Washington Post tried cheap "day pass" subscriptions and they didn't really work.
Publishers already relying on subscription revenue need to be careful: some portion of the people already paying $20/mo could save a lot by switching to $1/article.
Newsrooms also hate that approach because of the incentive structure. A lot of the most important stories aren't the ones people want to spend $1 to read.
I'd encourage you to ask a recording artist how they like the arrangement they have with Spotify.
But also, yeah, I do think the streaming financial incentives affect what music gets written and produced. Just not necessarily anything to do with cuss words.
The artists are there because of their own free will. They voluntarily signed their contracts with the record labels. How are journalists and independent journalism doing in comparison?
I think this is even harder to make work than straightforward micropayments with crypto or paypal or similar.
Is it the same subscription fee no matter what publications I read or how many articles? (If it varies directly based on what I'm reading then I think it is just micropayments.)
Publications with healthy subscription revenue like WSJ or the Economist are not going to be interested in participating unless they get paid a lot of money and/or can be assured it somehow will not cannibalize their direct sales.
Who owns the customer relationship? Publishers have been burned pretty much 100% of the time they cede that direct relationship to someone else.
Also, it's been tried: see Scroll, Apple News, Flattr, Coil, Brave BAT...
I agree Scroll seemed very promising but I'm not sure how successful they were. Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees? Meeting that goal while burning investors money is less impressive.
This does not seem to reckon with the many, MANY times this has been tried and failed. (The LinkedIn post at least acknowledges attempts that "did fail in the 90s and 2000s" and quickly waves them away.) There have been at least a dozen serious attempts in the last 20 years that I'm aware of.
What about Blendle? They had NYT, WaPo and WSJ as launch partners in 2014 but give up on micropayments in 2023 citing "very low demand"
Or Flattr. Or Invisibly. Or Pico. Or Brave's goofy crypto token. Or Coil. The Washington Post themselves experimented with cheap "day passes" a few years ago but I guess they didn't work well enough to keep. Arguably Medium's rev share program was another failed attempt. Heck no less a content middleman powerhouse than Apple tried and mostly failed to do a rev share / micropayments scheme with Apple News.
The trick is market share. I'm not going to subscribe to a NYT/WaPo/WSJ trio because sometimes I want to read Reuters and I'm not going to pay for a partial solution.
I was very happy with my Apple News subscription because it has every English-language newspaper I've come across.
I like Apple News too, though they are walking a bit of a tightrope with their publishing partners which is why you can't just click a link to wsj.com/blahblah and have it open in Apple News, and you can't really just browse a front page. (Also it notably does not have NYT.)
which had startup royalty behind it and a very slick web site that they didn't promote very well. (A friend of mine who is interested in this space didn't find out about it until it was announced it was shutting down.)
I can only guess that the New York Times, WaPo and such were too good to talk to these people because they only managed to sign up third-tier news sources.
I assume it was more about dollars and cents than pretensions. Scroll was plausible as a replacement for ad network revenue, but at $5/month it can't come close to robust subscription or premium ad revenue. NYT subscription is more than the entire $5.
I believe the main reason that Flattr failed was just bad execution. After a successful start and Flattr being used more and more, they just stopped iterating on it, leaving it dormant for years. Partnering with Adblock Plus was the final nail in the coffin.
Is the idea that you could decide from the envelope whether you want to even bother fetching the message? Besides that I'm not sure I see the advantage
You have to have a working mail server attached to a domain to be able to send mail... that's the big part. Right now, email can more or less come to anywhere from anywhere as anyone. There are extensions for signing connections, tls, etc... but in general SMTP at it's core is pretty open and there have been efforts to close this.
It would simply close the loop and push the burden of the messages onto the sender's system mostly.
And yes, you can decide from the envelope, and a higher chance of envelope validity.
SPF doesn't prove that... I can send through SendGrid with an SPF record, doesn't mean I've got a server configured to receive mail... for that matter, it actually makes it so you HAVE to be responsible for the mail system and cannot outsource sending separately from receiving. Again, shifting the burden enough to where other measures of dealing with bad actors are more effective.
You assume that internet standards are prescriptivist; that the document describes how it is to be implemented. In practice it's often descriptivist, with the standards documents playing catch-up with how things are actually going in practice.
Anyway, in general you can expect that doing unusual but technically valid things with email headers will very often get your messages rejected or filtered as spam.
Standards are definitely prescriptive. But just like a medical prescription, it doesn’t ensure that actors in the wild will conform to what’s prescribed. People will not follow prescriptions for whatever reason, willingly or otherwise. It doesn’t mean the document wasn’t prescriptive.
How would you generate a picture of Noun + Noun in the first place in order to train the LLM with what it would look like? What's happening during that 1 estimated second?
Use any of the image generation models (eg Nanobanana, Midjourney, or ChatGPT) to generate a picture of a noun on a noun. Simonw's test is to have a Language (text) model generate a Scalar Vector Graphic, which the language model has to do by writing curves and colors, like draw a spline from point 150,100 to 200,300 of type cubic, using width 20, color orange.
In that hypothetical second is freaking fascinating. It's a denoising algorithm, and then a bunch of linear algebra, and out pops a picture of a pelican on a bicycle. Stable diffusion does this quite handily. https://stablediffusionweb.com/image/6520628-pelican-bicycle...
Publishers already relying on subscription revenue need to be careful: some portion of the people already paying $20/mo could save a lot by switching to $1/article.
Newsrooms also hate that approach because of the incentive structure. A lot of the most important stories aren't the ones people want to spend $1 to read.
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