[nottorp]

Price thing: no one can afford to pay "a latte per month" for every site they visit.

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.

[nullfield]

I managed to subscribe at a really good annual rate vs. list through some online aggregator, where they pre-warn me of renewal and rate changes to let me cancel if I want. I don’t remember what it was without searching my email, so not shilling for them in any way, but there are methods.

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…

[nottorp]

> 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...

[soco]

There is this thing called Zette: https://www.zette.ai/ - 30 cents per article on about hundred (so far) big newspapers. However it's not working for EU/Switzerland because data protection rules (what are they doing with your personal data???) and their FAQ site is broken, so I wouldn't even bother.

[nottorp]

Lol 30 cents. When they will quit with trying to lead you into a subscription, they'll get people paying reasonable microtransactions.

[Dylan16807]

Fixed is great, it just needs to apply to a lot of sites.

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.