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Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

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Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#321

Post by [deleted] »

munificent wrote: post #294
shimman wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to be the wet blanket but what you're arguing for, advocacy, is by far the worst and most ineffective form of doing politics. Talking about things doesn't convince anyone. Talking to the small amounts of people that agree doesn't get the balling moving. Want to know what does? Organizing. Getting people that disagree with you, to agree with you. That never happens through advocacy, you have to organize.

Organizing still requires access to ground truth information. It's not enough for people to be organized. They do need to be organized around actual good ideas which requires information. Organizing without journalism is just religious evangelism and mob justice.

[deleted]

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#322

Post by xpe »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #33

I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work - the main problems are not technical but social. Even in the gaming sector, nobody really charges less than about a dollar for items - that is the smallest unit of money where putting up with fraud, complaints, and chargebacks becomes worthwhile. Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and…

> For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.

A straw man. That's not the only way to do it. Asking this instead is helpful: "what might make this work?" and explore that in depth and try some experiments.* It might be a collective action problem or a first-mover problem or a culture problem. Such classes of problems are hard, sometimes even insanely hard for anyone lacking massive influence, but not categorically unworkable or impossible.

> I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work

I don't buy this generalization. Maybe micropayments don't "work" yet according to some (unstated, unfortunately) ideas of scope or degree. But smallish payments have worked (to some degree, for some periods of time) for music downloads and political contributions, just to mention a few things. There is something to smaller-than-usual payments, this seems pretty clear. (Yes, there is a sort of lower quantum based on the slice a payment processor takes, so creative bundling is often needed.)

Maybe micropayments according to some particular definition are unlikely to work for online content under current constraints. Still, the world is a big place, and the future (hopefully) leaves a lot of room for experimentation.

Aside: maybe a bigger problem is the status-quo idea of "news". Most of the "news" I real feels almost like junk food.

* I prefer to ask "what would make something work?" or "what is blocking something from working?" rather than claiming "X can (or can't) work". This is not because I'm naive or an optimist. I'm neither. But I'm genuinely curious about how and why things work, and the way one frames the question has a big effect on where your brain leads you.

P.S. WRT exaggeration or overconfidence: just say no. Let's make nuance the norm. It can start here, one comment at a time.

P.P.S. I'll say this again, and it _should_ make people uncomfortable: I'm getting more value out of interacting with a high quality LLM with a solid prompt than a typical comment on HN, and this does not bode well. I still hope that people can step it up, but we're not there yet, for various reasons.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#324

Post by sanex »

salawat wrote: post #274
sanex wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there was some sort of alternate monetary system based on cryptography that enabled instant micro payments.

Using a public ledger, that is just surveilled and treated as prosecution futures, or targeting for kidnappers. Yes, we know. It's also got major usability issues, and tends to end up in practice defaulting to a centralized custodial model anyways for the vast majority of users. Where it can't, the onramps to convert to the currency of the land are outlawed.

Still would work for the use case.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#325

Post by jstrong »

dylan604 wrote: post #220
zeta0134 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irritating thing to me here is that I actually don't mind the concept of advertising. Mostly it's the implementation. Newspaper ads don't bug me one bit, because they're not physically capable of moving, animating, dancing, and trying to get my attention. They're not physically capable of tracking my habits and reporting them back to the mothership. They're just... there. Passive. Occasionally interesting, or at…

Magazines on the other hand could get annoying, especially with the scratch-n-sniff perfume/cologne ads. Otherwise, I agree with the bad thing about ads is adTech and not ads themselves. The internet just allowed our worst selves to run rampant with the obvious result coming to fruition.

I don't know, man, glossy magazine ads were glamorous. sure there was stupid stuff, but the comparison between the "one weird trick" era and magazine ads of someone looking cool so you have a positive impression with some brand name is pretty stark.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#326

Post by jstrong »

dd8601fn wrote: post #247
jdejean wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, we see this play out clearly with streaming apps. Disney sells a subscription to remove ads, then one day they change their mind and now you only see “less ads” and they introduce an even more expensive plan that removes ads. The behavior should be criminal yet every major streaming app does this. These companies like to pretend ads are the pro-consumer approach when in reality they’d much rather scale throu…

Prime is worse. Pay for the service. Then pay more to remove ads. But then a massive amount of their catalog remains “only with ads.” And then they pack half the usable screen with media that must be bought and titles that require add-on subscriptions. It’s a real cesspool. Hulu does a lot of this garbage too, but not quite as obnoxiously.

I feel like the less tolerance I have for ads (as time goes on), the more desperate they get in trying increasingly aggressive ways of making you watch ads. I'm never watching ads again, ever! I'm willing to pay, but not with my time for your terrible, horrendous, bullshit ads!

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#327

Post by roysting »

chongli wrote: post #308
derektank wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run. They go unnoticed because of scaling issues, not because people are per se less interested in local politics than national politics. If you write a story about a decision on the local city council, it is of interest to maybe a few hundred thousand, whereas a story about Congre…

I think a lot of our issues today are because people are too engaged in federal politics. It's turned into a massive spectacle on the same level as the NFL.

That seems to be the point; WWE USA: Blue Team vs Red Team, The Democracy Simulation Show. Everyone has the same and equal meaningless vote.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#328

Post by Twisell »

munificent wrote: post #234

Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it. But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unloc…

The system you describe is already implemented at least on this French independent media "Arrêt sur Images". Subscribers can vote to gift articles to the public.

(I'll link Wikipedia as a proxy to avoid HN hug of DDOS https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arr%C3%AAt_sur_images English version has not been updated so recently)

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#329

Post by Dunedan »

eli wrote: post #12

This does not seem to reckon with the many, MANY times this has been tried and failed. (The LinkedIn post at least acknowledges attempts that "did fail in the 90s and 2000s" and quickly waves them away.) There have been at least a dozen serious attempts in the last 20 years that I'm aware of. What about Blendle? They had NYT, WaPo and WSJ as launch partners in 2014 but give up on micropayments in 2023 citing "very lo…

I believe the main reason that Flattr failed was just bad execution. After a successful start and Flattr being used more and more, they just stopped iterating on it, leaving it dormant for years. Partnering with Adblock Plus was the final nail in the coffin.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#330

Post by servo_sausage »

bobro wrote: post #99
subpixel wrote: post #51

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…

>That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. I disagree with this so much. Paying for a thing once and getting the thing is absolutely intuitive. Subscription models where you pay generally for access over a time period to a broad swath of things is counter-intuitive. I want to read a handful of articles from NYT a month. I will never sign up for a subscription for that, so I just don’t r…

The problem is consistency, or maybe discovery...

If I see a link to an article, or get it as a search result, I have no real way to see the quality of what I'm buying.

With a subscription the assumption is the quality is consistent over time.

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