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Community discussion seems like an interesting vehicle for article micro-payments. Could someone try to negotiate a pooled deal with the WSJ based on a valid H

Community discussion seems like an interesting vehicle for article micro-payments. Could someone try to negotiate a pooled deal with the WSJ based on a valid HN cookie with >X internet points? Or just a single subscription with the agreement that it would be scraped and self-hosted by the community?

catchmeifyoucan 7y ago
I like this. Would be cool to start a HN News fund
- catchmeifyoucan 7y ago
  Thinking more about implementation - although users could use micro-transactions among themselves, providers might be more inclined to opt-in if we offered to pay by block. For example, if a paywall article starts ranking up, we could let the provider know to remove the paywall for certain duration. Kind of like a scheduled spot instance on a Cloud VM. I bet there's a flag that toggles paywalls on articles and is easier for providers to implement than restrictive access. Using our fund - we could then pay the provider. Assuming that an average top HN post gets 10K views - and each user pays $.05 per viewing. That makes a total of $500. We would give the provider an upfront payment of say $500 dollars based on estimations. A $20 contribution to the fund means almost 400 articles [enough for more than a year] on front-page paywalled subscriptions for a user. So the spiel to providers are - we'll pay you $500 for 6 hours of free article read time. That's all they need to know. We handle collecting funds on our side from actual readers. It's actually genius because content providers can write and support articles catered to a particular community and are incentivized because they don't have to worry about conversion of users to paid subscribers.
sk55 7y ago
I dig this idea as well.
flukus 7y ago
How many paywall sites have half decent forums/discussions? It seems like that's the sort of thing they could leverage to drive their subscriptions, kind of like how the letters to the editor section used to get used. At the moment this is outsourced to twitter/facebook/reddiit/etc and they get no revenue from it.

catchmeifyoucan 7y ago

I like this. Would be cool to start a HN News fund

catchmeifyoucan 7y ago
Thinking more about implementation - although users could use micro-transactions among themselves, providers might be more inclined to opt-in if we offered to pay by block. For example, if a paywall article starts ranking up, we could let the provider know to remove the paywall for certain duration. Kind of like a scheduled spot instance on a Cloud VM. I bet there's a flag that toggles paywalls on articles and is easier for providers to implement than restrictive access. Using our fund - we could then pay the provider. Assuming that an average top HN post gets 10K views - and each user pays $.05 per viewing. That makes a total of $500. We would give the provider an upfront payment of say $500 dollars based on estimations. A $20 contribution to the fund means almost 400 articles [enough for more than a year] on front-page paywalled subscriptions for a user. So the spiel to providers are - we'll pay you $500 for 6 hours of free article read time. That's all they need to know. We handle collecting funds on our side from actual readers. It's actually genius because content providers can write and support articles catered to a particular community and are incentivized because they don't have to worry about conversion of users to paid subscribers.

sk55 7y ago

I dig this idea as well.

flukus 7y ago

How many paywall sites have half decent forums/discussions? It seems like that's the sort of thing they could leverage to drive their subscriptions, kind of like how the letters to the editor section used to get used. At the moment this is outsourced to twitter/facebook/reddiit/etc and they get no revenue from it.