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I'm not convinced this isn't a solution in search of a problem. What is it good for? For most things being sold you'll want an account attached. If this is a s

I'm not convinced this isn't a solution in search of a problem. What is it good for? For most things being sold you'll want an account attached. If this is a song or a book then you probably want to at least have functionality like reviews, ratings and recommendations. Whatever it is that you're selling probably forms part of some sort of established relationship -- I don't recall ever getting out my credit card and paying $5 for something from a random link on Twitter. It also seems abuse prone. If we're supposed to share these paid links, that creates an incentive for scammers and trolls to create their own links and get people's money while delivering nothing. That means customers will lose confidence in the system, vendors will get screwed, and the company will be hit with chargebacks. This seems like a dangerous business model. For the vendor side, this seems to be a redirector, so once the first person pays, they can share the URL they got redirected to. This doesn't seem like a good business plan. EDIT: I just got one to load. This is all I get: "This link costs $15.00 to access. You are trying to accessed a link through PaidLink.to, which requires payment to proceed. Fill out your payment details below." What the heck am I even paying $15 for? I haven't a clue. Not only there's no preview, there's not even a description! Screenshot for anyone having issues: https://imgur.com/YIsypEN https://imgur.com/YIsypEN

sdwr 4y ago
You kidding me? You're a complainer in search of an issue, there's nothing wrong with this. "Buying things on the internet" obviously works already, in the form of patreon, subscriptions, and digital purchases. This is a minimal, clean service, does exactly what it says on the tin. IDK if it gets any uptake, and the UI doesn't quite look trustworthy enough for my taste, but the idea itself is pretty much perfect.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > You kidding me? You're a complainer in search of an issue, there's nothing wrong with this. "Buying things on the internet" obviously works already, in the form of patreon, subscriptions, and digital purchases. And I've used such services, yes. But this looks way too minimalistic to me to be useful. On Patreon I subscribe to a specific artist. I know who they are and they can know me if we talk to each other. I can favorite posts, provide feedback, get perks, etc. When an artist says that for $10 I'll get access to their latest sketches that's a public announcement on Patreon, and if they don't hold up their promise, fans will get upset. Here there's an obscure link. I don't know what I'm paying for, or who made it. I don't know whether it belongs to the actual person who's supposed to benefit. Somebody could pay for the first access, make their own link and then leech off the actual artist by spreading their link around.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    What happens when the URL inevitably starts 404ing would be my first question.
    - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
      It would be a plus if paidlink.to actually made a call to the link before accepting payment, and put up a warning / stopped the transaction if it didn't get a 200, "We're sorry but thingyouwanted.com/enticing.html isn't currrently available, please try again later."
  - yyu990 4y ago
    The artist can just have a webpage/blog/... where they would include such "paid links". That is, the audience still knows who they are and still builds some trust etc. But now they don't have to deal with setting up payment systems and account handling and billing and all that stuff. The value proposition of the OP service is to take care of all that and the artist can focus on their art instead. A per-click webshop, basically.
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      The issue is I as a scammer can create a paid link to any arbitrary URL, including your URL. There's no verification of control like how say LetsEncrypt works. As a user I'm taken to a link with no verification of what I might be paying for. There's no preview of the content or even a declaration of who might own rights to the linked content. So I get a link that says I need to pay $10, what the fuck am I paying for? Even if I followed a link and expect to be paying, a scammer could also send me a link to the same content. I expected to pay through this site so I go ahead and pay for the content. Since I followed the scammer's link they get paid instead of the content owner. This is a system just rife with abuse potential.
      - sacrosancty 4y ago
        You don't seem to have addressed your parent's point. A creator can post a paidlink link on their own site. You already know they're not a scammer because you're part of their happy fanbase. So you trust the links they post will do what they say. Of course you wouldn't just pay money for some random link you found on Google search.
- wpietri 4y ago
  It is "perfect" in the H L Mencken sense: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." One of the reasons that Bitcoin never took off for their stated purpose, payment, is that they had a similarly too-simple model of irreversible one-shot transfers. Anybody who has worked on an actual payment system can tell you that commerce is more complex than that.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    I don't think that was the main issue. Bitcoin's main use as an actual currency was for things like drugs, where the legal system wouldn't be on your side anyway. So lack of chargebacks wasn't an issue anyway. The bigger issues with BTC is the onboarding problem, limited capacity and rapidly fluctuating exchange rate.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      I don't think I said it was the main issue. I agree that it had other problems too, including the ones you name. But I think you're missing my point. The anonymous, one-shot nature of things made it most appealing to only one set of merchants and one set of customers: people doing crime, and who were therefore most tolerant of the risks. The onboarding problem is also partly a consequence of this. Because a bitcoin transaction is irreversible, and exchange can't just take a credit card payment and give you bitcoin.
  - iopq 4y ago
    Bitcoin actually DID take off for payments. The issue is it became too popular and the people in charge of it didn't want to extend the block size limit. I would use Bitcoin to play poker online because the alternative was using Western Union - which is much more of a hassle. Because of this issue, online poker sites now use Litecoin, BSV, BCH, etc. See: bovada.lv and other poker sites who still offer their services to US players
    - wpietri 4y ago
      It actually did not. I agree that it's useful for certain niche quasi-legal cases, but it poses absolutely no competition to both traditional payment media like credit cards and debit cards or modern options like Venmo and MPesa. It was accepted for a brief period by something like 1% of top internet retailers but it's down to at best a handful.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  > IDK if it gets any uptake This is pretty much what solution in search of a problem is. "Here, we made this thing that solves this problem someone could theoretically have." crickets
  - drusepth 4y ago
    I still think there's value in a solution already existing if someone were to have that problem. As long as the site isn't hemmoraging money and/or needs users to survive, I don't see any reason the site couldn't just sit until someone needs it and/or grow slowly.
jonnycomputer 4y ago
You're paying for the information about what the link points to, apparently. Imagine, for example, Musk's twitter requiring payment to see what some user's post linked to somewhere else off of Twitter. Not saying its a good idea. It's mafia-esque, tbh.
noxer 4y ago
This is most likely targeted at the onlyfans kinda "internet sex worker" who sell zip archives or lewd images and videos. This lets "content creator" circumvent the platform fees that come with selling over platforms like onlyfans.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  So on one hand, I think this is still too little. Even when buying porn one would want to know exactly what it is they're paying for, and it would make more sense to do the payment at some place with a gallery, previews, etc. But on the other hand, this might be a plausible deniability sort of thing. This way paidlink.to doesn't host anything, they don't even say what it is that they're going to direct the user to. This might be an attempt to keep payment processors off their back as long as possible. It may not work forever but since next to nothing is being provided, this site is extremely cheap to setup and run, which means it won't take long to pay off.
  - Nowado 4y ago
    If customer has an established relationship with a seller already, seller can put this link on a website where products are presented. It's not polished, but it's fine.
  - lalopalota 4y ago
    I imagine the description / preview would be displayed with the link on the seller's site. No need for this service to open itself to the liability / vulnerability of displaying whatever the seller wants (illegal content / XSS / etc)
  - nvr219 4y ago
    Why should the payment piece show a preview or gallery or anything? When I buy something using paypal, that info isn't on PayPal - it's on the vendor site.
  - JoeyBananas 4y ago
    The gallery problem is easy to solve, the models put these Stripe links on their instagram or snapchat, and then fill up their pages with saucy photos to serve as the gallery.
layer8 4y ago
The adjacent submission https://tafc.space/qna/the-topologists-world-map/ https://tafc.space/qna/the-topologists-world-map/ would be an example use case, for selling the digital version of their map.
robbyking 4y ago
> I don't recall ever getting out my credit card and paying $5 for something from a random link on Twitter. The other issues with this site aside, affiliate programs don't require the user purchase the item that brought them to the site. There's a book I found myself recommending quite often, so I created an affiliate account at a retailer and started using that link when I recommended it online. I make about $100 each quarter off of site referrals, but almost no one buys the book -- instead they follow the link, click on something in a related items carousel and buy one of those items. Sometimes the time between click and purchase is pretty long (weeks or even months), but as long as the affiliate cook persists I get a percentage of the purchase price.
- alwayslikethis 4y ago
  Hm, the way I use the browser most likely break affiliate programs. I have ClearURLs which remove affiliate links, and no cookies are stored unless I use a persistent container, so the site can't realistically remember if I ever clicked on one of those links (unless they use some fingerprinting thing, but that's unlikely to persist over weeks/months).
vikingerik 4y ago
> I'm not convinced this isn't a solution in search of a problem. What is it good for? It's quite possible this isn't determined yet. It might exactly be a solution searching for a problem, intentionally so. The creator can implement the idea and launch it as a proof-of-concept, and see if anyone comes up with any good use cases for it. Maybe it goes nowhere, but maybe it's worth a shot at hitting it big in some unforeseen niche.
geysersam 4y ago
1. You can still have reviews, decription of content, etc etc. But it doesn't have to ce coupled to payment processing and distribution of the content. This significantly lowers the bar for what is required to have a "webshop" like page. For example: a Reddit post can have a product description, with payment links directly in the description, and reviews in the comments. How convenient is that? 2. > What the heck am I paying for? I assume you accessed their example link. In practice you would have clicked the link from a page describing what you are paying for. I'm not affiliated with the product. Just found this a really cool and innovative idea.
- zyx321 4y ago
  If your example doesn't show how the tool is supposed to be used in practice, it's kind of a garbage example.
- croes 4y ago
  Clicking a link and getting to a page without mentioning what I'm paying for is highly suspicious.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    But before you click the link, the page would explain what you're paying for, right? Sure, at the exact moment you're entering your card details, it doesn't say what the product is. However, it seems this could be changed quite trivially. Just add an optional `description` field to the form used to generate the url, and let the description be displayed on the payment page.
jstummbillig 4y ago
> For most things being sold you'll want an account attached. Who is the subject? Because in my mind, for most things sold, as the buyer, you actually just want the product/service. > I don't recall ever getting out my credit card and paying $5 Even if you never shopped in a retail store or dined in a restaurant and paid with your credit card (which seems somewhat unlikely) you are familiar with the concept of paying for something "random" as a one of. What's the conceptual hurdle?
ChuckMcM 4y ago
From dale_glass' comment below: This way paidlink.to doesn't host anything, they don't even say what it is that they're going to direct the user to. This might be an attempt to keep payment processors off their back as long as possible. This explanation strikes me as being closest. There is a well known problem, which is that using the non-crypto payment systems for things is difficult, by disintermediating the payment provider from the product the paidlink guys can say they have clean hands. VISA: "What are you selling?" PL: "Links" VISA: "Links to what? Prohibited items?" PL: "Oh no, our TOS doesn't allow that, we tell our customers not do do that." VISA: "Can you verify that they don't?" PL: "Uh, well as far as our platform is concerned their just links, you know like groceries are just groceries, we don't get into the nitty gritty of what exactly they are." The weird thing is, even if the PL guys are 100% aligned with not letting their customers use this for "bad things" their customers are going to try to find ways around any systems they put in place to check or regulate. Watching the shenanigans people pulled to get around our efforts to prevent the misuse of Blekko (a search engine) was really educational in that regard.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  My first thought was that this was made for crypto locker payments. The locker displays the qr code and polls for payment status
  - O__________O 4y ago
    For clarity, you’re referring to ransomware.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - antifa 4y ago
    Finally, I'll be able to do chargebacks on ransomware.
- strifey 4y ago
  You might have noticed already, but your reply is quoting the same person you're replying to.
emodendroket 4y ago
I've seen similar products except the thing was that they made you watch ads. These were mostly popular with people sharing links to pirated content.
lx0741 4y ago
good for onlyfans "influencers"?
jollyllama 4y ago
Accounts are a barrier to sales.
masswerk 4y ago
Also: as a user, I have no idea whom I am paying – is it the content creator, a scammer, an obscure man in the middle? What kind of transaction is this even? Is there any kind of resolution in case of conflict? It's just an actual payment block box with the promise of some content behind that link, which cannot be verified, and no trust at all. (Edit) In terms of transparency, there isn't really much to find out about of who is behind this service. From the terms of service (hosted by another domain) we learn: Neptune Technologies, United States (no further address details) But there's an email address, and this is the site behind that domain: http://www.neptune.is http://www.neptune.is (???)
captainmuon 4y ago
I can imagine this is useful if you want to sell digital goods, say an ebook or, cough, pictures, but don't want to or can't set up a shop, or use a payment processor. It looks like a simple and convenient solution, they handle all the payments and send you a check in the end. But oh boy this seems to be an invitation to money laundering. 3 2 1 and people are going to put up links, and buy them themselves with stolen credit cards.
shyn3 4y ago
I'm convinced this will be a Dropbox moment.

sdwr 4y ago

You kidding me? You're a complainer in search of an issue, there's nothing wrong with this. "Buying things on the internet" obviously works already, in the form of patreon, subscriptions, and digital purchases. This is a minimal, clean service, does exactly what it says on the tin. IDK if it gets any uptake, and the UI doesn't quite look trustworthy enough for my taste, but the idea itself is pretty much perfect.

dale_glass 4y ago
> You kidding me? You're a complainer in search of an issue, there's nothing wrong with this. "Buying things on the internet" obviously works already, in the form of patreon, subscriptions, and digital purchases. And I've used such services, yes. But this looks way too minimalistic to me to be useful. On Patreon I subscribe to a specific artist. I know who they are and they can know me if we talk to each other. I can favorite posts, provide feedback, get perks, etc. When an artist says that for $10 I'll get access to their latest sketches that's a public announcement on Patreon, and if they don't hold up their promise, fans will get upset. Here there's an obscure link. I don't know what I'm paying for, or who made it. I don't know whether it belongs to the actual person who's supposed to benefit. Somebody could pay for the first access, make their own link and then leech off the actual artist by spreading their link around.
- TylerE 4y ago
  What happens when the URL inevitably starts 404ing would be my first question.
  - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    It would be a plus if paidlink.to actually made a call to the link before accepting payment, and put up a warning / stopped the transaction if it didn't get a 200, "We're sorry but thingyouwanted.com/enticing.html isn't currrently available, please try again later."
- yyu990 4y ago
  The artist can just have a webpage/blog/... where they would include such "paid links". That is, the audience still knows who they are and still builds some trust etc. But now they don't have to deal with setting up payment systems and account handling and billing and all that stuff. The value proposition of the OP service is to take care of all that and the artist can focus on their art instead. A per-click webshop, basically.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    The issue is I as a scammer can create a paid link to any arbitrary URL, including your URL. There's no verification of control like how say LetsEncrypt works. As a user I'm taken to a link with no verification of what I might be paying for. There's no preview of the content or even a declaration of who might own rights to the linked content. So I get a link that says I need to pay $10, what the fuck am I paying for? Even if I followed a link and expect to be paying, a scammer could also send me a link to the same content. I expected to pay through this site so I go ahead and pay for the content. Since I followed the scammer's link they get paid instead of the content owner. This is a system just rife with abuse potential.
    - sacrosancty 4y ago
      You don't seem to have addressed your parent's point. A creator can post a paidlink link on their own site. You already know they're not a scammer because you're part of their happy fanbase. So you trust the links they post will do what they say. Of course you wouldn't just pay money for some random link you found on Google search.
wpietri 4y ago
It is "perfect" in the H L Mencken sense: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." One of the reasons that Bitcoin never took off for their stated purpose, payment, is that they had a similarly too-simple model of irreversible one-shot transfers. Anybody who has worked on an actual payment system can tell you that commerce is more complex than that.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  I don't think that was the main issue. Bitcoin's main use as an actual currency was for things like drugs, where the legal system wouldn't be on your side anyway. So lack of chargebacks wasn't an issue anyway. The bigger issues with BTC is the onboarding problem, limited capacity and rapidly fluctuating exchange rate.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    I don't think I said it was the main issue. I agree that it had other problems too, including the ones you name. But I think you're missing my point. The anonymous, one-shot nature of things made it most appealing to only one set of merchants and one set of customers: people doing crime, and who were therefore most tolerant of the risks. The onboarding problem is also partly a consequence of this. Because a bitcoin transaction is irreversible, and exchange can't just take a credit card payment and give you bitcoin.
- iopq 4y ago
  Bitcoin actually DID take off for payments. The issue is it became too popular and the people in charge of it didn't want to extend the block size limit. I would use Bitcoin to play poker online because the alternative was using Western Union - which is much more of a hassle. Because of this issue, online poker sites now use Litecoin, BSV, BCH, etc. See: bovada.lv and other poker sites who still offer their services to US players
  - wpietri 4y ago
    It actually did not. I agree that it's useful for certain niche quasi-legal cases, but it poses absolutely no competition to both traditional payment media like credit cards and debit cards or modern options like Venmo and MPesa. It was accepted for a brief period by something like 1% of top internet retailers but it's down to at best a handful.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
> IDK if it gets any uptake This is pretty much what solution in search of a problem is. "Here, we made this thing that solves this problem someone could theoretically have." crickets
- drusepth 4y ago
  I still think there's value in a solution already existing if someone were to have that problem. As long as the site isn't hemmoraging money and/or needs users to survive, I don't see any reason the site couldn't just sit until someone needs it and/or grow slowly.

jonnycomputer 4y ago

You're paying for the information about what the link points to, apparently. Imagine, for example, Musk's twitter requiring payment to see what some user's post linked to somewhere else off of Twitter. Not saying its a good idea. It's mafia-esque, tbh.

noxer 4y ago

This is most likely targeted at the onlyfans kinda "internet sex worker" who sell zip archives or lewd images and videos. This lets "content creator" circumvent the platform fees that come with selling over platforms like onlyfans.

dale_glass 4y ago
So on one hand, I think this is still too little. Even when buying porn one would want to know exactly what it is they're paying for, and it would make more sense to do the payment at some place with a gallery, previews, etc. But on the other hand, this might be a plausible deniability sort of thing. This way paidlink.to doesn't host anything, they don't even say what it is that they're going to direct the user to. This might be an attempt to keep payment processors off their back as long as possible. It may not work forever but since next to nothing is being provided, this site is extremely cheap to setup and run, which means it won't take long to pay off.
- Nowado 4y ago
  If customer has an established relationship with a seller already, seller can put this link on a website where products are presented. It's not polished, but it's fine.
- lalopalota 4y ago
  I imagine the description / preview would be displayed with the link on the seller's site. No need for this service to open itself to the liability / vulnerability of displaying whatever the seller wants (illegal content / XSS / etc)
- nvr219 4y ago
  Why should the payment piece show a preview or gallery or anything? When I buy something using paypal, that info isn't on PayPal - it's on the vendor site.
- JoeyBananas 4y ago
  The gallery problem is easy to solve, the models put these Stripe links on their instagram or snapchat, and then fill up their pages with saucy photos to serve as the gallery.

layer8 4y ago

The adjacent submission https://tafc.space/qna/the-topologists-world-map/ https://tafc.space/qna/the-topologists-world-map/ would be an example use case, for selling the digital version of their map.

robbyking 4y ago

> I don't recall ever getting out my credit card and paying $5 for something from a random link on Twitter. The other issues with this site aside, affiliate programs don't require the user purchase the item that brought them to the site. There's a book I found myself recommending quite often, so I created an affiliate account at a retailer and started using that link when I recommended it online. I make about $100 each quarter off of site referrals, but almost no one buys the book -- instead they follow the link, click on something in a related items carousel and buy one of those items. Sometimes the time between click and purchase is pretty long (weeks or even months), but as long as the affiliate cook persists I get a percentage of the purchase price.

alwayslikethis 4y ago
Hm, the way I use the browser most likely break affiliate programs. I have ClearURLs which remove affiliate links, and no cookies are stored unless I use a persistent container, so the site can't realistically remember if I ever clicked on one of those links (unless they use some fingerprinting thing, but that's unlikely to persist over weeks/months).

vikingerik 4y ago

> I'm not convinced this isn't a solution in search of a problem. What is it good for? It's quite possible this isn't determined yet. It might exactly be a solution searching for a problem, intentionally so. The creator can implement the idea and launch it as a proof-of-concept, and see if anyone comes up with any good use cases for it. Maybe it goes nowhere, but maybe it's worth a shot at hitting it big in some unforeseen niche.

geysersam 4y ago

1. You can still have reviews, decription of content, etc etc. But it doesn't have to ce coupled to payment processing and distribution of the content. This significantly lowers the bar for what is required to have a "webshop" like page. For example: a Reddit post can have a product description, with payment links directly in the description, and reviews in the comments. How convenient is that? 2. > What the heck am I paying for? I assume you accessed their example link. In practice you would have clicked the link from a page describing what you are paying for. I'm not affiliated with the product. Just found this a really cool and innovative idea.

zyx321 4y ago
If your example doesn't show how the tool is supposed to be used in practice, it's kind of a garbage example.
croes 4y ago
Clicking a link and getting to a page without mentioning what I'm paying for is highly suspicious.
- geysersam 4y ago
  But before you click the link, the page would explain what you're paying for, right? Sure, at the exact moment you're entering your card details, it doesn't say what the product is. However, it seems this could be changed quite trivially. Just add an optional `description` field to the form used to generate the url, and let the description be displayed on the payment page.

jstummbillig 4y ago

> For most things being sold you'll want an account attached. Who is the subject? Because in my mind, for most things sold, as the buyer, you actually just want the product/service. > I don't recall ever getting out my credit card and paying $5 Even if you never shopped in a retail store or dined in a restaurant and paid with your credit card (which seems somewhat unlikely) you are familiar with the concept of paying for something "random" as a one of. What's the conceptual hurdle?

ChuckMcM 4y ago

From dale_glass' comment below: This way paidlink.to doesn't host anything, they don't even say what it is that they're going to direct the user to. This might be an attempt to keep payment processors off their back as long as possible. This explanation strikes me as being closest. There is a well known problem, which is that using the non-crypto payment systems for things is difficult, by disintermediating the payment provider from the product the paidlink guys can say they have clean hands. VISA: "What are you selling?" PL: "Links" VISA: "Links to what? Prohibited items?" PL: "Oh no, our TOS doesn't allow that, we tell our customers not do do that." VISA: "Can you verify that they don't?" PL: "Uh, well as far as our platform is concerned their just links, you know like groceries are just groceries, we don't get into the nitty gritty of what exactly they are." The weird thing is, even if the PL guys are 100% aligned with not letting their customers use this for "bad things" their customers are going to try to find ways around any systems they put in place to check or regulate. Watching the shenanigans people pulled to get around our efforts to prevent the misuse of Blekko (a search engine) was really educational in that regard.

411111111111111 4y ago
My first thought was that this was made for crypto locker payments. The locker displays the qr code and polls for payment status
- O__________O 4y ago
  For clarity, you’re referring to ransomware.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- antifa 4y ago
  Finally, I'll be able to do chargebacks on ransomware.
strifey 4y ago
You might have noticed already, but your reply is quoting the same person you're replying to.

emodendroket 4y ago

I've seen similar products except the thing was that they made you watch ads. These were mostly popular with people sharing links to pirated content.

lx0741 4y ago

good for onlyfans "influencers"?

jollyllama 4y ago

Accounts are a barrier to sales.

masswerk 4y ago

Also: as a user, I have no idea whom I am paying – is it the content creator, a scammer, an obscure man in the middle? What kind of transaction is this even? Is there any kind of resolution in case of conflict? It's just an actual payment block box with the promise of some content behind that link, which cannot be verified, and no trust at all. (Edit) In terms of transparency, there isn't really much to find out about of who is behind this service. From the terms of service (hosted by another domain) we learn: Neptune Technologies, United States (no further address details) But there's an email address, and this is the site behind that domain: http://www.neptune.is http://www.neptune.is (???)

captainmuon 4y ago

I can imagine this is useful if you want to sell digital goods, say an ebook or, cough, pictures, but don't want to or can't set up a shop, or use a payment processor. It looks like a simple and convenient solution, they handle all the payments and send you a check in the end. But oh boy this seems to be an invitation to money laundering. 3 2 1 and people are going to put up links, and buy them themselves with stolen credit cards.

shyn3 4y ago

I'm convinced this will be a Dropbox moment.