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You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

mcsweeneys.net

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Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#81

Post by Dylan16807 »

bsder wrote: post #76
Dylan16807 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges. Which should be significantly less than a dollar for small charges. Processing fees get in the way of charging a dollar each month, but they're perfectly compatible with charging $5. And that $5 could be for multiple months.

A payment processor generally also charges something simply for usage of service. And, even if they don't (and I'm having trouble thinking of any that don't), you almost always need a full time programmer supporting your monetary transaction flow. Sure, supporting that overhead doesn't matter if you have a million transactions a month. If, however, you only have a hundred transactions a month, a salary of $120K per y…

You do not need a full time payments programmer to handle that many transactions running through a processor.

And as you say, there are services that handle the entire shop process, for a few more percentage points or a few hundred dollars per year, whichever you prefer.

If someone is charging ten dollars a month, it's not because of how much payment processing costs.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#82

Post by hatsix »

bsder wrote: post #76
Dylan16807 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As such, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will immediately outsource money handling, which means that your minimum price is now limited by how much your processor charges. Which should be significantly less than a dollar for small charges. Processing fees get in the way of charging a dollar each month, but they're perfectly compatible with charging $5. And that $5 could be for multiple months.

A payment processor generally also charges something simply for usage of service. And, even if they don't (and I'm having trouble thinking of any that don't), you almost always need a full time programmer supporting your monetary transaction flow. Sure, supporting that overhead doesn't matter if you have a million transactions a month. If, however, you only have a hundred transactions a month, a salary of $120K per y…

in my experience, payment processors charge $.30 - $.50 + 2.X% per transaction (for credit cards). No other monthly fees required, though they'll gladly sell you some.

You definitely don't need an engineer dedicated to monetary transaction flows. We use Braintree and haven't had an engineer touch it more than once a year in the past 4 years.

if you want to go engineering free, shopify has subscription plugins that can handle everything for $20-$80/month...

I feel like your comment is from 10+ years ago, back before competition led to payment processors becoming a commodity... has it been a while since you've looked?

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#83

Post by joe_the_user »

thyrsus wrote: post #79
joe_the_user wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, yes, I would have joined. I dreamed of such a thing but also had a theory why it could never be. Now, I'm not sure if the theory is true (though the shutdown might prove it true). But this is it: Newspapers and magazines want subscribers much more than they want revenues . Especially, while newspapers certainly seek revenue, another key function for a newspaper is to influence public opinion in the direction pre…

There was a trope five years ago that small town papers had become economically infeasible, e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/decline-of-newspapers-leaves-ma... My own town (60,000+) lost its paper more than ten years ago. Was that not the general experience?

Well, I wouldn't want to claim that every small town paper would keep going regardless of profits. Just that a fair number of considerations exist other than profit. Consider why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, for example.

That said, my small town's paper is going strong - it serves two cities of 12,000 and 3,000 people in a county of a little less than 100K.

https://www.theunion.com/

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#84

Post by waltbosz »

Animats wrote: post #73

Almost all US news sources now have either a paywall, an article limit, or a demand that ad blockers be turned off. A notable exception is Fox News.

Fox News does have a article limit. It didn't ask for money, but it definitely wanted me to create an account to view an article. I was able to bypass with incognito browser.

The strange thing was, the article I read was almost verbatim to the one I had just read on CNN.

Maybe they both just copied from the AP? I dunno how these things work.

It is fun to compare how different news source report the same story.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#85

Post by TZubiri »

itsoktocry wrote: post #4
ReadCarlBarks wrote: post #2

Most sites use simple cookies or a localStorage entry to limit how many articles you can read in a month. You can bypass this with a private tab or by disabling JavaScript with uBlock Origin: * https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/open-in-temp-container/ * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-... * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

I mean, yeah? This entirely misses the point of the article. In fact, it couldn't have been a worse shot. I don't know enough about the economics of this stuff, but I'm willing to pay for good online writing. I have a national paper subscription, two magazines and a handful of substacks I subscribe to. But this feel like a price point issue for me. Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Where are all…

Because the time cost of getting out your credit card, risk of unwanted charges, overhead of managing a subscription, a new account per password, far outweighs 2.5$

The difference between k+2.5 and k+10 is very small. But you quadruple the income to the business, and so the value of the product (more resources can be invested)

K can be labelled as transaction costs, price must be higher than tx costs.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#86

Post by TZubiri »

red_admiral wrote: post #16
itsoktocry wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, yeah? This entirely misses the point of the article. In fact, it couldn't have been a worse shot. I don't know enough about the economics of this stuff, but I'm willing to pay for good online writing. I have a national paper subscription, two magazines and a handful of substacks I subscribe to. But this feel like a price point issue for me. Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Where are all…

Blogger siderea has talked about this a lot in relation to patreon, and the challenges for any platform wanting to replace it. EDIT: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html and https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html Apparently it comes down to how card processing fees work, as long as there's a constant fixed cost per payment (whether or not there is also a percentage fee), "microtransactions" become unecono…

Is netflix a payment processor?

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#87

Post by [deleted] »

darby_nine wrote: post #77
kazinator wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of bug happens under the "everything is a string" software paradigm. Abstractions that have more than one string representation inadvertently end up treated as different.

They are semantically different—one is a relative domain name, the other is distinct. I'm not sure how this impacts localstorage or cookies but it might.

[deleted]

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#88

Post by joe_the_user »

itsoktocry wrote: post #4
ReadCarlBarks wrote: post #2

Most sites use simple cookies or a localStorage entry to limit how many articles you can read in a month. You can bypass this with a private tab or by disabling JavaScript with uBlock Origin: * https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/open-in-temp-container/ * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-... * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

I mean, yeah? This entirely misses the point of the article. In fact, it couldn't have been a worse shot. I don't know enough about the economics of this stuff, but I'm willing to pay for good online writing. I have a national paper subscription, two magazines and a handful of substacks I subscribe to. But this feel like a price point issue for me. Why is everything $9.99/month (close to $15/month CAD)? Where are all…

I thought the point of the article is that pathological economics cause "progressive" magazines to pointlessly harangue and leave ignorant their impoverished audience knowing full well this audience won't subscribe. IE, it was parody and social commentary.

This is your last free article. There will be no more, forever seemed to be a reference to Orwell's A boot stomping on a face, forever, etc.

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#89

Post by OptionOfT »

darby_nine wrote: post #77
kazinator wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of bug happens under the "everything is a string" software paradigm. Abstractions that have more than one string representation inadvertently end up treated as different.

They are semantically different—one is a relative domain name, the other is distinct. I'm not sure how this impacts localstorage or cookies but it might.

Localstorage and cookies are stored by domain. If the relative domain is kept relative then it will never be equal to the absolute domain.

Or

    let map = HashMap::from_iter([
        "www.domain.com.": Cookiebag::new(),
        "www.domain.com": Cookiebag::new(),
    ]);

Re: You've Read Your Last Free Article, Such Is the Nature of Mortality

#90

Post by takumif »

amelius wrote: post #21
akulbe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped watching and reading the news, in general. I have some friends who balked at the idea when I mentioned it. They'd say, "Oh, but how do you keep up on important news?" I don't. My life is better for letting it go. If something is genuinely important, and I really need to know - I always end up finding out somehow.

And yet, here you are, on HN.

I read tech news because I enjoy it.

I don't read articles about autocrats or mass shootings or whatever because I don't enjoy them, and me reading them doesn't make the world a better place.

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