It’s strange. Part of me thinks this is a great idea, but some of the websites are also the worst offenders of what the site is trying to combat. Looking at Gizmodo and the verge, the crazy amount of 3rd party cookies, unable to really opt out at all. While writing pieces about how horrible google and Facebook are for all the privacy evasive stuff they are doing. I’d rather support content that aim for quality and differ it kind of business model then rewarding some of these sites for being so horrible that this service is even needed. Like https://decorrespondent.nl/ or specific patreons
CEO of Scroll here. Glad you're a fan of The Correspondent, we love them too. Also hear you on the privacy concerns. The publisher contracts with Scroll require that they remove third-party trackers 'that share information with parties other than Publisher or have a commercial purpose other than improving user experience.'
It's always going to be a negotiation when you're trying to work with sites rather than unilaterally act against them, but we're genuinely trying to get them to a place where they're living up to the privacy promise that a consumer would want.
You're being lenient. All of these websites either have crazy amount of trackers, actively engage in accusing others of what they're doing, or just write clickbait articles with little substance.
You may not get ads but everything you do in the sites is sold. Why would I pay for this?
I've said it before but verge is long form and sophisticated tabloid with sensational articles and a deliberate attempt to go against the consensus or prevailing view, only to come across as edgy.
I used to use a similar service called Blendle. It, too, promised ad-free news. But even though I have lots of credit in my account, I stopped using it for three reasons:
1. It had a very limited number of publications available.
2. You couldn't just read a whole publication. You could only read a selected few articles from each publication. And the curation of those showed clear political bias on the part of the curators.
3. Blendle sends out a weekly newsletter with a list of the stories it thinks are the best. It also presented a clearly one-sided view of the world and the stories available from the Blendle publications, accompanied by a TON of editorializing on the part of the newsletter authors.
Instead, I subscribe to several newspapers both in electronic and dead tree editions. I don't mind paying for news. But I want to make up my own mind about the news, and not be force-fed one ideology by a gatekeeper.
Back on topic: I hope that Scroll does better than Blendle. Looking at its list of publications, I only see two that I would read, and only one regularly. If Scroll expands to more interesting content, I'll get on board.
I also was excited by the promise of Blendle and stopped using it, but for different reasons to you: the main way i consume news is by finding links to articles on twitter and reddit. with blendle, those links didn't take me to the "blendle version" of the article, but to the paywalled version, and there was no easy way to jump from the paywalled version to the blendle version. To see an article on blendle, i'd have to go out of my way to find it on blendle, and their browsing experience wasn't especially great.
Scroll looks really nice because you don't have to access the content through scroll. You're still on the original source, and you get the benefits of your Scroll subscription no matter how you found the article.
The downside here is that because Scroll isn't re-hosting the content, you're stuck reading it on the generally awful websites of the original publishers, which are only made marginally better by the lack of ads and trackers.
Would be great to hear more about what newspapers and magazines you’re subscribed to. I am in the same boat and much prefer subscriptions to quality journalism instead of untenable options like paying by the article or installing ad-blockers. The former just incentivizes the same crappy journalism as ads, and the latter is disingenuous.
A fascinating area. I've seen several people getting into it in one way or another:
Blendle
The system in the Brave browser
Scroll
...
What I really want is:
1. A friction free way to pay what I want AFTER I've read an article (I assume a base level fee to read it in the first place) so that I can reward an excellent article. I want to know that that money goes to those who made that article not all the other people at the "publication".
2. Coverage of many good articles and publications, so that I can get most anything I want.
3. Excellent search that suits me. (Would be great bonus to have a mechanism to automatically hook me up to a rewardable version.)
4. No attempted surveillance at all. (I block much of it but hate that people try this nonsense, and I note that they do, if they're really objectionable I block them permanently at the DNS. Newspapers and magazines tend to be the worst offenders of all.)
Friction-less payments is unfortunately an issue that seems unsolvable on the 'banks' end. There's no easy way for you to just one-click take care of a payment, and for good reason. I do wish it wasn't as friction-full as it is right now, and there are initiatives by alternative banks to make that happen (direct API connectivity for small payments etc., although seems like the new EU standards will turn that into a pipe dream); no standards to my knowledge, however.
> 1. A friction free way to pay what I want AFTER I've read an article (I assume a base level fee to read it in the first place) so that I can reward an excellent article. I want to know that that money goes to those who made that article not all the other people at the "publication".
Sounds like a great way to lose more publications.
How far do you think we could get with merely a friction-free method to pay a small fee to read individual articles across a broad range of publications?
I'd be concerned that if pay-per-view articles became the norm, clickbaiting would only intensify. I suppose the countervailing force would be source reputation.
It seems that the OP linked to the /sites page, rather than the landing/home page. Can this be corrected? The linked page is pretty bare and has almost zero information.
I think it's a compelling and feasible solution to the news site monetization problem. It just seems difficult to imagine users flocking to something like this away from ad blockers—which improve daily (and are mostly free).
There's been a bunch of similar initiatives, albeit more typically aggregating via a single app (Inkl, Pressreader etc). I've tried some in the past because I'd like to pay for news, but consider site subscriptions as deeply hostile to the www per se. But they all end up with the same problem - great early hope of accumulating more sources over time, which then doesn't happen.
Standardised micropayments are the obvious answer, but it seems to be a ship that's sailed.
Yeah I don't see the appeal here. I do however. see value in a service like this that would allow accessing paid content from multiple news sites - like a netflix or spotify of paywalled news. I still don't think I'd buy it unless I was flush with cash, but I think more people would be interested in that.
I was really excited about Scroll when I first heard about it, but after I looked into it more I lost almost all interest. I was looking at it almost a month ago, so it may have changed a bit since then, but at the time, the main things were that:
1. Even though almost all of the material about Scroll says "300+ sites supported", it's actually about 30 sites, mostly from the same few networks, and 304 "SBNation blogs". This was the list of domains initially supported: https://gist.github.com/archon810/b4ec827d5fbe9e22a43ad39ca2... (and I broke down that list by owner here, if anyone's interested in that: https://tild.es/lc6#comment-4ij7)
So if it's a site that's supported by Scroll that also has a paywall (like The Atlantic), you're expected to both subscribe to the site and Scroll to get a "clean" experience. It's also notable that even though the New York Times is one of the main investors in Scroll, they apparently don't currently intend to support it themselves (mentioned here: https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/revolutionary-a-h...).
Why pay for the atlantic and pay for scroll when you can just pay for atlantic, or not, and read their RSS feed however you like w/o ads?
I don't know who the target audience of this product could be. There's probably 40 people on earth who fall in the venn diagram of not knowing about ad blockers, not knowing about RSS feeds, and willing to seek out a service like scroll for their 30-odd supported websites.
The problem with Scroll is we trade one evil for another: instead of ads and trackers, we get legally dubious "AS IS" clauses in Terms of Service, and censorship-laden arbitration clauses that cannot be subject to oversight.
CEO of Scroll here. It's really helpful to get this feedback, if we were to try and fuck people over through opaque moves hidden in our terms we'd lose half our business overnight and everyone here would quit.
Either way, I totally hear you on this stuff, first thing on the list is building members even more privacy/data controls so that if for any reason you think you don't trust us anymore, you can make sure that you're protected.
From there, making sure we can iterate on our Terms to make sure they live up to the best of what our members want is going to be key. We've been launched for less than a month so keep the feedback coming.
I use scroll as a way to read USA Today ad-free. Their content is pretty good. I also read Vox, The Atlantic, and Verge sometimes. It's nice to not have ads on these sites.
We tried this before and failed. It was a browser-extension called Sterling that would block ads on every site with a monthly subscription. Payment to sites would be based on the ratio of time spent across domains.
The problem isn't technical, it's that people just don't want to pay for general content. They might accept subs for netflix or spotify or specific newspapers but paying for "the internet" is still an unknown and unaccepted model. Until that changes, no amount of new apps are going to fix this.
And Readability and Blendle and Contenture and several Google things and I've lost count.
Disclosure: I had the same basic idea and I have a patent on a small problem related to it (reliably tracking visits, allowing paywall passage without revealing user identity, without box-stuffing by either readers or publishers).
I really wish they'd get rid of that persistent Scroll banner on every page where the service is active. I'm not going to pay for a service to get rid of ads just to see a different ad.
And no, the ability to share to social media isn't a "useful" service.
I realize they need a way to remind users that Scroll is active, but there needs to be a much less intrusive way to do it, or else they're defeating the purpose of the product.
CEO of Scroll here. yep, it's super annoying and we're changing it to be way less so. Should be rolling out early this coming week, so let me know what you think.
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of stuff to change as we learn, so please keep the feedback coming.
There's an unfortunate lack of what I consider "real" news (I realize the definition is subjective), such as NYT, WP, Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera, RT etc. I'd never pay for a subscription of "news" that doesn't cover my basic need of actual news.
And just to cover my bases here, by "real" news I don't mean that they are "unbiased". I just mean sources that will give me actual, interesting reports about things happening in the world. As long as there is a baseline, I'm happy to filter what I believe on my own as long as the sender is clear.
I'm also skeptical as to why a paid service selling news would include things like The Onion. I appreciate them as much as anyone but I don't want it in my "news" feed.
Off the shelf solution is just pulling you favorite news website's RSS feed and running it through a full text filtering service, if the publication don't already give you the full text feed from the get go.
50% of the websites listed are click-bait garbage, content free, or rewritten wire stories. Hope they go bankrupt and learn that the internet is not a copy paste and charge money machine.
I was thinking about doing something like this a year or two ago, but the cross-domain cookie landscape is making the idea less workable.
Also how much people hate paying for things. I recently went on a short rant about how I've never seen anyone with a paid version of Sublime Text. A lot of its users are professional software engineers should either be able to afford it or work for a company that can, and engineers that should have empathy for someone trying to make money off software
Well, I'm the one with paid version of Sublime Text. And a subscription to Bloomberg . I'm not going to disprove your point, but not all of us are overly greedy )
I wish there was a Google News replacement that only lists news sites that are focused on privacy and do not have those stupid turn off your AdBlocker messages.
There is a ton of news sites out there that need an audience. They can make their money through sponsorships and non-invasive ads. You don't have to make millions off of your news site .. maybe off a few you can.
I've been wanting someone to do this idea (spotify for news) for years. But they really need to get one of the heavy hitters with paywalls (NY Times, The Economist, Financial Times, WaPo, or WSJ).
But maybe it's worth paying just to show publishers that it's viable. It's a rough chicken/egg problem.
I had to whitelist Scroll in my DNS-level ad and tracker blocking (nextdns), but that works fine. I assume you can whitelist in Chrome or whatever else as well.
winkelwagen|6 years ago
arctictony|6 years ago
It's always going to be a negotiation when you're trying to work with sites rather than unilaterally act against them, but we're genuinely trying to get them to a place where they're living up to the privacy promise that a consumer would want.
twitch-chat|6 years ago
You may not get ads but everything you do in the sites is sold. Why would I pay for this?
animalnewbie|6 years ago
LeoPanthera|6 years ago
So I'm unsure about the incentives going on here. Make your site even worse for normal visitors to incentivize paying up to "fix" it?
Seems pretty gross.
reaperducer|6 years ago
1. It had a very limited number of publications available.
2. You couldn't just read a whole publication. You could only read a selected few articles from each publication. And the curation of those showed clear political bias on the part of the curators.
3. Blendle sends out a weekly newsletter with a list of the stories it thinks are the best. It also presented a clearly one-sided view of the world and the stories available from the Blendle publications, accompanied by a TON of editorializing on the part of the newsletter authors.
Instead, I subscribe to several newspapers both in electronic and dead tree editions. I don't mind paying for news. But I want to make up my own mind about the news, and not be force-fed one ideology by a gatekeeper.
Back on topic: I hope that Scroll does better than Blendle. Looking at its list of publications, I only see two that I would read, and only one regularly. If Scroll expands to more interesting content, I'll get on board.
notatoad|6 years ago
Scroll looks really nice because you don't have to access the content through scroll. You're still on the original source, and you get the benefits of your Scroll subscription no matter how you found the article.
The downside here is that because Scroll isn't re-hosting the content, you're stuck reading it on the generally awful websites of the original publishers, which are only made marginally better by the lack of ads and trackers.
gargs|6 years ago
I am subscribed to the FT, Guardian online.
MikeGale|6 years ago
Blendle
The system in the Brave browser
Scroll
...
What I really want is:
1. A friction free way to pay what I want AFTER I've read an article (I assume a base level fee to read it in the first place) so that I can reward an excellent article. I want to know that that money goes to those who made that article not all the other people at the "publication".
2. Coverage of many good articles and publications, so that I can get most anything I want.
3. Excellent search that suits me. (Would be great bonus to have a mechanism to automatically hook me up to a rewardable version.)
4. No attempted surveillance at all. (I block much of it but hate that people try this nonsense, and I note that they do, if they're really objectionable I block them permanently at the DNS. Newspapers and magazines tend to be the worst offenders of all.)
grenoire|6 years ago
SrslyJosh|6 years ago
Sounds like a great way to lose more publications.
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
lambdatronics|6 years ago
I'd be concerned that if pay-per-view articles became the norm, clickbaiting would only intensify. I suppose the countervailing force would be source reputation.
gruez|6 years ago
lolc|6 years ago
WritelyDesigned|6 years ago
crispinb|6 years ago
Standardised micropayments are the obvious answer, but it seems to be a ship that's sailed.
slashdev|6 years ago
_ps6d|6 years ago
1. Even though almost all of the material about Scroll says "300+ sites supported", it's actually about 30 sites, mostly from the same few networks, and 304 "SBNation blogs". This was the list of domains initially supported: https://gist.github.com/archon810/b4ec827d5fbe9e22a43ad39ca2... (and I broke down that list by owner here, if anyone's interested in that: https://tild.es/lc6#comment-4ij7)
2. Scroll does not get you past paywalls: https://intercom.help/scroll/en/articles/3344875-does-scroll...
So if it's a site that's supported by Scroll that also has a paywall (like The Atlantic), you're expected to both subscribe to the site and Scroll to get a "clean" experience. It's also notable that even though the New York Times is one of the main investors in Scroll, they apparently don't currently intend to support it themselves (mentioned here: https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/revolutionary-a-h...).
asdff|6 years ago
I don't know who the target audience of this product could be. There's probably 40 people on earth who fall in the venn diagram of not knowing about ad blockers, not knowing about RSS feeds, and willing to seek out a service like scroll for their 30-odd supported websites.
TrinaryWorksToo|6 years ago
arctictony|6 years ago
Either way, I totally hear you on this stuff, first thing on the list is building members even more privacy/data controls so that if for any reason you think you don't trust us anymore, you can make sure that you're protected.
From there, making sure we can iterate on our Terms to make sure they live up to the best of what our members want is going to be key. We've been launched for less than a month so keep the feedback coming.
ericd|6 years ago
jarrell_mark|6 years ago
asdff|6 years ago
manigandham|6 years ago
The problem isn't technical, it's that people just don't want to pay for general content. They might accept subs for netflix or spotify or specific newspapers but paying for "the internet" is still an unknown and unaccepted model. Until that changes, no amount of new apps are going to fix this.
jacques_chester|6 years ago
Disclosure: I had the same basic idea and I have a patent on a small problem related to it (reliably tracking visits, allowing paywall passage without revealing user identity, without box-stuffing by either readers or publishers).
Wowfunhappy|6 years ago
And no, the ability to share to social media isn't a "useful" service.
I realize they need a way to remind users that Scroll is active, but there needs to be a much less intrusive way to do it, or else they're defeating the purpose of the product.
arctictony|6 years ago
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of stuff to change as we learn, so please keep the feedback coming.
hnarn|6 years ago
And just to cover my bases here, by "real" news I don't mean that they are "unbiased". I just mean sources that will give me actual, interesting reports about things happening in the world. As long as there is a baseline, I'm happy to filter what I believe on my own as long as the sender is clear.
I'm also skeptical as to why a paid service selling news would include things like The Onion. I appreciate them as much as anyone but I don't want it in my "news" feed.
asdff|6 years ago
mike50|6 years ago
dannyw|6 years ago
dehrmann|6 years ago
Also how much people hate paying for things. I recently went on a short rant about how I've never seen anyone with a paid version of Sublime Text. A lot of its users are professional software engineers should either be able to afford it or work for a company that can, and engineers that should have empathy for someone trying to make money off software
YarickR2|6 years ago
paul7986|6 years ago
There is a ton of news sites out there that need an audience. They can make their money through sponsorships and non-invasive ads. You don't have to make millions off of your news site .. maybe off a few you can.
bratao|6 years ago
ericd|6 years ago
But maybe it's worth paying just to show publishers that it's viable. It's a rough chicken/egg problem.
eh78ssxv2f|6 years ago
freeAgent|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
wiradikusuma|6 years ago
layoutIfNeeded|6 years ago
Tepix|6 years ago
On the other hand they bill you based on the percentage of the time you spend on each individual partner site. That seems somewhat contradictory.
hhjj|6 years ago
dmje|6 years ago
dylz|6 years ago
surround|6 years ago
Crazyontap|6 years ago
jackdh|6 years ago
tonymet|6 years ago
sys_64738|6 years ago
saagarjha|6 years ago
LeoNatan25|6 years ago