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It’s not so much about medium or any other name, it’s purely a matter of a tease with no follow through. Any site which teases you with content and then slams

by z9znz 4y ago

It’s not so much about medium or any other name, it’s purely a matter of a tease with no follow through. Any site which teases you with content and then slams the door in your face is obnoxious and aggravating. Sites that aggravate me get negative goodwill. Eventually, as with Facebook, I avoid them entirely as a matter of personal principle. My hope is that people with interesting things to share will start to see the decline of their platform and move elsewhere to less user hostile places. I know companies need revenue, but there are ways of getting revenue without being obnoxious or deceptive.

gofreddygo 4y ago
> I know companies need revenue, but there are ways of getting revenue without being obnoxious or deceptive. 100% agree. Can't take consumer market customers for granted like you can enterprise ones. Best option for them was to drop their costs to bare minimum and show some ads. Have popular content creators spread the word enough.
wizofaus 4y ago
"there are ways of getting revenue without being obnoxious or deceptive" If you're including only allowing a certain number of free articles a month, or only showing the first few paragraphs before requesting payment to read the rest, I'm not sure what alternatives you'd think would be non-obnoxious (and what's the deception exactly?). My concern is that there's still no good way to make easy essentially anonymous micropayments to sites with content that you want to read - if there were I doubt there'd really be much issue with just having a simple button to confirm that you're happy to pay a small fee (say, 50c) to read the rest of the article. And if the rest of the article turns out to be crap, you just avoid that site. But 95% of the time I end up reading an archive.ph version of an article is not because I don't think it's worth paying money for, but because I'm expected to provide far more info than I think is relevant and then hand over credit card details in a way that likely will result in ongoing recurring charges. I'd actually prefer it if there were simple mechanism for agreeing to have the cost of viewing pages from particular domains added to my monthly internet usage bill. Are there any ISPs that offer such a facility?
- z9znz 4y ago
  > anonymous micropayments At some point we have to trust some online service to keep our data safe, and that service could theoretically provide an anonymous payment proxy. Ignoring whether one believes that Apple is a good custodian of one's privacy, they already have the email anonymization feature. They could do the same for anonymous payments. That would really only work for small payments which could not be refunded, because the refund process would likely need to expose some personal information. For me, the concern is not anonymity. It's purely a matter of how much extra noise and email crap I have to suffer if I sign up for "free" access. The user experience once signed in is often just as bad, but differently so. As for paying for an article, the issue is that most of these sites hide so much of the article that you really don't know what you're paying for. And frankly speaking, most "articles" nowdays are just fluff to raise the visibility of some developer or the company they work for. In some cases, I think that university students from certain parts of the world are being required to generate a certain number of posts per period (as part of their training?). So the signal to noise ratio is continuously getting worse.

by z9znz 4y ago

gofreddygo 4y ago

> I know companies need revenue, but there are ways of getting revenue without being obnoxious or deceptive. 100% agree. Can't take consumer market customers for granted like you can enterprise ones. Best option for them was to drop their costs to bare minimum and show some ads. Have popular content creators spread the word enough.

wizofaus 4y ago

"there are ways of getting revenue without being obnoxious or deceptive" If you're including only allowing a certain number of free articles a month, or only showing the first few paragraphs before requesting payment to read the rest, I'm not sure what alternatives you'd think would be non-obnoxious (and what's the deception exactly?). My concern is that there's still no good way to make easy essentially anonymous micropayments to sites with content that you want to read - if there were I doubt there'd really be much issue with just having a simple button to confirm that you're happy to pay a small fee (say, 50c) to read the rest of the article. And if the rest of the article turns out to be crap, you just avoid that site. But 95% of the time I end up reading an archive.ph version of an article is not because I don't think it's worth paying money for, but because I'm expected to provide far more info than I think is relevant and then hand over credit card details in a way that likely will result in ongoing recurring charges. I'd actually prefer it if there were simple mechanism for agreeing to have the cost of viewing pages from particular domains added to my monthly internet usage bill. Are there any ISPs that offer such a facility?

z9znz 4y ago
> anonymous micropayments At some point we have to trust some online service to keep our data safe, and that service could theoretically provide an anonymous payment proxy. Ignoring whether one believes that Apple is a good custodian of one's privacy, they already have the email anonymization feature. They could do the same for anonymous payments. That would really only work for small payments which could not be refunded, because the refund process would likely need to expose some personal information. For me, the concern is not anonymity. It's purely a matter of how much extra noise and email crap I have to suffer if I sign up for "free" access. The user experience once signed in is often just as bad, but differently so. As for paying for an article, the issue is that most of these sites hide so much of the article that you really don't know what you're paying for. And frankly speaking, most "articles" nowdays are just fluff to raise the visibility of some developer or the company they work for. In some cases, I think that university students from certain parts of the world are being required to generate a certain number of posts per period (as part of their training?). So the signal to noise ratio is continuously getting worse.