221–230 of 273 posts
This doesn't seem to solve the issue that website operators face... which is providing a free public experience to humans while the price of hosting is driven up by increased bot traffic. The issue isn't charging for API access with request caps, that's not hard to do. It's preserving the free experience for our users while our traffic is increasingly made up of bots. The problem is that AI has made it increasingly d…
I feel like this kind of tech can solve the news problem. So many paywalls. Imagine they don’t exist and your impression costs a few cents. I’d prefer this to massive lawyer grade cookie popup wizards and monthly memberships. My MiL is a writer at a large newspaper in Kentucky and it’s wild how much she is pressured to share her stories and gain sign ups from her referral links. Pay per view solves this.
With no popup but automatic non-user-approved payment, I'm going to set up 5 million pages, filled with AI generated content, and just wait for the money to roll in.
No matter how you slice it, user approval is required per microtransaction. For an AI bot it's no easier - they will exhaust their funds on my SEO pages in due course anyway.
Microtransactions made sense in the age where content production was gated by human effort and time. Now that I can effectively churn out millions of pages in a week, microtransactions make no sense.
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"host a ton of crap content across a wide swath of topics.." But how will anybody know it's there?
Host two crap tons of content across a wide swath of topics... one which points to the other? I'm basically of the impression that this is already happening based on all the LLM generated slop search results I get - presumably for ad revenue (or in the case of Musk to push political views).
This doesn't seem to solve the issue that website operators face... which is providing a free public experience to humans while the price of hosting is driven up by increased bot traffic. The issue isn't charging for API access with request caps, that's not hard to do. It's preserving the free experience for our users while our traffic is increasingly made up of bots. The problem is that AI has made it increasingly d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Options: 1. Any cost of browsing an e-commerce site is taken off the next purchase, whenever it happens. 2. Give each user 100 free page viewed per day or some such before you charge. 3. You don’t actually have to charge users for browsing the site if you provide a free or cheap API allowing bots to search and index your entire catalog. Agents and bots would certainly rather parse a kilobyte of JSON than 20 megabytes…
1. Bots don't make purchases (and you can't identify them anyway), so there's nothing to take the costs off of. 2. Again, no way to identify users (bots use hordes of residential proxies with only a few requests per IP). 3. Agents and bots care more about a universal solution that works for all the sites than an efficient solution. You could standardize on a header for this, but then some sites would start hiding som…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Options: 1. Any cost of browsing an e-commerce site is taken off the next purchase, whenever it happens. 2. Give each user 100 free page viewed per day or some such before you charge. 3. You don’t actually have to charge users for browsing the site if you provide a free or cheap API allowing bots to search and index your entire catalog. Agents and bots would certainly rather parse a kilobyte of JSON than 20 megabytes…
1. Bots don't make purchases (and you can't identify them anyway), so there's nothing to take the costs off of. 2. Again, no way to identify users (bots use hordes of residential proxies with only a few requests per IP). 3. Agents and bots care more about a universal solution that works for all the sites than an efficient solution. You could standardize on a header for this, but then some sites would start hiding som…
so is Cloudflare the cancer now?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Options: 1. Any cost of browsing an e-commerce site is taken off the next purchase, whenever it happens. 2. Give each user 100 free page viewed per day or some such before you charge. 3. You don’t actually have to charge users for browsing the site if you provide a free or cheap API allowing bots to search and index your entire catalog. Agents and bots would certainly rather parse a kilobyte of JSON than 20 megabytes…
1. Bots don't make purchases (and you can't identify them anyway), so there's nothing to take the costs off of. 2. Again, no way to identify users (bots use hordes of residential proxies with only a few requests per IP). 3. Agents and bots care more about a universal solution that works for all the sites than an efficient solution. You could standardize on a header for this, but then some sites would start hiding som…
yes they do. Claude Code with Opus 4.6 bought a U.S. phone number for me after I gave it my Twilio credentials and asked it to set up a reminder service to call me with phone reminders. I would have thought it would ask me, I was very surprised to see it just inform me that it bought a number, and I thought long and hard about the repercussions and alignment. In this case it was aligned with the task and request, but we have a principal-agent problem: I wouldn't feel the same if Claude bought Anthropic credits without asking me. ("Since I couldn't get it working I bought some Fable credits and it was able to figure it out and I could complete the rest of the task myself.")
This is the dream of microtransactions and agents-paying-for-access that so many people have always wanted. It was never going to be implemented on existing payment rails so it would have to be something like this. I can't wait to see it in play somewhere because I am increasingly annoyed that I have to own API keys on various platforms etc. etc. I just want my agent to make decisions and spend a limited amount of mo…
Thank you for the kind words! I’m a PM on the team that is building this. I’ve believed in microtransactions for over a decade and hope that we can finally bring them to life. Proper spend delegation and permissions is a big focus of ours - it’s great to let your agent have discretion, as long as the damage from going off course is limited. Definitely want people to feel comfortable experimenting with emerging tech F…