Ask HN: What will it take to destroy the ads market?
I&#x27;ve got the answer (I think.)  It&#x27;s a pretty simple idea, really.  I even have a proof-of-concept website up for it, but I&#x27;m not going to link it here because there&#x27;s nothing to see.  What I mean is that if you go to the site it will challenge your browser to provide a client certificate to authenticate, and since you don&#x27;t have a cert it won&#x27;t let you in and you&#x27;ll get a blank page or an &quot;UNAUTHORIZED&quot; message from your browser or something.<p>So how do you get a cert?  A friend (who is already a member) gives you a one-time access URL to a page that lets you download a new client cert.  Install that in your browser and now you can access the site, and you can generate your own &quot;new cert&quot; URLs like the one your friend gave you to give to your friends for them to join.<p>So that&#x27;s how the network grows: word-of-mouth direct personal connections.  And all these connections are public: recorded in a public DB (Sqlite file) and published regularly (say, every four hours or so) so the membership graph is known to all.<p>How do you use it?  Well, the other thing you can do with the site (besides minting new &quot;join URLs&quot;) is to propagate information (not to be coy, URLs to some article or whatever, like the submissions here on HN) through the network.  You go to the site (auth w&#x2F; client cert), enter the URL of the thing you want to propagate, and you get back what I call a &quot;bump URL&quot; that has a code that identifies the subject and the sender (you).  You send this &quot;bump URL&quot; to your contacts (via email, Twitter, whatever) who can click on it to see a page that has the original subject URL and a new &quot;bump&quot; URL customized for that contact, for them to send to their contacts.  There are two buttons: &quot;Engage&quot; and &quot;Reject&quot;.  &quot;Engage&quot; redirects you to the subject site after recording the &quot;engage event&quot; in the public DB; &quot;Reject&quot; likewise enters a &quot;reject event&quot; in the public DB.  Both are optional, you don&#x27;t have to click on either (it probably doesn&#x27;t make sense to click on both.)<p>And that&#x27;s pretty much it: you have a public graph of members, and a public sub-graph for each subject URL with public &quot;engage&quot;&#x2F;&quot;reject&quot; events, and all the data are published in a public DB that anyone can download and analyze.  (Have I mentioned that it&#x27;s all done in public enough yet?)<p>- - - -<p>So how does it work?  Why would you use it?  And how does it kill the ads market?<p>Simple (and as yet theoretical): Let&#x27;s say I&#x27;m a small business with some widgets to sell.  I create a sales page and make a &quot;bump&quot; URL for it and send it to my contacts, who forward it to theirs, who forward it to theirs, and so on.  When someone &quot;engages&quot; with that URL&#x2F;page and actually buys a widget, I can check the public DB to find out the &quot;chain&quot; of word-of-mouth links that led to that sale and reward each of those folks somehow.<p>- - - -<p>I am not spelling it all out here, there are additional details, but the above is the crux of the idea.  There are also some pretty obvious problems (e.g. how many &quot;bump URLs&quot; are going to be flying around?  Billions!?) but I think most of the potential problems are solved by the direct interpersonal nature of the thing:<p>Spam?  No, why would you forward spam to your friends?  If a friend sends you spam you can talk to them and tell them to stop, or just stop clicking on their &quot;bump&quot; URls.
As far as I can anticipate, most problems would be solved by the open feedback between members in light of the public DB.<p>Moderation?  Everyone is a moderator, and then some: people who don&#x27;t participate can still read the DB, so the moderation &quot;team&quot; is <i>larger</i> than the userbase!<p>Censorship?  No, because no information (other than the URLs themselves) goes through the network, so there&#x27;s nothing to censor.  (Of course someone could use an offensive URL, but again, if you get a link to something that offends you (for whatever reason, in whatever way) you can &quot;reject&quot; it, or just not propagate it.)<p>Anyhow, I can go on but I want to know what y&#x27;all think?  I&#x27;ve been sitting on the demo for months now because I just don&#x27;t know if I really want to do this or not, but I really DO think it&#x27;s &quot;got something&quot;, that there&#x27;s potential in this idea.  What do you think?