Hacker News Reader

Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather someone implement a tipping API where I can allocate money per website per minute (or hour spent). When the money runs out, depending on the configuration, the website can choose to serve me the page or ask me to reload (on money for the website)

They get small amounts of micro transactions (I'm talking less than a cent) and I change my behavior to stop going to useless sites.

everyone wins!

personally, I believe ads are a disease. if your website isn't worth paying a penny to go to for an hour, then just shut down. a penny an hour could be very sustainable for plenty of sites. take some random forum: 15,000 thousand users per month, let's say the average user goes on for an hour a day, or 30 hours a month. 450,000 cents is about 5 thousand a month. not too shabby. if your website is that awesome up the price to 10 cents and increase your money an order of magnitude.

the problem is the culture of "free", unfortunately.

View on HN

Something like Google Contributor, which was just relaunched today?

https://contributor.google.com

Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14467702

That is "pay to block ads" and doesn't cover the OP's use case of "pay to use this site" (afaik, I could be wrong). That use case is important for sites that don't want to use ads in the first place.

This is pay the site to replace what they would get from an advertiser.

It goes through Google, and the whole point of ad blockers (for me) is to block Google's tracking/surveillance crap.

So, it is dead on arrival for me and all the other privacy-minded people that run ad blockers, which is a large and increasing percentage of the population.

Wow ... first you build a massive ad network to create a pain point and than you have users pay for not using it. Brilliant!

Treat information as the public good it is.

Pay those who create it.

Allow free access to public information.

The entire advertising market worldwide is $600 billion, which works out to roughly $600 per man, woman, and child among the 1 billion inhabitants of the US, EU, Japan, CA, AU, and NZ. (Or OECD states, if you prefer, or G-7.)

Total media spend (print) is on the order of $200/year. Cable + broadband on the order of $1500 - $3000 per year (content and connectivity).

Seems to me there's some streamlining potential possible.

Piecework is actually a tremendous distraction.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...

i'm interested to know why you think information is a public good (implying free to access and consume). surely you can't actually believe that.

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.h...

http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...

J. Stiglitz's essay on p. 308.

> surely you can't actually believe that

Not the grandparent poster, but I would have preferred if you'd either ommitted this part or provided some justification for why you feel it isn't a ~~public~~ non-rivalrous good.

I am the GP poster.

Quite this.

I defined public information as having the property of: free access. I don't believe information inherently is public for the same reason I believe in privacy.

is there public information? sure. there's also private information.

"Public good" has a specific definition in an economic context.

The definition you are using is not that.

Charging money isn't a great solution as it's too complicated and fee-ridden to be of value to low income users.

P2P CDNs are one solution, but they aren't perfect either. They may be a lot easier to adopt than monetary roadblocks though.

In the future, a combination of mandatory P2P CDN participation and a monetary P2P CDN opt-out fee may be the best compromise. No ads, and everyone is actually helping host the website (be it through their own personal bandwidth and storage or through monetary means).

I don't see how charging money is any more complicated than serving ads. Couldn't you trivially implement this with a NEED_TIP header and some javascript on the website that makes sure the user has paid (there are plenty of ways to implement that).

Http status code 402 - payment required

For some types of site, hosting is a big portion of the cost. For others, content production is. For example, I doubt hosting fees are the real cost for most news organizations. It's likely a huge percentage of the cost for something like imgur.

Isn't this essentially the concept behind Brave?

The internet wasn't designed with a mechanism to force clients to pay hosts for server time, unfortunately.

> 450,000 cents is about 5 thousand a month.

Assume that one person works full time on it. $5,000 a month is $60,000 a year. Subtract hosting costs and it's a relatively low income for one person who has the skills necessary to build and administer such a web site.

> not too shabby

It is actually a little shabby.

>It is actually a little shabby.

Perhaps in many parts of the US, but plenty of places elsewhere in the world, this is a really attractive salary.

hosting 15,000 users a month is trivial for a forum use case. building a forum is also trivial. you can literally do the entire thing in 15 minutes (buy a domain, use cPanel, install phpBB, done). I think 5K a month is more than appropriate.

you're greatly overestimating the difficulty of setting up a forum and the costs to have 15,000 active accounts with 1 hour viewing time.

> hosting 15,000 users a month is trivial for a forum use case. building a forum is also trivial. you can literally do the entire thing in 15 minutes (buy a domain, use cPanel, install phpBB, done).

Given the above is true, I have a proposition for you: I will pay you whatever you consider fair payment for fifteen minutes of your time to set me up a web site with an income of $5,000 dollars a month.

What? I didn't say finding 15K users and getting them to pay a cent an hour was easy. I said setting up a website that can easily support 15K users is.

I've already provided instructions on how you can trivially setup a phpBB forum using cPanel.

> I've already provided instructions on how you can trivially setup a phpBB forum using cPanel.

This statement is incorrect. You haven't provided instructions on how one can trivially set up a phpBB forum using cPanel.

> I change my behavior to stop going to useless sites.

But how would you know if a site is useless or not unless you visit it and read its content? So you will be paying to view a site that you have never seen before, this will limit discoverability of new sites imo

under this scheme any smart website owner would allow certain amounts of usage to be for free, and optimize discoverability for things that are of high value, a win for both them and the viewer.

Which isn't really all that different from the paper magazine model.

Yeah, you might risk your five bucks on that first purchase of Time, but you'll know soon enough if you ever want to spend it again.

I don't want to pay money to read a website that I have never seen before.

> But how would you know if a site is useless or not unless you visit it and read its content?

Noscript identifies all the useless sites for me when nothing renders and I see that they're pulling in scripts from 20+ trackers, CDNs, and ad networks. I avoid violating any social contract by never having seen their dreck.

If you pay a small amount for each page load, then you start censoring many of your clicks. Also, websites would do any shady thing to keep you longer. Money are a large influence on everyone's behavior.

New browser Brave does something similar.

https://brave.com/publishers.html

What about an addon that participates in a BTC mining pool and expends dividends to websites you visit?

CPU/GPU mining of Bitcoin is a thing of the distant past.

We prototyped a JS version of that during a hack day, with the intent being that people could elect to donate some mining time to charity while using a client's website.

It worked, technically, but the return was basically zero.

That's too bad. It was always something I wanted to prototype but I had a feeling it just wouldn't be worth it. Do you have any statistics like average BTC produced per 8 hours of browsing or something?

I don't remember off-hand; it wasn't my team. I can dig them up if you'd like though, fire me an email at duncan@bayne.id.au. IIRC it worked out something like a few cents for our entire (sizable) user base.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com