> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators
As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites:
1. They provide only a subscription that is comparable cost to an old-media full subscription. Like most people in the Internet age I have a small number of main sources that I visit daily, and a much larger secondary tier where I may average one or two stories a week. Or they're the sites linked from here that I only visit when something interesting is waved under my nose.
There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing, for a site I might be getting £1 or 10p a month "value" from.
2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal.
Leaves things a bit stuck, and me paying out a smaller amount than I'm willing to.
I just want to pay a monthly "digital content fee" to some service and have that money be fairly distributed to all the digital services I use: websites, music, video, tools, etc. Is anyone working on a system like that?
I'm interested and will read more later. But that should not be built into a browse, at least not exclusively. It feels like it could be an add-on. Of course, preventing gaming and malicious manipulation is something to consider...
Initially, Brave was set up so a user could add bitcoins to an account and set a monthly spending target. Then Brave would split up that monthly amount and send it to sites based on how much time the user spent at each site. But as far as I can tell, they discontinued that model, and now they also sell ads.
Just to back up your (currently downvoted) comment:
"[Brave] browser blocks ads and website trackers. Currently, the company is developing a feature that allows users to opt in to receiving ads sold by Brave Software in place of the blocked ads. Brave intends to pay content publishers 55% of the replaced ad revenue. Brave Software, ad partners, and browser users would each be allocated 15% of the revenue. Users could donate their revenue share to bloggers and other providers of web content through micropayments. The browser claims to improve online privacy by sharing less data with advertising customers, but will target web ads by analyzing users' anonymized browsing history." -- Wikipedia
I consider this ad-replacement scheme extraordinarily scummy. It sounds like the plan is to use protection racket strategies to get the target publishers to buy in.
I'm on the latest version of the browser, and there's a "Payments" tab in Settings where you can add funds with BTC / ETH / BAT / LTC, set monthly budgets, and see what your percentage is. So I'm not sure where you saw that they discontinued that feature or sell ads.
That's really cool. I had no idea Brave did that, and thought it was just another Chromium spin-off.
Unfortunately I'm unwilling to change browser for this, and would rather see it as an addon or local software install so it works on the user's choice of browser, but it's a very good idea.
So, just imagining this could be Patreon's next service - sign up for X dollars a month for a VIP pass - but the issue suddenly becomes they need to oauth against patreon, and add in a new tier of subscriber .. it's doable but slow
I kind of like tying this into U2F. I think FIDO and the like will rollout as oauth has done - slowly but becoming the "default" way.
If as part of the initial sign up process, you authenticate your public key on site A, as being someone who can have a share of your monthly subscription... then we have built a distributed subscription service ...
People have been thinking seriously about micropayments for many decades now[1]. No one's managed to nail a complete concept and/or an execution that's really worth mentioning, except perhaps as historical interest. tl;dr: it's an enormously tough problem space to get right.
[1] "Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
Personally, I don’t want to pay anything for content. Look at cable tv. It got so bad there is a cord cutting movement. The same will happen again in another form.
I'm confused. You want people to write all content for free? Whilst that works for a lot of people who do it in their spare time, it does restrict anyone looking to write professionally from contributing.
Not parent, but I would absolutely _demand_ people to write all content for free.
I refuse to pay a single cent for anything that is even remotely accessible on the Internet and does not result in a physical tangible good being delivered to me, of which I pay $15/mo as acceptable rate-limited mobile LTE bandwidth -- my only communication related recurring cost.
There are several reasons at play here:
- Content quality is not correlated with amount an author is "compensated". In fact quality is almost universally _inversely_ correlated with profitability. Once dollars are attached, out of the woodwork comes a bunch of charlatans peddling useless shit that will not only give you no useful advantage in seeking external information but will actively degrade your life either through dubious advice that will trash your health, finances, legal status, cognitive & mental state, relationships, you name it, or through malevolent action such as selling your privacy or methodical persuasion in you undertaking self-defeating behaviors by hijacking basic human emotional reactions.
- Time has shown repeatedly that volunteers are the entire backbone of quality information sources. I come to HN to have some chance of experts congregating for an actual discussion on certain topics. QA forums, encyclopedias, topic-specific discussion forums, educational materials, news aggregation, scientific research, _all_ is higher quality in volunteer communities before it's essentially leeched for profit by journals, website owners, policy spinmasters, malvertising business, and venture capital.
- "Writing professionally" is not a useful skill in itself, no matter the fantasy colleges want to dream up by funneling the otherwise academically unfit into a program that will lead to a degree thus allowing them to join in on the unnecessary inflationary credentialization of _remedial_ skills. Linguistic mastery is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for creating useful information, you first need a deep understanding of the material you wish to cover. I'd much rather read barely comprehensible jargon from a deranged genius than an eloquent soliloquy by some shill with no idea of what he's talking about other than a general idea that permuting a dictionary in the right magical incantation will summon a paycheck at the end of the week. If you have skills that allowed you to amass wisdom in a field to the point that it would benefit someone else, there are _much_ more efficient and useful means to acquire income and instead use "writing" as a tool for social meaning and development either through reciprocity, self-selection, altruism, whatever.
- The greatest costs are borne not in writing but in deciphering meaning. The combined readership burden of filtering out the wheat from the chaff will _always_ exceed the cost of an author even doing "important" research. This is the crucial point of it all, with some smart people realizing that if information has any value besides propaganda it's due to careful curation, summarizing, and tailoring to an individual's goals and instantaneous state-of-mind, while even smarter people realizing that this will _never_ scale as a business model. Even "clever" workarounds to this problem by infiltrating an individual's web-of-trust in recommendations always end up backfiring. After decades of this scheme being retried and rehashed, I now am completely confident in ignoring whatever bullshit du jour comes out of the mouths of family and friends, and am even running up against the problem of being contrarian against my own internal thoughts.
- Even if against all the odds that you paid someone to get valuable information in the long run you'll regret it. Give an inch, they take a mile. Everyone who is dependent on a paycheck dreams of eventually retiring, and quickly to boot once the actuaries remind them of the future. Once you paid someone for content, you just anchored the negotiations of tomorrow and crystallized the form of how protection money must be paid. "Oh I know you paid back then, but life isn't getting any cheaper and I'd like to get to the beach someday without working so I'm really sorry but I _need_ to add some 'features' that will juice my revenue!" Negotiating with terrorists is not a strategy to get to a stable equilibrium in an iterated game -- the cat has been let out of the bag and it's never going back in. Wake up.
Your views are factually incorrect, don’t suggest any real solution, and in my view somewhat extremist. A realistic solution must consider the in turn actions of all influential parties invloved.
It’s economics. It’s requires modeling, strategies, and thinking equally about all parties because it doesn’t matter whether you like them or not it matters what the future would look like a few years out.
This is not personal I have no ties to ad revenue or professional writing. It’s about putting emotion and philosophy in one basket and solutions in another. You’re allowed to have both, but the latter should be dispassionate.
Just one example on the facts, writing professionally is provably a useful skill. Take even what you may consider a mundane job of writing instruction manuals. if it weren’t useful there wouldn’t be jobs and people being paid money to do it. There’s all kinds of writing jobs that require little independent domain expertise. That’s before we even discuss original or creative content.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Once you've stretched the limits of acceptability beyond the capacity of short-term memory, anything of a 'compromise' is just a token dilution that keeps the same status quo intact in everything except a temporary face-saving apology.
A realistic solution must consider the actions of all parties involved, but it doesn't have to actually appease any of those parties with anything they may want.
It's currently an adtech bubble, foaming to the brim. People speculating in attention-based revenue and side-dealing surveillance armaments through malware distribution to ferment the process should feel the losses when the deal goes bad to set an example that hurting others isn't going to get you a bailout. I don't care about your moral plea for "equality" where we make sure no one suffers the consequences of damaging the commons such as the intrinsic value of information and content.
Because of the adtech bubble, we have a _huge_ problem of noise pollution. Valuable public research cannot be funded effectively because the public realizes the history of paid "results" to turn a profit for media proselytizing and reframing unpopular governmental policies.
Public institutions are no longer credible due to the obvious connections between surveillance, profit, and legislation that is effectively mediated through media companies.
There's a real solution here: puncture the bubble by drying up the money stream. It'll help the useful creators in the long term that are being suppressed by the influx of dumb content and blackholing clickbait algorithms designed to minimize utility to maximize profitability.
Now, for writing professionally being a useful skill. That paragraph was obviously in the context of becoming something like a journalist, blogger, or news pundit where your income is paid by this scam of exchanging between attention and currency though a network of super shady intermediaries.
If you're writing instruction manuals for a living, you're not getting paid for how long eyeballs are on your work so that someone can monetize a reader's susceptibility to suggestion. In fact if I hired you, you'd be paid by how _quickly_ a human can view your instructions and move on with their life in doing something productive.
And that's exactly my point: I know many communications major graduates and many engineering major graduates. The former usually went into the program as a last resort for underwhelming academic performance and trying to latch on to the hype before it bursts rather than being gifted in communication ability. The latter could definitely transition to professional writing, not because of language skills that are essentially expected anyways but because their deep understanding in a subject allows them to distill useful insights that are rather hard to crack otherwise.
For example, I love IKEA/Lego instruction manuals not because a random "professional writer" with no independent domain expertise was able to checkmark that off his daily tasklist, but because the manual was made by people with incredibly sophisticated knowledge of how to visualize and communicate the ideas of physical assembly and knew their audience appreciates that expertise. If you're able to document the assembly process, you're qualified to critique and help improve the usability, design, and even materials engineering that ultimately influences what you write in the manual.
This reinforces the idea that if you're just a writer, you're useless because you _should_ be funneling what insight you distilled back to the process your're documenting. And then you're not really a writer, but an engineer.
And just because there are jobs and people being paid money to do it doesn't mean it's useful at all. Biggest fallacy I've ever heard.
The best content I've ever read has been books that each took years to write. After that come NPR and the Washington Post. Then Ars. I pay for all of them, and everything else I read, present company included, isn't even in the same league of quality.
I guess I'm saying that I couldn't disagree with you more; if all the content I didn't pay for went away, I doubt I'd be negativity effected at all.
Very true. There's a proliferation of content nowadays but most of them are just of absolutely horrible quality. I regret having wasted quite some time on hastily written free contents instead of more systematic books.
I lean toward agreeing with you. Sure. I'd rather view ads than pay. BUT! Why I'm setting up a pi-hole isn't about ads in and of themselves. It's the intrusive and misleading ads. It's the tracking and difficulty opting out of targeted advertising.
I don't have a problem with tv ads for shampoo that I won't ever buy. I do have a problem with a web page that surrounds a legit news article with bizarre ads with cockimamy health claims, and links that don't go where they claim to go.
If a website says, "Pay up or look at these 'spider veins' ads" that's entitlement, arrogance and open contempt. That's not treating me like a desired customer.
Nope. People _say_ they want to pay an equitable price for content rather than viewing ads because that's exactly what they prefer and would do.
The problems are:
- Your definition of 'equitable price' when we live in a time where no single human can digest across their lifetime even a single year's worth of the glut created.
- The quality is universally garbage and as an information consumer you'd still have to spend your resources in thinking critically whether to accept and update your assessment of the information. If you're consuming 'content' as escapism well then you still might consider a more cost-effective route such as heroin or even direct neural stimulation.
- Consumers rightfully work out the long game plan of content creators. They'd like to not view ads but know that once you've climbed above the threshold of starving artist you'll get greedy and the ads will come right back. Always. No exception.
For TV, I'm happy to pay for renting from google or a monthly fee to Netflix. In return I never need to go to the cinema, I watch films at the time that works for me, and no ads!
Yeah, I'd be happy to pay for quality video, podcast, and articles, but not 5$ to each site I want to read from.
I completely agree with your assessment of the problem.
I'm using https://blendle.com, which offers a wide variety of publications with payment per article (usually something around 0.70 EUR, with the odd 1.99 EUR for articles from DER SPIEGEL). They also have a daily mix of manually curated content and content based on the articles I purchased in the past, which works really well. I'm afraid it's only available in the Netherlands and Germany so far.
I didn't know the Brave browser had a payment model built in, will give this a try as well.
> There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing
There is yet to be a quick and simple micro-transaction infrastructure for the web. Transaction costs inhibit micro-transactions. They don’t scale down.
Some are trying to use crypto to do micro-transactions, but even crypto has transaction costs that inhibit how small micro-transactions can be, not to mention the exchange rate volatility.
It’s a big unsolved problem. Gotta spend money to spend money.
I read an article once that argued the big problem with microtransactions was the transaction cost imposed on users.
For the sites, sure, everything can be automated. But even in the best case of good browser ui/ux support the burden shifted to users would be massive.
The cognitive cost of trying to decide whether to spend 10c on an article I haven’t read yet costs me way more than 10c. Man that article sucked. Did I just get ripped off by clickbait again?
This argument is what convinced me that straight per-article “microtransactions” will never take off for very low value things on the web.
What’s scary to me is that the one “successful-ish” application we have for microtransactions is mobile gaming. Imagine a huge ecosystem of different beans, gems, flooz, widgets or whatever, and all the dark ux patterns to get people to spend them, and also to hide how much they are spending from people.
I would absolutely pay $10 a month to an aggregator like HN or /. that then paid publishers a portion of that based on article rank and/or number of clicks through.
I understand it's about cognitive costs. What I propose makes the cognitive load of actual monetary payment a single decision per month. I pay X. Let the aggregator and the publishers automatically figure out every little fractional detail.
If the objective of paying is to make the web better and reward quality content, you don't want two pages of clickbait to pay more than one page of watergate-level investigative reporting.
And any automated system to tell clickbait from quality journalism will incentivise people to trick it.
blendle.com, which I mentioned earlier in this thread, has this instant-refund feature. I've used it a few times when an article was disappointing, or when there were technical problems (digitized article cut off the second half of the print version).
Seems to work for them, though I don't know their revenue/profit numbers.
Scaling cryptocurrencies would absolutely address this issue, but that's an enormous challenge.
A simple, centralized service could easily fill this role with batched transactions. Each reader pays once a month, each publisher gets payed once a month, and those payments can be shuffled about a database trivially. O(n) vs. O(n^2)
Patreon kind of did/does this. There was a big stink not long ago where this appeared to fall apart. The issue Patreon faced was that it was not so trivial to bundle transactions like this. Some creators wanted to get paid in a piecemeal fashion for each video uploaded, etc. For patreon supporters, they would each be on their own separate billing cycle because they decided it would be bad UX to have the first month be pro-rated or whatever.
As much as Patreon is best situated to provide a service like this, I'm not encouraged that they'll do so.
A transaction on bitcoin cash costs 1 to 2 sat, which is less than 0.01 penny.
It is true that the cost can vary greatly (which sucks, please tell me of a crypto coin that is 1:1 with dollars), but you can adjust the price in real time and since you are selling a digital product even in an extreme situation you are not going to lose money (remember the transaction fee is pretty much going to be 1-2 sat always).
>There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing, for a site I might be getting £1 or 10p a month "value" from.
A "tip jar" or micropayment model to supplement subscriptions would be a great option. Unfortunately I think processing fees eat up a significant chunk of your take to the point where it's not really profitable to build a business model around it. Even if you get a great solution going, getting buy-in from the number of vendors you'd need on board would be prohibitively difficult. The only ones with the reach would either be inclined to lock it down and stick with the ad centric model (Facebook, Google) or just don't have the organizational culture to give it the attention or support it would deserve (Apple, Amazon).
In the old days you could go to a corner newsstand and pick up a newspaper, even from one of those little boxes on the street. This let you just buy if there was something interesting that you needed to look at that day without committing and, importantly, without handing personal financial information to who-the-hell-even-knows. A payment infrastructure that makes this quick, easy, and cheap enough to where cost isn't a concern would be incredible.
Except it would work a bit differently. Say I approve N number of sites (NY Times, WaPo, EE Times, etc.) They each get paid out of a monthly fund based on how much I visit each of them.
>2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal.
As it currently stands, a large chunk of the newspaper industry in the states is willing to block the whole of the EU, when it could offer it that model, so I wouldn't hold your breath.
A source at Tronc says not only have most of the chain's papers blocked EU visitors because of GDPR, but Tronc "currently has no plans to support the EU" because doing so is seen as not economically viable
The usual way people have tried to solve the microtransactions problem is through aggregation/centralization. eg, everyone who wants to gives HN $K/mo, and then HN distributes that money proportionally to sites clicked.
Unfortunately, I think the incentives are too loose. Users aren't obligated in any way to pay for links; as usual, humans aren't charitable enough to actually sustain public goods voluntarily. Secondly, the aggregator site isn't under strong incentives to pass on revenues (which applies equally to ads).
And the usual way people have tried to solve the solved-microtransactions-problem is by gaming the system, which is exactly the history and outcome of the current situation.
The 'microtransactions problem' using 'aggregation/centralization' you're describing would be readily identified as the newspaper industry a few decades ago. Nowadays you have to wrap it up in a healthy dose of cryptocurrency scamming, federated networking bullshit, and other huckster lingo to make it seem like a radical approach.
Newspaper companies, which allowed patrons to exchange a few cents for a daily source of vital information curated by professionals across a wide array of expertise, distributed money received in patronage towards the journalists, editors, fact-checkers, you name it.
Of course, that isn't the full story. What newspaper companies did was become the mouthpiece of the government and eliminate any useful information, filled nearly all the pages to the brim with huge obnoxious ads with little text remaining, started some perverse incentives with journalist pay forcing the smart ones to abandon ship a long time ago, and helped build a mass culture of frantic zombies who cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction, parroting whatever they read as a sort of social lubricant, and trained to resort to looking on a page for the local weather information yesterday that could be far more accurately sourced now by looking up to see if there are clouds above.
Good riddance to 'content creators.' Don't let the door hit you on the way out, and HN will never receive a cent of my money. :D
> I heavily believe we should be supporting creators
As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites:
If some big company like Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon wanted to get behind micropayments, they might be able to actually get it started. It would basically amount to disrupting the advertising model itself. Advertising would morph into influencer media produced at the behest of advertisers, but much of media would be much freer from the worst depredations of advertising.
As do I. There's two significant issues I have supporting most sites:
1. They provide only a subscription that is comparable cost to an old-media full subscription. Like most people in the Internet age I have a small number of main sources that I visit daily, and a much larger secondary tier where I may average one or two stories a week. Or they're the sites linked from here that I only visit when something interesting is waved under my nose.
There's no low user or micro transaction options for these, so I get a choice of pay say £10 a month or nothing, for a site I might be getting £1 or 10p a month "value" from.
2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal.
Leaves things a bit stuck, and me paying out a smaller amount than I'm willing to.