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Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

robinwinslow.uk

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Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#91

Post by BaseballPhysics »

> Paywalls offend me. The Internet exists to share knowledge with everyone across the world. You shouldn’t need a subscription, all you should need is an internet connection to access the world’s knowledge.

Cool. So remind me how anyone can survive creating high quality content online?

Ads? Nope. Privacy nightmare.

Subscriptions? Nope. "Offensive".

What next? Tips? Please. We already know most people won't pay for content if they don't have to.

Micropayments? Just tips dressed up as technology.

What's left? Patronage of the rich?

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#92

Post by towaway15463 »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #86
eganist wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 25 cents, I don't think I'd care. If I get burned on five articles at 25 cents each, I'll probably stop reading their stuff though. And that might actually provide a usable metric to their editors.

How many people do you think will go through the trouble of signing up for an account and giving x publisher their credit card for a 25 cent purchase though?

The general idea with micro transactions is that you have some small number of service providers that you use to pay the individual retailers with. You know like how credit cards work.

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#93

Post by up6w6 »

paxys wrote: post #69
sefrost wrote: post #32

In my opinion if we keep popularizing technologies like this we will lose them. Look at the number of websites that are now blocking ad blockers because we all installed ad blockers on our parents machines and popularized the technology. We should keep some technology under the radar and just for hackers.

No useful technology can be kept under the radar. In fact I think ad blocking is a good example of something that got so widespread that it became impossible to block. The "disable your adblocker to read this site" banners are quickly disappearing from the internet now that a critical mass of users has adopted them and companies are realizing they can't give up all that traffic.

Why won't companies give up that traffic if it's not profitable? We are still talking about articles, right?

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#94

Post by MontyCarloHall »

towaway15463 wrote: post #92
lp0_on_fire wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people do you think will go through the trouble of signing up for an account and giving x publisher their credit card for a 25 cent purchase though?

The general idea with micro transactions is that you have some small number of service providers that you use to pay the individual retailers with. You know like how credit cards work.

And that’s the real reason micropayments haven’t caught on—there is no universal one-click payment system for the web. Every payment processor requires at least one redirection away from the content at hand. A micropayment transaction needs to be as easy as clicking “Continue {Reading,Watching,Listening}” and the content resumes without skipping a beat.

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#95

Post by arcastroe »

eganist wrote: post #76
paxys wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of the number of links you click on in a regular day. The front page of HN itself contains 30 articles. Browsing a few pages of it at 25c each is already $40+ in costs. Is that something you are willing to spend?

No. (Also, I'm confused at how you got to the $40+ figure with each article costing $0.25, but alas.) And consequently, I'd just browse less. If anything, I might spend more time outside as a result.

"Browsing a few pages". After enough pages, you could end up at any monetary amount.

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#96

Post by x-complexity »

slg wrote: post #37
towaway15463 wrote: post #30

I’m still waiting for micro transactions. I won’t pay $5 a month for a newspaper I might read one article from but I would gladly pay 25 cents for that one good article. How are there still minimum amounts and fees on transactions when everything is supposedly digitized and networked?

I think it is an inditement of the crypto space that this obvious use case never materialized.

The micropayments use case was highlighted in the Brave Browser's whitepaper:

https://basicattentiontoken.org/static-assets/documents/Basi...

I will admit that this venture has user-related problems, in that similar to ads on a website, it relies on an honest userbase that's willing to give/pay BAT to the creator of the website's content.

The infrastructure for such a system is still not fully developed, but it is technically possible to do so right now by minting an article-exclusive NFT in response to a user's micropayment, and then using SIWE (sign-in with Ethereum) to link a session with said address that has paid for the article. In order to facilitate cheap transactions, it'll have to be performed on a rollup like Arbitrum or Optimism, or on a sidechain like Polygon PoS.

It does still suffer from the archive.is problem where a cached version of the unlocked article can be shown to everyone else, but such an endeavor will have to be funded out of pocket and is orders of magnitude more expensive than current archive.is bypasses.

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#97

Post by x-complexity »

hactually wrote: post #35
towaway15463 wrote: post #30

I’m still waiting for micro transactions. I won’t pay $5 a month for a newspaper I might read one article from but I would gladly pay 25 cents for that one good article. How are there still minimum amounts and fees on transactions when everything is supposedly digitized and networked?

This is probably a use-case for crypto currency I could actually support... except the gas fees make it worse than the MC/Visa rails

The gas fees can be mitigated by moving the process over to a rollup scaling solution like Arbitrum or Optimism, or to a sidechain like Polygon PoS: I mentioned it as a necessity for cheap transactions with ETH-level security in another child comment to GP.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31646936#31648768

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#98

Post by x-complexity »

mertd wrote: post #56
syntheticcdo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transaction fees are a market-based mechanism to allocate a scarce resource (limited amount of block space on a given block chain). Moving from POW to POS will not reduce transaction fees in any appreciable amount, instead the fees previously paid to miners will instead be paid to stakeholders.

Doesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply?

> Doesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply?

In the most technically-correct sense: No, switching out PoW with PoS does not guarantee faster block times. There can exist a PoS chain with 10 minute block times, just like there can exist PoW chains with I'm guessing that this opinion came from the early days of Ethereum, where the roadmap for the transition to PoS was still unclear. Now, as ETH's switching system is being tested on its testnets & is more or less finalized, it's been made clear that the block times will only decrease from 14 seconds to 12 seconds - A ~14% decrease, which is significant, but not by much.

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...

> Whereas under proof-of-work, the timing of blocks is determined by the mining difficulty, in proof-of-stake, the tempo is fixed. Time in proof-of-stake Ethereum is divided into slots (12 seconds) and epochs (32 slots).

The truth of the matter is that an increase in block speed will compromise on either decentralization or security/finality: Increasing ETH's TPS will compromise on one of the two. As such, there's been a shift in focus from relying on ETH for everything, & instead towards allowing ETH to focus on security & decentralization, while the L2 solutions (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, etc.) focus on scaling the TPS, utilizing/renting ETH's security for their own benefit. This way, ETH's overall ecosystem gets to scale up, while still maintaining its security & decentralization.

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#99

Post by dymk »

javajosh wrote: post #55
Barrin92 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because that kind of transaction system isn't in high demand. People already suffer from choice-fatigue and if anything people are likely looking for bundles that give them access to more papers for a flat fee rather than the opposite. It's why Spotify and Apple Music exist rather than people paying a fraction of a cent for each song.

Isn't that the 12ft pivot? They can offer people a $10/mo subscription and then give them 100 articles or something spread across all the major publications, and forward that revenue "on demand". It's a classic pirate start: 12ft starts out life by hand subscribing to all the pubs, violating ToS by proxying 3rd party traffic through those subscriptions, demonstrating demand, and then they reach out to publications (c…

Why would any of the existing outlets play nice with a service that got their start pirating the outlets’ content?

Re: Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer

#100

Post by dymk »

paxys wrote: post #74
eganist wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 25 cents, I don't think I'd care. If I get burned on five articles at 25 cents each, I'll probably stop reading their stuff though. And that might actually provide a usable metric to their editors.

Think of the number of links you click on in a regular day. The front page of HN itself contains 30 articles. Browsing a few pages of it at 25c each is already $40+ in costs. Is that something you are willing to spend?

The number of links that involve a paywall on the front page of HN is a handful at the most. Not $40 over a few pages.
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