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Comment by CuriouslyC | Hacker News Reader

SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet. All of this is the result of advertising as a business model. For any content, the perverse incentive is to copy it repeatedly with slight variations then monetize the copies with ads and SEO your monetized version to the top of the search results.

What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph. This will be doubly important in the age of AI.

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Also, a pay-per-use Internet (where appropriate), where people will vote for content with their wallets, instead of having to purchase subscriptions whether they read an article or not.

Just a few minutes ago, I wanted to read an NYT article but it asked me to buy a $1/mo subscription. Very cheap, but a) I don't read NYT that regularly and b) doing that with every news outlet I occasionally read, adds up. On the other hand, if it had asked for $0.25 to read just that article, I might have paid it. I would have been even more likely to pay if there had been some service, possibly provided by the ISP itself, where all such microtransactions of mine are aggregated and billed once for me at the end of the month.

I've been saying this for a while. It doesn't even need to be that expensive either. Pay a penny to watch a YouTube video type of deal. It can be done through lightning network to avoid per transaction credit card fees which would probably otherwise make it too expensive. My biggest hangup is paying for something that quickly turns out to be crap. I guess people would learn pretty quickly and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.

I would love that. just a tip jar button on my browser that I load up with a few bucks every month, and send to websites or commenters who made me laugh or got me thinking. Streamers have proven (albeit crudely) that viewers are more than willing to part with their money (if they have it). And I'm not just hinting at salacious young women (who probably receive the bulk of the dollar value). There's a streamer team who broadcast live at LAX and other airports and get excited about the various air traffic. It's fun watching their dedication and passion, their broadcasting skills grow, and how happy they are to do what they enjoy. I've donated probably $200-$300 over the years to them.

I've literally read several articles today (mostly via HN) from which I have garnered enough value to pay at least $1 to each author. And I'd gladly pay it, as long as it's not a subscription and I don't have to enter my card details all over the place, or have my money charged as a large number of individual transactions.

Especially for micropayments. If I google and find a minor 1-liner that taught me something I'd deposit $0.10 or $0.25. If it was something I was struggling with for a long time - like some arcane tar or mt command to use my tape backup drive, I'd give at least a few $. These amounts add up quickly, and encourage a much more wholesome form of publishing.

This was kind of the theory of using Brave Browser to earn BAT through ads, and then set up an "auto-contribute" list that took your earned BAT and distributed a % that you set to each person. The adoption didn't exactly happen, especially with Brave's weirdness lately.

I like the idea of BAT but I just don't fully trust it.

> and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.

My problem with recommendation algorithms, at least YouTube's, is that by design they recommend things based on keywords and categories for videos you have watched previously. So what happens is that I get hooked on some new topic, say cave diving for example. And then I watch a whole bunch of cave diving videos ... until I get sick of cave diving and want something different. But because of my viewing patterns, my recommendations are FLOODED with cave diving videos that I don't care about anymore.

I don't know how to solve that problem. And it might even just be a "me" problem related to the way that my brain works.

Not just a "you" problem. I have to routinely reset my youtube history (I don't have time to prune it) to avoid stale recommendation. I have few interests, but every once in a while, I'm on a research spree or just want some new vibes, then my home view is ruined.

If they are not getting rid of the algorithm, it would make sense to let me manage the keywords that are driving it.

I really want the ability to easily create multiple persons/personalities like Netflix lets you do.

On Netflix I have a seperate "user" for asian movies so the main user is not flooded with recommendations for asian movies. Those 2 users have extremly different list of recommended movies.

When I watch a few "The girl is doing her homework" music movies on YouTube they quickly drown out everything else on the homepage. When I later watch a few "watch later" engineering movies, the music videos are drowned out and I then have difficulty finding more music videos. It's like starting over from scratch every time.

You can create new channels and use each them just for viewing, from the YouTube account page:

https://www.youtube.com/account

Works well to keep different viewing histories and commenting identities separated.

This is giving me PTSD from using old online services like Quantum Link on the C64 and having my parents freak out on me for racking up a huge bill.

Ted Nelson's vision (in "Dream Machines") was strongly focused on micro-transactions for this reason.

To “nickel and dime”¹ is usually seen as a bad thing; to intentionally build it into our information infrastructure would probably be a horrible idea.

1. <https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=nickel_and_dime&...>

There is this Dutch company called Blendle that started out with this idea, the NY times even invested in it. But unfortunately it was not a viable model, so they switched to a all you can consume type of subscription like every other platform

We had per-use systems. I remember when people would pay multiple £ for one (1) phone ringtone. I think Minitel may have been per-use metered as well? Either way, both were obliterated by the massive benefit of not paying per use.

> if it had asked for $0.25

The economics of credit-card transactions, unfortunately, make this fundamentally impossible.

I pay these tiny amounts by card all the time for public toilets, parking meters and the like.

And it's why, when paying like that, you're typically paying more than would have done in cash, or the amount is high enough to cover the extra transaction fees. That's definitely the case for most UK carpark operators - the minimum amounts you can specify online are always higher than the ones for cash, because of transaction fees.

You're probably also misjudging how tiny those amounts are. Vending machines, for example, nowadays don't really stock anything costing less than £0.50, if they take credit cards. Public toilets can often be £1 or £2.

This would have to be a "load up a wallet and 'pay'" sort of thing, where the website owner gets the money in aggregate minus a transaction fee when they request it.

I can't reply to the child directly due to nesting, so I'll do it here:

As far as I know, for in-person transactions ("contactless" in Europe) the economics work differently - for example SumUp quotes a flat fee of 1.69% plus a small one-time cost to buy and register the reader devices. That gets you parking meters, public toilets and the like.

However, for online credit card transactions (which are a very different risk profile, to be fair) there's a fixed cost of something like $0.20 per transaction on top of the percentage fee.

That is why, for example, substack has a minimum pricing tier of $5 for subscriptions, and why Patreon is "restructuring" because their original micropayments model wasn't breaking even.

So I agree with the parent poster that microtransactions _online_ are currently infeasible - not fundamentally impossible (Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Diners etc. could bring in a new pricing model) but it is impossible for even the NYT to set up a workable "pay $0.50 to read this artice" tier at the moment.

A kind of system where you micropay "on credit" and it's all billed once at the end of the month could, depending on the jurisdiction, make the service provider subject to regulation as a provider of financial services.

Can't a Medium-like model work -- where a third party aggregates all the credits and bills monthly?

I've wondered about that. Patreon used to group all of your subscriptions into one payment, but they've recently been going away from that. I can't understand why, the small $0.20 + % adds up for multiple transactions. But if you only have to pay the $0.20 once, it effectively gets distributed across all of your subscriptions. It baffles me why Patreon went away from the single subscription model.

NYT could easily setup such a system by asking you to top up your account by a bigger amount (say, the price of a monthly sub), but only charge you cents per read article

Reply to hliyan, since HN is not giving me a reply link for their post:

As far as I'm aware, a "medium-like" model works when all content you're paying for is "on the platform", this includes not just medium, but also substack, and a lot of streaming sites like twitch. There's one company involved, and one jurisdiction for settling any disputes.

Once the enities you're paying are corporations themselves - potentially based in different states - the picture becomes a lot messier; I would imagine that a system where both a reader in Germany and one in India can micropay per article for a combination of the NY Times, the Toronto Star and the South China Morning Post is beyond what current market dynamics can offer.

After all, Patreon was supposed to be the next step up from medium etc. albeit with content creators as individuals rather than corporations, and that's already struggling.

there is an ongoing initiative in EU (I think US has something similar brewing) called SEPA-Inst which in theory allows free transfers between bank accounts in the EuroZone. sadly, it still comes with a lot of caveats and not possible to guarantee it being free, depending on counterparty banks and potential FX charges.

https://www.quanloop.com/en/investing/are-sepa-payments-real...

it will be interesting to see if lightning/crypto etc. will continue to increase pressure to improve this capability in the traditional banking system - it would enable all sorts of new payment/pricing models for online services like discussed here.

i would love to be able to just make micro-payments for things i have found useful, regardless of what site they are on.

You just spent much more than $1 of your time arguing against spending a dollar. You would never spend 25 cents to read an article, don't fool yourself. If that was an option, you'd invent another reason not to pay. Oh, I need to fold my laundry, no time to read this article.

A social-first Internet makes sense but this is not going to be the way people do it. Let’s consider some models for rewarding content authors:

1. You are asked to pay before viewing the content. This incentivizes content owners to display clickbait titles but does not incentivize content quality. People will click through lots of interesting titles and have a hard time finding out the valuable ones.

2. You are asked to pay after viewing the content. This is similar to a donation - just look at the state of open-source software. Only a few geeks who understand the value of donation will pay.

3. You are asked to pay a subscription fee upfront, and the fee is split between all content owners that you did read. If you view YouTube, have you signed up for YouTube Premium? Why not? Do you trust YouTube not to hold your videos hostage and pay only a tiny bit of revenue to uploaders?

(I know it's bad HN to put two replies to a comment, but I found my prepared argument: The Problem With MicroPayments is MicroFraud)

Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:

    pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?

    so do you give refunds a la steam?

    pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying

    pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?

    pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)

    pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off

    pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?

    pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?

Part 2: business model problems!

    getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods

    nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%

    winner-take-all effects are very strong

    Play store et al already exist, why not use that?

    Free substitute goods are just a click away

    Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is

    No real consumer demand for micropayments

=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero

    existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money

    friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned

    first most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)

    Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.

    accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?

> What we need is a social-first internet

* blood pressure intensifies *

> where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph

I do think that latter part is an interesting idea, modulo performance questions and echo-chamber concerns. Also, what about providing anonymity to oppressed peoples?

Perhaps for my last point above, we could have bifurcated services, where the user explicitly knows if they are operating in verified space or anon space.

The idea of a social first internet is that each person would maintain their own trust graph, rather than relying exclusively on centralized authorities to do so. It's a lot easier to game google than to try and astroturf the entire internet, and it's harder for google to quickly tweak ranking algorithms to fix some bad results than it is to revoke trust in the social graph from a bad actor.

I think professional trolls, bad faith argument, toxic influencers, lynch mobs, rage bait, and all the other moving parts that make up the Internet’s profoundly toxic political and social activism sphere also did their part. That stuff really exploded in the mid 20-teens.

Of course you could consider some of that a special case of content mills and spam. It certainly can’t be separated from the ad based business model and the attention maximizing algorithms that drive it, since most of that stuff rides on the fact that being crazy or toxic maximizes engagement.

I wonder if all the toxicity is just a reflection of people's state of mind. Just seems to be a lot more anger and sadness online in the late 2010s early 2020s than there ever was before.

There just seems to be a lot of lonely and depressed people out there, and unfortunately they often time they seem to congregate to wallow in each other's depressive thought loops. It's hard enough to escape from the gravity well of depression when you're alone in reinforcing the darkness. Can't even imagine what getting stuck into one of those quagmires might be like.

They were always there, but the impetus for frictionless experiences to drive revenue also removed all the barriers and effort to congregating and often exploiting those people.

It was there on Usenet, it's been there since people were scratching messages on bathroom stalls and subway walls.

But yes, now we have effectively created cult generators and not only does no one want to turn them off, really smart people (even many with good intentions) keep making them more efficient.

When the internet was young, i thought the comments sections were going to leave us confronted with our own shadow selves. I pictured a utopia where we saw that raw honesty and all became a bit more accepting of our own inner critics, shadows, golden shadows and the like.

In retrospect, I was naive. Just because we see something our shadow wrote next to our handle doesn't mean we recognize that as ourselves. If anything, we're shadow projecting much harder than ever.

You're not the only one :)

Two causes spring to mind:

Covid lockdowns - people actually were lonely for a long period.

The decline of traditional news media - more extreme headlines are essential for more money to appear.

This has been going on far longer than Covid though, but it sure didn't do anyone's mental health any favors.

To be honest, i do not think the internet invented that. There are parts of the world, were lynch mobs still are considered justice. Were face is more important than facts. To generate a healthy eco-system, for a unhealthy human species.. thats quite the challenge.

> SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet.

Right, so how do we fix it? I'm wondering if uBlacklist has a place here (a tool to block domains from search results) -- it would be interesting to see if we could all come together and contribute to a database of SEO farm / junk websites to improve search results.

My idea: Align ads to the viewer's self-actualization. I had chatgpt write me a full business plan for it a while back, shameless plug: https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos/post/making-advertisin...

Doesn't this just assume that ad domains are some scarce resource? Ada can be served from a GUID domain just as effectively.

It does not -- it follows the same concept as an adblock list, just being used for a different purpose.

As an example, EasyList includes a lot of GUID domains[0].

[0]: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/blob/master/easylist/ea...

> Right, so how do we fix it?

By paying for content you consume, so that there will be no money in SEO, content farms and click mills.

Destroy spyvertising ads by making the business model illegal, so don't-care-where-my-ad-is-hosted ad networks die. Non-spying ads on sites that naturally draw lots of real eyeballs will still be a thing, which is fine. Actually-free sites, open source, and open protocols, would all see more interest and development in such a world, filling in most of the gaps people worry about from the death of shitty-ads.

This.

SEO has become a real current day Paperclip Apocalypse, just through ads instead of paperclips. And to think we’ve barely introduced AI to it yet!

Google's been using ML in ads long before LLMs were invented.

You need that. I like the internet as it is.

> What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph. This will be doubly important in the age of AI.

Isn't that what the social networks are, internally?

I agree that attention/engagement farming is a major driver for the web's enshittification. I don't think content attribution and verified identities are the solution.

Two(ish) key features of the earlier phases of the web that seem relevant to me were:

- most content wasn't profit driven

- social interaction was not gamified, was slower and was often siloed/themed

Trending, dog-piling, attention-economy hacks were all greatly limited.

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