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m82labs | 7 months ago

I want RSS with micropayments. I want to consume information in my own interface, and am willing to pay. I am not willing to pay for a full subscription to a publication when I only find a few articles a year that I want to read.

I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.

discuss

order

mbirth|7 months ago

Does somebody remember the service Flattr from a decade ago? You’d set a fixed amount to pay every month. Like a subscription.

Then, this amount got distributed between the sites you visited. If you only visited one site, they would get everything. 2 different websites = 50% each. And so on. This way there were no surprises in your monthly spending. I still see this as a pretty ideal model.

PaulHoule|7 months ago

There's that new thing CloudFlare has that lets you set a price for A.I. crawlers, maybe that could be used to set a price for anybody. If the price was reasonable at all I'd have my crawler pay it for maybe 300 articles a week.

NicuCalcea|7 months ago

Micropayments have been tried plenty of times and never succeeded. People say they'd be willing to pay, but they're not.

Crespyl|7 months ago

If it was trivial for me to spend 5 cents for a one off article that someone recommended me, I probably wouldn't mind it at all. Payment processor fees make that essentially impossible, requiring more thought and investment in systems like Flattr to group together the small payments.

We need to decouple online payment infrastructure from the duopoly/oligopoly of private corporations that control how and when users can exchange money online.

fragmede|7 months ago

They haven't been tried plenty of times, what are you talking about? It's been discussed since the dawn of the Internet and the ideas been around since forever, but actual attempts have been very limited in scope. The rails are there though, they're just not user friendly (http://micropayments.fyi).

rsingel|7 months ago

Unfortunately you aren't willing to pay enough.

Micro payments for journalism don't work