I suppose "credit system" is indeed more accurate than "fee", it's just that I personally would set it at a flat rate and then stop thinking about it, so it would feel like a sort of admission-to-the-internet to me.

As for bandwidth and storage costs... that could just be rolled into the same attribution/payment scheme. If content is not propagating well because too few people are hosting it, then I'm ok with allocating some space and bandwidth to help distribute it. I don't think there's anything wrong with that so long as when it gets viewed, the creators still get the bulk of the credit and I only get a teensy bit for the part I played in distributing it.

The goal would be to mostly decouple the attribution/payment handling from the data handling so that it's as simple as seeding a torrent and it's the players/clients/whatever that handles giving credit. If I notice that I've got a leacher problem (whether as a creator or as a distributor) then maybe I revoke trust in the leachers and they stop getting the content from me.

I think the costs of serving digital content are so low that you don’t need to rely on oversubscription. The user can stream 24/7 and you would still make money (assuming you got the working IP payment model like YouTube does that divide up individual user revenue proportional to that user’s watch time - I think Spotify has a problem here). The only “anti abuse” you need is to enforce that the user only streams one thing at a time.

The problem with the credit system is that the user won’t like that they have to pay extra for the good stuff, the feeling of watching worse stuff to save money etc.

Given the marginal cost of distributing the good stuff is the same as the bad stuff, why make the customer feel bad about watching by adding an incremental cost? Just let it rip. If you have a lot of good stuff, customers will be willing to pay more for the bundle. Once they’re in the bundle, let them watch exactly what they want.

More or less, yeah.

When it's all grown up though, I'd hope for more transparency into where the money is going. Suppose a journalist has risked life and limb to expose some important information and two news outlets publish stories about it. I don't want to pay the news outlets under the assumption that they'll then pay the journalist. Instead I want to decide which story to read based on whichever one triggers my client to compensate the journalist the most (because I care more about the investigative work than the writing, though other users might configure their clients differently).

Yeah, everything in the same bundle is what I'm going for. Except it's not a bundle that is offered and gatekept by some platform, but rather one that emerges from the participation of users while they interact with each other or with artists.

Whether I received the content via a browser, over bittorrent, or on a USB stick should have no bearing on whether I'm able to

- reward its creators

- assess the content's trustworthiness based on whether I trust those creators

I want to have single subscription and then happy to pay extra $5 to watch an out of network show.

I feel streaming companies should offer some sort of content exchange for a fee so users wouldn’t have to switch platforms.

Well in my case the value is not there at their price which includes YouTube music as a separate service that must be maintained and I assume separate licensing as well. I’m not interested in paying for access to that side of the service. I have little doubt that the access to YouTube music adds to the sticker price of their bundle. They are not simply passing along bundled costs, they are also targeting what they think consumers are willing to pay. I think they’ve miscalculated in this case.