5 ms·

Except they shouldn't be islands. Unify/standardise the payment mechanism, make it frictionless and only for content consumed. There's no technical reason you s

Except they shouldn't be islands. Unify/standardise the payment mechanism, make it frictionless and only for content consumed. There's no technical reason you shouldn't see an article on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it without having set up and pay for a subscription for the entire publication or jump through hoops. It should be a click at most. There will always be a place for subscriptions, but people want the hypertext model of just following a link from somewhere and there is absolutely no technical reason for that to be incompatible with paying for content. The idea that ads are the only way to fund the web needs to be challenged, and generative AI might just provide the push for that to finally happen. Or maybe there will be no such crisis and it'll just make the whole thing even more exploitative and garbage-filled.

munificent 3y ago
> There's no technical reason you shouldn't see an article on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it without having set up and pay for a subscription for the entire publication or jump through hoops. It should be a click at most. People have been saying this and building startups on this and having those startups crash and burn for decades. It's not a technical problem. It's a psychology problem. Paying after you've read an article doesn't provide the immediate post purchase gratification to make it an inpulse purchase [0]. The upside of paying for an article you've already read is more like a considered purchase [1]. But the amount of cognitive effort worth putting into deciding whether or not to pay for the article is often less than the value you got from the article itself. So it's very hard for people to force themselves to decide to commit to these kinds of microtransactions. See also [2]. It's just a sort of cognitive dead zone where our primate heuristics don't work well for the technically and economically optimal solution. It's sort of like why you can't go into a store and buy a stick of gum. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_purchase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_purchase [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
- omnicognate 3y ago
  I'm a bit confused here. I never said the click would be after reading the article. You would need to pay to read. Edit: Ah, I did say > see an article on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it That wasn't supposed to be a chronological sequence of events, but I see I accidentally implied that. Apologies for the confusion.
  - munificent 3y ago
    > You would need to pay to read. Now you're talking about a paywall. Many news organizations are going in that direction but with subscriptions. Doing it where you pay for each article is also psychologically hard. Since you are actually spending some money, the choice requires some mental effort. But since you haven't read the article, it's a choice whose value is very hard to estimate. Choices where: 1. The value is hard to predict. 2. The cost is low. 3. The perceived maximum value is also likely low. Are also sort of a worst case for the heuristics our brains have evolved to apply. It's difficult to get our brains to even put the mental effort into making the choice whether or not to buy the article.
    - omnicognate 3y ago
      A paywall is around an entire site. You have to pay for the whole thing or not at all, and you have you do it separately for every site. Subscriptions to the NYT, WSJ, Economist and the FT would cost a fortune, and I would read a minute fraction of the content. As a result I don't have subscriptions for any of them, and none of them get a penny from me. With a common system, paid with a single click per article, I and many others would happily rack up significant tallies reading individual articles across all these publications. It's a win/win. I don't buy the argument that people wouldn't be bothered. A popup with a balance, cost for the article and yes/no button would be far less mental effort than I already spend finding how to refuse consent on tracking popups, and about the same effort as required for those that simply click the button to grant consent. If that were too much to expect people to do nobody would be reading any articles in the EU at present.
pixl97 3y ago
>It should be a click at most. Welcome to new and interesting ways to defraud people over the internet for money school of thought. At least with Amazon it's a "one and done shop" of who I spent my money with when I bought something. Imagine tomorrow with your click to pay for random links on the internet you suddenly have 60,000 1 cent charges. They all appear to go different places and to get a refund you need to challenge each one.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  It sounds like the digital version of the CD scam. https://viewing.nyc/nyc-scams-101-dont-get-fooled-by-the-cd-hustlers-in-popular-nyc-tourist-areas/ https://viewing.nyc/nyc-scams-101-dont-get-fooled-by-the-cd-...
- omnicognate 3y ago
  I think you're imagining this would be open to random individual bloggers, but that wouldn't solve the quality / clickbait / AI generation problem. Sure, individuals could scam, but they could also produce clickbait, low effort crap. The context of this discussion is the high quality, paid, edited writing that is currently behind site-wide subscription paywalls at sites like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Economist, etc. It would be great to lower the barrier to entry for individual writers as far as possible, and maybe even include some sites that are run more like blogging platforms, but there would always have to be content standards and some degree of editorial control for reasons other than avoidance of scams, and with those things in place avoidance of scams is a non-issue because you're dealing with organisations that are trading on reputation. The New York Times isn't going to be defrauding its readers (and neither is Medium if it comes to that).

munificent 3y ago

> There's no technical reason you shouldn't see an article on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it without having set up and pay for a subscription for the entire publication or jump through hoops. It should be a click at most. People have been saying this and building startups on this and having those startups crash and burn for decades. It's not a technical problem. It's a psychology problem. Paying after you've read an article doesn't provide the immediate post purchase gratification to make it an inpulse purchase [0]. The upside of paying for an article you've already read is more like a considered purchase [1]. But the amount of cognitive effort worth putting into deciding whether or not to pay for the article is often less than the value you got from the article itself. So it's very hard for people to force themselves to decide to commit to these kinds of microtransactions. See also [2]. It's just a sort of cognitive dead zone where our primate heuristics don't work well for the technically and economically optimal solution. It's sort of like why you can't go into a store and buy a stick of gum. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_purchase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_purchase [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

omnicognate 3y ago
I'm a bit confused here. I never said the click would be after reading the article. You would need to pay to read. Edit: Ah, I did say > see an article on hn or wherever, follow the link and read it and pay for it That wasn't supposed to be a chronological sequence of events, but I see I accidentally implied that. Apologies for the confusion.
- munificent 3y ago
  > You would need to pay to read. Now you're talking about a paywall. Many news organizations are going in that direction but with subscriptions. Doing it where you pay for each article is also psychologically hard. Since you are actually spending some money, the choice requires some mental effort. But since you haven't read the article, it's a choice whose value is very hard to estimate. Choices where: 1. The value is hard to predict. 2. The cost is low. 3. The perceived maximum value is also likely low. Are also sort of a worst case for the heuristics our brains have evolved to apply. It's difficult to get our brains to even put the mental effort into making the choice whether or not to buy the article.
  - omnicognate 3y ago
    A paywall is around an entire site. You have to pay for the whole thing or not at all, and you have you do it separately for every site. Subscriptions to the NYT, WSJ, Economist and the FT would cost a fortune, and I would read a minute fraction of the content. As a result I don't have subscriptions for any of them, and none of them get a penny from me. With a common system, paid with a single click per article, I and many others would happily rack up significant tallies reading individual articles across all these publications. It's a win/win. I don't buy the argument that people wouldn't be bothered. A popup with a balance, cost for the article and yes/no button would be far less mental effort than I already spend finding how to refuse consent on tracking popups, and about the same effort as required for those that simply click the button to grant consent. If that were too much to expect people to do nobody would be reading any articles in the EU at present.

pixl97 3y ago

>It should be a click at most. Welcome to new and interesting ways to defraud people over the internet for money school of thought. At least with Amazon it's a "one and done shop" of who I spent my money with when I bought something. Imagine tomorrow with your click to pay for random links on the internet you suddenly have 60,000 1 cent charges. They all appear to go different places and to get a refund you need to challenge each one.

bobthepanda 3y ago
It sounds like the digital version of the CD scam. https://viewing.nyc/nyc-scams-101-dont-get-fooled-by-the-cd-hustlers-in-popular-nyc-tourist-areas/ https://viewing.nyc/nyc-scams-101-dont-get-fooled-by-the-cd-...
omnicognate 3y ago
I think you're imagining this would be open to random individual bloggers, but that wouldn't solve the quality / clickbait / AI generation problem. Sure, individuals could scam, but they could also produce clickbait, low effort crap. The context of this discussion is the high quality, paid, edited writing that is currently behind site-wide subscription paywalls at sites like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Economist, etc. It would be great to lower the barrier to entry for individual writers as far as possible, and maybe even include some sites that are run more like blogging platforms, but there would always have to be content standards and some degree of editorial control for reasons other than avoidance of scams, and with those things in place avoidance of scams is a non-issue because you're dealing with organisations that are trading on reputation. The New York Times isn't going to be defrauding its readers (and neither is Medium if it comes to that).