Comment by incompatible
9 hours ago
A dream for some, a nightmare for others. People locked out from much of the Internet because they don't have enough money. Of course, the prices would usually be set at whatever maximises revenue, just check out scientific journal publishing.
I would argue a nightmare for most.
Turning everything into a microtransaction / subscription is destroying what was good about the internet.
Advertising and all the anti-patterns it incentivizes are worse.If the payments are very low and frictionless this could be very good for the internet - as long as Cloudflare is only the first and not the only.
Depends what you compare it to. If the alternative is buying a subscription to get past a paywall, it might be better?
Ads, especially personalized ads, are the alternative that powers much of the open internet.
More options are great.
If the choice is between micro-transactions and ad-driven content (ads -> engagement maximization -> sensationalization + enshittification -> social and industrial decay), I'll take the former.
Remember: from a business's perspective, advertising has positive ROI. Which means you as the consumer pay for it anyway. No ad supported service is free.
Conversely this has the potential to unlock the internet. How often have you clicked a paywalled link on HN and moved on because you don't want to go through the hassle and pay $20 to read an article? If you could be frictionlessly billed 10c to read the article instead, wouldn't you be more willing?
I'm actually OK with paying a fair price for the content I consume, I just don't want to be paying hundreds of subscriptions for websites that I might only visit twice a year.
Which payment processor will charge less than 10c per transaction?
Nope, not going to happen. Any per use micro transaction isn't going to work. If anything it's going to require a huge amount of workarounds to get the content for free via alternative means
Presumably, nobody would offer the 10c per page unless they were making more than the $20 / month or whatever previously. So people will be paying more. Then add all the sites that currently just get what they can with advertising, and now they can become pay-per-view.
They weren't getting the $20 / month from users who bounce off.
Seems more likely that subscriptions, advertising, and microtransactions will coexist.
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The $20/month model is exclusionary as you are excluding people who are not interested in regularly reading a single newspaper. Pay-per-page is more reasonable. I have rarely paid for news subscription (partly because I find news here which comes from many sources). Obviously, I am not going to pay hundreds in subscriptions, so I am essentially paying $0.
With this, I can see myself paying $20-30/month (less than my coffee spend). That's money that was previously unlocked. Also, being able to pay some random writer/journalist outside the mega-news-corps, has a special feel to it and this gives me the option to do that.
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