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Comment by somebodythere | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine the situation has gotten better. How many pieces of web content does a person view in a typical day? 50? 100? Imagine making fifty purchase decisions every day. I think anyone would be exhausted.

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Well, to be fair, Ted Nelson designed Xanadu so that everything would be automatic. The design called for everyone to have a single verified identity linked to their payment information, and they could both make and receive payments with automatically. If you copied and pasted (or transcluded, rather) content from one document to another, the authorship information would go with it (assuming that nobody cheated), and your viewers would pay both you and that other author when they viewed the resulting document.

I don’t think it would really work, but it wouldn’t be exhausting either. You wouldn’t have to put in your credit card number and address every time you viewed a document.

The payment friction can be taken away, but before every link I click, I would still be thinking to myself: "Is what I'm about to read worth ten cents?"

The worst part is, this model would incentivize clickbait even more.

This is precisely the problem. I subscribed to some sort of a pay-per-article newspaper site some time ago, and the idea of paying 8-17c per article made me fear committing to reading anything. I ended up dropping it.

Really, "micro" payments are not micro at all! "Micro" should mean a thousandth of a dollar at most, with the assumption that volume will make up for the profit.

Definitely. No one would read replies to their own comments either, because they would have to pay back the money they earned when their interlocuter read their comment.

A pay for access to content model would really only work if it were frictionless. If you have to decide before you read, people would simply say no. If you pay after you read, people would probably say no, too.

On the other hand, in the before times, people paid by the minute to a network provider (such as Compuserve, Genie, AOL, etc) as well as to their phone company to get online. I might consider paying per minute to access some high quality journalism... But then again, probably not, I'm cheap.

As a kid, I was very active on Prodigy's message boards. I remember when they added a per-hour charge to access them. It absolutely wiped the boards out; trying to charge for something people have been getting for free, even "free", doesn't fly.

If it was sufficiently cheap, perhaps 1 cent per view, you wouldn’t really have to think about it.

It has to be cheaper than that, thousandths of a dollar at most. A single dollar should last me a long while when I'm out binging for content.

Spotify is about a third of a cent per stream... and aggregated so you don't have to think about it.

When I go to a supermarket, I easily make 50 purchase decisions.

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