4 ms·

I wish it was just standard to pay for sites. Imagine every month you insert a $10 bill into your computer, and your browser automatically dispenses that value

I wish it was just standard to pay for sites. Imagine every month you insert a $10 bill into your computer, and your browser automatically dispenses that value proportionately to the sites you used most last month. Such a system would probably be crippled within minutes of being deployed by people forging data and blocking payment to people they don't like and all sorts of associated bullshit. So we have to put up with sites harvesting our personal information, sucking out $20 of our information each month. Besides the ad networks, almost everyone is worse off under our current system, but it's too much of a Prisoner's Dilemma to get us to a decent state. . . . Or maybe I'm missing something and someone could get this to work. Explicit "microtransactions" are too much work -- I don't want to decide whether to send this site a nickel to view its content.

mkr-hn 14y ago
Sounds like flattr. And Techdirt happens to have a button for it on every page.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Cool. Build it into the browser, and have websites say "if you are sending us flattr thingies we won't show you ads." That could even help bootstrap us there.
  - sometodd 14y ago
    The problem I had with Flattr is that not enough sites used it. I wound up putting the same money into Readability, which earmarked a chunk of change based on the domains of the sites I read that month. The catch is they had few sites sign up to claim that cash (among other reasons, authors had issues with the terms) and they caught a lot of flak for making money on the backs of others. I don't see a winning hand here. I would happily pay $X/month ($20? $30?) to strip ads from the whole web if money got to the creators. I don't want to pay $Y/month to each site I visit. My solution for most sites so far is to subscribe to the RSS feeds. At least the ads at the bottom of a feedburner'd feed aren't so bad, and I can sync the contents to my phone readily.
    - mkr-hn 14y ago
      Feedburner ads are being discontinued soon.
      - sometodd 14y ago
        Interesting. I wonder if my precious feeds will go away.
        mkr-hn 14y ago
        There's no telling what Google will do with it. It might not be a bad idea to track down all the direct feeds for your favorite sites.

mkr-hn 14y ago

Sounds like flattr. And Techdirt happens to have a button for it on every page.

danielweber 14y ago
Cool. Build it into the browser, and have websites say "if you are sending us flattr thingies we won't show you ads." That could even help bootstrap us there.
- sometodd 14y ago
  The problem I had with Flattr is that not enough sites used it. I wound up putting the same money into Readability, which earmarked a chunk of change based on the domains of the sites I read that month. The catch is they had few sites sign up to claim that cash (among other reasons, authors had issues with the terms) and they caught a lot of flak for making money on the backs of others. I don't see a winning hand here. I would happily pay $X/month ($20? $30?) to strip ads from the whole web if money got to the creators. I don't want to pay $Y/month to each site I visit. My solution for most sites so far is to subscribe to the RSS feeds. At least the ads at the bottom of a feedburner'd feed aren't so bad, and I can sync the contents to my phone readily.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    Feedburner ads are being discontinued soon.
    - sometodd 14y ago
      Interesting. I wonder if my precious feeds will go away.
      - mkr-hn 14y ago
        There's no telling what Google will do with it. It might not be a bad idea to track down all the direct feeds for your favorite sites.