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Comment by entropyie | Hacker News Reader

If I could rig my browser to pay 1 cent for every newspaper article I read, I would happily do so. The biggest issue with paying for news is that you are reduced to a small handful of sources. I would like to read a couple of articles from a hundred sources, not a hundred articles from one source. Not sure this platform solves the problem, but it would be a game changer if it did.

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My standard reply to this: https://github.com/pjc50/misc-personal.github.io/blob/master...

> If I could rig my browser to pay 1 cent for every newspaper article I read

Define "read". And "article". Should you get charged for every link preview you scroll past on Twitter? (see lawsuits! the publishers think you should, or at least that this is copyright infringement)

Can I build a page with one "article" plus one thousand hidden iframes each of which also contains a one-cent "article"?

Who polices fraud in this system? How much does it cost?

That link doesn't work.

It's pretty apt since the argument doesn't either[1].

[1]Taler requires explicit user action for payment, it's not like publishers can charge you for scrolling.

Not quite. GNU Taler's reference implementation requires explicit user consent for payment. But as GNU Taler is Free Software, you are free to modify the code on your system (and share your with others) to not require an explicit confirmation if you prefer that. Or even better, to add an option to do that on some "trusted" sites which you make configurable for each user via settings. I don't know if the risk is worth the UX improvement, but a key contribution of GNU Taler is that it is a Free Software payment system where you actually have the full four freedoms. Use them!

While what you say is completely valid, that doesn't save the original argument by pcj50 which was made up claims about the ability for scammer to drain your wallet. Of course you could build your own implementation that allows for such an attack, it is not a valid criticism of the project.

Indeed, I just wanted to point out that the "game changing" desire of entropyie to fully automate payments can still be done with GNU Taler. So you are right that the scammer in the default deployment won't succeed, but additionally entropyie could still totally get what entropyie wants as a feature on their own system (and conceivably make this reasonably secure, too).

> Can I build a page with one "article" plus one thousand hidden iframes each of which also contains a one-cent "article"?

It should be up to your user-agent (aka the browser) to implement your decision and protect you from scammers, just like it happens in the rest of scenarios.

Yeah, it's weird that no one ever made that model work. I think it was tried?

Flattr was a kind of a version of that (although billed as "donations"), and it recently shut down.

https://flattr.com/

I appreciate the "service no longer exists" page. But is there any official statement why flattr was closed down?

I tried to use flattr a few years back, but the UX was horrible and for something that needs to become ubiquitous to be useful, that's not the kind of mistake you can afford.

Take the Brave browser, swap their crypto wallet for this.

Yeah, I know of one example where idea was actually created and pitched to media outlets.

They did not like the idea. They very much more like the idea of owning the customer and keeping the customer paying subscriptions.

I also know of a media outlet which incentivizes customer to go from credit card payment to automated bank transfers, since credit cards expire every x years but the bank transfer goes on forever.

A long time ago, Mozilla had a prototype of this, but it never took up, in part because there was no standard for web payments. Then Brave claimed to be working on this, I don't know the status. I believe that Chrome had someone working on this, too, at some point, but the project vanished.

Not hard enough. The problem with this model is that it would be vendor agnostic and no one wants to be the "dumb pipe". Everyone wants to own the entire system, ergo, proprietary payment systems (Google/Apple/Samsung/Microsoft/... Pay).

I don't think that's contradictory though. You sign up for you "media smorgasboard" service, and pay for it however you pay for it.

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