100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by galaxyLogic on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @03:21AM (#21003066)

I often hit the free limit on say articles on New York Times and similar sites. After seeing the article title I am often interested enough to click on it to read it. But the count of free articles is full so I can't read the article. Now if it said "If you want to read this article there will be $0.50 charge in your next month's internet bill, I would probably go ahead and click and pay it in the next bill.

Problem is I don't want to open an account with just every possible newspaper and magazine on the web. What is needed is some common mechanism for most if not all content providers.

Maybe $0.50 is too much. Maybe $0.25 would be more like ok.

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Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by jfim on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @08:14AM (#21004500)

Your point about having a single account is correct, but the sheer amount of decisions when browsing the web would quickly become overwhelming.

Say that in an hour you browse two articles from the NYT, one from the WSJ, five Wikipedia pages, one click on a BuzzFeed listicle, and one blog post from Joe's blog.

Is the NYT article worth $0.50? $0.25? What about the WSJ one? And surely Wikipedia is worth as much as a NYT article. But the BuzzFeed one is definitely worth less. Maybe $0.05? It was moderately entertaining after all. And what about Joe's blog?

Having to do dozens of these micro decisions per hour is exhausting, and is the whole point behind having a system that allocates funding automatically. It's not optimal, but it avoids decision fatigue.

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Re:100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web by galaxyLogic on Thursday September 19, 2019 @11:14PM (#21023024)

I'n thinking that the content-provider obviously would set the price, I would decide whether to click if it is 25 or fifty cents.

I don'think it would be more exhausting than being in a bar and putting coins into the jukebox.

Automatic funding sounds interesting, was it explained in the article somewhere? Or is the point that we should use 100 million to develop a working automatic funding algorithm since no such thing exists yet?

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