8 ms·

> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites: 1. They provide only a subscription

> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites: 1. They provide only a subscription that is comparable cost to an old-media full subscription. Like most people in the Internet age I have a small number of main sources that I visit daily, and a much larger secondary tier where I may average one or two stories a week. Or they're the sites linked from here that I only visit when something interesting is waved under my nose. There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing, for a site I might be getting £1 or 10p a month "value" from. 2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal. Leaves things a bit stuck, and me paying out a smaller amount than I'm willing to.

reitanqild 8y ago
> 2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal. Ars technica. (Subscriptions are tiered but I think this is included in a low tier.)
mygo 8y ago
> There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing There is yet to be a quick and simple micro-transaction infrastructure for the web. Transaction costs inhibit micro-transactions. They don’t scale down. Some are trying to use crypto to do micro-transactions, but even crypto has transaction costs that inhibit how small micro-transactions can be, not to mention the exchange rate volatility. It’s a big unsolved problem. Gotta spend money to spend money.
- clarkmoody 8y ago
  I suggest looking at Lightning Network for micro-transactions. Still emerging tech, but it shows great promise.
  - zhoujianfu 8y ago
    Or bitcoin cash! ;)
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y ago
  Scaling cryptocurrencies would absolutely address this issue, but that's an enormous challenge. A simple, centralized service could easily fill this role with batched transactions. Each reader pays once a month, each publisher gets payed once a month, and those payments can be shuffled about a database trivially. O(n) vs. O(n^2) Patreon kind of did/does this. There was a big stink not long ago where this appeared to fall apart. The issue Patreon faced was that it was not so trivial to bundle transactions like this. Some creators wanted to get paid in a piecemeal fashion for each video uploaded, etc. For patreon supporters, they would each be on their own separate billing cycle because they decided it would be bad UX to have the first month be pro-rated or whatever. As much as Patreon is best situated to provide a service like this, I'm not encouraged that they'll do so.
- xyzzy123 8y ago
  I read an article once that argued the big problem with microtransactions was the transaction cost imposed on users. For the sites, sure, everything can be automated. But even in the best case of good browser ui/ux support the burden shifted to users would be massive. The cognitive cost of trying to decide whether to spend 10c on an article I haven’t read yet costs me way more than 10c. Man that article sucked. Did I just get ripped off by clickbait again? This argument is what convinced me that straight per-article “microtransactions” will never take off for very low value things on the web. EDIT: found it: http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/31/costs-of-micropayments/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/31/costs-of-micropayme... - Think it was Nick Szabo. What’s scary to me is that the one “successful-ish” application we have for microtransactions is mobile gaming. Imagine a huge ecosystem of different beans, gems, flooz, widgets or whatever, and all the dark ux patterns to get people to spend them, and also to hide how much they are spending from people.
  - cestith 8y ago
    I would absolutely pay $10 a month to an aggregator like HN or /. that then paid publishers a portion of that based on article rank and/or number of clicks through.
    - xyzzy123 8y ago
      Yes, agree that fixed-price deals with publishers / aggregators are tenable. Spotify works for people, for example. The original argument was essentially that there was a minimum transaction size that was cognitively viable at scale.
      - cestith 8y ago
        I understand it's about cognitive costs. What I propose makes the cognitive load of actual monetary payment a single decision per month. I pay X. Let the aggregator and the publishers automatically figure out every little fractional detail.
        8y ago
- tomjen3 8y ago
  A transaction on bitcoin cash costs 1 to 2 sat, which is less than 0.01 penny. It is true that the cost can vary greatly (which sucks, please tell me of a crypto coin that is 1:1 with dollars), but you can adjust the price in real time and since you are selling a digital product even in an extreme situation you are not going to lose money (remember the transaction fee is pretty much going to be 1-2 sat always).
lifeformed 8y ago
I just want to pay a monthly "digital content fee" to some service and have that money be fairly distributed to all the digital services I use: websites, music, video, tools, etc. Is anyone working on a system like that?
- xfitm3 8y ago
  Personally, I don’t want to pay anything for content. Look at cable tv. It got so bad there is a cord cutting movement. The same will happen again in another form.
  - codefined 8y ago
    I'm confused. You want people to write all content for free? Whilst that works for a lot of people who do it in their spare time, it does restrict anyone looking to write professionally from contributing.
    - 1943820037 8y ago
      Not parent, but I would absolutely _demand_ people to write all content for free. I refuse to pay a single cent for anything that is even remotely accessible on the Internet and does not result in a physical tangible good being delivered to me, of which I pay $15/mo as acceptable rate-limited mobile LTE bandwidth -- my only communication related recurring cost. There are several reasons at play here: - Content quality is not correlated with amount an author is "compensated". In fact quality is almost universally _inversely_ correlated with profitability. Once dollars are attached, out of the woodwork comes a bunch of charlatans peddling useless shit that will not only give you no useful advantage in seeking external information but will actively degrade your life either through dubious advice that will trash your health, finances, legal status, cognitive & mental state, relationships, you name it, or through malevolent action such as selling your privacy or methodical persuasion in you undertaking self-defeating behaviors by hijacking basic human emotional reactions. - Time has shown repeatedly that volunteers are the entire backbone of quality information sources. I come to HN to have some chance of experts congregating for an actual discussion on certain topics. QA forums, encyclopedias, topic-specific discussion forums, educational materials, news aggregation, scientific research, _all_ is higher quality in volunteer communities before it's essentially leeched for profit by journals, website owners, policy spinmasters, malvertising business, and venture capital. - "Writing professionally" is not a useful skill in itself, no matter the fantasy colleges want to dream up by funneling the otherwise academically unfit into a program that will lead to a degree thus allowing them to join in on the unnecessary inflationary credentialization of _remedial_ skills. Linguistic mastery is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for creating useful information, you first need a deep understanding of the material you wish to cover. I'd much rather read barely comprehensible jargon from a deranged genius than an eloquent soliloquy by some shill with no idea of what he's talking about other than a general idea that permuting a dictionary in the right magical incantation will summon a paycheck at the end of the week. If you have skills that allowed you to amass wisdom in a field to the point that it would benefit someone else, there are _much_ more efficient and useful means to acquire income and instead use "writing" as a tool for social meaning and development either through reciprocity, self-selection, altruism, whatever. - The greatest costs are borne not in writing but in deciphering meaning. The combined readership burden of filtering out the wheat from the chaff will _always_ exceed the cost of an author even doing "important" research. This is the crucial point of it all, with some smart people realizing that if information has any value besides propaganda it's due to careful curation, summarizing, and tailoring to an individual's goals and instantaneous state-of-mind, while even smarter people realizing that this will _never_ scale as a business model. Even "clever" workarounds to this problem by infiltrating an individual's web-of-trust in recommendations always end up backfiring. After decades of this scheme being retried and rehashed, I now am completely confident in ignoring whatever bullshit du jour comes out of the mouths of family and friends, and am even running up against the problem of being contrarian against my own internal thoughts. - Even if against all the odds that you paid someone to get valuable information in the long run you'll regret it. Give an inch, they take a mile. Everyone who is dependent on a paycheck dreams of eventually retiring, and quickly to boot once the actuaries remind them of the future. Once you paid someone for content, you just anchored the negotiations of tomorrow and crystallized the form of how protection money must be paid. "Oh I know you paid back then, but life isn't getting any cheaper and I'd like to get to the beach someday without working so I'm really sorry but I _need_ to add some 'features' that will juice my revenue!" Negotiating with terrorists is not a strategy to get to a stable equilibrium in an iterated game -- the cat has been let out of the bag and it's never going back in. Wake up.
cuboidGoat 8y ago
>2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal. As it currently stands, a large chunk of the newspaper industry in the states is willing to block the whole of the EU, when it could offer it that model, so I wouldn't hold your breath. A source at Tronc says not only have most of the chain's papers blocked EU visitors because of GDPR, but Tronc "currently has no plans to support the EU" because doing so is seen as not economically viable https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/1001571559679582209?lang=en https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/1001571559679582209?lang=...
naravara 8y ago
>There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing, for a site I might be getting £1 or 10p a month "value" from. A "tip jar" or micropayment model to supplement subscriptions would be a great option. Unfortunately I think processing fees eat up a significant chunk of your take to the point where it's not really profitable to build a business model around it. Even if you get a great solution going, getting buy-in from the number of vendors you'd need on board would be prohibitively difficult. The only ones with the reach would either be inclined to lock it down and stick with the ad centric model (Facebook, Google) or just don't have the organizational culture to give it the attention or support it would deserve (Apple, Amazon). In the old days you could go to a corner newsstand and pick up a newspaper, even from one of those little boxes on the street. This let you just buy if there was something interesting that you needed to look at that day without committing and, importantly, without handing personal financial information to who-the-hell-even-knows. A payment infrastructure that makes this quick, easy, and cheap enough to where cost isn't a concern would be incredible.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  It seems that these fees would be trivially avoidable by having one monthly transaction to the aggregator and one monthly transaction
  - ansible 8y ago
    Sort of like Patreon. Except it would work a bit differently. Say I approve N number of sites (NY Times, WaPo, EE Times, etc.) They each get paid out of a monthly fund based on how much I visit each of them.
    - epicalex 8y ago
      Wouldn't that in itself involve tracking your behaviour on the web, though, which is what commenters on this thread started off saying they disliked?
      - 8y ago
tcmb 8y ago
I completely agree with your assessment of the problem. I'm using https://blendle.com https://blendle.com, which offers a wide variety of publications with payment per article (usually something around 0.70 EUR, with the odd 1.99 EUR for articles from DER SPIEGEL). They also have a daily mix of manually curated content and content based on the articles I purchased in the past, which works really well. I'm afraid it's only available in the Netherlands and Germany so far. I didn't know the Brave browser had a payment model built in, will give this a try as well.
- ansible 8y ago
  I've been waiting for these guys to launch in the USA since I first heard of them. They're still in beta?
  - mmcclure 8y ago
    I've been using them in the US for over a year for what that's worth.
    - ansible 8y ago
      And I just got the beta invite. Yay!
- egeozcan 8y ago
  I also recommend blendle. It has the most reasonable payment system. btw, I've purchased a few articles from Der Spiegel but they were around 0,75€.
stcredzero 8y ago
> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites: If some big company like Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon wanted to get behind micropayments, they might be able to actually get it started. It would basically amount to disrupting the advertising model itself. Advertising would morph into influencer media produced at the behest of advertisers, but much of media would be much freer from the worst depredations of advertising.
sdenton4 8y ago
The usual way people have tried to solve the microtransactions problem is through aggregation/centralization. eg, everyone who wants to gives HN $K/mo, and then HN distributes that money proportionally to sites clicked. Unfortunately, I think the incentives are too loose. Users aren't obligated in any way to pay for links; as usual, humans aren't charitable enough to actually sustain public goods voluntarily. Secondly, the aggregator site isn't under strong incentives to pass on revenues (which applies equally to ads).
- 1943820037 8y ago
  And the usual way people have tried to solve the solved-microtransactions-problem is by gaming the system, which is exactly the history and outcome of the current situation. The 'microtransactions problem' using 'aggregation/centralization' you're describing would be readily identified as the newspaper industry a few decades ago. Nowadays you have to wrap it up in a healthy dose of cryptocurrency scamming, federated networking bullshit, and other huckster lingo to make it seem like a radical approach. Newspaper companies, which allowed patrons to exchange a few cents for a daily source of vital information curated by professionals across a wide array of expertise, distributed money received in patronage towards the journalists, editors, fact-checkers, you name it. Of course, that isn't the full story. What newspaper companies did was become the mouthpiece of the government and eliminate any useful information, filled nearly all the pages to the brim with huge obnoxious ads with little text remaining, started some perverse incentives with journalist pay forcing the smart ones to abandon ship a long time ago, and helped build a mass culture of frantic zombies who cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction, parroting whatever they read as a sort of social lubricant, and trained to resort to looking on a page for the local weather information yesterday that could be far more accurately sourced now by looking up to see if there are clouds above. Good riddance to 'content creators.' Don't let the door hit you on the way out, and HN will never receive a cent of my money. :D

reitanqild 8y ago

> 2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal. Ars technica. (Subscriptions are tiered but I think this is included in a low tier.)

mygo 8y ago

> There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing There is yet to be a quick and simple micro-transaction infrastructure for the web. Transaction costs inhibit micro-transactions. They don’t scale down. Some are trying to use crypto to do micro-transactions, but even crypto has transaction costs that inhibit how small micro-transactions can be, not to mention the exchange rate volatility. It’s a big unsolved problem. Gotta spend money to spend money.

clarkmoody 8y ago
I suggest looking at Lightning Network for micro-transactions. Still emerging tech, but it shows great promise.
- zhoujianfu 8y ago
  Or bitcoin cash! ;)
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y ago
Scaling cryptocurrencies would absolutely address this issue, but that's an enormous challenge. A simple, centralized service could easily fill this role with batched transactions. Each reader pays once a month, each publisher gets payed once a month, and those payments can be shuffled about a database trivially. O(n) vs. O(n^2) Patreon kind of did/does this. There was a big stink not long ago where this appeared to fall apart. The issue Patreon faced was that it was not so trivial to bundle transactions like this. Some creators wanted to get paid in a piecemeal fashion for each video uploaded, etc. For patreon supporters, they would each be on their own separate billing cycle because they decided it would be bad UX to have the first month be pro-rated or whatever. As much as Patreon is best situated to provide a service like this, I'm not encouraged that they'll do so.
xyzzy123 8y ago
I read an article once that argued the big problem with microtransactions was the transaction cost imposed on users. For the sites, sure, everything can be automated. But even in the best case of good browser ui/ux support the burden shifted to users would be massive. The cognitive cost of trying to decide whether to spend 10c on an article I haven’t read yet costs me way more than 10c. Man that article sucked. Did I just get ripped off by clickbait again? This argument is what convinced me that straight per-article “microtransactions” will never take off for very low value things on the web. EDIT: found it: http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/31/costs-of-micropayments/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/31/costs-of-micropayme... - Think it was Nick Szabo. What’s scary to me is that the one “successful-ish” application we have for microtransactions is mobile gaming. Imagine a huge ecosystem of different beans, gems, flooz, widgets or whatever, and all the dark ux patterns to get people to spend them, and also to hide how much they are spending from people.
- cestith 8y ago
  I would absolutely pay $10 a month to an aggregator like HN or /. that then paid publishers a portion of that based on article rank and/or number of clicks through.
  - xyzzy123 8y ago
    Yes, agree that fixed-price deals with publishers / aggregators are tenable. Spotify works for people, for example. The original argument was essentially that there was a minimum transaction size that was cognitively viable at scale.
    - cestith 8y ago
      I understand it's about cognitive costs. What I propose makes the cognitive load of actual monetary payment a single decision per month. I pay X. Let the aggregator and the publishers automatically figure out every little fractional detail.
      - 8y ago
tomjen3 8y ago
A transaction on bitcoin cash costs 1 to 2 sat, which is less than 0.01 penny. It is true that the cost can vary greatly (which sucks, please tell me of a crypto coin that is 1:1 with dollars), but you can adjust the price in real time and since you are selling a digital product even in an extreme situation you are not going to lose money (remember the transaction fee is pretty much going to be 1-2 sat always).

lifeformed 8y ago

I just want to pay a monthly "digital content fee" to some service and have that money be fairly distributed to all the digital services I use: websites, music, video, tools, etc. Is anyone working on a system like that?

xfitm3 8y ago
Personally, I don’t want to pay anything for content. Look at cable tv. It got so bad there is a cord cutting movement. The same will happen again in another form.
- codefined 8y ago
  I'm confused. You want people to write all content for free? Whilst that works for a lot of people who do it in their spare time, it does restrict anyone looking to write professionally from contributing.
  - 1943820037 8y ago
    Not parent, but I would absolutely _demand_ people to write all content for free. I refuse to pay a single cent for anything that is even remotely accessible on the Internet and does not result in a physical tangible good being delivered to me, of which I pay $15/mo as acceptable rate-limited mobile LTE bandwidth -- my only communication related recurring cost. There are several reasons at play here: - Content quality is not correlated with amount an author is "compensated". In fact quality is almost universally _inversely_ correlated with profitability. Once dollars are attached, out of the woodwork comes a bunch of charlatans peddling useless shit that will not only give you no useful advantage in seeking external information but will actively degrade your life either through dubious advice that will trash your health, finances, legal status, cognitive & mental state, relationships, you name it, or through malevolent action such as selling your privacy or methodical persuasion in you undertaking self-defeating behaviors by hijacking basic human emotional reactions. - Time has shown repeatedly that volunteers are the entire backbone of quality information sources. I come to HN to have some chance of experts congregating for an actual discussion on certain topics. QA forums, encyclopedias, topic-specific discussion forums, educational materials, news aggregation, scientific research, _all_ is higher quality in volunteer communities before it's essentially leeched for profit by journals, website owners, policy spinmasters, malvertising business, and venture capital. - "Writing professionally" is not a useful skill in itself, no matter the fantasy colleges want to dream up by funneling the otherwise academically unfit into a program that will lead to a degree thus allowing them to join in on the unnecessary inflationary credentialization of _remedial_ skills. Linguistic mastery is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for creating useful information, you first need a deep understanding of the material you wish to cover. I'd much rather read barely comprehensible jargon from a deranged genius than an eloquent soliloquy by some shill with no idea of what he's talking about other than a general idea that permuting a dictionary in the right magical incantation will summon a paycheck at the end of the week. If you have skills that allowed you to amass wisdom in a field to the point that it would benefit someone else, there are _much_ more efficient and useful means to acquire income and instead use "writing" as a tool for social meaning and development either through reciprocity, self-selection, altruism, whatever. - The greatest costs are borne not in writing but in deciphering meaning. The combined readership burden of filtering out the wheat from the chaff will _always_ exceed the cost of an author even doing "important" research. This is the crucial point of it all, with some smart people realizing that if information has any value besides propaganda it's due to careful curation, summarizing, and tailoring to an individual's goals and instantaneous state-of-mind, while even smarter people realizing that this will _never_ scale as a business model. Even "clever" workarounds to this problem by infiltrating an individual's web-of-trust in recommendations always end up backfiring. After decades of this scheme being retried and rehashed, I now am completely confident in ignoring whatever bullshit du jour comes out of the mouths of family and friends, and am even running up against the problem of being contrarian against my own internal thoughts. - Even if against all the odds that you paid someone to get valuable information in the long run you'll regret it. Give an inch, they take a mile. Everyone who is dependent on a paycheck dreams of eventually retiring, and quickly to boot once the actuaries remind them of the future. Once you paid someone for content, you just anchored the negotiations of tomorrow and crystallized the form of how protection money must be paid. "Oh I know you paid back then, but life isn't getting any cheaper and I'd like to get to the beach someday without working so I'm really sorry but I _need_ to add some 'features' that will juice my revenue!" Negotiating with terrorists is not a strategy to get to a stable equilibrium in an iterated game -- the cat has been let out of the bag and it's never going back in. Wake up.

cuboidGoat 8y ago

>2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal. As it currently stands, a large chunk of the newspaper industry in the states is willing to block the whole of the EU, when it could offer it that model, so I wouldn't hold your breath. A source at Tronc says not only have most of the chain's papers blocked EU visitors because of GDPR, but Tronc "currently has no plans to support the EU" because doing so is seen as not economically viable https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/1001571559679582209?lang=en https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/1001571559679582209?lang=...

naravara 8y ago

>There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing, for a site I might be getting £1 or 10p a month "value" from. A "tip jar" or micropayment model to supplement subscriptions would be a great option. Unfortunately I think processing fees eat up a significant chunk of your take to the point where it's not really profitable to build a business model around it. Even if you get a great solution going, getting buy-in from the number of vendors you'd need on board would be prohibitively difficult. The only ones with the reach would either be inclined to lock it down and stick with the ad centric model (Facebook, Google) or just don't have the organizational culture to give it the attention or support it would deserve (Apple, Amazon). In the old days you could go to a corner newsstand and pick up a newspaper, even from one of those little boxes on the street. This let you just buy if there was something interesting that you needed to look at that day without committing and, importantly, without handing personal financial information to who-the-hell-even-knows. A payment infrastructure that makes this quick, easy, and cheap enough to where cost isn't a concern would be incredible.

michaelmrose 8y ago
It seems that these fees would be trivially avoidable by having one monthly transaction to the aggregator and one monthly transaction
- ansible 8y ago
  Sort of like Patreon. Except it would work a bit differently. Say I approve N number of sites (NY Times, WaPo, EE Times, etc.) They each get paid out of a monthly fund based on how much I visit each of them.
  - epicalex 8y ago
    Wouldn't that in itself involve tracking your behaviour on the web, though, which is what commenters on this thread started off saying they disliked?
    - 8y ago

tcmb 8y ago

I completely agree with your assessment of the problem. I'm using https://blendle.com https://blendle.com, which offers a wide variety of publications with payment per article (usually something around 0.70 EUR, with the odd 1.99 EUR for articles from DER SPIEGEL). They also have a daily mix of manually curated content and content based on the articles I purchased in the past, which works really well. I'm afraid it's only available in the Netherlands and Germany so far. I didn't know the Brave browser had a payment model built in, will give this a try as well.

ansible 8y ago
I've been waiting for these guys to launch in the USA since I first heard of them. They're still in beta?
- mmcclure 8y ago
  I've been using them in the US for over a year for what that's worth.
  - ansible 8y ago
    And I just got the beta invite. Yay!
egeozcan 8y ago
I also recommend blendle. It has the most reasonable payment system. btw, I've purchased a few articles from Der Spiegel but they were around 0,75€.

stcredzero 8y ago

> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites: If some big company like Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon wanted to get behind micropayments, they might be able to actually get it started. It would basically amount to disrupting the advertising model itself. Advertising would morph into influencer media produced at the behest of advertisers, but much of media would be much freer from the worst depredations of advertising.

sdenton4 8y ago

The usual way people have tried to solve the microtransactions problem is through aggregation/centralization. eg, everyone who wants to gives HN $K/mo, and then HN distributes that money proportionally to sites clicked. Unfortunately, I think the incentives are too loose. Users aren't obligated in any way to pay for links; as usual, humans aren't charitable enough to actually sustain public goods voluntarily. Secondly, the aggregator site isn't under strong incentives to pass on revenues (which applies equally to ads).

1943820037 8y ago
And the usual way people have tried to solve the solved-microtransactions-problem is by gaming the system, which is exactly the history and outcome of the current situation. The 'microtransactions problem' using 'aggregation/centralization' you're describing would be readily identified as the newspaper industry a few decades ago. Nowadays you have to wrap it up in a healthy dose of cryptocurrency scamming, federated networking bullshit, and other huckster lingo to make it seem like a radical approach. Newspaper companies, which allowed patrons to exchange a few cents for a daily source of vital information curated by professionals across a wide array of expertise, distributed money received in patronage towards the journalists, editors, fact-checkers, you name it. Of course, that isn't the full story. What newspaper companies did was become the mouthpiece of the government and eliminate any useful information, filled nearly all the pages to the brim with huge obnoxious ads with little text remaining, started some perverse incentives with journalist pay forcing the smart ones to abandon ship a long time ago, and helped build a mass culture of frantic zombies who cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction, parroting whatever they read as a sort of social lubricant, and trained to resort to looking on a page for the local weather information yesterday that could be far more accurately sourced now by looking up to see if there are clouds above. Good riddance to 'content creators.' Don't let the door hit you on the way out, and HN will never receive a cent of my money. :D