If you mean automatic micropayments when reading articles then you'll still be tracked, because the payment provider has to track what you read to make the payments and even has to be able to provide a log of it in case there is a payment dispute, so they will store what urls you visit and when.
Without a proper log payment disputes can't be resolved legally.
if there was something like anonymous payments (cryptocoin-based maybe?) then it would be possible without any tracking. In the few cases where you ask your penny cash back because something happened, most companies would just give it back without questions asked assuming they dont get tons of cashback requests from your IP.
That's why they need a log, because there will be cashback requests which people could abuse. And this will not necessarily be only pennies. A penny for a single page, for example, but if you visit many pages of the same site then the amount will be much higher and a user could claim then he has never visited that site and wants his money back.
something similar is happening with ads nowadays. There is tons of fraud in ads and all earnings / payouts are approximate. yet the system works, even approximately. My guess is fraud will be a small percent, certainly tolerable
Seems like there has to be some method to solve this? Maybe the transaction is part of the page load? You don't get the page until you pay via anonymous cryptocurrency. No need for any post-transaction verification and reconciliation? The problem there will be if the page fails to load, how can I safely get a second attempt without creating some kind of "double-spending" problem.
You can do tracking in such a way only the person browsing has a log. In the case of a dispute, the log file can be revealed to the website so they can determine how to resolve the dispute.
In the undisputed case, the website wouldn't see the log.
> if there was something like anonymous payments (cryptocoin-based maybe?) then it would be possible without any tracking
Taxes mess that up. A large number of jurisdictions charge a sales tax or VAT on sales to people in their jurisdiction and require the seller to collect. Some tracking is necessary in order to figure out what the tax is and where to send it.
That tracking doesn't necessarily have to be at the content provider. The service handling the micro-payments could also incorporate tax handling. The buyer would have to give up personal information to the payment service, but they probably already did when funding their micro-payment account.
It could also be handled by having content providers sell through aggregator sites, with the aggregator sites being the seller to the end user as far as taxes are concerned. Then the buyer only has to give up personal information to the aggregator site, instead of every content provider site that they buy an article from.
Aggregator sites would also help with the costs of dealing with taxes. An aggregator would have enough sales in each jurisdiction for the costs of filing to not be excessive. That's not necessarily true when individual content providers sell on their own sites. Some jurisdictions, for example, require tax collection and payment if you have more than 200 transactions in the past year in that jurisdiction, regardless of how low the total dollar amount is. Sell 200 articles for $0.05 and you've earned $10...and will be paying way more than that in quarterly filing fees.
My prediction is that if we move away from the ad model for funding content providers, we will see a big move toward aggregators for all but the major newspapers and magazines. The websites of smaller newspapers and magazines will just be summaries, and when you click to get the full text it will take you to some third-party publisher that the paper has licensed the full article to, and it is from that publisher that you will buy full access.
I think the aggregator market will end up concentrated in a very small number of aggregators that together have pretty much all of the "professional" content on the web, except for a few major newspapers and magazines that are big enough to justify consumers maintaining separate subscriptions just for them.
> When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed. Just like payments in cash, nobody else can track how you spent your electronic money. However, you obtain a legally valid proof of payment.
If you don't want to see ads then fine it's your computer.
But Brave is hijacking ads by force then strong-arming websites to sign up to their own shitty crypto currency if they want to be paid. It's basically an extortion scheme, or a mafia stye "protection scheme"
I wonder who's more unethical: The guy who comes in, smashes your stuff and leaves or the guy who comes in, smashes your stuff and leaves a check for you at his place.
I bet that's a common battle ground between consequentialists and idealists.
Fun aside, I don't think the comparison holds up very well. I don't think that anyone has a right to execute code on my devices just because I'm browsing a website. In this concept, "hijacking" ads is completely void of any ethical meaning.
Braves platform attempt is still not very good. A good solution for paying content creators would need to be open, decentralized and accepted by the stakeholders involved.
Requesting the code doesn't mean I'm obliged to run all of it. If you serve data to my computer I am free to do whatever the hell I want with it, if you don't like that, don't serve me the data.
I've read a few threads on this and while I don't want to be absolutist and say you are wrong, I believe it's a lot more nuanced than what you described. My understanding is that the Brave injected ads are strictly opt-in at this point for the user, not the default, which makes it a lot less of a racket imho, but I dislike Brave simply because I don't need it, which seems like a good enough reason to grumble about it.
The economics and game theory of this suggests that newspapers should be forced to cooperate with each other.
Cartelize on-line journalism. Make the 4th estate official. Create a pseudo-governmental entity like the US post office, Fannie Mae, or the Fed. If you have an Internet connection, you have the option, through your ISP, to pay $X towards journalism on the web. Your ISP will then cryptographically vouch for any request that goes from a paying subscriber to a cartel member site, such that the member doesn't know exactly who the subscriber is. If you're on a foreign network provider that doesn't participate, you'd have to get crypto keys and a standalone program (or browser add-on) directly from the cartel (that could make you identifiable), or go through a VPN that participates.
If a request comes in with valid crypto, the response is the requested article, with no tracking, and a cartel-fixed standard for ad content. If it does not, it is up to the publisher as to what to do with the response. Deny. Inject intrusive ads. Infect with tracking malware. If you didn't pay, you get what you get. Cartel members are paid from the common fund via analysis of the server logs, targeting X% of the total amount paid out as potentially lost to fraud (so as to not overspend on analysis and fraud detection). Baseline income is determined by quantity of eyeballs. The cartel can then dole out bonuses for quality--if one of your writers wins the Pulitzer, your paper gets extra money. And it's no big deal if bots are visiting sites, because each bot has to pay in order for its requests to count towards the circulation-based distributions.
I'm sure there are a lot of people out there willing to pay $10 a month or more for online journalism, but they don't want that whole budget to get sucked up by one newspaper, only to get locked out by all the others. And there are plenty of sites out there that can't seem to manage online subscriptions or micro-transactions very well.
It so happens I designed a scheme a lot like this: clients send an opaque payload which the service provider wraps and forwards to an authenticator. The authenticator simply replies with a yes/no statement of whether the user is a legitimate participant in the scheme. The payloads are compared offline to validate that the versions of events given by the user and service provider are the same. There's a lot more needed to make it trustworthy, though.
To me the primary advantage would be to open up an untapped segment. There are readers who will never pay, they see ads. There are readers who love a source so much they will pull out their credit card and deal with the hassle of having yet another subscription. In the middle is a large, untapped group who would pay if the transaction costs (pulling out the card, hassle of multiple subscriptions, worrying about how much they're spending etc) were approximately nil.
We need something integrated directly into the browser with microtransactions for each page load (or X amount of pages) paid for anonymously via cryptocurrency.
i dont agree with the tracking that goes along with all of them. i shouldnt be recording my action to a bunch of unrelated companies just so i can give a few cents to a website.
Brave records that data locally, none of it is actually sent to any servers. The only thing they know is an amount of money must go to the websites that your browser viewed. They don't record IP addresses or any personal data.
AFAIK, all tracking (in both Brave and Flattr) happens locally on your device.
Some level of tracking _is_ strictly necessary for a system like this, because otherwise there's no way for the system to know which sites to give your money to.
Google has the ability to get us halfway there, if not more.
The previous version of google contributor was almost a solution.
But it used a bad payment allocation algorithm, it never guaranteed adsense ads would be blocked, and the new version is just a way to subscribe to a handful of sites.
But they also run youtube red, which has the model they need. They just need to copy their own idea.
One way to make this happen is to vote with your eyeballs and attention. If you and other internet users that feel the same way don’t consume from sites without micropayments, they will be encouraged / forced to offer a new way of monetization.
Sometimes I wonder if people actually believe this, because it sounds more like nobody should read anything on the web that is monetized with a subscriber or ad-based business model.
Not even sure how newspapers would be able to figure out that all those readers they are not seeing is because they don’t take micropayments.
> Not even sure how newspapers would be able to figure out that all those readers they are not seeing is because they don’t take micropayments.
By interacting with their users. I’ve written to newspapers in the past asking about their subscription. I remember one ocassion I did it with 2 newspapers. One replied they’d look and I never heard back. The other didn’t reply.
If I write asking if there’s a way to use micro donations and there isn’t or they haven’t heard about that, it might be a good idea to research it.
Another is following news about competitors. ‘We’ve increased readership by x% since we added micro donations’. Or following industry conferences where it might be discussed.
How does that square with not even spending your time or eyeballs or money on a particular site till they support micropayments? That was half of my point.
Do the contents of your letters read “I like your website but I cannot in good conscience support you till you support this specific business model in which I might give you a penny, or perhaps as much as a nickel every time I read an article to support your operations and salaries?”
This particular idea has been kicking around for at least a decade that I know of, and since I don’t tend to hear about most ideas when they’re new, most likely much much longer than that. At this point I’ve been forced to conclude the industry as a whole has probably looked into it and come to the conclusion it just isn’t worthwhile. Understandably, they would need some critical mass of readers and enough papers that matter supporting it and a particularly friendly credit card processing agreement in which the processor would need to be happy with a micropayment of a micropayment. Services like Spotify have somewhat paved the way as well and are demonstrating what the long tail of micropayments actually looks like.
I have found that lowering my threshold for bullshit* has also increased the signal ratio of the content I read by a huge margin. I believe there is correlation.
* includes crippled without JS, ads, paywalls, poor accessibility, etc.
publishers don’t like micropayments because (a) they don’t work, and (b) what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important.
It becomes a lot harder for journalists to justify spending months on a subject when the business side has hard data showing it brings in barely more than reprinting the soccer scores.
What’s potentially workable is a Spotify-style subscription model.
> (b) what people read doesn’t correlate with what’s important
> It becomes a lot harder for journalists to justify spending months on a subject when the business side has hard data showing it brings in barely more than reprinting the soccer scores.
This is already true with the current advertising model.
It doesn't work, since people faced with paywall moe to competition that only has ads. If adblocking is common enough will try harder to make micropayments just work.
And that's why we have clickbait. Letting people cherry pick exactly what they want is seriously going to hurt quality content. Subscriptions to a wide range of stuff like Netflix and Spotify are perfect. There's something in there for everyone's taste.
You don't understand the problem of clickbait. What people say and what they do are two different things, and you need to choose which to listen to.
This is one of the reasons clickbait was so prevalent on facebook a few years ago - people clicked on these so much that they were ranked very highly. But in user surveys, the same users claimed they hated clickbait and wished it wasn't there. So what do you do?
Is it moral to allow people to only consume the things they believe they need, even if the things they believe they need are only that because they are addictive and potentially harmful?
If allowing cherry picking exactly what they want is the only moral way to provide the news, does that mean all prior forms of broadcast news publication were immoral (e.g. television & radio news broadcasts)?
You are reading this comment. The are billions of lines of text on the internet you will never read. Is this comment strictly more important to you than every single other text on the internet? A comment that includes a nonsense paragraph of just “banana”, repeated over and over?
If the endorphins you get reading the content from your list is more important for you, so be it. You decide what's important for you, and that's the definition.
So your definition would be "Everything someone does is good for them"?
That reminds me of Austrian praxeology.
Behavioral patterns that lead individuals away from their goals do exist. Such irrationality is what most of behavioral economics policy advice is all about.
It's easiest to explain with the difference in long term goals and short term decision making. There it gets obvious very fast that peoples immediate preferences do rarely reflect their stated and consistent long term preferences.
