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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

> You kidding me? You're a complainer in search of an issue, there's nothing wrong with this. "Buying things on the internet" obviously works already, in the form of patreon, subscriptions, and digital purchases.

And I've used such services, yes. But this looks way too minimalistic to me to be useful.

On Patreon I subscribe to a specific artist. I know who they are and they can know me if we talk to each other. I can favorite posts, provide feedback, get perks, etc. When an artist says that for $10 I'll get access to their latest sketches that's a public announcement on Patreon, and if they don't hold up their promise, fans will get upset.

Here there's an obscure link. I don't know what I'm paying for, or who made it. I don't know whether it belongs to the actual person who's supposed to benefit. Somebody could pay for the first access, make their own link and then leech off the actual artist by spreading their link around.

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The artist can just have a webpage/blog/... where they would include such "paid links". That is, the audience still knows who they are and still builds some trust etc. But now they don't have to deal with setting up payment systems and account handling and billing and all that stuff. The value proposition of the OP service is to take care of all that and the artist can focus on their art instead. A per-click webshop, basically.

The issue is I as a scammer can create a paid link to any arbitrary URL, including your URL. There's no verification of control like how say LetsEncrypt works. As a user I'm taken to a link with no verification of what I might be paying for. There's no preview of the content or even a declaration of who might own rights to the linked content. So I get a link that says I need to pay $10, what the fuck am I paying for?

Even if I followed a link and expect to be paying, a scammer could also send me a link to the same content. I expected to pay through this site so I go ahead and pay for the content. Since I followed the scammer's link they get paid instead of the content owner.

This is a system just rife with abuse potential.

You don't seem to have addressed your parent's point. A creator can post a paidlink link on their own site. You already know they're not a scammer because you're part of their happy fanbase. So you trust the links they post will do what they say.

Of course you wouldn't just pay money for some random link you found on Google search.

> The issue is I as a scammer can create a paid link to any arbitrary URL, including your URL.

Sure, but that was a problem that already existed. People already sell other people's artworks / pictures / etc.. Having to copy a file rather than a link is not a significant barrier.

> Even if I followed a link and expect to be paying, a scammer could also send me a link to the same content. I expected to pay through this site so I go ahead and pay for the content. Since I followed the scammer's link they get paid instead of the content owner.

Presumably you're getting the link from somewhere reputable - the creator's own site, or their patreon/twitter/etc.. Sure, a scammer can create a fake profile to impersonate them - but again, that's something that already happens.

You can put a video behind DRM. You can screen record that video, but it's going to lose quality.

If it's a link, it's available to anyone if they have it

Theoretically you can. In practice I've never seen that done, and certainly anyone big enough to do that has their own store infrastructure already.

I’ve done it plenty. Got hours of live concerts that were live-streamed during the early part of the Pandemic. All screengrabbed with OBS.

I've watched DRM videos, couldn't do anything unless I logged in even after downloading it

Since it's something that already happens and it's a known issue, it's pretty ridiculous a brand new project doesn't have some mechanism in place to prevent it. Something as simple as a signed file at the site's root would let a content creator make paid links to their content but not a scammer.

It's not helped that there's no preview of the content or creator's site branding to give some indication of an intentional connection between the creator and paid link.

> Something as simple as a signed file at the site's root would let a content creator make paid links to their content but not a scammer.

How does anything like that help though? The scammer can download the file and host it themselves and you're right back where you started, and that's always going to be the case.

What happens when the URL inevitably starts 404ing would be my first question.

It would be a plus if paidlink.to actually made a call to the link before accepting payment, and put up a warning / stopped the transaction if it didn't get a 200, "We're sorry but thingyouwanted.com/enticing.html isn't currrently available, please try again later."

Wtf man?

First you claim this is useless, then, in this reply you claim that you've used similar services before. Make up your mind.

Yes, it's simplistic and ugly af. But don't attack the idea.

And, I guess, you got that link from somewhere, or rather from someone.

He said he used similar services to Patreon.

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