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Comment by sanex | Hacker News Reader

I've been saying this for a while. It doesn't even need to be that expensive either. Pay a penny to watch a YouTube video type of deal. It can be done through lightning network to avoid per transaction credit card fees which would probably otherwise make it too expensive. My biggest hangup is paying for something that quickly turns out to be crap. I guess people would learn pretty quickly and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.

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I would love that. just a tip jar button on my browser that I load up with a few bucks every month, and send to websites or commenters who made me laugh or got me thinking. Streamers have proven (albeit crudely) that viewers are more than willing to part with their money (if they have it). And I'm not just hinting at salacious young women (who probably receive the bulk of the dollar value). There's a streamer team who broadcast live at LAX and other airports and get excited about the various air traffic. It's fun watching their dedication and passion, their broadcasting skills grow, and how happy they are to do what they enjoy. I've donated probably $200-$300 over the years to them.

I've literally read several articles today (mostly via HN) from which I have garnered enough value to pay at least $1 to each author. And I'd gladly pay it, as long as it's not a subscription and I don't have to enter my card details all over the place, or have my money charged as a large number of individual transactions.

Especially for micropayments. If I google and find a minor 1-liner that taught me something I'd deposit $0.10 or $0.25. If it was something I was struggling with for a long time - like some arcane tar or mt command to use my tape backup drive, I'd give at least a few $. These amounts add up quickly, and encourage a much more wholesome form of publishing.

This was kind of the theory of using Brave Browser to earn BAT through ads, and then set up an "auto-contribute" list that took your earned BAT and distributed a % that you set to each person. The adoption didn't exactly happen, especially with Brave's weirdness lately.

I like the idea of BAT but I just don't fully trust it.

> and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.

My problem with recommendation algorithms, at least YouTube's, is that by design they recommend things based on keywords and categories for videos you have watched previously. So what happens is that I get hooked on some new topic, say cave diving for example. And then I watch a whole bunch of cave diving videos ... until I get sick of cave diving and want something different. But because of my viewing patterns, my recommendations are FLOODED with cave diving videos that I don't care about anymore.

I don't know how to solve that problem. And it might even just be a "me" problem related to the way that my brain works.

Not just a "you" problem. I have to routinely reset my youtube history (I don't have time to prune it) to avoid stale recommendation. I have few interests, but every once in a while, I'm on a research spree or just want some new vibes, then my home view is ruined.

If they are not getting rid of the algorithm, it would make sense to let me manage the keywords that are driving it.

I really want the ability to easily create multiple persons/personalities like Netflix lets you do.

On Netflix I have a seperate "user" for asian movies so the main user is not flooded with recommendations for asian movies. Those 2 users have extremly different list of recommended movies.

When I watch a few "The girl is doing her homework" music movies on YouTube they quickly drown out everything else on the homepage. When I later watch a few "watch later" engineering movies, the music videos are drowned out and I then have difficulty finding more music videos. It's like starting over from scratch every time.

You can create new channels and use each them just for viewing, from the YouTube account page:

https://www.youtube.com/account

Works well to keep different viewing histories and commenting identities separated.

This is giving me PTSD from using old online services like Quantum Link on the C64 and having my parents freak out on me for racking up a huge bill.

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