[fxtentacle]

For most articles, I'm lured in by the clickbait headline and then later regret wasting time on reading it. Most YouTube personalities are either undifferentiated haters or conspiracy theorists. So I'm not sure if I really want to support "content creators" in general.

[shuntress]

Articles that are not clickbait and YouTube personalities that are differentiated and not conspiracy theorists definitely exist and are worth supporting.

You are on Hacker News, so presumably you click some of the links. Some clickbait of course does end up here but linked articles are mostly not clickbait.

Similarly, you should pay attention to youtube links in comments (here and elsewhere) to start building a catalog of creators of content that you enjoy.

Also, incidentally, the apparent deluge of "haters" and "conspiracy theorists" you have noticed and pointed out here relates to a topic of frequent discussion in this forum (regulation of social media networks) and it is worth thinking about how it impacts us in these seemingly unrelated ways.

[fxtentacle]

I fully agree with you, that there is good content. But in my experience, the good content on HackerNews is freely accessible without ads or paywalls because the author has another job and is writing just to get his/her story out, and not for any financial reason.

I'm happy to read a programming story written by a professional full time programmer just for fun.

I'm not sure I would equally enjoy a programming story written by someone who cannot find a programming job to pay the bills.

In the beginning, the internet was only people sharing things just for fun in their free time, without any commercial intent. I would like to go back there as the base model of how content websites operate.

[satotious]

Id also like to add, maybe the reason there is so much clickbait/rubbish is because there isn't a viable business model for good quality content? How many subscriptions can people have?

[jacques_chester]

Blendle (another one in this general space) had a mechanism where you could decide not to pay after seeing the content.

Disclosure: I have previously pursued a business not dissimilar to the one under discussion.

[satotious]

Yes that would work for them as they aggregate and pay publishers at the end of the month. Problem with that is Blendle needs to track what users are viewing. If something like that ever got big, it would have everyone's browsing history

[throwaways885]

"I ate a chocolate bar and regretted it, so I won't pay the shop".

Buyer's remorse doesn't make this more ethical.

[fxtentacle]

Nah, more like "I won't eat chocolate that they specifically produced at such a low quality that it's financially viable to give it away for free."

[satotious]

The flow we are aiming for: users visit a site, they navigate a paywall and see the content is good. They add that domain to the auto-pay list. If it's clickbait, they dont. Hopefully by letting creators charge whatever amount they want, we can produce not just clickbait but well researched articles.

[fxtentacle]

I'm paying for the newspapers that I read, and I usually close a clickbait website once I find out.

So then, the question here is: How many websites are there that are worth my time to read, but not worth purchasing a $5 monthly subscription for?

So I'm not sure that there is a use for micropayments here. Either it's good quality, then they charge $5+ anyway, or it's "ad level quality" and then I'm better off not wasting my time.