Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Compliments on making it a deal for the "whole piece" instead of per-page. The latter invites a scam where sites would break an article into many small segments, and when the vistor finds out, he/she has paid for at least one already.

There are some other problems tho. A participating site won't show anything unless it sends the visitor's data to (a) the micropayment company and (b) google (at least, the demo won't work without requests there)? There's too much tracking on the web already. Of course, not everyone cares about this and it may become popular with the non-privacy-conscious public.

Other problems are more subtle. Sites using this would be likely to tailor content to maximize revenue - attention-grabbing titles, sensationalism - while some readers prefer qualities that are found where the motives are less commercial.

And of course, this is not likely to reduce ads. A site owner might try to go with this alone, but soon would be subject to economic pressure to include ads as well.



Thanks! We want the consumer to get a feel of the article quality early on.

We think the algorithm to summarize is resistant to tailoring due to some core assumptions we are making. We are not dependent on the title and so on.

If such a system gets adopted, it would to some extent clear up the insanity that is ads on good articles no matter where its posted.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: