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I hope your model works as an antidote to the perverse incentives of ad-based revenue, but I wonder if you could improve the incentives even more. There will st

I hope your model works as an antidote to the perverse incentives of ad-based revenue, but I wonder if you could improve the incentives even more. There will still be advantages to using click-bait and writing that manipulates our curiosity. If you make it trivial to get a refund, that will greatly negate those incentives, but it also enables freeloaders, no? Jean, I would love to hear your or Blendle's thoughs on my variation of a reader payment scheme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960

JeanMertz 11y ago
In fact, refunds have proven to be a great way to combat click-bait links. The example we've given before is gossip magazines, which thrive on click-bait (purchase-bait?) titles on their front covers. In Blendle, we see a high refund rate on these types of magazine articles, when the title suggests something else than the article presents to the reader. Freeloaders have turned out to be only a minor issue, whom we are willing to live with, if it means we have a great user experience for 99% of the other people using Blendle in good faith. We're of course thinking of ways to tackle this as well, but never at the cost of user experience. RE: Being asked whether or not I want to spend $0.25 or $0.50 twenty or fifty times a day is not an appealing prospect. I agree, this is indeed something we work to improve every day. The two biggest features to combat this are refunds and low-friction purchases. The latter we implement by not requiring any action except for clicking on the text you want to read.