So nice to meet you.

We’ll make a transcript. We get to co-edit for 10 days.

Sure, I’ve read about it. It’s so nice to meet you. A little bit about myself, I’m Ryan. My parents are Taiwanese, so I’m a Taiwanese citizen. I went to elementary school in a local School and an international school after middle school so I’m bilingual.

Actually, last summer, I met Dees in San Francisco who introduced us. How did you meet Dees, by the way?

He was here [laughs] in a presentation about Mozilla Common Voice.

Oh, I see. He’s no longer with Mozilla anymore. I met him at a startup in San Francisco called Coil that I was actually interning at over the summer. I’d like to tell you a little bit about what we’re doing. I think it’s really interesting.

Personally, I’m really interested in entrepreneurship, startups, that kind of stuff, as well as the freedom of the Internet, maybe tied to that topic, the blockchain. Have you heard about Coil before, by the way?

Like donating browser resources for websites?

It’s a little bit different than that.

Oh, OK.

The idea is that currently the business model on the Internet is mostly ads. There are some subscriptions, and the advertisements is most of it. The value chain works in a pretty simple way. The user goes to a website, and then the website provides free data in exchange for user’s data and it will show some advertisements that are from advertisers paid by the key websites.

The idea is that we want to change the incentive system. Currently, I feel that as well, because I’ve worked on small websites since I was around 12, 13. I’ve felt that incentives were kind of misaligned, because the users were the ones that were actually using the website.

From the website’s point of view, they were getting money from the advertiser. They weren’t getting any money from the user, right?

That’s right.

Making sure the user’s experience was as good as possible wasn’t their first priority. What do you think?

I generally agree with the assessment. As far as I understand Coil, because in its current form, it’s the browser extension. It’s trying to kind of reshape the experience.

Yes.

So that it’s more easily monetizable, right?

Yeah. The idea is that once a user subscribes to the Coil service, every millisecond through the Interledger Protocol we will send a fraction of a penny to the website depending on how long a user stays on the website.

It’s a kind of tracking way.

Sorry?

It’s kind of a tracking system because then a website is going to know exactly how many milliseconds a user is actively browsing the page?

Yeah, but the website doesn’t get information about each user. They just get the money sent through the Interledger protocol. The Interledger protocol allows them to withdraw the money from the protocol in different ways, such as cryptocurrency. Coil also works with some payment providers so they can withdraw in XRP or through in cash, that kind of stuff.

The main idea is that, first of all, we want to empower content creators, especially content creators who are marginalized by current platforms, so that all creators can exist without the risk of censorship from centralized platforms and can be supported directly by users. That’s the platform in a nutshell.

It’s built to be ledger agnostic, right?

Yes.

It is an Interledger, if I understand it correctly. Then a particular realization with the particular ledger technology, basically the user has the freedom to choose.

Yes, they can choose. For example, they can take the money out the websites and can withdraw. In the future, once we build enough connectors for it, they can use Bitcoin to withdraw. They can use Ethereum. They can use XRP Ripple. Or they can withdraw maybe through a regular banking system once we’ve built a banking credit card connector on Interledger.

What exactly is the current ledger implementation that actually it’s been deployed?

Currently, since we’re still in beta, we only support the XRP Ledger, the Ripple ledger, which I think is a pretty good system. It’s pretty secure, can process all our transactions pretty fast. We do have teams that are currently building the Ethereum connectors or maybe a Lightning Network Bitcoin connector in the future, as well as a USD connector.

This is not at all related to web mining, which is narrow and things like that?

No.

There is no logical connection at all?

No. I was working on something that was linked with mining, the same idea but before I joined them. I told them about the project, and then they said, "Why don’t you come intern for us instead?" I actually built a little project called OBlocker over the past year or so.

How do you spell it?

OBlocker?

Odblocker?

OBlocker, like AdBlocker, but with an O in front. The idea was basically that people browsing the Internet can use this little program that will mine cryptocurrency in the background to pay out websites.

I spent a lot of time working on it and the economy of scales never made fully sense. There’s nowhere near enough money with my specialty after the prices dropped to support that as well as I think it slows down a lot of computing devices which...

...adding up.

Yeah, which is...

It doesn’t work on mobile anyway. [laughs]

Yeah, doesn’t work on mobile. I think it’s bad, it’s negative for people whose devices aren’t as powerful. I think that’s a big problem, especially with ASICs taking over most of the market. Coil is completely updated.

OK. How can I help? What would you like to talk about?

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on such a system. What do you think about it?

From a point of a creator, I think anything that’s as easy as adding AdSense has a chance. At this point, as a creator, AdSense is kind of the go-to.

The golden standard.

The standard if you want to monetize your content, because it’s a lot of externalities that Google measures anyway. Google packages that as analytics, or as customer relationship, or things like that. That basically helps you to help them to track the user. [laughs]

This is a kind of dynamic. There’s a book called "Surveillance Capitalism" that basically deconstructs this whole idea of Google.

Of Google...

Yeah, of how Google...

Those analytics services...

Yeah, exactly. Right, so as a creator, I’ve been advocating like self-hosted analytics, and things like that. It doesn’t offer the same network effect that Google analytics is able to offer. Simply because there’s no easy way to track movements across different domains.

They’re all owned by similar-interested creators. Unless they pre-agree on an analytics server, there’s no easy way to fabricate the insights of interactions across those creator’s domains.

Google demographic data for the websites’ users that they kind of share...

That’s right...

That’s the value add that they provide.

That’s right. Just by nature of being a browser extension, Coil has the possibility of offering that tracking.

If you do it in a way that preserves the autonomy and shape it like a data collaborative, rather than a kind of data monopoly, then I think it has a resource, which is the creator’s desire to learn about how the people browsing the Web is interacting with their creations.

Of course, money does good. The behavior and such is what people are opting-in for analytics for. I own a domain called moedict.tw that is a linked dictionary website that basically has like...

I read about that, it’s part of the g0v...

g0v, yeah, they’re part of the g0v movement.

g0v, yeah.

Basically, it can show you calligraphic representations, all sort of different ways of writing this particular character across the ages. It’s a lot of calligraphic forms, how to pronounce it, what’s its English, French, German, and Taiwanese Holo, Hakka, etc.

This has a huge number of visitors, of course, and a lot of quality content that are basically public domain or under Creative Commons license. This is just a presentation of that. I did place a Google AdSense advertisement which is dynamically priced, meaning that I’ll only bid if nobody else bids on it and to all the words that in the Chinese language.

It is advertisement on every possible keyword. It works really well. What I learned during that AdSense experiment was that the main value is a longer relationship of what is trending.

In that point, a particular Taiwanese follower called me up. It is trending. There is a panda named that and people typing their searches...It’s very new. It’s emergent. Nobody bothered to place a advertisement for that particular word. That place an advertisement on every word [laughs] it gets redirected to my dictionary. Then I started learning about...

You actually got clicks at a very low price because there wasn’t bidding on it, right?

That’s right. The original price. I only bid if nobody else bids.

You bid the absolute minimum.

Right. Exactly. The absolute minimum. It’s almost zero cost.

That’s interesting to know.

Then what I learned is ways to keep people engaged once they come to the site.

To decrease the bounce rate.

That’s exactly what we’re looking for or something similar. Then I offer them some gamified systems so that they can contribute to dictionaries, for example, indigenous language dictionary and things like that. It gives them something to participate in.

What I learned during that is the longer you can keep the browser extensions connection with the website and the creators, the deeper the relationship can go. Previously, offers to create more value for Google as a result. Google keeps tabs on both sides. If one can use the interledger protocol or some other way to provide a similar value, it could be advertisement. It could be sponsorship.

Google has data on every part of the funnel even on hardware side like Chrome, Android, all that stuff.

Exactly. Google Analytics, of course.

Every website.

That’s right. I imagine newer Firefox extensions are just Chrome extensions. What extension is Chrome’s browser? Is Coil strategically only offering Firefox extension or Chrome?

I think there’s a Chrome extension for sure.

Is there Safari as well?

I’m not sure. I think the team might still be working on them. It’s still in closed beta. The open beta hasn’t launched official yet. We need an invitation code right now to sign up.

There is a Chrome extension?

Yes. There is a Chrome extension. The idea is that we want to propose a...Web monetization is our overall intellectual protocol is the underlying but monetization is the overall. We want to propose it to browsers. We’d like to include it within...

Part of the web standard?

Yes. To add it to the web standards protocol. The team at Ripple...Coil was a spin-off of Ripple. Our CEO used to be the CTO at Ripple. They managed to add the web payments protocol to a lot of popular browsers.

We are hoping to do the same with web monetization now that we’re currently in the process of that. Web monetization, once integrated with all major browsers, would mean that we wouldn’t have the need to have an extension or the polyfill. It will all be part of the browser.

Is there a polyfill?

Yes. We used to have a polyfill. That was how it works. Our website can add a meta tag to your website and then combined with the extension they can read the meta tag.

It’s not the polyfill in the sense that you can do without an extension.

No. There were plans for a polyfill. As of the current stage they’re using extension. It’s probably a pretty simple way for both websites to adapt and for the users to set it up. It was more reliable than a polyfill, we found, the extension.

That makes sense.

The idea was that eventually, we wouldn’t need an extension anymore at all. The actual web monetization is open standard. Coil was one provider of payments. We encouraged other companies to also start initiatives based on monetization and pay-ups are different. Coil currently is general platform.

We pay more or less equally to all websites. A different provider might, for example, focus only on gaming. They would pay more to game websites. While you’re playing games they will pay more to support gaming’s more intense server costs and could eventually do that but could also be brought apps. It’s pretty simple to integrate Coil into app. You just put a meta tag into HTML file, window...

Container.

Yes, container in an app. On that side, there’s not much difficulty there. We hope it eventually becomes a full platform thing. Going back to what you said before about data analytics, it’s interesting you mentioned that you had a lot of fun with AdSense. Looking at what data they had.

AdSense plus Analytics.

The combination. These two are well-integrated with each other. You can connect with AdSense and with Analytics as well. I used to spend a lot of time playing around with Analytics. How can I increase my bounce rate? How can I increase my average time on site?

It goes to what countries to go visit from. What device they visit from. Mobile visitors, how can they improve mobile potential? That’s a fundamentally flawed look at this. I’m not looking at, how can I make a user’s experience better? I’m looking at, how can I put more AdSense ads per website over the user?

You’re essentially proxy matrix.

If instead the matrix becomes, how much time is used by the website? One step further, how much value can a website create for a user? Clearly, we can quantify that. That’s a more in the future thing.

Yes. Which is why I said at the end of the film, I always convince my users to become co-creators, essentially, by helping digitalize the dictionary, helping finding the typos in the dictionary, and so on. Basically create some public value for everybody else, rather than just me and the user.

That is a different version to action. It is a real fact when it comes to metrics. If you only look at the very beginning of the interaction, and only calculate approximate metrics, I do agree that it doesn’t really represent anything you created. It measures addiction, basically.

That’s being pretty really negative actually to the user. For example, games, like lootbox mechanisms, where people are essentially gambling thousands of dollars of money and these game developers are learning from the casinos as to how to capture the user’s attention. I think that’s pretty negative.

On that note, just as a side note, did you have any thoughts on regulation of lootbox or casino-style mechanics on websites of digital experiences? In Europe, for example, some countries actually ban...

Oh, I get it.

...like games that use lootboxes. Is that just because of the odds? I think...

Yeah, there is a very similar problem, here. You need to accurately review the attributes.

Like some websites that don’t destroy all the...

...on stats. That’s a pretty bad issue...

Of course.

...like defrauding the users, that kind of stuff.

Heading back to Coil, the idea is the Internet of value, right?

Mm-hmm.

One thing I’m curious about your thoughts on is how we can measure values for the subjective thing, like a website might have value for me and to you, like value website, a lot that I would value it on. We were having a discussion, internally, about what metrics should we look at to measure the user’s stats.

Is it a combination of things? Or is it something that’s quantitative or more qualitative, or something that users can subject to be choosed, like a star rating, or like a comment box, or like a thumbs up, thumbs down button for each website?

What are you quantifying it for?

To measure value. The idea is that maybe, eventually, we’re going to pay out different amounts at different websites. Right now, we’re only paying based on time spent on the page.

For example, certain pages, let’s say a finance tracker, that’s Mint, it’s a finance tracker. You probably want to spend a lot of time on your finances website, but it provides a lot of value for you. It makes sure that you’re not spending too much, it helps you keep your finances in check.

Compare that to a clickbait article website, maybe something like BuzzFeed algo, where it drags your value to user. If you ask the user, they generally will say, "Yeah, I don’t think BuzzFeed should get 10 times more money than My Finance Tracker, just because I spent 10 times more time on BuzzFeed."

Kind of discourage that kind of more exploitative, attention-based economy.

Are you capping it somehow? Or currently there’s no cap at all?

Currently, there’s no cap. Currently it’s beta so users can experiment free. We also get some information on how users are interacting, so we get feedback from them on, things to improve.

We’re counting only the active path...

Yeah.

...while the user is engaging?

Is on the path, yeah, engaging.

Then it’s not, for example, if I leave the space for an hour and go back, will it count for an hour, or you will detect that...?

There’s basic anti-fraud measures in place. A couple weeks after we launched, we noticed that a couple users were paid...

Very easily, yeah.

Earn like $50 off setting up a lot of devices all at the same...

It was pretty funny because we were already getting fraud from the users before almost any genuine users came on. That was really early, so we’ve taken steps to fix that at a pretty basic level.

There’s some metrics used to track active engagement. Currently, it’s just if you stay on the website for a long time, they get paid more.

The idea is that, for example, in the future, let’s say you video stream the website, video-streamed websites take more resources on their end, compared to just text-based websites. Should we pay them more? Or, for example, if the websites provide more value, should we pay them more?

A couple of things. First of all, is it a fixed, monthly payment, based on the percentage of browsing activities?

Yes.

Just like Spotify?

It’s a little bit different. Right now, you’re getting paid five dollars, but we don’t just pay out five dollars to these websites. We actually do micropayments to them. It works out to like few dollars an hour, per person.

For example, if we both buy a subscription, and I’m going to stay like 40 hours a day and you use it for 20, then you’ll expect to be subsidizing some of my usage , and you might actually only donate...

Right, so it’s like a collective.

Yeah, and I would donate too. Kind of like collectives, like I think Roadmap in your social impact article. That’s how it works.

In that case, then, it’s very interesting because it creates an incentive for people to kind of maximize the hours spent. If it’s all just prorated what went on, just a free ride.

It does create a perverse incentive for people to spend more time, because it’s a proportional reward your spent time?

That is the issue. Our train of thought, there was some internal discussion of this as well. Initially, we were worried that by prorating it for each person, for example, if I spent 10 percent of my time on this website, they get paid 10 percent from my month’s payment, then it would actually create a negative effect on...

Yeah, a diverse...

Yeah, it would affect the outcome. It’s like, "Oh, I don’t want to give this website that much money, so let me close it."

That’s right.

Or, "Should I support this website?" We don’t want the users to think about that. We just want them to use the website...

Why wouldn’t you want a user to think about that? I mean, with a credit card, I get a monthly bill. It is a customary gesture for people at least every month, perhaps every week, to review the effects my donations had, right?

Right.

Are you keeping this opaque, or do you want to be kind of completely transparent?

The users will be able to see which way their money is going.

Of course, if they request for it, but not actively saying, you know, "This month this is our sponsors..."

They will be able to see a page, but I’m not sure what exactly page, and whether it’s available to users.

In other subscription-based website, like Patreon or whatever, there is this feel-good monthly report that lets people see how exactly they’re spending their time on. I think it could be a perfect chance for people to kind of intervene. If I see this is proportionally large...

Right, realizing, "Oh, I’m spending so much time on these clickbait websites."

Right, "So maybe I can just dial down." Maybe the user should have their preference that says for example, you provide a natural cap, but the user can lower that cap.

Oh, they can do that. They can adjust how much money...

Yeah, but only with intentions, right?

Yeah.

They’d have to think about it then. What I’m saying is that maybe it’s easier if you just monthly, or every other week, remind users somehow through an email or something like that.

Like send a report. Oh, these are the websites...

Yeah, because it’s the value of analytics. This is what my credit card company offers me, an analysis of my spending habits.

That’s interesting, because the train of thought before was we don’t want to interfere in the user’s...

But it’s not interference. This is adding like an insight into your...

Actually it’s like...

...ah-ha habits.

There’s a couple extensions out there that do the exact same thing. This would be an added layer of that.

This is the feel-good part, because they can feel good that these websites...

Supportive.

...are now being supported. It’s not just a trivial number of dollar amount, because we can also include in the total payments you made, like a co-collective. Of course, it doesn’t compromise privacy, because I don’t know about it anyway.

I get to know that I’m one of the 50,000 people that frequent this website, and it makes me feel good, because then I’m part of the collective, and I’m supporting the...like I’m one patron to any thread... any web comment author, and then I only get one dollar per month, but then I get to know that this particular artist is being supported by 100,000 people, and it makes me feel like I’m part of that 100,000 people.

That gives a stronger incentive to engage more with the creator, rather than just me being on my own rather behavior. Which, as it’s said, everybody can look at their whole browsing history. But nobody does that, right?

Yeah.

Unless you want to clear it. [laughs] Just showing them one person is part of a collective, and how they’re in proportion of the collective is useful by itself.

That’s interesting.

That provides a natural touchpoint for them to adjust their rated weight for one, cap for another, into this pool.

That’s interesting. That’s going to look like a self-policing mechanism for how much time you’re spending on websites.

Then any other voluntary, let’s just call it votes. Of course, it suffers from the people that want linearly power one thing up, and everything else down because of this...

Yes...

...to vote.

In the Ethereum community, they’re running this idea of quadratic voting. QV basically say you can take the square root of the points that you have and that becomes the prorated vote. I’m not saying that you should take the square root of the time spent. I don’t know, you make sure that it makes sense. [laughs]

If the user has a way to dive between the different options, if it’s done through quadratic voting, I think it then gives people more incentive to look more closely into each choices and how those choices synergize with each other.

That’s another thing I think maybe you can look into, is whenever there’s a kind of voluntary expression of preference is that if they’re only offering the one...

Like a yes or no.

...yes or no, maybe you can try some sort of quadratic voting.

Like out of 10, they can borrow. They can...

Exactly. There’s a interesting visualization of QV, which is like a cup. Then it’s like a triangle, and then you dip into it, and the height is the vote that you give, but the volume is the point that you’ve spent.

That’s one, and three, and five, and seven for each traditional voting, so you’re literally pouring into a champagne cup or something. That gives a nice visualization of filling in the glasses of the creators, and things like that.

What I’m saying is that, with my example, you providing those insights into the collective of their own behavior. Second, you let them express preference. Knowing that they’re expressing their preference while it takes effort from them actually creates value by signaling it to your collective.

Right. I think things like Patreon shows how much people are willing and interested in interacting with this specific community. They want access to that new content, premium content, behind the scenes...

That’s when a creator can announce their pledges. If 10,000 people donate to me and then I agree to make one extra product every week or something like that’s a very familiar arrangement. I must say that with monetization as a protocol should address this.

If a extension allows a way for such creators, it could be used for Patreon, it could be OPENCOLLAB or things like that to hook into this, then you get to learn more about how each of your subscription in the outer web is doing to fund creator’s career. That is another thing that provides social value.

Value exists between two social actors. It doesn’t really exist abstractly on one solo mission. Any attempt to capture value purely on a single user scenario isn’t going to work. If I recognize that my favorite creator is gaining some extra time to draw one more product every week, that provide social value to me.

You’d be willing to pay for that, right?

Right. Then I know that my payment helps the creator goes that extra mile.

I think maybe more direct feedback information about the creators and how they spend the income, how Patreon does it or, how social media installments influences...

Speaking about Patreon, it may be interesting to plug into their API, if they have one, to let the creators announce on their website, many people already do, through a button or something.

We’re working on a creator system that might be a little bit similar to a Facebook or a Patreon for creators, not in terms of the pledges but in terms of the updates. A lot of people send updates.

If you’ve streamed a certain amount of money to them this month or you’ve spend a certain amount of time engaging some content you have access to, their latest updates or some premium content as well. One thing we really want to do is micropayments. We don’t send lump-sum payments. We send payments every second.

We wanted to open the door for things that weren’t possible before. You know CodePen? The idea is we’ll have paid CodePen. You would pay the micropayments while you’re on the CodePenCodePen for every second that you’re running it.

In the back end, we’re spinning something like an AWS cloud to run your thing that you are paying for with micropayments. The second that you close the website that instance closes or is used by some other user that is also streaming. We’re still not 100 percent sure what micropayments will bring to the web.

Things like video streaming, if, as each byte of data is sent from the video server to the user, the user sends a fraction of a cent back to the video website as the transfer of data and the transfer of money, if it can exist in the same medium, both through two different protocols, the Internet protocol and interledger protocol.

Previously, the cost was in storage and then computation and bandwidth. Then storage become free. [laughs] Now, it’s mostly computation, some bandwidth.

Bandwidth is pretty cheap as well.

It’s just computation, and some bandwidth, and then negligible storage. We have a way to recover the computation costs that would work. It is much easier for your model which is clearly sponsored the use of the screens rented computation rather than using client computer to run computation to the mine, to pay then you go back. [laughs] There’s a huge amount of value in electricity loss along the way.

Web mining was a cool idea. I don’t think it really works in practice. Right now, mostly uses for it are pirate websites or other illegal hacks.

Yes. I’m saying that as you walk in there and introduce the website, open the website that UI looks a lot like web mining.

Oh, I see.

That it’s kind of identical, so it’s just my first guess.

Maybe I can tell the UI team about that.

The difference is that Coil is donating, right?

Right.

It doesn’t explain that John is already paying Coil as a subscriber. If I’m not a subscriber then the only thing I have of value is my browser computation. [laughs]

We want to make that distinction clear. Blockchain is pretty popular technology right now. We’re not leaning too much on it. We are using a blockchain to power the interledger protocol. It’s...

It’s negligent.

Yes. It’s not the main thing of the common. We’re not doing ICO or anything like that.

STO or thing like that.

Yes. We’re just using blockchains in this platform.

As you should.

Maybe how JPMorgan is using it for some internal banking project. Actually, on the topic of micropayments, one of the thing we also thought that we could do is maybe something with gaming. I know Taiwan has pretty vibrant gaming market.

Esports market.

Yes, Esports market, gaming market. The idea is that maybe gaming companies in the future don’t have to focus as much on monetizations through exploitive groups like premium games, cost mending problems, a lot of things that I feel are pretty negative to the user’s experience. No one loves these cosmetics.

If users are streaming payments, the gaming history has less pressure to use these techniques. Money in the gaming industry’s really tight, multi-tech industry. Gamers are less lucrative than other tech-based opportunities because of high filming costs, a lot of competition. What do you think about the current gaming industry and how gaming economics work?

I play mostly indie games. I’m not the best person to offer my opinion. [laughs] I can download one indie game from the group GOG or whatever and play for a month. I’m not the ideal person to ask this question. I view gaming more like chess.

A fixed set of rules and I enjoy mostly turn-based games. I spend a lot of time on it but not interactively. I’m the wrong person to ask is what I’m saying. I do agree that if more games is able to build on each other’s successes that would mean a lot.

I have a friend called Rufus Pollock. He wrote "Open Revolution" which is a openly pay-what-you-want book that explains that, just like Spotify. He thinks that both patent and copyright need to be reformed so that it should be freely available but then paid by remuneration rights, which is paid by actual use.

The drug is paid by how many life it actually saves. Music is paid by how many hours it’s actually played and things, basically micropayments through a redistribution. He thinks that it makes new creations easier because it’s not entangled in patents and copyrights.

New creations still gives the royalties implicitly by a fork from your GitHub. Then, if I monetize that, then you would automatically still get a screen credit. This is a interesting model. It currently only has worked in very centralized like Apple Music or Spotify models or in state-owned...

It’s the Spotify model. Looking to the Spotify model to all copyrights.

That’s the Spotify model. That’s right. Exactly.

I had a conversation with someone that worked at a VC firm. They had a lot of investments in companies that had a lot of the copyright and all the patents. They were a customer using blockchain to license it. This would be one step further, removing the old copyright or patent system and replacing it with a system where it’s pay-per-use.

I like that idea. I think it’s more beneficial. You hear all the time about technologies or medical discoveries that are kept because of the patent or because of the copyright, the companies can’t increase collaboration.

It will give the game-making community some more economic incentive and shift more of the AAA games into essentially platform builders. Then it will make economic sense for them to encourage more of the modding community. Theoretically, this is really good.

Then it’s setting free what we thought as "intellectual property" into something of a co-ownership model. To make it work, you first have to solve micropayment. [laughs] There is a natural synergy with the revolution model and the work that you’re working on.

Interesting. I like this Open...What is it?

It’s called The Open Revolution.

The Open Revolution.

Yes. He’s an economist. There’s lots of economy stuff. You can... [laughs]

For example, books too, I think would be a great model for micropayments. Most creators would benefit from micropayments except for maybe certain more clickbait or more popular use. Even most journalists will also benefit.

Very much so.

Have you had a chance to be involved with journalism in Taiwan? I know all around the world, journalists are worried about social media and how it’s taking over all of the journalists’ profits.

Subscription-based investigative journalism is already in Taiwan, there’s quite a few cases that actually worked from all those magazine, "The Taiwan Reporter." Things like that are genuinely engaging their readers so that they’re willing to...

Are you using online model?

It’s still paywall, subscription-based.

Like the "The New York Times" or "Wall Street Journal."

Right. Initium is doing the same, I think. "Apple Daily," which is a newspaper is, for their own website, getting your social media profiles in exchange for the right of reading the articles and things like this. It could be monetized in every which way.

There is a pretty mature market in Taiwan that the journalists are generally not as dependent on social media advertisement anymore. I mostly talk about web media. Of course, the traditional media like TV and so on is pretty advertisement-based.

Would you be more positive about maybe small creators in Taiwan compared...These large brand like New York Times or Wall Street are famously very successful business models. They have that brand and the users have that need.

When you look at smaller bloggers that are starting out or maybe don’t have as much of an established community, maybe they’re the ones who are hit even harder. Maybe not because their costs are lower. They’re not a setup company.

I’m not as worried. Also, the cost of actually producing content, even video blogging, is negligible. [laughs]

Is quite low.

I don’t think there is a shortage of quality content being produced. However, there is a lot of know-how, and common assets, and the free models that people can use as part of their creations, the templates for their stories and things like that.

More of the things in the commons the more higher-quality the culture becomes. A part of our minister of culture plan, there is a lot of high-quality. The Taiwan Digital Asset Library.

Graphics.

Yes. The Digital Asset Library is what I’m thinking of. Whenever they make a movie or something, it offers free three dimensional...

Assets.

Assets to everybody. That enables creators to very easily set their scene anywhere in Taiwan. What we are saying is that if we build commons so thick that you can very easily turn your idea into a convincing creation work.

That work in creativity.

That encourage creativity. Instead of sympathizing only particular creators, it democratizes the creator community.

If you have a large library of free, public...

It’s creative commons. Yes. That’s the main work I’m doing. Because Taiwan has a pretty good culture of creative commons, our very transcript is going to be creative commons license.

Of collaboration.

It creates more synergy between different localities of artwork and creation. That is the main work that we’re doing. When that is already the case then the social sector and the private sector doesn’t see it as zero-sum. This is something that they can add to.

I see. What do you think about the blogger community in Taiwan? I was pretty surprised when I looked overseas and realized that I don’t think bloggers are as prominent as they are in Taiwan.

There are still plenty of bloggers around...

There’s bloggers all over the world. For example, especially Taiwan, they’re really centralized with these platforms, whereas the US, they mostly set up themselves a WordPress. They don’t use a shared...Maybe now this Medium has taken back a lot of the bloggers in the US. What do you think about blogging community in Taiwan?

I find it really interesting that Taiwan has so many bloggers with Pixnet. I wrote a project charity work a year ago where I connected bloggers to charities. The bloggers could visit the charities, use their website as a platform.

To promote the charities?

Yes. To promote the charities, to spread awareness for causes like autism, for example, on kids.

Personally, I’m on Medium now. I have my own blog in my office, blog.pdis.tw. What I’m seeing is that people is very much willing to write on forum but a old way of segregators and so on doesn’t scale that well and it doesn’t solve the discovery problem which is why people converge to a more centralized Medium.

What do you think about Medium as a platform? I think they’re recently going changes where they’re pushing a paid version.

Indeed.

What do you think about that?

They put it on the tin. They said that they’re going to monetize this stuff. It makes sense and it still respects the creator. If I said I work in the public domain, as I always do, then it doesn’t force a paywall.

It encourages people who are in the creative commons to build a community around it. It still lets people who want to monetize using a non-commercial creative commons or other CC licenses for their work to be able to actively monetize their by a subscription-based model. It is a...

Medium has pretty strict rules on what the users can do with regards to monetization. There is a little bit of concern involved with Medium creators that are lured into the platform being allowed to monetize any way they want. There is really strong encouragement from Medium to join their paid platform so that you join their payroll. Do you read Hacker Noon?

Mm-hmm.

Recently they left Medium.

They did?

Yes, they did. They had a public crowdfunding. They raised around a million. I think that’s the limit in the US for how much you can raise for the public. Now they’re on their own platform. They used the money to build a platform to hire more staff, essentially.

I’m less worried because of the migration paths from a Medium community into your own platform is relatively straightforward compared to a physical page. It’s almost impossible to migrate from a physical page to your own website.

Their only loss is probably a loss of referral traffic that they’re...

That’s right. I’m less worried about Hackernoon is what I’m saying, which is why I’m still on Medium. The blogging community is very flexible and is mostly a social connection anyway.

There is already a backbone of microblogging supporting bloggers [laughs] so you can still rediscover the social connections through microblogging, through Twitter or in the early days in Taiwan in [Taiwanese] .

Nowadays, Mastodon has some users now and things like that. Having a microblogging layer to still be a consistent social layer while the underlying platform can change, at the moment it’s working...

The actual blogging has changed a lot even in the past 10, 20 years. Medium is pretty recent, past five, six years?

Yes. What I mean is that the blogging community is pretty resilient to the underlying technology. As you remember the time I was part of the group that translated the term blog to Mandarin. [laughs] 部落格 as we say so in Taiwan.

We’ve seen generations of platforms. When Movable Type threatened to charge royalty or something people migrated en masse to WordPress or whatever.

People moved en masse.

Exactly.

You don’t think there’s...

...bad guy.

...is what I’m saying.

Interesting. I’m curious what’s Taiwan’s stance on net neutrality. That’s an issue that I was really...

No. Our telecom operators is behaving so well that it’s not even a active political issue.

OK. That’s good to know.

There are some terms, actually, put into the Digital Communication Act, the DCA, for net neutrality, but it’s still waiting Parliament to be passed into action.

I see.

We do have a net neutrality draft bit.

I know it was a huge issue in the US, as well as Europe recently, was Article 13, it passed.

It helps that one of our largest telecom is still like 36 percent state-owned.

State-owned, right. They always fall in line with the government. I see. It’s interesting how I think Comcast was it, or maybe it was Verizon, wasn’t it? I think maybe Verizon, they’re actually looking to expand more into content with acquisition stuff...

...AOL.

...the stack.

They don’t want this to be defunded, but they also want to own all the content on the site. I would say both.

That’s the US direction. Meanwhile, in the EU, they’re doing link tax, so they’re now pulling in two completely different directions.

Yeah, but Taiwan is not aligned with...

No...

[laughs] We’re not doing anything active over there.

Nothing too extreme.

No, we have to be compatible with these different world orders.

I was worried about the traffic in the US, because I feel like it’s a terrible idea to be a little strict, too extreme with a website browser. That kind of goes back to the old days of like AOL, when they were acquiring Internet access.

I see.

That’s a terrible idea. It looks like Netflix is at the center.

We’re very blessed with Taiwan’s current telecom operators.

It’s not a monopoly in any way. Whereas I think in a lot of countries, it’s a lot closer to a monopoly, and that’s how to accommodate such a large distribution.

That’s right.

That’s interesting. I know you talk a lot about social innovation. I’m curious where your interest in social innovation began.

Maybe the internet itself. It’s one of the earliest social innovations that I participated.

I was interested in social innovation, for example, a corporate point of view. Are you aware of Public Benefit Corporations in the US?

Benefit Corporations, yes. We’re introducing that regulation, I think, in Taiwan soon.

What is it called in Taiwan.

It will be the guideline for recognizing social innovative organizations.

It’s like a type of company that...

It could be company. It could be co-op. It could be a NGO. In the US, actually charities are a form of company that have to fit a certain 501 code of tax. What we’re saying is that if you declare your public purpose, you deliver your public reports, you do your, what is it called...?

...benefit reports. Then whether you’re a company or NGO, or whatever, we recognize you as a social innovation organization.

Does the government provide any incentives for...?

Yeah, like low-interest loans and things like that.

Maybe tax...?

Not tax, because each organization form has its own tax code. It’s impossible to offer a tax benefit across organization types, but we can offer like better interest loans and more dynamic allocation of resources by treating these as partners in our policymaking and things like that. Basically treat them as a larger social sector.

I really love the work that nongovernment organizations do, like charities, NGOs. I also feel like being in a company of the past has been a strong incentive to actually do...

Which is why Mozilla is both a company and a foundation. [laughs]

Yeah, like my Mozilla. Have you heard of KaiOS ?

It does ring a bell. Are they based in Taiwan?

I actually met with their team in Taiwan. They’re local. What they’re working on is really interesting. They’re actually working on...

Right, it’s the successor of Firefox OS.

They’re actually growing really fast. They have, I think like 89 million users now.

Yeah, I read about that.

In India, or Turkey, they’re providing like...

It’s good to know that Firefox OS lives on. Lots of my friends used to work for that particular department, and they got laid off and become free foxes. [laughs] It is very good to see that, because of all the good work carries on.

I think KaiOS has pretty much took the Firefox OS, and kind of changed a bit to make it a little bit more commercial, because according to them, originally, Firefox OS has more limitations on what they can do because of their whole mission.

More than.

Also, Firefox OS wanted more of the touch. The touch devices are expensive. Cheap touch devices are...

Doesn’t work well.

Yeah, have a poor user experience. They went back actually to the old kind of button-based. They’re doing, I felt it was interesting. I’m not sure how much demand there will be for it in Taiwan.

I think people want that kind of feature phone for their grandparents. There is a stable kind of demand for that age group, and so there is always demand, I think. It’s not just because of low cost but also because of less complicated interface.

Right. Their other sales is that they have group of people who can only afford this kind of device, right?

Of course. That’s...

For them, it’s their first experience of the Internet. When I talked to them, what I found the most interesting, maybe you’ll find it interesting as well is that when they’re building these things, they have to keep in mind how the Internet works, because the Internet is optimized for large devices, for large phones.

How do you let people use Facebook, such a complicated interface?

To be a graceful fallback.

Yeah, how can you let people use Facebook with just buttons? You go up, down, left, right with each button. How do they scroll? How do they do anything?

They actually have to work with these companies and create custom apps, custom experiences for these people and also to introduce them, what is search? What is Google? Basically, introduce them to the Web for the first time. I found that they were doing interesting...

Indeed.

They actually mentioned that they have a little group of people who are tired with the modern Internet, with modern social media, and all the baggage that that brings at times. They want to return to a simpler time.

Some of them will use a KaiOS phone for a couple months. They still have the basic messaging functionality, but they’re not watching videos on it all the time because the screen is less than two inches.

It’s much harder to build addiction using that interaction.

On the government’s side, is there any concern about especially younger people with tech addiction? Any health issues it brings, for example.

Of course, which is why digital literacy, critical thinking, and so on is built into our new curriculum starting this year. That’s the active curriculum now. It’s called 媒體識讀.

Is it more focusing on STEM education?

Mm-hmm.

Is it like...

It’s part of STEM education, actually, because it crosses all of the disciplines. We teach students to treat anything, including the teacher as not authority. They’re just resources. Then it encourages critical thinking on any information that they receive.

If you view things as a more paced, like slow think, instead of fast think, it makes it less easy for people to get addicted, and it also makes it more difficult for this information to grow as well. That’s part of our disinformation awareness campaign as well. Not everything that you receive as a message from your LINE group is true, and things like that.

There’s many curriculum activities being developed under the umbrella of critical thinking...

That’s interesting, because I think fake news is really a big issue...

The dissemination...

...especially how gullible people are...

This kind of education probably helps to cut down on that. Like Facebook is hacking a ton of issues...

That’s right.

On Facebook and other social media platforms will...

That’s right. They’ll be more accountable of the negative externalities of their platforms to the society.

Yeah, because they are spreading misinformation on a really massive scale.

Right, so if this fact check is false, then it is flagged to demote its virality. It’s like sending a spam...

...have like a herd mentality that works with people on the Internet. If one person says, it kind of becomes like almost like a tribal sense.

Exactly. I do have another call to attend to, so perhaps we can follow up on email and so on.

Sure. We can...

Later this evening, there will be a vTaiwan meetup here. That’ll be right here. They’ll be throwing a meet up. Feel free to linger around.

I see.

Then there will be people bringing in pizza. [laughs]

Oh, cool. Yeah.

It’s every Wednesday at 7:30...

I see. Here?

Right here. They meet here.

Oh, I see. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to attend tonight.

No, I understand...

Oh, yeah. I’ll make sure and attend some time.

Yeah.

Is it like a hollow hackathon?

It’s a regular meet up.

Oh, OK.

You will meet many of the civic testing groups and so on. It’s usually from 7:00 to 10:00.

7:00 to 10:00.

Three hours. I figured you could drop by any time.

Cool. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed meeting you.

No problem.

I really appreciate your time.

Sure. Yes. Really enjoyed talking to you.

Hope you found it enjoyable.

Of course. It’s really nice to know that Firefox OS lives on. [laughs]