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Comment by svachalek

3 days ago

There really should be a micropayments setup on the internet that's not advertising based. Let these models pay a nickel to read the article, covered by the multi trillion dollar AI blank check.

18 comments

svachalek

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AnthonyMouse  3 days ago

The biggest problem with micropayments is that the buyer needs to be anonymous or you'll be creating a massive surveillance apparatus, which is the thing we're trying to get rid of. But existing laws make it difficult to build something like that which is easy for normies to use, so someone either needs to come up with a creative solution or reform the laws.

  • _jackdk_  3 days ago

    GNU Taler[1] is an interesting middle-ground in the payments space: privacy-preserving for consumers, non-blockchain digital cash, and keeps merchant activity taxable.

    I do worry about their whitepaper recommending it for a CBDC[2] (linked from [3]) which points out the state can implement negative interest rates, and that its architecture requires the issuer to get involved even in "spot your friend a $20"-level use cases. Since the issuer would presumably be required to KYC everyone, that also creates a big surveillance problem.

    [1]: https://www.taler.net/en/index.html

    [2]: https://www.snb.ch/public/asset/de/www-snb-ch/publications/r...

    [3]: https://www.taler-systems.com/en/digital-currency.html

  • svachalek  3 days ago

    Well my thought is in this case the buyer is OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google.

    • AnthonyMouse  2 days ago

      If normal people get to be anonymous then you don't know if someone accessing the site is OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, at which point why are they going to pay when anonymous access doesn't?

      Also, this works pretty poorly for scrapers because people would just set up massive junk farms to collect micropayments from crawlers, and then either the amounts would be too small for real creators to get anything or anything requiring them just wouldn't get accessed. The latter is probably what a lot of the media companies want, but then if the AI companies aren't paying and the normal users aren't paying, who is?

andrepd  3 days ago

There's a river of cash flowing to the pockets of the wealthy and to the megalomaniac projects of hyperscaler, but not to drip a few pennies onto the pockets of people providing such an important public service as journalists.

jeroenhd  3 days ago

For as long as there's free data to be downloaded, there will be an AI to ruin a public good. Why pay when you can just have your scraper generate a million trial accounts?

A pay wall at the news site would just bankrupt the internet archive, and a pay wall at the internet archive will kill most public interest in the service.

poisonfountain  3 days ago

Cloudflare is trying to push for that, but every time it's mentioned people complain (because they hate Cloudflare for making them wait 2s for a captcha) and nobody proposes an alternative solution. I don't think this is going to happen, unfortunately, and the internet will get silo-ed into oblivion.

  • overfeed  3 days ago

    People don't hate micropayments because it's Cloudflare promoting them, it's because it truly is a shit idea, for many reasons.

    People would equally reject Netflix, if Netflix fooated the idea of replacing the subscription model with pay-per-view micropayments.

    > ...nobody proposes an alternative solution

    Such is the human condition - some problems simply have no satisfactory solutions.

    • lo_zamoyski  3 days ago

      > People would equally reject Netflix, if Netflix fooated the idea of replacing the subscription model with pay-per-view micropayments.

      You sure about that?

      Something like over half of Netflix viewers believe their subscription isn't justified by how much they watch or else they aren't sure of it. Less than half believe the subscription cost is justified.

      Whether a PPV model would actually be cheaper for the first half is a good question, but it is possible. Certainly, in my case, I do not watch $20 worth of content on Netflix a month. I would gladly take PPV.

    • svachalek  3 days ago

      I'm absolutely the opposite. I'd do a reasonable pay per view on Netflix, but I don't want 73 different streaming subscriptions draining my account every month.

      1 reply →

    • kube-system  3 days ago

      I do rent movies on Apple TV or Google Play for $4 rather than pay Netflix $20/mo for a smaller collection of movies.

      I would never watch 6 movies in a month, and the selection with Netflix sucks by comparison to what is available when renting.

      The subscription services are only a good deal if you binge them

  • AnthonyMouse  3 days ago

    > because they hate Cloudflare for making them wait 2s for a captcha

    Why does it work like that anyway? Every time I open a page on some sites, their vexing box shows up to waste my time. Five minutes later I want a different page on the same site and it does the same thing. They can't do it once and cache the result?

  • Forgeties79  3 days ago

    My issue with cloudflare is that if I run a VPN it randomly just locks up. Coin toss I can get through if I am routing thorough another country.