4 ms·

I don't and I won't. I am old, nearly 70 years old. I have nothing better to do than read online newspapers every morning, about 10 of them. Every newspaper

by reify 3y ago

I don't and I won't. I am old, nearly 70 years old. I have nothing better to do than read online newspapers every morning, about 10 of them. Every newspaper has exactly the same articles. There is nothing new or exciting to read. I would not pay a farthing, halfpenny, tuppence nor thruppenny bit, to click through this tripe. Conversations with real humans is much more pleasing and fulfilling. An employer once told me he was doing me a favour for employing me, even though he was only paying me £5 an hour and charging customers £70 per hour. I was driving a beaten up old banger, he was driving a brand new Jaguar. Who was doing who a favour?

hilbert42 3y ago
Anyway, a farthing would be far too much (I'm becoming antiquated too so I at least know what a farthing is, I actually have several in a junk box). Who was doing who a favour? That's a long debate so I'll avoid it. I mostly agree about the garbage quality and the sameness of content, but there's one advantage with content being repeated across news outlets. Many news sources now have paywalls in place. When one hits a paywall all one has to do is to search its headlines and one inevitability finds the same or similar article on another site that's sans paywall (I do this regularly)! It seems news outlets don't understand how useless paywalls actually are and how they make readers like me all the more determined to bypass them. Still, there's the occasional gem amongst the swathes of junk and detritus that one wants to read, the trouble is actually finding it. Here, HN often comes to the rescue as a news aggregator and quality filter. I would have no problem with micro payments if I knew the content wasn't junk before I landed on the site. Making a micro payment for junk would certainly irk, so we two problems with such a system. First, not knowing the quality of the site before having the micro payment deducted is a sort of a Catch-22 situation, and second there's no efficient way of making micro payments. I've many ideas about solving the first but the second—the payment method—seems almost intractable without a major rethink. Credit cards are impractical for such small payments and there's a major privacy issue with making payments from a payment system that clearly identifies the cardholder. I've long advocated something along the lines of a scratchy lottery ticket. One would make an anonymous purchase for a 'scratchy' at one's newsagent or such for say $10 or $20 and then enter the number into one's browser (like, say, one does with a prepaid mobile account), this way micro payments could be deduced automatically from the scratchy evey time one visited a suitable website. Such a scheme would hardly inconvenience the viewer at all. One's browser could keep tabs of the balance, sites visited etc. However the bureaucratic obstacles are obvious, opposition from traditional credit providers (credit card companies, etc.), and of course snooping governments who want to track the flow of money. No doubt, money-laundering would be raised as an issue even though payments would be trivially small. It seems to be that until some simple anonymous system for making small payments is implemented the notion of micro payments is dead in the water.
chaosmonger7 3y ago
[flagged]

by reify 3y ago

hilbert42 3y ago

Anyway, a farthing would be far too much (I'm becoming antiquated too so I at least know what a farthing is, I actually have several in a junk box). Who was doing who a favour? That's a long debate so I'll avoid it. I mostly agree about the garbage quality and the sameness of content, but there's one advantage with content being repeated across news outlets. Many news sources now have paywalls in place. When one hits a paywall all one has to do is to search its headlines and one inevitability finds the same or similar article on another site that's sans paywall (I do this regularly)! It seems news outlets don't understand how useless paywalls actually are and how they make readers like me all the more determined to bypass them. Still, there's the occasional gem amongst the swathes of junk and detritus that one wants to read, the trouble is actually finding it. Here, HN often comes to the rescue as a news aggregator and quality filter. I would have no problem with micro payments if I knew the content wasn't junk before I landed on the site. Making a micro payment for junk would certainly irk, so we two problems with such a system. First, not knowing the quality of the site before having the micro payment deducted is a sort of a Catch-22 situation, and second there's no efficient way of making micro payments. I've many ideas about solving the first but the second—the payment method—seems almost intractable without a major rethink. Credit cards are impractical for such small payments and there's a major privacy issue with making payments from a payment system that clearly identifies the cardholder. I've long advocated something along the lines of a scratchy lottery ticket. One would make an anonymous purchase for a 'scratchy' at one's newsagent or such for say $10 or $20 and then enter the number into one's browser (like, say, one does with a prepaid mobile account), this way micro payments could be deduced automatically from the scratchy evey time one visited a suitable website. Such a scheme would hardly inconvenience the viewer at all. One's browser could keep tabs of the balance, sites visited etc. However the bureaucratic obstacles are obvious, opposition from traditional credit providers (credit card companies, etc.), and of course snooping governments who want to track the flow of money. No doubt, money-laundering would be raised as an issue even though payments would be trivially small. It seems to be that until some simple anonymous system for making small payments is implemented the notion of micro payments is dead in the water.

chaosmonger7 3y ago

[flagged]