7 ms·

I don't want to subscribe, I also don't want to see ads or be tracked. I wish there was a universal micropayments way of paying for what I read.

by laktak 8y ago

matt4077 8y ago
publishers don’t like micropayments because (a) they don’t work, and (b) what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important. It becomes a lot harder for journalists to justify spending months on a subject when the business side has hard data showing it brings in barely more than reprinting the soccer scores. What’s potentially workable is a Spotify-style subscription model.
- aiCeivi9 8y ago
  It doesn't work, since people faced with paywall moe to competition that only has ads. If adblocking is common enough will try harder to make micropayments just work.
- snaky 8y ago
  > what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important What people read does correlate with what's important for them, by definition.
  - fwn 8y ago
    I would love to know more about this definition. If doing my taxes were as exciting as my reading list I would get much more out of my paycheck.
    - snaky 8y ago
      If the endorphins you get reading the content from your list is more important for you, so be it. You decide what's important for you, and that's the definition.
      - fwn 8y ago
        So your definition would be "Everything someone does is good for them"? That reminds me of Austrian praxeology. Behavioral patterns that lead individuals away from their goals do exist. Such irrationality is what most of behavioral economics policy advice is all about. It's easiest to explain with the difference in long term goals and short term decision making. There it gets obvious very fast that peoples immediate preferences do rarely reflect their stated and consistent long term preferences.
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        And if the list just makes me upset because the headline lied? If a site evades my ability to disapprove and stay away from it, it should not be rewarded.
  - mschuetz 8y ago
    And that's why we have clickbait. Letting people cherry pick exactly what they want is seriously going to hurt quality content. Subscriptions to a wide range of stuff like Netflix and Spotify are perfect. There's something in there for everyone's taste.
    - snaky 8y ago
      It depends on how you define 'the quality'. Letting people cherry pick exactly what they want is the only moral way to provide the news actually.
      - nindalf 8y ago
        You don't understand the problem of clickbait. What people say and what they do are two different things, and you need to choose which to listen to. This is one of the reasons clickbait was so prevalent on facebook a few years ago - people clicked on these so much that they were ranked very highly. But in user surveys, the same users claimed they hated clickbait and wished it wasn't there. So what do you do?
      - oarsinsync 8y ago
        I think it depends on your particular morality. Is it moral to allow people to only consume the things they believe they need, even if the things they believe they need are only that because they are addictive and potentially harmful? If allowing cherry picking exactly what they want is the only moral way to provide the news, does that mean all prior forms of broadcast news publication were immoral (e.g. television & radio news broadcasts)?
  - matt4077 8y ago
    You are reading this comment. The are billions of lines of text on the internet you will never read. Is this comment strictly more important to you than every single other text on the internet? A comment that includes a nonsense paragraph of just “banana”, repeated over and over? Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana.
- iicc 8y ago
  > (b) what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important > It becomes a lot harder for journalists to justify spending months on a subject when the business side has hard data showing it brings in barely more than reprinting the soccer scores. This is already true with the current advertising model.
ileitch 8y ago
I believe this is the idea behind the Brave browser and their Basic Attention Token https://basicattentiontoken.org https://basicattentiontoken.org
- JustFinishedBSG 8y ago
  What Brave is doing is highly unethical. If you don't want to see ads then fine it's your computer. But Brave is hijacking ads by force then strong-arming websites to sign up to their own shitty crypto currency if they want to be paid. It's basically an extortion scheme, or a mafia stye "protection scheme"
  - fwn 8y ago
    I wonder who's more unethical: The guy who comes in, smashes your stuff and leaves or the guy who comes in, smashes your stuff and leaves a check for you at his place. I bet that's a common battle ground between consequentialists and idealists. Fun aside, I don't think the comparison holds up very well. I don't think that anyone has a right to execute code on my devices just because I'm browsing a website. In this concept, "hijacking" ads is completely void of any ethical meaning. Braves platform attempt is still not very good. A good solution for paying content creators would need to be open, decentralized and accepted by the stakeholders involved.
    - rovr138 8y ago
      If you consider the page code, you requested it and it’s bundled in there. Same with CSS and JS used for features. In that case, you requested the page and allowed them to.
      - barnabee 8y ago
        Requesting the code doesn't mean I'm obliged to run all of it. If you serve data to my computer I am free to do whatever the hell I want with it, if you don't like that, don't serve me the data.
      - 8y ago
Aissen 8y ago
Flattr set out do that, many years ago. They still exist. Brave is trying to address that. There's patreon, and many others. Have you tried them ?
- buboard 8y ago
  i dont agree with the tracking that goes along with all of them. i shouldnt be recording my action to a bunch of unrelated companies just so i can give a few cents to a website.
  - johnnyfaehell 8y ago
    Well... If you can think of a solution, make it because there are lots of other people who also want this. But without a 3rd party payment system, it seems like you're screwed.
    - buboard 8y ago
      some cryptocurrencies come to mind. unfortunately none has caught up
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    Your idea is going to be pretty much impossible to legally do in the US, where you need to have some idea of who your money is coming from to operate.
  - Ajedi32 8y ago
    AFAIK, all tracking (in both Brave and Flattr) happens locally on your device. Some level of tracking _is_ strictly necessary for a system like this, because otherwise there's no way for the system to know which sites to give your money to.
  - michaelbrooks 8y ago
    Brave records that data locally, none of it is actually sent to any servers. The only thing they know is an amount of money must go to the websites that your browser viewed. They don't record IP addresses or any personal data.
dmortin 8y ago
If you mean automatic micropayments when reading articles then you'll still be tracked, because the payment provider has to track what you read to make the payments and even has to be able to provide a log of it in case there is a payment dispute, so they will store what urls you visit and when. Without a proper log payment disputes can't be resolved legally.
- buboard 8y ago
  if there was something like anonymous payments (cryptocoin-based maybe?) then it would be possible without any tracking. In the few cases where you ask your penny cash back because something happened, most companies would just give it back without questions asked assuming they dont get tons of cashback requests from your IP.
  - dmortin 8y ago
    That's why they need a log, because there will be cashback requests which people could abuse. And this will not necessarily be only pennies. A penny for a single page, for example, but if you visit many pages of the same site then the amount will be much higher and a user could claim then he has never visited that site and wants his money back.
    - buboard 8y ago
      something similar is happening with ads nowadays. There is tons of fraud in ads and all earnings / payouts are approximate. yet the system works, even approximately. My guess is fraud will be a small percent, certainly tolerable
    - lunchables 8y ago
      Seems like there has to be some method to solve this? Maybe the transaction is part of the page load? You don't get the page until you pay via anonymous cryptocurrency. No need for any post-transaction verification and reconciliation? The problem there will be if the page fails to load, how can I safely get a second attempt without creating some kind of "double-spending" problem.
ec109685 8y ago
One way to make this happen is to vote with your eyeballs and attention. If you and other internet users that feel the same way don’t consume from sites without micropayments, they will be encouraged / forced to offer a new way of monetization.
- SllX 8y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if people actually believe this, because it sounds more like nobody should read anything on the web that is monetized with a subscriber or ad-based business model. Not even sure how newspapers would be able to figure out that all those readers they are not seeing is because they don’t take micropayments.
  - rovr138 8y ago
    > Not even sure how newspapers would be able to figure out that all those readers they are not seeing is because they don’t take micropayments. By interacting with their users. I’ve written to newspapers in the past asking about their subscription. I remember one ocassion I did it with 2 newspapers. One replied they’d look and I never heard back. The other didn’t reply. If I write asking if there’s a way to use micro donations and there isn’t or they haven’t heard about that, it might be a good idea to research it. Another is following news about competitors. ‘We’ve increased readership by x% since we added micro donations’. Or following industry conferences where it might be discussed.
    - SllX 8y ago
      How does that square with not even spending your time or eyeballs or money on a particular site till they support micropayments? That was half of my point. Do the contents of your letters read “I like your website but I cannot in good conscience support you till you support this specific business model in which I might give you a penny, or perhaps as much as a nickel every time I read an article to support your operations and salaries?” This particular idea has been kicking around for at least a decade that I know of, and since I don’t tend to hear about most ideas when they’re new, most likely much much longer than that. At this point I’ve been forced to conclude the industry as a whole has probably looked into it and come to the conclusion it just isn’t worthwhile. Understandably, they would need some critical mass of readers and enough papers that matter supporting it and a particularly friendly credit card processing agreement in which the processor would need to be happy with a micropayment of a micropayment. Services like Spotify have somewhat paved the way as well and are demonstrating what the long tail of micropayments actually looks like.
kgwxd 8y ago
I'd take static image ads without the tracking.
chapium 8y ago
Perhaps a popup prompting for you CC# each time you access an article? Because that seems convenient. Seriously though, perhaps a "read in" app (perhaps instapaper) which reconciles payment is what you want.
justinmchase 8y ago
Have you tried the Brave Browser? You basically just requested the 3 primary features it advertises: https://brave.com/features/ https://brave.com/features/
logfromblammo 8y ago
The economics and game theory of this suggests that newspapers should be forced to cooperate with each other. Cartelize on-line journalism. Make the 4th estate official. Create a pseudo-governmental entity like the US post office, Fannie Mae, or the Fed. If you have an Internet connection, you have the option, through your ISP, to pay $X towards journalism on the web. Your ISP will then cryptographically vouch for any request that goes from a paying subscriber to a cartel member site, such that the member doesn't know exactly who the subscriber is. If you're on a foreign network provider that doesn't participate, you'd have to get crypto keys and a standalone program (or browser add-on) directly from the cartel (that could make you identifiable), or go through a VPN that participates. If a request comes in with valid crypto, the response is the requested article, with no tracking, and a cartel-fixed standard for ad content. If it does not, it is up to the publisher as to what to do with the response. Deny. Inject intrusive ads. Infect with tracking malware. If you didn't pay, you get what you get. Cartel members are paid from the common fund via analysis of the server logs, targeting X% of the total amount paid out as potentially lost to fraud (so as to not overspend on analysis and fraud detection). Baseline income is determined by quantity of eyeballs. The cartel can then dole out bonuses for quality--if one of your writers wins the Pulitzer, your paper gets extra money. And it's no big deal if bots are visiting sites, because each bot has to pay in order for its requests to count towards the circulation-based distributions. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there willing to pay $10 a month or more for online journalism, but they don't want that whole budget to get sucked up by one newspaper, only to get locked out by all the others. And there are plenty of sites out there that can't seem to manage online subscriptions or micro-transactions very well.
- yason 8y ago
  That sounds like you could just paraphrase it as "Spotify for newspapers".
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    If you insist on reducing a perfectly readable story to just a three-word sentence, journalism is already doomed.
forgotmypw 8y ago
I have found that lowering my threshold for bullshit* has also increased the signal ratio of the content I read by a huge margin. I believe there is correlation. * includes crippled without JS, ads, paywalls, poor accessibility, etc.
Dylan16807 8y ago
Google has the ability to get us halfway there, if not more. The previous version of google contributor was almost a solution. But it used a bad payment allocation algorithm, it never guaranteed adsense ads would be blocked, and the new version is just a way to subscribe to a handful of sites. But they also run youtube red, which has the model they need. They just need to copy their own idea.

I don't want to subscribe, I also don't want to see ads or be tracked. I wish there was a universal micropayments way of paying for what I read.

by laktak 8y ago

I don't want to subscribe, I also don't want to see ads or be tracked. I wish there was a universal micropayments way of paying for what I read.

matt4077 8y ago

publishers don’t like micropayments because (a) they don’t work, and (b) what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important. It becomes a lot harder for journalists to justify spending months on a subject when the business side has hard data showing it brings in barely more than reprinting the soccer scores. What’s potentially workable is a Spotify-style subscription model.

aiCeivi9 8y ago
It doesn't work, since people faced with paywall moe to competition that only has ads. If adblocking is common enough will try harder to make micropayments just work.
snaky 8y ago
> what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important What people read does correlate with what's important for them, by definition.
- fwn 8y ago
  I would love to know more about this definition. If doing my taxes were as exciting as my reading list I would get much more out of my paycheck.
  - snaky 8y ago
    If the endorphins you get reading the content from your list is more important for you, so be it. You decide what's important for you, and that's the definition.
    - fwn 8y ago
      So your definition would be "Everything someone does is good for them"? That reminds me of Austrian praxeology. Behavioral patterns that lead individuals away from their goals do exist. Such irrationality is what most of behavioral economics policy advice is all about. It's easiest to explain with the difference in long term goals and short term decision making. There it gets obvious very fast that peoples immediate preferences do rarely reflect their stated and consistent long term preferences.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      And if the list just makes me upset because the headline lied? If a site evades my ability to disapprove and stay away from it, it should not be rewarded.
- mschuetz 8y ago
  And that's why we have clickbait. Letting people cherry pick exactly what they want is seriously going to hurt quality content. Subscriptions to a wide range of stuff like Netflix and Spotify are perfect. There's something in there for everyone's taste.
  - snaky 8y ago
    It depends on how you define 'the quality'. Letting people cherry pick exactly what they want is the only moral way to provide the news actually.
    - nindalf 8y ago
      You don't understand the problem of clickbait. What people say and what they do are two different things, and you need to choose which to listen to. This is one of the reasons clickbait was so prevalent on facebook a few years ago - people clicked on these so much that they were ranked very highly. But in user surveys, the same users claimed they hated clickbait and wished it wasn't there. So what do you do?
    - oarsinsync 8y ago
      I think it depends on your particular morality. Is it moral to allow people to only consume the things they believe they need, even if the things they believe they need are only that because they are addictive and potentially harmful? If allowing cherry picking exactly what they want is the only moral way to provide the news, does that mean all prior forms of broadcast news publication were immoral (e.g. television & radio news broadcasts)?
- matt4077 8y ago
  You are reading this comment. The are billions of lines of text on the internet you will never read. Is this comment strictly more important to you than every single other text on the internet? A comment that includes a nonsense paragraph of just “banana”, repeated over and over? Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana Banana.
iicc 8y ago
> (b) what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important > It becomes a lot harder for journalists to justify spending months on a subject when the business side has hard data showing it brings in barely more than reprinting the soccer scores. This is already true with the current advertising model.

ileitch 8y ago

I believe this is the idea behind the Brave browser and their Basic Attention Token https://basicattentiontoken.org https://basicattentiontoken.org

JustFinishedBSG 8y ago
What Brave is doing is highly unethical. If you don't want to see ads then fine it's your computer. But Brave is hijacking ads by force then strong-arming websites to sign up to their own shitty crypto currency if they want to be paid. It's basically an extortion scheme, or a mafia stye "protection scheme"
- fwn 8y ago
  I wonder who's more unethical: The guy who comes in, smashes your stuff and leaves or the guy who comes in, smashes your stuff and leaves a check for you at his place. I bet that's a common battle ground between consequentialists and idealists. Fun aside, I don't think the comparison holds up very well. I don't think that anyone has a right to execute code on my devices just because I'm browsing a website. In this concept, "hijacking" ads is completely void of any ethical meaning. Braves platform attempt is still not very good. A good solution for paying content creators would need to be open, decentralized and accepted by the stakeholders involved.
  - rovr138 8y ago
    If you consider the page code, you requested it and it’s bundled in there. Same with CSS and JS used for features. In that case, you requested the page and allowed them to.
    - barnabee 8y ago
      Requesting the code doesn't mean I'm obliged to run all of it. If you serve data to my computer I am free to do whatever the hell I want with it, if you don't like that, don't serve me the data.
    - 8y ago

Aissen 8y ago

Flattr set out do that, many years ago. They still exist. Brave is trying to address that. There's patreon, and many others. Have you tried them ?

buboard 8y ago
i dont agree with the tracking that goes along with all of them. i shouldnt be recording my action to a bunch of unrelated companies just so i can give a few cents to a website.
- johnnyfaehell 8y ago
  Well... If you can think of a solution, make it because there are lots of other people who also want this. But without a 3rd party payment system, it seems like you're screwed.
  - buboard 8y ago
    some cryptocurrencies come to mind. unfortunately none has caught up
- Klathmon 8y ago
  Your idea is going to be pretty much impossible to legally do in the US, where you need to have some idea of who your money is coming from to operate.
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  AFAIK, all tracking (in both Brave and Flattr) happens locally on your device. Some level of tracking _is_ strictly necessary for a system like this, because otherwise there's no way for the system to know which sites to give your money to.
- michaelbrooks 8y ago
  Brave records that data locally, none of it is actually sent to any servers. The only thing they know is an amount of money must go to the websites that your browser viewed. They don't record IP addresses or any personal data.

dmortin 8y ago

If you mean automatic micropayments when reading articles then you'll still be tracked, because the payment provider has to track what you read to make the payments and even has to be able to provide a log of it in case there is a payment dispute, so they will store what urls you visit and when. Without a proper log payment disputes can't be resolved legally.

buboard 8y ago
if there was something like anonymous payments (cryptocoin-based maybe?) then it would be possible without any tracking. In the few cases where you ask your penny cash back because something happened, most companies would just give it back without questions asked assuming they dont get tons of cashback requests from your IP.
- dmortin 8y ago
  That's why they need a log, because there will be cashback requests which people could abuse. And this will not necessarily be only pennies. A penny for a single page, for example, but if you visit many pages of the same site then the amount will be much higher and a user could claim then he has never visited that site and wants his money back.
  - buboard 8y ago
    something similar is happening with ads nowadays. There is tons of fraud in ads and all earnings / payouts are approximate. yet the system works, even approximately. My guess is fraud will be a small percent, certainly tolerable
  - lunchables 8y ago
    Seems like there has to be some method to solve this? Maybe the transaction is part of the page load? You don't get the page until you pay via anonymous cryptocurrency. No need for any post-transaction verification and reconciliation? The problem there will be if the page fails to load, how can I safely get a second attempt without creating some kind of "double-spending" problem.

ec109685 8y ago

One way to make this happen is to vote with your eyeballs and attention. If you and other internet users that feel the same way don’t consume from sites without micropayments, they will be encouraged / forced to offer a new way of monetization.

SllX 8y ago
Sometimes I wonder if people actually believe this, because it sounds more like nobody should read anything on the web that is monetized with a subscriber or ad-based business model. Not even sure how newspapers would be able to figure out that all those readers they are not seeing is because they don’t take micropayments.
- rovr138 8y ago
  > Not even sure how newspapers would be able to figure out that all those readers they are not seeing is because they don’t take micropayments. By interacting with their users. I’ve written to newspapers in the past asking about their subscription. I remember one ocassion I did it with 2 newspapers. One replied they’d look and I never heard back. The other didn’t reply. If I write asking if there’s a way to use micro donations and there isn’t or they haven’t heard about that, it might be a good idea to research it. Another is following news about competitors. ‘We’ve increased readership by x% since we added micro donations’. Or following industry conferences where it might be discussed.
  - SllX 8y ago
    How does that square with not even spending your time or eyeballs or money on a particular site till they support micropayments? That was half of my point. Do the contents of your letters read “I like your website but I cannot in good conscience support you till you support this specific business model in which I might give you a penny, or perhaps as much as a nickel every time I read an article to support your operations and salaries?” This particular idea has been kicking around for at least a decade that I know of, and since I don’t tend to hear about most ideas when they’re new, most likely much much longer than that. At this point I’ve been forced to conclude the industry as a whole has probably looked into it and come to the conclusion it just isn’t worthwhile. Understandably, they would need some critical mass of readers and enough papers that matter supporting it and a particularly friendly credit card processing agreement in which the processor would need to be happy with a micropayment of a micropayment. Services like Spotify have somewhat paved the way as well and are demonstrating what the long tail of micropayments actually looks like.

kgwxd 8y ago

I'd take static image ads without the tracking.

chapium 8y ago

Perhaps a popup prompting for you CC# each time you access an article? Because that seems convenient. Seriously though, perhaps a "read in" app (perhaps instapaper) which reconciles payment is what you want.

justinmchase 8y ago

Have you tried the Brave Browser? You basically just requested the 3 primary features it advertises: https://brave.com/features/ https://brave.com/features/

logfromblammo 8y ago

The economics and game theory of this suggests that newspapers should be forced to cooperate with each other. Cartelize on-line journalism. Make the 4th estate official. Create a pseudo-governmental entity like the US post office, Fannie Mae, or the Fed. If you have an Internet connection, you have the option, through your ISP, to pay $X towards journalism on the web. Your ISP will then cryptographically vouch for any request that goes from a paying subscriber to a cartel member site, such that the member doesn't know exactly who the subscriber is. If you're on a foreign network provider that doesn't participate, you'd have to get crypto keys and a standalone program (or browser add-on) directly from the cartel (that could make you identifiable), or go through a VPN that participates. If a request comes in with valid crypto, the response is the requested article, with no tracking, and a cartel-fixed standard for ad content. If it does not, it is up to the publisher as to what to do with the response. Deny. Inject intrusive ads. Infect with tracking malware. If you didn't pay, you get what you get. Cartel members are paid from the common fund via analysis of the server logs, targeting X% of the total amount paid out as potentially lost to fraud (so as to not overspend on analysis and fraud detection). Baseline income is determined by quantity of eyeballs. The cartel can then dole out bonuses for quality--if one of your writers wins the Pulitzer, your paper gets extra money. And it's no big deal if bots are visiting sites, because each bot has to pay in order for its requests to count towards the circulation-based distributions. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there willing to pay $10 a month or more for online journalism, but they don't want that whole budget to get sucked up by one newspaper, only to get locked out by all the others. And there are plenty of sites out there that can't seem to manage online subscriptions or micro-transactions very well.

yason 8y ago
That sounds like you could just paraphrase it as "Spotify for newspapers".
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  If you insist on reducing a perfectly readable story to just a three-word sentence, journalism is already doomed.

forgotmypw 8y ago

I have found that lowering my threshold for bullshit* has also increased the signal ratio of the content I read by a huge margin. I believe there is correlation. * includes crippled without JS, ads, paywalls, poor accessibility, etc.

Dylan16807 8y ago

Google has the ability to get us halfway there, if not more. The previous version of google contributor was almost a solution. But it used a bad payment allocation algorithm, it never guaranteed adsense ads would be blocked, and the new version is just a way to subscribe to a handful of sites. But they also run youtube red, which has the model they need. They just need to copy their own idea.