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Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

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Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#251

Post by Sankozi »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #199
thinkloop wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A $1 entry subscription where you have to type your name and credit card and submit and wait and now you have a relationship to manage, is infinitely more expensive than a 10 cent, automatic, non-recurring, one-time, no cancelation needed, pseudonomous, microtransaction.

> pseudonomous Which isn't private. Wallet ID 123 buys a 10c article from Leftist Newspaper A and one from Leftist Newspaper B. Leftist Newspaper A and B, being businesses, sell the information that Wallet ID 123 purchased an article to Data Broker A. Data Broker A correlates all purchases Wallet ID 123 has ever made and with a high degree of accuracy identifies who they are and their political affliation. Data Broke…

90% of people are careless and 9.9% are ignorant thinking they are safe.

Microtransactional web is only a risk in an alternative universe which doesn't have spying/tracking/profiling funded by enormous ad industry.

In our world it is a big improvement.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#252

Post by Sankozi »

incompatible wrote: post #193
csomar wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $20/month model is exclusionary as you are excluding people who are not interested in regularly reading a single newspaper. Pay-per-page is more reasonable. I have rarely paid for news subscription (partly because I find news here which comes from many sources). Obviously, I am not going to pay hundreds in subscriptions, so I am essentially paying $0. With this, I can see myself paying $20-30/month (less than my…

Random writer/journalists outside the mega-news-corps sometimes have a page for donations. You could donate to one once per month if you want to get rid of your $20-30.

Or you could just read the news and pay automatically in the microtransactional world, without analysing which journalist should be supported.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#253

Post by Sankozi »

cphoover wrote: post #111

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…

You forget that bots are often just AI agent working for humans. This will be more and more common. So by blocking bots (which is literally impossible but lets assume otherwise) you are also blocking legitimate customers.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#254

Post by fizzbuzzdizz »

Sankozi wrote: post #248
fizzbuzzdizz wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

o got it so journalism is dying because no one will pay for it - so your solution is to lock the entire internet behind a paywall so everything else can die to? or are you suggesting that charging people to read news is the solution to the problem of people not being willing to pay for news?

Journalism is losing to "free" "news" sites. Those need to produce cheap, clickbait slop to be able to function. There is no Spotify for press so the only other good solution is having microtransactions - paying only for articles you want to see, from any provider you want. Currently you must subscribe even if you want to read single article so the very few that buy the press are usually limited to single news source…

yes, because they are free. and those sites will continue to win all of those people just like they do today. and paid journalism will keep losing, and in fact will suffer more. i pay subscriptions to news sites that i deem trustworthy and reliable and if anyone of them switch from a subscription model to this pay per api call scheme they will never see a dime from me again. so the net accomplishment here is an internet wide paywall and those who this was supposed to help are further hurt. best part is 1) this shit will never happen because its such an obviously terrible idea 2) we dont have to argue! see 1 - this will never happen but if by some miracle it does all i have to do is wait and say “told ya so” because the shitty outcome is 100% guaranteed

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#257

Post by theshrike79 »

cphoover wrote: post #111

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…

A commercial site being invisible to AI Agents is starting to be as smart as being invisible to search engines.

SEO is standard practice, whatever the same thing is for Agents will be as standard very soon.

More and more people go "I want to buy thing X" to an AI Agent and if it can't find or access your product pages, it practically doesn't exist for those people.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#258

Post by tristor »

someonebaggy wrote: post #215
tristor wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be economically impossible for me to run a small personal website without Cloudflare thanks to the sheer quantity of badly behaved automated traffic on the Internet in 2026.

What happened when you tried?

I got stuck with a very large bill for bandwidth overages due to bots hammering my photo gallery on my website. With Cloudflare in front I've since been running my site for years off a $10/mo VPS.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#259

Post by me-vs-cat »

fizzbuzzdizz wrote: post #246
tln wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember feeding arcade machines coin after coin, buying magazines and newspapers, and paying to see a movie. Those aren't all microtransactions but they are direct purchase -> consume content. So is the rise of microtransactions mostly history repeating itself? There are nuances but web microtransactions feel a lot more like putting a quarter in to an arcade machine than the iap for phone apps.

this isnt putting a quarter in a machine. thats what we already have today. this is making the pinball game free but now you have to pay 1 cent every time you hit paddle button.

> this isnt putting a quarter in a machine. thats what we already have today.

What have I missed where I can, today, feasibly pay $0.25 at a time, online, regardless of other factors such as privacy, without putting down a larger balance at a time from which $0.25 is deducted?

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#260

Post by me-vs-cat »

gpm wrote: post #183
colesantiago wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We were providing free services decades ago. That was then. Now VPS providers are significantly increasing prices (Due to memory shortage) making it unaffordable to run servers cheaply.

Servers, and memory, are orders of magnitude cheaper today than they were decades ago... for memory see: https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html Yes there's a slight upwards blip right now, but not even close to cancelling decades of progress in price reduction.

Yet absolute price per GB isn't the full story when the popular tools accessible for the general public require more RAM for the same task today as compared to the past. You won't get far using the latest version of MS Word on a desktop with specs from 1999, or running MS Word 97 to edit academic essays turned this year.

Even for background services, rather than the general public, I would not attempt running an email server with the same RAM as I used in the 90s, 00s, or 10s.

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