots of people don’t have the ability to make larger donations off-hand, and even if they could said larger donations would only last so long. The goal needs to change from size of donation to consistency of a large number of small, predictable donations.
Mozilla - Yes, the peeps who make Firefox. For years, the Mozilla Foundation has relied on revenues from its partnership with Google for being set as default search engine, a relationship many understand is designed to help Google avoid antitrust liability. The reasoning being that if there is at least one competitor, Google can’t be a monopoly. Of course, Google seriously overpays Mozilla to make sure that the open source organization is beholden to them for operations, but with a voluntary $1/mo. from each willing user, just ₄₀ million users paying in would make that arrangement unnecessary, or at least allow Mozilla to negotiate much better terms for itself. I realize that’s a lot of peeps to get that done, but it wouldn’t have to be quick to have a positive impact on Mozilla, their products, and their users.
YouTube Creators - Don’t get me wrong. I think YouTube creators should be paid for their efforts. Unfortunately, YouTube itself seems to hate them. Watch this video from Second Thought, a verified YouTube creator, who covers much of what’s wrong with YouTube, and I think you’ll understand. These creators have to work themselves to the bone and hope that YouTube’s algorithm actually works for them and they earn some of that sweet ad sharing money. Seriously, watch the video. All will become clear. If, however, 10% of Second Thought’s subscribers gave him $1 a month, that would be approximately $170,000 a month in revenue. Consistent. Repeatable. These are things YouTube has trouble with, and it’s driving creators away.
Writers Like Myself - I won’t hammer on this as I don’t think this needs additional exposition. Do, however, check out my Ko-Fi page linked on the homepage. Even if you are also a writer, check it out to see how simple the setup is and do your best to emulate it. Even a few hundred contributors would likely change the lives of most independent writers, and that only costs each subscriber $1 a month.
Completely Free WordPress Themes & Plugins - The once promising universe of WordPress assets has turned to utter crap over the past decade. Just poke around their themes and plugins and you’ll find loads of downloads that are handicapped versions you can “unlock” with payments to “Go Pro”. For someone who just wants to blog or start a simple website, it’s a field of endless “Pro” landmines. And even if you go for the free version, most add persistent or frequently appearing promotional ads in an attempt to convince you to upgrade. Automattic, the company that created WordPress, is clearly unwilling to place any limits on theme or plugin developers or even bother to curate their own resources to make it easier to find completely free options. I would happily pay $1 a month to get curated access to verified resources that are completely free of any upgrades, passing along the bulk of the subscription income to the creators of the resources as an incentive to keep feeding the ecosystem.

Using a no-fee service like Ko-Fi or Liberapay you can get the most out of each donation without much overhead or the parasitic middle-man, aside from processor fees which no one can escape (whee).

I’m going to leave it at this for now. These exemplars should be more than enough to derive plans for other applications. Next will be a completely new spin on user security and the simplification of the user space of the internet. Don’t worry, despite sounding complex, it’s dirt simple.

Saving the Internet for Humanity: Dollarnomics 101

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 20:30:26 -0700

Or not…

The Internet of 2023 sucks.

Every site, every service, every entree and every destination on the modern Web of today is controlled by corporations. Blood and treasure is expended, our personal data and real money is hoovered up to feed bottomless C-suite salaries…

While the World Wide Web may be comprised of an endless cavalcade of corporate entities vying for ultimate control, there remains a much, much larger contingent that has yet to stand up and take it’s own power: we average peeps.

Yup. The rest of us. The rank and file, as it were. The NOT 1% of Americans who just want to get on with life minus all the drama and violence.

So, within this unpleasant and difficult context, I’d like to offer my thoughts on fixing our ailing Internet. Now, I’m not going to suggest my ideas can fix all our woes, but a better foundation for our public internet can go a long way towards healing the rifts dividing and disrupting all our lives. So, let’s kick this proverbial pig.

NOTE: I have no idea where I learned that pig-kicking axiom. Likely the years of my youth spent in East Tennessee. Lovely place, the Smokies :)

We need a perspective change.

In this first piece, I’d like to focus on a single factor of the overarching issues plaguing the internet in 2023; user retention. In other words, keeping eyeballs on “content.” Merely look to the overwhelming success of TikTok and Instagram to see that content length has gotten dramatically shorter and screen-on times have gone up.

At one point, reports in the mid ’20s indicated that, on average, Facebook earned ~$20 a year in ad-view revenue for each user. It turns out that was just for the US and Canada. When you look at the Worldwide averages, you can see that a few bucks a person can float an entire Capitalist Wonderland of exploitation. That’s the power of the individual dollar. Even Facebook knows how powerful the dollar is.

All amounts are in U.S. Dollars. All further information on this statistic can be found at Statista. So what if I use Dark Mode. It’s better on the eyes. Fight me.

This is the kind of awareness I want to see leveraged by everyone, and I will explain how… minus the exploitation, of course :) First, however, lets go over some basic principles with a few goals I have for a new Web:

It must be affordable.
It must be secure.
It must be discoverable.
It must be open source.
It must benefit humanity with as few restrictions to access as possible.

Affordability is critical, and the lowest common denominator is the US $1. In order to facilitate masses of Internet users spending $1 to subscribe to a service or creative we’ll need to do an end-run around big chunks of the corporate-controlled web with a simple, uncomplicated $1 micro-economy that naturally removes the need for advertising as a source of funding.

Right now, web services are built around the classic database concept of One-To-Many.* Millions of viewers go to a single website to watch videos on YouTube. That’s how database servers work. It’s a simple idea.

* While this is not technically true, it’s more than accurate enough for our purposes. Most sizable web services (i.e., Google, Amazon, etc.) are distributed across servers using technologies like load balancing to redirect incoming users to physical servers that have less traffic.

Most web servers today aren’t one machine in a rack. These four full racks could very easily be one website. Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash

According to current YouTube corporate dogma, the costs to operate dictate that they sell ad space and charge Premium users $21+ a month, filtering fractions of your premium to the creators you actually do watch, after it has taken it’s cut of the advertising and membership revenue, of course. Google, Meta, Amazon and others have an effective thumb on the scales, but that advantage can be eliminated, or at least blunted.

And if that wasn’t enough, we know all too well that most online services collect and sell our personal data to anyone with coin. They extract value from people who cannot or will not pay. Many creators are forced to augment their YouTube profit sharing revenue by selling in-line sponsorships which all users have to consume, even the Premium tier. And if we skip the ads, the creators get a lot less, at least that’s what I understand. This can be fixed.

A universally accessible micro-economy

Marques Brownlee is an insanely popular YouTube creator. You might also know him by his channel, MKBHD, which has, as of late September 2023, 17.6 million subscribers. One of his more recent videos about the new iPhone 15 has almost as many views as he has subscribers, an astounding 13 million.

Wow! That’s a lot of views!!

Now, I know nothing about how much money MKBHD makes from YouTube revenue sharing, but with YouTube taking around 30% of everything, it would suggest that there’s a lot Marques is missing out on. And yes, that is sarcasm.

For the fix, let’s look in the parts bin for the required technologies. I’ll explain more about this a bit later. For now, here’s what Marques would need to get started:

A media-specific Content Delivery Network (CDN) account with space enough for video uploads. KeyCDN appears to be the quickest to get into, but you should research options.
A web server, likely through a hosting service. Check out Linode for reasonable rates on capable Linux-based services.
A Ko-Fi.com account configured with a $1 a month subscription and nothing else.
A good website designer.

Here’s one critical point: We have everything we need to make this happen now. Allow me to repeat that more emphatically:

WE HAVE EVERYTHING WE NEED TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN NOW! TODAY!

This isn’t theory. It’s not a complex new framework that depends on massive, inter-agency cooperation. We don’t need to develop any new technologies. The only thing that must be developed is familiarity with the concept itself.

So, what does this look like?

I would hope that it would look like a calm, orderly experience, but that will likely come after a few years of maturation. Let’s say, however, that Marques sets this up and tries it out.

First, I imagine he’d post a video to YouTube announcing that he is opening a new streaming service outside of YouTube and invite his subscribers to join for $1 a month. Not as a promotional rate, but as the actual rate. Next, he’d upload ad-free/sponsor-free versions of his latest YouTube videos to the CDN and post them to his new single-channel streamer.

If 10% of his subscribers take him up on his offer, he’d be pulling in $1.7 million a month before expenses. And yes, this means that the service would not be free, but it’s only a dollar a month and subscribers don’t have to suffer any advertising terrorism or other corporate interference.

It represents a kind of freedom. A very narrowly defined freedom, but in this America now, that would be very welcoming to me.

Where can this go?

That is a valid question to which I do not have an answer. For YouTube, I think all creators with more than five million subscribers could easily do this independently, but an affordable infrastructure offering would need to be available for smaller creators. If a sufficiently large number of influential creators make such a move, CDNs other than KeyCDN will adapt to accommodate, I’m sure.

Local newsrooms, radio stations, independent coffee shops, music shops and record stores, small farms and farmer’s markets, kids sports teams and teacher supplies, and other resources threatened by corporate consolidation could be buoyed by some additional support that doesn’t hurt the individual citizens wallet. Could you spare $5 a month to help your community float five small businesses against the rising tide of corporate mergers and retail assassinations?

It’s true. The smaller the community, the fewer the people to give $1 a month. I don’t have a fix for that, yet, but I’m brewing some lateral ideas. If you already have, leave a comment for posterity :) It’s worthless to make things better for most people and not all, and small-town America is just as important to this country as any big city. There’s also no reason why a town couldn’t take $1 donations.

I believe that this can be a powerful tool to return some power back to the people. It won’t fix everything, but we need to keep working towards real, viable, accessible solutions. There’s nothing wrong with fixing one thing at a time, but there are some additional notes I should make before offering my summary:

Ko-Fi is a decent solution for now, but I suspect it would be far smarter to develop an open source solution for moving dollars around.
One of the strengths of YouTube will be lost; discoverability. I have a fix for that coming in another piece, but it’s not yet ready. My smooth brain takes longer, so be patient. Any solution, however, will necessarily involve a real fix for the search engine problem.
I believe that for this to work everything must be open source. There can be zero direct corporate influence on the operations of those who manage to escape their greedy clutches. It is imperative that only open source resources are leveraged. This would be a project of, by, and for the people.

That summary I promised…

I would think that it has become crystal clear that things need to be done to save the Internet, our supposed shared resource, for those who use it from those who see it solely as another space to be plundered savagely.

That’s gonna take a lot of work, but we can start small.

For my next piece, I’m going to tackle the next bullet point; security. The issue has vexed me for years, but I’m quite sure I have a new way to approach the problem that has utterly fascinated me.

Thanks for reading :)