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Comment by hightrix | Hacker News Reader

I would argue a nightmare for most.

Turning everything into a microtransaction / subscription is destroying what was good about the internet.

Advertising and all the anti-patterns it incentivizes are worse.If the payments are very low and frictionless this could be very good for the internet - as long as Cloudflare is only the first and not the only.

in no world is advertising worse. 0. none. you’re utterly delusional as the people pushing this are thinking anyone is going to pay for their garbage content behind 10cent micro transactions

> no world is advertising worse. 0. none. you’re utterly delusional as the people pushing this are thinking anyone is going to pay for their garbage content behind 10cent micro transactions

The current political situation we find ourselves in is partly due to the destruction of real journalism caused because people won’t pay for timely and accurate news. Advertising perverts incentives; I need you entertained - not informed - to make money…

o got it so journalism is dying because no one will pay for it - so your solution is to lock the entire internet behind a paywall so everything else can die to? or are you suggesting that charging people to read news is the solution to the problem of people not being willing to pay for news?

Journalism is losing to "free" "news" sites. Those need to produce cheap, clickbait slop to be able to function.

There is no Spotify for press so the only other good solution is having microtransactions - paying only for articles you want to see, from any provider you want. Currently you must subscribe even if you want to read single article so the very few that buy the press are usually limited to single news source.

yes, because they are free. and those sites will continue to win all of those people just like they do today. and paid journalism will keep losing, and in fact will suffer more. i pay subscriptions to news sites that i deem trustworthy and reliable and if anyone of them switch from a subscription model to this pay per api call scheme they will never see a dime from me again. so the net accomplishment here is an internet wide paywall and those who this was supposed to help are further hurt. best part is 1) this shit will never happen because its such an obviously terrible idea 2) we dont have to argue! see 1 - this will never happen but if by some miracle it does all i have to do is wait and say “told ya so” because the shitty outcome is 100% guaranteed

I agree with you, but the reality is...

>people won’t pay for timely and accurate news.

This won't be changed by forcing payments through API contracts or other microtransactions.

I don't pay for news today. I won't pay for news tomorrow. And so ads are the only way they will make money from me, even though I block them.

> I don't pay for news today. I won't pay for news tomorrow. And so ads are the only way they will make money from me, even though I block them.

So you're going to be the problem no matter what happens.

I block a lot of ads but I also pay monthly to a lot of creators through Patreon so I don't feel guilty about blocking ads on youtube. I also pay monthly for a few news sites but not most because I read an article or two at most there per year (lots of random links from friends ... etc, almost always to local / regional news).

Microtransactions are _exactly_ what those guys need. The "please give us $10/month!" banner on the regional news site is not worth it for me, they're loosing out because i'm not going to fiddle with adblocker for just this one visit. I'd pay $0.30 to support them and not be guilty about it.

Depends what you compare it to. If the alternative is buying a subscription to get past a paywall, it might be better?

Ads, especially personalized ads, are the alternative that powers much of the open internet.

More options are great.

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