3 ms·

I've been thinking about an idea that would solve this for bloggers and other small-time publishers: Readers subscribe to a federation of publishers for, say, 1

I've been thinking about an idea that would solve this for bloggers and other small-time publishers: Readers subscribe to a federation of publishers for, say, 10 or 20 dollars a month. They now get to consume as much as they want on those sites. After they read an article, they can click either a "worth it", "meh" or "garbage" button. At the end of the month, all subscription fees are distributed to each publisher proportional to their "worth it" votes. This will drive up quality. If "garbage" votes are penalized, it will discourage bad content as well as link-baiting, dishonest titles or any other gaming of traffic.

icebraining 11y ago
Yeah, except I want to read, say, 6 blogs, and they'll be on four different federations, so I'd have to pay $40-80/month, which I definitively won't. We're seeing the same problems with all the streaming platforms.
- eevilspock 11y ago
  We can all handle 3 or 4 subscriptions. The dollar amount I came up with was an example. A small federation might charge $1. The invisible hand of the free market decides. The federation would fail if it charged more than the amount of good content it produced. An author could also syndicate her/his content to more than one federation. If we're not willing to pay for good content, i.e. the writer's livelihood, then we're all fucked. If you read my other comment herein[1], you'd know we're all paying anyway, even though we are fooled into thinking it is free. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761
  - icebraining 11y ago
    I'm willing to pay for good content. But I also live in a place where a good software developer (net) salary is €14k/year, and that's still much higher than the average national salary, so I'm wary of these subscription services. They usually end up with a single price (since geo restrictions work poorly on the web), which the invisible hand pushes up to accommodate the disposable income of wealthier places. As bad as advertisement is, it still helped subsidize my reading when I couldn't afford to pay for it, while the subscription model would create a tiered Internet for the more and less well-off.
    - eevilspock 11y ago
      So would you be in favor of the advertising business model for books? All books would be free, but there would be ads on the cover and interspersed throughout the book, sometimes on separate pages, sometimes in boxes between paragraphs. There would be product placements, as well as “native ads” which appear to be integral chapters of the book. What if authors who refused ads just couldn’t compete against the deluge of free books? What if books had a way of tracking who read them, and this previously private information was sold on the information markets?
      - icebraining 11y ago
        No, I wouldn't. But I wouldn't like if most authors published in "book subscription services" either - ads might actually be less bad. Thankfully, they don't.
kuyfiuyg 11y ago
You're thinking of flattr, I think
- eevilspock 11y ago
  Actually, it's different. See this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960
betenoire 11y ago
he with the biggest voting ring wins
- eevilspock 11y ago
  Ehh… no. The subscribers in the ring would only be gaming its own payments, no one else's. They'd be paying themselves, less the federation's operating fees.
mcphage 11y ago
> Readers subscribe to a federation of publishers for, say, 10 or 20 dollars a month. They now get to consume as much as they want on those sites. Federation isn't a very catchy name. Maybe you can think of it as a bunch of strings, all wound together. Like a cord, or... or like a Cable! Yeah, call it "Cable".
- Roodgorf 11y ago
  Exactly. Except that this supposed ratings system could potentially have a bigger impact on quality than the cable model, though I'm not entirely convinced. I assume most channels make their income almost entirely off of advertisers, and channels which are not watched as frequently are presumably not paid as much. In the proposed system I would assume the idea is to decrease/remove advertising and content providers would be given a share of the revenue based on user ratings? Seems interesting, but probably not terribly practical. It seems this could devolve into clickbait hell pretty quickly.
- eevilspock 11y ago
  @Roodgorf: > It seems this could devolve into clickbait hell pretty quickly. Avoiding clickbait and rewarding actual quality is the point of the simple rating system. The garbage rating actually penalizes clickbait further. Clickbait happens today because of the advertising model, where the click not the content generates revenue.
  - Roodgorf 11y ago
    Sure, but the level of responsibility required by the user as a curator doesn't seem like it would hold past a critical mass. The insane amount of reposts that Buzzfeed-esque garbage gets just isn't all that encouraging to me. Short of the decidedly undemocratic method of only counting a certain group of users' ratings, I'm just not confident it would change things at scale.
  - mcphage 11y ago
    > The garbage rating actually penalizes clickbait further. But the reason that clickbait works, is that people like clickbait. So I'm not sure you'd get much success with getting people to rate them "garbage" when they like them. Sure, maybe not en masse, but on an article-by-article level, people do like clickbait.

icebraining 11y ago

Yeah, except I want to read, say, 6 blogs, and they'll be on four different federations, so I'd have to pay $40-80/month, which I definitively won't. We're seeing the same problems with all the streaming platforms.

eevilspock 11y ago
We can all handle 3 or 4 subscriptions. The dollar amount I came up with was an example. A small federation might charge $1. The invisible hand of the free market decides. The federation would fail if it charged more than the amount of good content it produced. An author could also syndicate her/his content to more than one federation. If we're not willing to pay for good content, i.e. the writer's livelihood, then we're all fucked. If you read my other comment herein[1], you'd know we're all paying anyway, even though we are fooled into thinking it is free. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761
- icebraining 11y ago
  I'm willing to pay for good content. But I also live in a place where a good software developer (net) salary is €14k/year, and that's still much higher than the average national salary, so I'm wary of these subscription services. They usually end up with a single price (since geo restrictions work poorly on the web), which the invisible hand pushes up to accommodate the disposable income of wealthier places. As bad as advertisement is, it still helped subsidize my reading when I couldn't afford to pay for it, while the subscription model would create a tiered Internet for the more and less well-off.
  - eevilspock 11y ago
    So would you be in favor of the advertising business model for books? All books would be free, but there would be ads on the cover and interspersed throughout the book, sometimes on separate pages, sometimes in boxes between paragraphs. There would be product placements, as well as “native ads” which appear to be integral chapters of the book. What if authors who refused ads just couldn’t compete against the deluge of free books? What if books had a way of tracking who read them, and this previously private information was sold on the information markets?
    - icebraining 11y ago
      No, I wouldn't. But I wouldn't like if most authors published in "book subscription services" either - ads might actually be less bad. Thankfully, they don't.

kuyfiuyg 11y ago

You're thinking of flattr, I think

eevilspock 11y ago
Actually, it's different. See this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008960

betenoire 11y ago

he with the biggest voting ring wins

eevilspock 11y ago
Ehh… no. The subscribers in the ring would only be gaming its own payments, no one else's. They'd be paying themselves, less the federation's operating fees.

mcphage 11y ago

> Readers subscribe to a federation of publishers for, say, 10 or 20 dollars a month. They now get to consume as much as they want on those sites. Federation isn't a very catchy name. Maybe you can think of it as a bunch of strings, all wound together. Like a cord, or... or like a Cable! Yeah, call it "Cable".

Roodgorf 11y ago
Exactly. Except that this supposed ratings system could potentially have a bigger impact on quality than the cable model, though I'm not entirely convinced. I assume most channels make their income almost entirely off of advertisers, and channels which are not watched as frequently are presumably not paid as much. In the proposed system I would assume the idea is to decrease/remove advertising and content providers would be given a share of the revenue based on user ratings? Seems interesting, but probably not terribly practical. It seems this could devolve into clickbait hell pretty quickly.
eevilspock 11y ago
@Roodgorf: > It seems this could devolve into clickbait hell pretty quickly. Avoiding clickbait and rewarding actual quality is the point of the simple rating system. The garbage rating actually penalizes clickbait further. Clickbait happens today because of the advertising model, where the click not the content generates revenue.
- Roodgorf 11y ago
  Sure, but the level of responsibility required by the user as a curator doesn't seem like it would hold past a critical mass. The insane amount of reposts that Buzzfeed-esque garbage gets just isn't all that encouraging to me. Short of the decidedly undemocratic method of only counting a certain group of users' ratings, I'm just not confident it would change things at scale.
- mcphage 11y ago
  > The garbage rating actually penalizes clickbait further. But the reason that clickbait works, is that people like clickbait. So I'm not sure you'd get much success with getting people to rate them "garbage" when they like them. Sure, maybe not en masse, but on an article-by-article level, people do like clickbait.