And then cram down their bias down your throat, with you paying. Whether it’s sponsored placements or interest group’s lobbying. I mean, there is no money to make in neutrality anyway.
There's still too much of friction in current payment systems to be dealt with (along with subscription models) vs. ad model. And I guess it's also telling of the actual worth of the news and opinions. We just consume too much inactionable information, mostly to entertain or distract ourselves.
Nobody will accept real micro payments. It is a pipe dream. As soon as such monetization system is deployed the prices will start at 5$ to read an article and will increase even more in the subsequent years. Why? Because people will pay.
Have you seen video games monetization? Over past 15-20 years we have rapidly passed the price threshold of 20-30$ per whole game, then per half of a game, then a quarter of a game, then a complete single character in a game, then a costume for a character, then only a single clothing item for a single costume for a single character, then a chance of that. Currently gacha games which have multiple hundreds of characters ask between a a few hundreds of dollars and a few thousands for a single character (best case, worst - for a chance of one).
How easy the transaction is is almost more important to me than the actual cost. As long as it can be one click, I'll gladly pay 5 cents to read a good article
control of money. It's not a lack of solutions but the people who control money make the solutions illegal , because taxation / terrorism / child porn / the usual
Here's a thought... Why not let the paying subscribers promote content they especially like to the commons?
So, if you're a paying member, you get to read everything like it works today. But you also get a steady flow of tips. If you like an article, you can tip the author directly, which comes out of your monthly subscription. Once a given article gets enough tips, it's permanently unlocked for every visitor.
Basically, good quality content goes public, letting the readers both curate the content and help out those for whom a full subscription is not in the budget.
I just saw an interesting model on Substack: pay to comment. That might weed out the spammers and trolls quite effectively and build up a community of truly interested parties that have something to contribute.
Another thing that bothers me is that I have to subscribe to all pages separately and that the price of the individual venues is just too high. News are too important to lock in with one or maybe two providers, sorry.
Take, for instance, Urban Sports Club where I have a number of plans and for amount X I get, let's say, unlimited gym, 2x sauna and a yoga session per month at their partners.
Why not having this for news and other media? Like paying 50€ and you get 25 articles at partnering news sites, 10 hours Spotify and 5 hours Youtube premium.
The flaw with all this is that it is lacking the lock-in effect and let's be honest, competition is only cool if you're not exposed to it ;)
And flood literally every website with affiliate links produced by scripts. After a few years of the program the 99% of tip flows will be concentrated for a handful of best "influencers" and the rest will see some funny microscopic numbers. Then tip amounts will be adjusted based on the top earners (down of course) and the rest will see shift of amounts into nanodollars.
Articles are shared so quickly nowadays, the 'making it public when they get enough tips' might not happen fast enough and it'd be the same experience for most people...
We don't want to pay and we don't want to watch ads - still, we want to consume the content. I mean, I get the sentiment, I also share it to a great degree. But how are websites supposed to stay afloat?
Would be nice to see the source code for this. Then I could write up my own app to do the same. We shouldn't need to be dependent on a website that could shut down at any time.
For all of 12ft.io’s bluster it seems that they turn it off politely if the target site asks which means it doesn’t accomplish anything at all. Archive.ph needs to do something about the CAPTCHAs but maybe that is what they have to to shed load so they can afford to run it.
Is there a service like this that could work on a DNS level?
I'm using a DNS ad blocker and I could set-up overrides of certain news websites to a different hostname which in turn would redirect to the bypass URL.
It sounds doable but I haven't seen anything like that
That would need to involve more than the DNS. The browser expects to see the certificate for a specific website so you can't just redirect. The certificate needs to be forged. I don't think that is doable without a personal proxy server. In some cases, the browser may allow you to accept an invalid certificate but many sites forbid that via the HTTP Strict Transport Security mechanism. So you will need a proxy server plus a self-signed certificate authority installed in the browser or operating system.
A service could work but would need to work around TLS. It would either need to provide you a root CA certificate to install on your systems (bad idea as it would allow them to MITM any website), or a bundle of certificates for the hostnames of the news websites they support (so the MITM is constrained to those domains, but that's fine as that's your intention anyway).
A responsible developer should never supply a pre-configured certificate (though many do exactly that). An unique certificate should be created for the specific installation.
Others have in reply. See mocking bird, almost all are influenced by state.
The other factor is corporate influence. Most of the media is owned by the add dollars that drive it, so it's not the truth, often its what helps or at least doesn't harm the Corp that passes the filters.
Jeff Johnson's stopthescript and stopthemadness safari plugin for ios and mac os bypasses most paywalls and actually disables javascript. Inline included.
Readit News
Why does it take us so long?
They want you to pay for all the articles, including the shitty ones, every month.
Greed or not, it's always going to be a bit more than a price you would accept.
Have you seen video games monetization? Over past 15-20 years we have rapidly passed the price threshold of 20-30$ per whole game, then per half of a game, then a quarter of a game, then a complete single character in a game, then a costume for a character, then only a single clothing item for a single costume for a single character, then a chance of that. Currently gacha games which have multiple hundreds of characters ask between a a few hundreds of dollars and a few thousands for a single character (best case, worst - for a chance of one).
I.e. you need something like WeChat pay or Alipay. Can't work in the west. PayPal sucks
30.
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So, if you're a paying member, you get to read everything like it works today. But you also get a steady flow of tips. If you like an article, you can tip the author directly, which comes out of your monthly subscription. Once a given article gets enough tips, it's permanently unlocked for every visitor.
Basically, good quality content goes public, letting the readers both curate the content and help out those for whom a full subscription is not in the budget.
Thoughts?
Another thing that bothers me is that I have to subscribe to all pages separately and that the price of the individual venues is just too high. News are too important to lock in with one or maybe two providers, sorry.
Take, for instance, Urban Sports Club where I have a number of plans and for amount X I get, let's say, unlimited gym, 2x sauna and a yoga session per month at their partners. Why not having this for news and other media? Like paying 50€ and you get 25 articles at partnering news sites, 10 hours Spotify and 5 hours Youtube premium.
The flaw with all this is that it is lacking the lock-in effect and let's be honest, competition is only cool if you're not exposed to it ;)
1) Anything that was done for monetary gain on the internet was inherently bad and it's no loss if it goes away
2) People will just magically decide to keep creating content out of the goodness of their own hearts
They're not. If no one wants to pay for it then it's not supposed to exist, speaking in terms of how the capitalist system is supposed to work
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Cease and desists strike again!
I'm using a DNS ad blocker and I could set-up overrides of certain news websites to a different hostname which in turn would redirect to the bypass URL.
It sounds doable but I haven't seen anything like that
The other factor is corporate influence. Most of the media is owned by the add dollars that drive it, so it's not the truth, often its what helps or at least doesn't harm the Corp that passes the filters.