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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

It makes me so angry that Scroll died for this.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22417852/twitter-buying-sc...

Me too. I absolutely loved Scroll's idea - subscribe to a whole bunch of sites and have your money split between them, depending on how much you read them.

It's a shame to have them be bought out just to be closed down.

Brave browser does something similar with its attention tokens, which by default get allocated* depending on your time split between sites.

*provided the site supports it, unsure what the process for that is. Some really weird ones do, like specific Youtube channels, The Guardian, or some GitHub users.

Scroll wasn't locked into a particular browser, didn't use a pointless crypto scheme, and actively sought partners instead of opting sites in against their will.

I wasn't aware of the business model, merely that it's conceptually similar, if a bit "web 3.0" in implementation. Not sure it's any worse than browsing with an ad blocker, in which case the websites get 0 revenue, crypto or otherwise.

That's actually the reason I'm principally against using brave: they were accepting token payment on behalf of unsuspecting content creators without their consent. [1]

I don't know if that rises to the level of fraud legally speaking, but morally it's very sketchy. I don't want to associate myself with that and I don't trust them.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/https://twitter.c... Tom Scott on his experience. He makes a good point on potential GDPR compliance issues as well.

Fair enough, I am not advocating for that project, but it is close in spirit to what was described in the parent comment.

Aside from that, I personally do not see the issue with being able to opt into automatic crypto payments for browsing time, vs seeing nothing at all from the same. The default behaviour for unverified creators is that it goes into some internal pool for marketing, which is a bit sketchy though yeah.

Could Scroll be redone as a new startup?

Apple News+ is kinda similar. You get a whole bunch of free news and pay one monthly bill, instead of dozens of bills. I like it so far. I don't know how they compensate the publishers, but I hope they get a reasonable cut.

Today I learned about Apple News

Available in like 2 countries

Apple News has mostly low-quality publishers on board. $12.99 or whatever they charge isn't going to get you access to publications that cost $20/mo. on their own.

They have WSJ, Newsweek, Miami Herald, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle. The main one they don't have (and probably won't ever have) is NY Times.

The other major downside is it's only available on Apple devices (of course).

WSJ does not send everything to Apple News.

Only a small proportion of WSJ articles are available via Apple News.

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