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▲ frereubu 5 hours ago

The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!

I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, although I'm a bit despairing at the quality of the BBC these days, but perhaps that tracks the significant cuts to their budget...) I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything. We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!

▲preg_match 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The biggest problem with micropayments is how credit card payment processors work. You typically pay a percentage fee. But they thought of everything, so you also pay a flat fee per transaction like 10 cents. So they can get their money from tiny transaction.

So for something like a 20 cent micropayment, you pay more to your processor than you pocket.

One solution is a universal token system or something like it. You deposit say, 40 dollars, then get 10,000 tokens or whatever. Like Java Beans from back in the day.

▲II2II 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs.

Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.

But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.

▲boplicity an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, the biggest problem with micropayments is that they just don't match the needs of publishers. At all.

They work very well for LLM tokens though. So, go ahead and get your news that way.

▲xur17 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Stablecoins are a pretty clean solution to this. Negligible fee, sub-cent transactions supported, no need for kyc when paying. Fill up your browser periodically, and pay from an embedded wallet.

▲joseda-hg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't this what Brave tried to push? You get their Basic Attention Token crypto

▲godelski 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a real shame the grifters took over cryptocurrencies. I'd love to have a pre-minted ZKP USD style coin. Uncle Sam can take a small transaction fee as consumption tax, people can get wallets as they please. Fully private, semi-decentralized (you don't need full for a government currency), and gov even gets to "tax" transactions on illegal goods (Al Capone). But the two major flaws are that kinda kills a lot of the CC company businesses and it's not great for a country that wants to spy on its citizens. On the flip side, my nightmare is they implement that same system without the ZKP and now your grandma giving you lunch money gets tracked. Weirdly we want with grifting instead. Weird move...

▲lotsofpulp 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction?

The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.

▲rcpt 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Micropayments never work. It's too much friction for the median user to decide if they want to spend a quarter on an article.

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-ment...

▲m463 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Used to be you would trade a yak or a horse for something. Then you could trade little pieces of metal. In the future, why not something smaller? I mean, people are trading virtual things (like an app). Why not something small for something as small as a website view?

▲tempest_ 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You mainly get this because honestly I was already happy with the existing product. The main focus of this post is not something I was really looking for and is a nice addition but I would still be using the existing product regardless.

Basically I just want search that I can actually filter are returns relevant useful results.. This adds an extra facet that I might filter on from time to time but the main ones, which are time and exact strings, are the reason I use the product.

▲sph 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A good product that is not solely focused on rent seeking these days is worth celebrating.

▲frereubu 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I know what you mean, but it comes across - even to me, a paying customer who does really like Kagi - a bit like talking to someone involved in an MLM who can't wait to steer the conversation around to their product. I'd just prefer discussions to stay somewhat on topic. There's something interesting in this announcement in that, in my view, it deliberately omits an attribute that's a mild proxy for high-quality journalism, and I always find it a shame when the topic at hand is drowned out by generic boosterism.

▲adamtaylor_13 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The foregone conclusion is that journalism is somehow helpful or valuable to me. I have never read a piece of journalism or "news" and thought to myself, "Wow, how useful! I'm so glad I consumed that."

And I sat here struggling for 5 minutes to think of a single instance. I couldn't come up with one.

So maybe the underlying problem is that journalism isn't nearly as valuable as it thinks it should be.

▲ 6 minutes ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
▲ymolodtsov 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem with micropayments isn't the tech really, it's that only the users want them but not any publisher. Which is completely reasonable.

▲carlosjobim 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Publishers want them and many have tried. It is the other way around, people don't want to make micro payments. Some say they do, but the evidence proves they're wrong.

Edit: Typo

▲CoastalCoder 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Would AI tokens count as a kind of prepaid micropayment?

▲CoastalCoder 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!" rather than about the content of the blog. And I'm a happy Kagi subscriber!

Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)

▲al_borland 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I'm pretty sure that there's a technically viable solution to micropayments, but there are too many competing interests for anyone to settle on anything.

If I could easily use ApplePay to pay 20¢ to read an article, without any tracking or other strings attached, I would probably do that to avoid the whole song and dance of archive workarounds. It’s those competing interests that really get in the way. Giving an email, signing up for an account, storing payment information… money aside, those costs are too high for what I’m getting from a site I don’t read regularly.

▲orrito 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It has been tried e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle but it just doesn't work, even a tiny fee will already deter most people from "buying" an article as it will always feel as a loss. Whereas with a subscription you don't feel bad in the moment for losing money but feel good for using your already paid subscription.

▲tensor 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apple news manages to give access to a variety of mainstream sources for a fixed price. Unfortunately there is no way to block the ads and without an ad-free tier it's a no go for me.

▲bigcoffeeguy 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You can block Apple News ads with DNS-level adblockers. Still works, for now...

▲Anonyneko 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it

Often true, but sadly doesn't work in reverse - if you pay for it, it often still isn't good-quality journalism (although your mind will tell you it is, just because you paid for it).

▲bcraven 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I subscribed to https://the-fence.com/ last year and it's been superb.

▲boplicity 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Almost no publisher wants micropayments. Full stop. Micropayments are simply not good business.

▲gherkinnn 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Longstanding user and it is great!

It is one of the very, very few digital services that hasn't fucked me over within a year.

I will celebrate as if I had discovered Kagi yesterday.

▲lyu07282 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it

True for independent media but for corporate media the same stories end up in so many places and most paywalls can be easily removed anyway you aren't missing anything. It also feels wrong to pay for mainstream/corporate media in general, why pay for your own psyop, some PR/AD/NGO/lobby/agency/government already paid for the journalism why should I have to pay to be manipulated? I rather give my money to Democracy Now or Drop Site News.