201–210 of 408 posts
There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And i…
I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications. That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect. It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you sub…
It's really not, as evidenced by the fact that paying for what you use is how almost every physical good works, and many professional services (a lawyer's time).
It's fine for you to dislike the model -- I dislike it too. I don't like that it makes me anxious about consuming the next small unit of . But there's nothing inherently counterintuitive or punitive about it. It's the simplest and most defensible payment model possible.
Micropayments is something that I think the internet as a whole needs. However, I don't think the mental model people usually have isn't quite "micro" and frictionless enough. Imagine a world where your web browser essentially contains and controls your wallet. You pre-pay into that wallet, say, $20. I imagine we'll probably also refer to that as "credits" so internationalization isn't so tough. So let's pretend we h…
Isn't the Brave web browser based on this idea, using cryptocurrency?
It was a great idea, but I get the feeling that it stalled somewhere along the way.
There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And i…
You can't pay $.001 to $0.05 to get someone to do actual reporting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Newspapers were already bundled that way: you got national news, local news, business news, sports, the funny pages, classifieds, wire stories from AP & Reuters, etc. Then they went onto the web and were forced to prioritize, but where the entire bundling idea falls apart is you’re suggesting that we bundle the bundles. Here’s the harsh reality: most news is already priced appropriately for the value that it delivers…
Are you assuming the current landscape where engaging in a financial transaction, even if only for $0.01, is a tedious and unquantifiably dangerous gambit? (Sale of your info, leaking of your info, dark pattern subscription TOS's, etc.) Or would you still hold your opinions even in a theoretical landscape where paying $0.01 is just consenting to that amount being deducted from your bank account, with no friction or d…
Of course, they would probably have to accept visa gift cards paid for in cash for this to actually be truly anonymous. I mean sure, I have nothing nefarious to hide - but who is to say what the current administration will decide is nefarious tomorrow? Reading too many NY Times articles, and not enough National Review articles? "You are in violation of the internet news fairness doctrine"...
Micropayments work for games because there is some specific outcome I know I want and know paying this money will move me closer to that goal in the immediate future. That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point". That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation…
I find it hard to take this objection seriously, since almost everything that isn't a physical commodity has some degree of "I don't know if I'm satisfied with this yet". Books and movies clearly do. But we expect to take a risk and occasionally pay for them, and it feels ordinary to do so -- so why not here?
I don't object at all to people not liking micropayments -- I don't like them either. But the reason I don't like them is because I'm accustomed to getting good quality content for free, and no other reason.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a token system where $10 gets you 1,000 tokens and each read is logged and costs 1-5 tokens, depending on severity of the news and its age, is a great idea.
Who determines severity? What about investigations that take months or years to produce, who counts how many more tokens they should cost compared with a news story about Trump's latest tweet? Do you get a popup asking if you want to pay x tokens for each link? Journalism micropayments have been tried many times before, and never worked. Things haven't substantially changed in the meantime, so what would be different…
There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And i…
There isn't so much hate, as it's fundamentally DoA based on the financial system architecture of the United States, which creates strict liability, and a licensing requirement for digital money transmission. You do not get to opt out of that responsibility . Micropayments are therefore a pipedream that undermines all progress at making any type of AML or KYC possible, which then in turn makes fighting any type of fi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a particular part in the discussion that rubs me the wrong way (which is more about micropayments as alternative to ads, rather than micropayments themselves) It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments. But I don't like the way ads are presented a…
Not only news giants need revenue. Everyone producing news needs it, including any hoped-for smaller, more democratised new entrants to the industry. Where will that revenue come from? Should we expect high-quality journalism for free?
Good journalism costs money, people should expect to pay.
Though I'd point out that publishing news is now cheaper than ever, and people were more than willing to pay for access before, so why shouldn't they be willing to pay less now?
Or perhaps more to the point, why are they _not_ willing to pay now? And is the reason something ad-based perhaps?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then I don't understand the bitter line in the sand you've drawn between $0.00 and $0.0001. You could spend a whole lifetime paying this latter amount multiple times per day, and it would cost you about as much as a box of bandaids. If you really value the information contained in these articles at $0.00, then neither would you spend that much more valuable resource—time—in order to digest it, even if it were given t…
The vast majority of the time that I read the news, it’s from a publication I pay for. They get far far more than a box of bandaids over a lifetime. The rest can be worth my time, sometimes, under limited circumstances, but usually it isn’t. Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters? If you put a financial cost on li…
Certainly many of them are time wasters! But before you've clicked on these links, I should think they are best modeled as a random variable payout (P) as measured against the monetary (M) and temporal (T) cost of clicking and reading through them. If the expected value calculation doesn't work out (E(P) 0 that I would (in a ideal and frictionless environment) also be willing to endure on top of the temporal cost.
What most "free" content providers decided to converge on in order to extract epsilons from consumers so that they can continue to do business is ads, rather than honest micropayments.
I would be fine with most businesses that rely on ad revenue burning to the ground. And there are a few businesses that I will go far out of my way to patronize with more-than-a-box-of-bandaids. But for the majority of the free content providers that are not steaming garbage, but are also not in the privileged group of content providers that I deeply approve of and consciously think about, then in a frictionless environment I think I would prefer that they survive off rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus.