Ad free internet costs ~$40 one time fee. Raspberry Pi + pihole dns.
uBlock Origin is free.
True but this only blocks ads in the browser.
Welcome to the ad-free internet
61–70 of 334 posts
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Credit card networks impose relatively high minimums - so transactions under ~$4 USD don't make it worthwhile. PayPal has their own microtransactions scheme (which is difficult to get approved for), I assume PayPal has enough clout to pull it off. The other approach: having a PAYG balance, has the problem of requiring users to pay a somewhat larger amount up-front (e.g. $5 or $10) which is off-putting to people who'v…
Unfortunately, a lot of American banking infrastructure is hard-coded on ancient systems, so it’s entirely possible that initiating a single transaction really has reached it’s price-bottom. That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication. Many companies (like Stripe and Venmo) mask these deficiencies. But when you have to do something like a wire transfer, you find that it…
I've been trying to find a bank that does consumer-level FedNow outbound transfers. So far, no joy. Many banks have receive-only FedNow - they can receive money, but not send it. The US Treasury's Fiscal Service, the part of the government that sends payments, is going to be using FedNow. So banks want to be connected enough to receive money faster.
There are some online services for companies that make lots of outbound payments. JP Morgan Chase and BNY Mellon offer that. But outbound FedNow at the consumer level, not yet.
Part of the problem is addressing. The clever thing about PayPal is that your email address is your inbound payments address. The banking industry hasn't figured out the consumer-facing side of this yet. FedNow at the Fed level is about the same as ACH at the Fed level - just faster. You need receiving bank account info. There's a "request for payment" mechanism (i.e. a bill), but how does that reach consumers?
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, a lot of American banking infrastructure is hard-coded on ancient systems, so it’s entirely possible that initiating a single transaction really has reached it’s price-bottom. That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication. Many companies (like Stripe and Venmo) mask these deficiencies. But when you have to do something like a wire transfer, you find that it…
You shouldn't make up completely wrong claims to use as an analogy. The US grid doesn't run at either 110V or 220V, it's much higher. The 50/60Hz thing doesn't make any sense as an analogy either, because there's no significant advantage to either, it's just arbitrary. You really should just delete your comment if you can't come up with a decent analogy, or edit it to eliminate the analogy that makes no sense whatsoe…
Damn sorry I offended you with my stupidity. Like many people, I have a limit to the things I know. Any ideas on what might have been a decent way to phrase that analogy?
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#64Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, a lot of American banking infrastructure is hard-coded on ancient systems, so it’s entirely possible that initiating a single transaction really has reached it’s price-bottom. That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication. Many companies (like Stripe and Venmo) mask these deficiencies. But when you have to do something like a wire transfer, you find that it…
> That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication. I always assumed anti-fraud had something to do with it. Give the victims time to notice and the institutions the ability to reverse transactions without loss
> I always assumed anti-fraud had something to do with it.
The banks must have had a good PR campaign going because I was under this impression for a long time too. Something didn’t click when I learned that mistyping a single digit in an ACH transfer means your money is gone forever…
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#66Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month? I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5). Do companies like the Economist crunch the…
I'm guessing it's mostly a psychological thing. You make the decision to purchase a subscription once (and ideally for them, forget about it soon after), but if you know you're paying $.25 per click, you'll make a decision every time - and perhaps not bother.
Pay per click is also user hostile. We’ve all accidentally clicked on the wrong thing or, especially with touchscreen devices, clicked when we didn’t mean to. I really don’t need my misclicks costing me a bunch of extra money.
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#67Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month? I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5). Do companies like the Economist crunch the…
> E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month?
Because the real economic cost of an article is likely a lot higher than $0.25. The newsstand price of a magazine is always more expensive than what you can get it for in a subscriptio. Companies prefer recurring revenue over one-timers and their pricing reflects that.
Apple claims to offer tons of publications in Apple News +, but they don't tell you that a) Apple News shows ads and b) the titles they carry still block off some articles and content as premium-member only.
Anytime somebody offers a flat rate for something, you have to remember that the flat cost is simply what they offer to the customer, it's not reflective of what it costs them to supply. iTunes sold songs for $1 20 years ago, but for Apple the real game was using iTunes to get customers to stick around and make it easier to sell them their next iPod.
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#68Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a space that my company operates in and we will hopefully provide this service in the future. First, publishers want more than what consumers are willing to pay per article, the credit card companies charge too much (even with special micro pricing we've negotiated) and no one has a market big enough to reasonably get $xx per month into a wallet from a massive audience. Google had tried something similar with…
Hmm interesting. But it seems like one industry that has gotten this down is p*rnography? OnlyFans seems to be an enormous processor of micro-transactions for marginal content. Maybe people are just more willing to open wallets for that type of content? It's interesting to see that even press "rebels" like Substack use a subscription model. You could argue this benefits writers with steady streams of incomes, and tha…
I think the answer is, that in sexual matters part of our brain is hardwired to attach to individual humans.
Subscriptions create an incentive to keep consuming a particular resource, you don’t need that incentive if your audience already gets an oxytocin/dopamin kick just from seeing your face.
The other industries that got that right are far more morally questionable than pornography: Big Pharma and computer games.
Re: Welcome to the ad-free internet
#70Ad free internet costs ~$40 one time fee. Raspberry Pi + pihole dns.
Genuinely curious what you do when a site asks you to turn off your adblocker? PiHole doesn't have an option to whitelist an individual site like an extension does. Do you just leave the site or do you temporarily turn off PiHole?
A lot of folks just temporarily disable their pi-hole. This happens rarely depending on where you hang out on the internet, I can't remember the last time it happened to me