> it kept fluctuating colors from heavy green to purple
"We put green and purple in great barrel [...]. We reach in, we take." [1]
"Rules change... caught up in committee." [2]
Trust thing: the site is likely to still spy on you even if you're a paid subscriber. Even if they drop ads they'll send your data to google or some other analytics provider, at the least. They'll "accidentaly reset" your email preferences. Plus other shenanigans *.
Infrequency thing: I won't subscribe to $SOME_SITE just because it's linked on HN a couple times per year.
* friend of mine said he's tempted to subscribe to the economist online. I pointed out that they need to call or talk to a rep over live chat to cancel. Friend stopped mentioning subscribing to the economist.
That said, yeah-no one can reasonably afford the constant “I just want to read this one linked article twice a year on your local community news” turning into “subscribe for $120 a year after $1 for your first month”, and we really need some middle ground.
Unfortunately, people have an aversion-a hard aversion-to anything that’s not “zero” or “fixed”. I discovered it with Kagi, for example-despite whatever number of searches you find yourself actually running, having only “x per month” means you have to think about it, until you’re just like “pay the unlimited price and put the cost of thinking about it on them”.
Maybe with news the best way would be some kind of micro transaction, but all attempts so far have failed…
It's hard. I wouldn't pay a subscription to a micro transaction middle man, for example. Unless it would work like a music service, i.e. have everything available for one price, and not like a video service with their islands and attempts to differentiate.
But if they had everything, you'd end up with a gatekeeper that decides who can make money and who can't, and that ends up as censorship. If such a service ever comes up, i want to be able to pay for any site with it, including porn, right wing propaganda and left wing propaganda if i so choose. And that ain't going to happen.
Now suppose there would be competing services where you could pay 5 cents for an article read, and they'd bill you when you reach $10 or something for the transaction fees to make sense. That's okay, you pay per read, you can have accounts with several middle men because you pay per use.
But what do you pay for? One read? What if something comes up and you can't finish? Will you be able to save it for later reading or will that cost extra?
Perpetual access? With per-article access control that's going to be a major database after a while. Hard problem technically.
And I've only begun to think about it...
Google was playing around with ad-replacement purchases, but they never made a version that does the same thing as youtube: pay X and all the google ads go away.
But that's not the case. Products cost money, and we've established a pattern of free to play to freemium for much of the most popular services. This could change, but it would take the major players to flip the script, and they've invested so much into ad systems that they'd be hard pressed to abandon it.
this is the comment I replied to. Apparently the old internet was fine, so what kind of "competition" are you looking for? Youtube gives you easy access to content you would have to spend hours trying to locate on "old" internet.
If you do not like their content, simply stop using their site. But it is immoral to pretend like it is OK to abuse their site, and deliberately hide their adviertisments that keep their site alive
