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Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

kapwing.com

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Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#131

Post by vlehto »

pjc50 wrote: post #127
vlehto wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only real problem there is the "how do you know who you're paying?" part. Everything else would be solved or effectively ignored with the following: I send you 10$ somehow, you send me email with ten hashes. Each hash worth a dollar. I pay to alex by cut and paste on a webpage (here's the catch, maybe It's a scam!) Alex has registered as content producer to your service. Alex immediately sends the hash wi…

> If it was that easy, it would have been done. Part 2: business model problems! - getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of card TX for pure digital goods - nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30% - winner-take-all effects are strong - Play store et al already exist, why not use that? - Free substitute goods are just a c…

"Play store et al already exist, why not use that?"

Play store does not have the content I want. And it seems overly difficult to post the content I want to make. And if I want to pay for engagement with the content, that's not an option.

Patreon is lot closer to what suits my needs. But even that is too inflexible on how to use payments and to what you should pay. So far everybody seems to be making their micro-transaction payment models "flexible" by making the amount paid flexible. But that's exactly the one thing I want to be fixed. I'd like to host my entirely own webpage and patreon just to handle the money from exactly the kind of transaction I want.

"Pirate" is not the thing I would concentrate on. People want to see the stuff before they pay for it. But if I could somehow engage with Slavoj Zizek about the superb youtube video he made, I'd actually pay for it. Or if I could promote that video to people in my home city I'd pay for that also. If some of that money went to Zizek I'd be even more willing to pay, because that would support him to continue. People underestimate the need for other people to be social about the content they consume.

People on reddit are using the reddit gold as super upvote. But that only works in Reddit.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#132

Post by jwilk »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #43
jancsika wrote: post #33

Did you get the permission of the users whose responses you posted?

Legally they're fine because the responses were anonymous and none of the users would reasonably believe that their responses would remain completly private. Ethically (at least in my opinion) is the same, as long as they're kept anonymous and there's nothing personal or private in the responses they can use them for any reason. Especially because they were given in lieu of payment.

Are you saying that expecting any privacy is unreasonable these days?

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#133

Post by jwilk »

Angostura wrote: post #81
stevefan1999 wrote: post #78

That means you are publicly shaming your "pirating" visitors? That's morally unacceptable!

Except, I see no mention that anything is made public.

Some of the "apologies" were published in this very article.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#134

Post by NoGravitas »

superkuh wrote: post #83
kilolima wrote: post #3

Who cares... site does not load with javascript disabled.

I agree. I'll JS whitelist the domain itself in good faith but when it's more than 4 CDN and framework domains deep, all loading each other in serially, I'm just going to close the tab. It's even worse when all they're trying to do is show simple text.

Yeah. I run uBlock Origin in "medium mode", defaulting to blocking third-party resources, but I'm pretty used to enabling them to get sites working. Enabling the most likely domains on this site just didn't do anything, so I'm just not going to bother doing anything more.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#135

Post by tyingq »

cpncrunch wrote: post #5

Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme. IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove the branded gifs...that's how you will gr…

It's the friction. Facebook gets people to pay for stupid games, over and over again, largely because once you pay the first the time, the friction is gone.

The WebPayments API might solve this: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/payments/

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#136

Post by gruez »

garblegarble wrote: post #110
jchw wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd guess it'd eat $0.50 of a $1.00 transaction, maybe a bit less if you're lucky. That's bad, but it's workable if you have low operating costs - it certainly isn't a loss. Most people seem to think $5.00 is when credit transactions start making more sense. Amusingly, Amazon charges me $0.14 every single month for my usage of Amazon S3. I wonder if they've got some sort of sick deal where they don't pay per-tx.

>Amusingly, Amazon charges me $0.14 every single month for my usage of Amazon S3. I wonder if they've got some sort of sick deal where they don't pay per-tx. Off-topic but I had this (except I have a non-US card, so the foreign transaction fee was larger than the S3 bill). I contacted Amazon and asked if I could prepay $50 and they added a small balance to my account for free that'll cover my tiny S3 usage for the ne…

Aren't foreign exchange fees calculated by %?

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#137

Post by Veen »

s17n wrote: post #52
KyeRussell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, cool, so like most of the modern Internet then? Accepting JavaScript's prevalence—even given its many many many many many flaws—is something us pragmatists that actually decide to use the Internet to do things decided to do long long ago.

Uh huh tell me more about these "things" that you "do". If there's a web app that I want to use, I whitelist it for js. For general browsing, I keep it off. Ironically, this works fine for the same reason that paywalls will never succeed - there is so much content out there that any individual piece of it has essentially no value.

> there is so much content out there that any individual piece of it has essentially no value

Zero multiplied by anything is zero, so if all individual pieces of content are worthless, so is content as a whole.

But of course that's not true because content isn't fungible. There's an infinity of content, but, unless you think a cat meme listicle is equivalent to War and Peace, it doesn't matter. The best content will always be worth paying for to people who care about what they put into their brain.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#138

Post by Veen »

kilolima wrote: post #3

Who cares... site does not load with javascript disabled.

It's fine for any website to choose who it wants to serve. I don't imagine most JavaScript-dependent services are sad about losing a fraction of a percent of their potential users. It's not for them in the first place.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#140

Post by sph »

I've had this idea, and this is a good time as any to put it in the wild, since I don't have time to build it:

My problem with paywalls/sponsoring/micropayments is that I'm completely fine to pay an entity, say $5 a month. What I am not OK with is supporting all the people I'd like to support, which at $5 a month might total a hundred bucks or more.

I have the budget for it, but $5 increments can really get expensive after a while. And if you don't want to support an entity anymore, you'd have to remove their subscription on Paypal or Patreon or on their website or on whatever platform they've decided to use.

My "disruptive" idea is composed of two pieces:

1) A budget. I have $50/month I want to give away. No more than that because X reasons. I want this money to be equally divided. Tomorrow I have a better job, so I can budget $200/month, and everybody wins.

2) A browser extension. I click it when I'm visiting a website part of the network and lo, I've subscribed to the entity and at the end of the month part of my budget goes to them. Whenever I visit their site/content the extension reminds me I'm a subscriber, so I get the warm fuzzy feeling I'm supporting them. When I want to unsubscribe I toggle my subscription with a click.

EDIT: also, the entity DOES NOT know if a visitor on their website is a subscriber or not. I want to keep the Internet free for everybody, and not split it between paying users and leechers.

That's it.

Seems to me it's _relatively_ easy to build, and it's miles ahead of all the current micropayment platforms, that are clunky as hell.

Flattr Plus seems to have gone towards the same direction, with a big difference: whenever you visit an entity registered with Flattr Plus they'll automatically send some of your money to them to support them. I DO NOT WANT that. I might visit a site, decide it's awful, and don't want to support them. I need to be able to choose.

I'd really like to discuss more on this idea, it might be totally bunk but I still think this is potentially disruptive.

My email is in my profile.

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