10 ms·

The approach that will work: 1. Have a service worth paying for. 2. Collect a payment with registration/account creation.

mathgeek 3y ago
Captchas are often implemented on the payment forms themselves to prevent card testing.
junaru 3y ago
That approach will not work at all. Majority shops have captchas since crawlers are like mini denail of service attacks on their resources and they continue day and night. You will not pay a single webshop to browse its inventory let alone dozens you currently check before buying anything. Like it or not this is what the internet runs on nowadays so killing that would have much bigger fallout than anything annoying captchas could do.
sam0x17 3y ago
Or really, proof-of-work based CAPTCHAs. I think inevitably that's the world we're eventually stuck in
neilv 3y ago
A bunch of news sites try that, but every link to them on HN (an Internet tech community you'd think would have a lot of people especially sympathetic to merit-based monetization of digital content) quickly gets a comment with a piracy link.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  Maybe the service news sites provide isn't worth paying for for the vast majority of incidental visitors.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  …because no one who isn't already a subscriber is going to pay to read one article.
  - xp84 3y ago
    This is the main issue I have. I actually maintain paid subs to Washington Post, NYT, plus a local major newspaper. This should be more than enough to cover my share of news reporting costs. Yet if I’m linked to the Atlanta Journal or whatever, I’m expected to subscribe? Really? Every paywalled newspaper should support roaming. If museums can do reciprocal benefits, at WORST there should at least be reciprocal benefits among the roughly 1,000,000 Digital First Media newspapers, and within other large conglomerates. And ideally they should find a way to let a subscriber consume a reasonable amount of articles across a larger network. The higher the subscription tier paid, the more articles. Share a few cents for each article viewed.
- sam0x17 3y ago
  I think most in the tech space tacitly believe that if Alice has a cool string of 0s and 1s, but you have to pay $5 to go into her house to see it, and Bob happens to memorize the string of 0s and 1s and decides to display it publicly for all to see on a billboard, that this is an extremely based and good thing to do and prevents Alice from holding back human progress. People who don't believe this are probably biased because they are Alice. Don't be Alice.
  - neilv 3y ago
    I was thinking our tacit belief is usually more "I want that, but I also want to keep my money. whynotboth.gif?" When challenged, rationalizations might come out. Circumstantial evidence of this is that we really don't see a lot of clear altruistic looking towards human progress... on other topics. If we mostly only talk about principled stands when it happens to be very convenient in a selfish way, the selfish way seems a more likely explanation.
    - stavros 3y ago
      For me, the issue is that I don't want to subscribe to the NYT because I never explicitly go to the NYT. If I'm linked to an article there, I'll read it, but subscribing on the off chance that I'm linked to an article there isn't a good reason. If there were a way to give two cents for each article I read, I'd do that, but there isn't.
      - mewpmewp2 3y ago
        Yeah, I also wish for such a way. Global metered system for services like those. I don't ever read one single thing, but I read an article or two from countless of services.
      - sam0x17 3y ago
        That they can't make enough money from contextual advertising with literally the entire internet linking to them all the time is a spectacular failure.
- indymike 3y ago
  No, they aren't piracy links. These are where the news site makes their content available to scrapers and then paywalls humans. This is where the news site is trying take advantage of search engines to get you to clink on their SERP, and then make you pay. In a lot of cases you can read this content by proxying off a non-dynamic ip range and changing your user agent.
  - brickteacup 3y ago
    > These are where the news site makes their content available to scrapers and then paywalls humans. This is where the news site is trying take advantage of search engines to get you to clink on their SERP, and then make you pay. In a lot of cases you can read this content by proxying off a non-dynamic ip range and changing your user agent. okay... so they're piracy links is what you're saying?
    - indymike 3y ago
      No, a piracy link would not show content from the original publisher it would show the publisher's work on another website.
- mishagale 3y ago
  I've always felt one of the main reasons for this is that we never really got true microtransactions on the web. Pretty much all payment processors charge at least $0.20-30 per transaction. My theory is that if there was a way to frictionlessly pay, say, $0.02 to access a piece of content ad-free, most people would be pretty okay with it. They key part is making the transaction frictionless - no more than 1-click/1000ms.
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    What's the challenge in already having this? There could be an aggregator service that has all the news sites joined with it and pays out on your visits to those news sites? Is it that it would be hard to get all news sites or content providers to accept this single one universal service?
    - atyppo 3y ago
      Apple tried with Apple News+ and hasn't exactly succeeded. If they can't succeed, I fail to see how anyone else could. Maybe a few media incumbents?
      - kyleyeats 3y ago
        They'll never do this because it dispels the illusion of independent media. It's the same reason cable news buys and shows ads: they want you to think the rest of the content isn't for sale. The truth is that the news is paid for by people who want to control the narrative, whether it's Logan Paul or Uncle Sam.
    - noAnswer 3y ago
      Old Flattr was something along those lines. You had to click though. (Like the old embedded Facebook likes. Are they old? Haven't seen them in a while, could be because of uBlock though.) I really liked it. A view Blogs, Podcasts and the KeePass-Homepage had it. Then they sold to Chines investors and pivoted to god knows what.
  - neilv 3y ago
- xormapmap 3y ago
  news site != service worth paying for
- bsder 3y ago
  I get infuriated when a site wants to limit everything to its subscriber base but also wants to clog up my public search results. No. Get out of my search results. Pinterest, for example, should NEVER appear in my links or search results. If the New York Times wants to appear in my search results, then that article should be free otherwise GTFO. Google used to heavily penalize sites that pulled this trick, but then gave in because it interefered with their ad revenue.
- viridian 3y ago
  How is it piracy to use archive.ph? Seems strange that the bots are allowed to read content for free, while the humans can't, but also the humans shouldn't read the bot's reposting of the content for free. It seems to me that if they really don't want humans reading things for free, they shouldn't give it away to the (human owned, operated, and designed) bots.
Vicinity9635 3y ago
This is exactly what twitter did. From just yesterday in fact: >Past bot defenses are failing. Only subscription works at scale. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1691969296543711471 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1691969296543711471 The included chart is super interesting: https://i.imgur.com/WI2XMCj.jpg https://i.imgur.com/WI2XMCj.jpg
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  Requiring subscriptions for twitter? talk about not driving nails in the coffin and dropping a wrecking ball on it instead...
  - Vicinity9635 3y ago
    [dead]
lost_tourist 3y ago
That's fine I guess if you're rich, but it would kill the spirit of the open web.

mathgeek 3y ago

Captchas are often implemented on the payment forms themselves to prevent card testing.

junaru 3y ago

That approach will not work at all. Majority shops have captchas since crawlers are like mini denail of service attacks on their resources and they continue day and night. You will not pay a single webshop to browse its inventory let alone dozens you currently check before buying anything. Like it or not this is what the internet runs on nowadays so killing that would have much bigger fallout than anything annoying captchas could do.

sam0x17 3y ago

Or really, proof-of-work based CAPTCHAs. I think inevitably that's the world we're eventually stuck in

neilv 3y ago

A bunch of news sites try that, but every link to them on HN (an Internet tech community you'd think would have a lot of people especially sympathetic to merit-based monetization of digital content) quickly gets a comment with a piracy link.

fluoridation 3y ago
Maybe the service news sites provide isn't worth paying for for the vast majority of incidental visitors.
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
…because no one who isn't already a subscriber is going to pay to read one article.
- xp84 3y ago
  This is the main issue I have. I actually maintain paid subs to Washington Post, NYT, plus a local major newspaper. This should be more than enough to cover my share of news reporting costs. Yet if I’m linked to the Atlanta Journal or whatever, I’m expected to subscribe? Really? Every paywalled newspaper should support roaming. If museums can do reciprocal benefits, at WORST there should at least be reciprocal benefits among the roughly 1,000,000 Digital First Media newspapers, and within other large conglomerates. And ideally they should find a way to let a subscriber consume a reasonable amount of articles across a larger network. The higher the subscription tier paid, the more articles. Share a few cents for each article viewed.
sam0x17 3y ago
I think most in the tech space tacitly believe that if Alice has a cool string of 0s and 1s, but you have to pay $5 to go into her house to see it, and Bob happens to memorize the string of 0s and 1s and decides to display it publicly for all to see on a billboard, that this is an extremely based and good thing to do and prevents Alice from holding back human progress. People who don't believe this are probably biased because they are Alice. Don't be Alice.
- neilv 3y ago
  I was thinking our tacit belief is usually more "I want that, but I also want to keep my money. whynotboth.gif?" When challenged, rationalizations might come out. Circumstantial evidence of this is that we really don't see a lot of clear altruistic looking towards human progress... on other topics. If we mostly only talk about principled stands when it happens to be very convenient in a selfish way, the selfish way seems a more likely explanation.
  - stavros 3y ago
    For me, the issue is that I don't want to subscribe to the NYT because I never explicitly go to the NYT. If I'm linked to an article there, I'll read it, but subscribing on the off chance that I'm linked to an article there isn't a good reason. If there were a way to give two cents for each article I read, I'd do that, but there isn't.
    - mewpmewp2 3y ago
      Yeah, I also wish for such a way. Global metered system for services like those. I don't ever read one single thing, but I read an article or two from countless of services.
    - sam0x17 3y ago
      That they can't make enough money from contextual advertising with literally the entire internet linking to them all the time is a spectacular failure.
indymike 3y ago
No, they aren't piracy links. These are where the news site makes their content available to scrapers and then paywalls humans. This is where the news site is trying take advantage of search engines to get you to clink on their SERP, and then make you pay. In a lot of cases you can read this content by proxying off a non-dynamic ip range and changing your user agent.
- brickteacup 3y ago
  > These are where the news site makes their content available to scrapers and then paywalls humans. This is where the news site is trying take advantage of search engines to get you to clink on their SERP, and then make you pay. In a lot of cases you can read this content by proxying off a non-dynamic ip range and changing your user agent. okay... so they're piracy links is what you're saying?
  - indymike 3y ago
    No, a piracy link would not show content from the original publisher it would show the publisher's work on another website.
mishagale 3y ago
I've always felt one of the main reasons for this is that we never really got true microtransactions on the web. Pretty much all payment processors charge at least $0.20-30 per transaction. My theory is that if there was a way to frictionlessly pay, say, $0.02 to access a piece of content ad-free, most people would be pretty okay with it. They key part is making the transaction frictionless - no more than 1-click/1000ms.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  What's the challenge in already having this? There could be an aggregator service that has all the news sites joined with it and pays out on your visits to those news sites? Is it that it would be hard to get all news sites or content providers to accept this single one universal service?
  - atyppo 3y ago
    Apple tried with Apple News+ and hasn't exactly succeeded. If they can't succeed, I fail to see how anyone else could. Maybe a few media incumbents?
    - kyleyeats 3y ago
      They'll never do this because it dispels the illusion of independent media. It's the same reason cable news buys and shows ads: they want you to think the rest of the content isn't for sale. The truth is that the news is paid for by people who want to control the narrative, whether it's Logan Paul or Uncle Sam.
  - noAnswer 3y ago
    Old Flattr was something along those lines. You had to click though. (Like the old embedded Facebook likes. Are they old? Haven't seen them in a while, could be because of uBlock though.) I really liked it. A view Blogs, Podcasts and the KeePass-Homepage had it. Then they sold to Chines investors and pivoted to god knows what.
- neilv 3y ago
xormapmap 3y ago
news site != service worth paying for
bsder 3y ago
I get infuriated when a site wants to limit everything to its subscriber base but also wants to clog up my public search results. No. Get out of my search results. Pinterest, for example, should NEVER appear in my links or search results. If the New York Times wants to appear in my search results, then that article should be free otherwise GTFO. Google used to heavily penalize sites that pulled this trick, but then gave in because it interefered with their ad revenue.
viridian 3y ago
How is it piracy to use archive.ph? Seems strange that the bots are allowed to read content for free, while the humans can't, but also the humans shouldn't read the bot's reposting of the content for free. It seems to me that if they really don't want humans reading things for free, they shouldn't give it away to the (human owned, operated, and designed) bots.

Vicinity9635 3y ago

This is exactly what twitter did. From just yesterday in fact: >Past bot defenses are failing. Only subscription works at scale. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1691969296543711471 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1691969296543711471 The included chart is super interesting: https://i.imgur.com/WI2XMCj.jpg https://i.imgur.com/WI2XMCj.jpg

lost_tourist 3y ago
Requiring subscriptions for twitter? talk about not driving nails in the coffin and dropping a wrecking ball on it instead...
- Vicinity9635 3y ago
  [dead]

lost_tourist 3y ago

That's fine I guess if you're rich, but it would kill the spirit of the open web.