A bunch of news sites try that, but every link to them on HN (an Internet tech community you'd think would have a lot of people especially sympathetic to merit-based monetization of digital content) quickly gets a comment with a piracy link.
My theory is that if there was a way to frictionlessly pay, say, $0.02 to access a piece of content ad-free, most people would be pretty okay with it. They key part is making the transaction frictionless - no more than 1-click/1000ms.
I really liked it. A view Blogs, Podcasts and the KeePass-Homepage had it. Then they sold to Chines investors and pivoted to god knows what.
Including some way to keep that from marginalizing people in the current very inequitable capitalist environment.
A non-technical challenge is that you'd need someone to lead this in good faith, and they'd need both principles and clout. The first 5 candidates I thought of just now seemed much better candidates in the past, than currently.
I feel this is a business negotiation instead of a tech issue. But then I may be just clueless.
People who don't believe this are probably biased because they are Alice.
Don't be Alice.
When challenged, rationalizations might come out.
Circumstantial evidence of this is that we really don't see a lot of clear altruistic looking towards human progress... on other topics.
If we mostly only talk about principled stands when it happens to be very convenient in a selfish way, the selfish way seems a more likely explanation.
If there were a way to give two cents for each article I read, I'd do that, but there isn't.
I don't ever read one single thing, but I read an article or two from countless of services.
That modern society is structured around protecting Alice rather than protecting Bob and helping him free the 0s and 1s is simply a side effect of this, and an extremely unfortunate, progress-stalling one... the kind where you seriously contemplate going back in a time-machine to fix whatever went wrong to make us end up with.. this...
I agree, it's so weird that people who devote time, effort, and resources to the production of articles or books somehow think they're entitled to be compensated for the use of those products! What a bizarre belief! I mean, obviously they should just give them away for free. Not like they need money to survive or anything. They can just go on food stamps and live under a bridge or something.
As a creative person currently making an obscenely high amount of money doing rust development (north of $350k/yr), I'd happily throw all of that away to just be able to work on my open source projects in perpetuity if I could trust that society will take care of me, forever, in exchange. In fact, playing this whole capitalism game is a huge waste of my time and energy that I'd much rather spend making creative works without worrying about how I'll monetize them.
As someone who makes creative works, I don't _want_ to have to charge people to use/access/enjoy them.
We finally invent a thing (the Internet) that will let us share knowledge for free, and one of the first things that happens is a bunch of lawyers invent more work and job security for themselves by creating this fantasy notion that you can have Imaginary Property and they call it "Intellectual Property" so it's not immediately obvious how ridiculously selfish and society-retarding it is.
We live in a world of actual scarcity and they invented some artificial scarcity to benefit themselves exclusively, then immediately funded a bunch of bribery^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbying to make it illegal to share information for free.
>As someone who makes creative works, I don't _want_ to have to charge people to use/access/enjoy them.
Same here. I self published some stories on amazon and they won't let me charge less than a dollar for them, or I would. I'm infinitely more interested in people enjoying them than profiting from it. In fact, I found that they almost immediately ended up in some pirated torrent and was like, "How cool is that? Somebody thought it was worth pirating."
This notion that creative types won't create without financial incentive seems to come from lawyers, not creative types.
I think your narrative has gotten the relation between the invention of the internet and the creation of the subcategory of intangible personal property known as “intellectual property” very, very wrong.
Like, intellectual property is older than the USA and the internet is... not.
I happily pay for Youtube Premium so that I can listen to whatever music I want anytime. Spotify and other services are fungible with that. I sort of happily pay for Netflix, but their catalog is shrinking. I would happily pay a subscription for access to all or at least ~99% of newspapers.
Whatever music did right (ASCAP, BMI) isn't perfect but it's miles ahead of the trash subscription schemes anywhere else.
Yeah this is a super good idea. I would pay $5 a lot of the time to access these just so I don't have to deal. Would have to accept paypal and I'd do it.
No. Get out of my search results.
Pinterest, for example, should NEVER appear in my links or search results. If the New York Times wants to appear in my search results, then that article should be free otherwise GTFO.
Google used to heavily penalize sites that pulled this trick, but then gave in because it interefered with their ad revenue.
Seems strange that the bots are allowed to read content for free, while the humans can't, but also the humans shouldn't read the bot's reposting of the content for free.
It seems to me that if they really don't want humans reading things for free, they shouldn't give it away to the (human owned, operated, and designed) bots.
okay... so they're piracy links is what you're saying?