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Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

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

#151

Post by chipperyman573 »

jwilk wrote: post #132
chipperyman573 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

1. I never said that, please stop putting words in my mouth.

2. In my opinion, posting completely anonymized responses is not a violation of privacy

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

#152

Post by thinkMOAR »

photonios wrote: post #51
dalfonso wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saw https://blendle.com/ posted on HN a while back. Works exactly like that.

Blende is great! I have zero problems paying for good reading material but I don’t want to pay 5 $10 subscriptions. Blendle just lets me pay per article. They are based in the Netherlands, my home country and they have deals with all major newspapers here, so I am not missing out on anything. I highly recommend you give this a shot. Note: I am not associated with Blendle in any way. Just a happy user spreading the wo…

Not sure if you are Dutch, but if you follow dutch news then you'd known the soap bubble 'blendle' has burst already... Afaics they are at the brink of bankruptcy, and needed multiple financial injections to 'survive' and papers like NRC, FTM and recently the telegraaf have already pulled their publications.

Today the people behind blendle launched a new product, Medianieuwsbrief.nl To me another pointer that blendle is no longer viable and they are looking for new products.

They are what others describe causing brand erosion, as they collect articles from lots of sources, readers will forget/not know who actually wrote the article, which newspaper the good articles come from etc.

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

#153

Post by mathgenius »

mirimir wrote: post #55
Retra wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online, asking for $1 is asking for someone's credit card info.

Right, and Mirimir has no credit cards :( I used to argue for Bitcoin, but at $6K that's crazy. However, a EZPass-like token funded with cards, cryptocurrencies, money in the mail, etc. That would be cool.

This seems relevant: "Ripple, XRP and Micropayments", https://xrphodor.wordpress.com/2017/09/17/ripple-xrp-and-mic...

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

#155

Post by s73ver_ »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #36
nlawalker wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> don't think it's worth paying $1 Key word there is paying . A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the function…

> Has anyone made any real progress in solving this problem? The reason they haven't is that the law puts the burden of fraud on the payment processors. The dispute resolution overhead is the same for a $.10 transaction as a $100 transaction, but if that average cost is $.30 then you can't have $.10 transactions and the fee on $1 transactions is onerous. Using some cheaper less effective dispute resolution for micro-…

BTC processors don't have that problem because they do absolutely no fraud detection. That's a pretty big no-go for most consumers.

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

#156

Post by s73ver_ »

bearbearbear wrote: post #18
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…

> Anyone can afford a dollar At the moment I'm unemployed and I'm literally living day to day just waiting for some kind of break. It's easy to say "anyone can afford a dollar" while you sit in your $4,000 apartment sipping a late` that was just brought to you in less than five minutes by any of fifty different food delivery services available to you. But consider that there are plenty of people who have a basic comp…

Your situation certainly sucks, but I still have bills to pay. I still have to pay for hosting and content creation and all that.

If you can't afford to pay the price I ask, well, then you shouldn't get it. Like anything else in the world.

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

#157

Post by pault »

greyman wrote: post #77
Aloha wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online micropayments is still a woefully untouched market, it was supposed to be the wave of the future some years ago, but never went anywhere. I won't pay 10 dollars a month (each) to the NYT (LAT, WaPo, et al) for a subscription I might quite happily pay 5 to 20 cents for an article though. I can see a service that functions a lot like EZPass, you load your account with 5-10 bucks, you agree to pay by clicking a p…

I think it is untouched market, since there were many attempts and it didn't work. I call it a "micropayments dream"... publishers dream about it, but it is not going to happen. I personally would not pay 5 cent per article, since I don't want the burden in the back of my mind to evaluate, if that particular article was "worth" 5 cents. Also, if there is a commentary which goes against my opinions, I might want to re…

I would totally pay 5 cents just to see if an article is good. I think the price point will vary wildly from person to person. For me, 50 cents is probably where I start getting price sensitive. I would pay 50 cents for a long form article from a publisher known for high quality, and 5 cents for your average news article.

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

#159

Post by deadmetheny »

mango1900 wrote: post #44

This might get downvoted, but let me play devils advocate... the $1 is too cheap. You don’t value my time if you’re making me whip out my credit card and go through the painful process of checking out for transacting only a dollar from me. You’re also extremely downplaying the value of your product. if it was only worth a dollar, you would likely not be building a startup around it :) Most people don’t know how much…

>$1 is too cheap The product is a meme maker, and that $1 gets a watermark removed on said meme. That isn't even remotely worth $1 for a single instance. There's plenty of free software that can do the same thing, albeit less streamlined.

Definitely a clever way to solicit feedback, though.

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

#160

Post by SomeHacker44 »

shash7 wrote: post #37

Don't think of it as asking for 1 dollar. Think like this: Say if you walk up to me irl and ask for a dollar, I'll be like, sure here's your change and open up my wallet. Online, asking for one dollar is too much mental overhead. Its not like people don't want to pay, but you need to make it easy for them to pay you. Personally, I would stick with ad revenue instead of 1 dollar payments.

I like you. I have had an IRL theory/behavior pattern like that for some time. If you need something modest like a dollar so much that you find a return on your time to ask random people for a dollar (or $2.75 for a ride on the subway) then you need the dollar way more than i will miss it, so if I have one I often give it out. There but for the grace of god go I.
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