But isn't that better than nothing? Even if my blog has a self-signed certificate and you can't say for sure that 'this blog is run by so-and-so', isn't that better than a wholly unencrypted connection? SSL seems to be used for two purposes, namely encrypted connections and validating the remote server, but surely encrypted connections alone are a sufficient benefit? And yet, if all I want to do is have a secure channel, I have to (theoretically) pay a certificate issuer yearly to prove that I am who I am, as if encryption requires I prove my identity.

It would make a great deal more sense to me to treat self-signed certificates the same way we treat HTTP sites: give no notification to the user whatsoever, unless they go looking for it. Browsers could also have a 'strict mode' enforcing the current behaviour (require authentication) for environments or users which prefer it.

The major problem I see here is that sites where you do want to guarantee certificates (e.g. Facebook.com, google.com, bank of america, etc) would be difficult to guarantee that you were connecting to the correct site, since MITM attacks against your SSL connection would be treated like HTTP connections and the browser would let them proceed as if nothing was wrong. I'm not sure if there are tangible ways around that, but it feels worth looking into.