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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I understand that the premise includes the idea that the gov't would subsidize artists who aren't currently published, and we would all be enriched thereby. I don't disagree with that notion--but I don't blithely accept that we'd be better off with the gov't choosing whose works to promote.
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There are ways to measure popularity on the Internet which are pretty much infallible. They are in fact much more precise than whatever audience measurements Radio, TV, Newspapers, Libraries and Museums have been using for decades. In fact, computer and Internet based statistics can be 10s of thousands of times more precise and more representative of the real actual audiences.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
How widely-read do you have to prove you are to be eligible? I predict a rash of spambot "readers" to drive up popularity numbers... and the authors who get the subsidies are the most technologically advanced ones, not the most skilled writers.
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Again, spambots don't work. There are other things on the Internet than just anonymous web hits and anonymous posts. The Internet can perfectly enable registration of users, even the verification of the real identity of users through very advanced "Human tests" and pretty secure identity verification systems using credit cards or real postal adresses or other real ID verification processes. For example Google has their algorithms that lets them know with 99.999999% certainty that Gmail users are real and unique real people. The way they know that is through months and years of clicks and usage scenarios for each Google account that are simply put totally impossible to emulate using a robot. And which would be completely ridiculous to suggest that cheaters would go through such efforts to spam and try to cheat the system.
The result is that whatever cheating there might be in the 0.0000001% of Gmail accounts can be made sure to have such a totally insignificant effect on the actual statistics. It makes really no sense to insist that all Internet systems are spamable and gamable. It is simply being much too primitive and to have much too little faith in the actual Internet and computer technologies to just disregard it all as unusable by design for anything other than spam and cheating.