672: Design Tokens, Web Compents, and Web Monetization  ## Metadata - Author: [[ShopTalk]] - Full Title: 672: Design Tokens, Web Compents, and Web Monetization - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/c2a295e0-50c9-42b2-aba8-104111459a29 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Clues by Sam Puzzle Experience** - The hosts discuss playing a logic-based grid puzzle called Clues by Sam to figure out who are criminals or innocents. - They describe the puzzle’s gating mechanism where you must solve clues in sequence and how it challenges their logical reasoning. Transcript: Dave Rupert Hey there, Shopping Magazine. You're listening to the coming in hot edition of the Shop Talk Show. I'm Dave Rupont. Me is Chris. That's right. Dave's all hopped up on meetings. I've been in meetings, man. Yeah. Amazing. Meetings are great. I went on vacation. That's cool. Then you come back and then you have like more work. So, because you have to read everything everyone said. And then you have to. That's hard, man. Catching up on, you know, like you have to be like, what, what transpired this week? Why is everyone, you know? So it was a lot like a, it's like a mystery. It's like that game we're playing in the discord clues by Sam is popping off in the discord. Chris Coyier And then I see one where everybody seems to be getting no hints days you know that means you crushed it and then i do it and i'm like i am i don't know that i should be here i am very stupid i did Dave Rupert Yeah everyone's like all green check marks it's kind of like wordle in the scoring right like you did like five guesses and got none wrong or whatever and so like uh but yeah it's it's a Puzzle where you try to figure out who the criminals and the innocents are and they all have clues like Sally's neighbor is innocent and things like that. Chris Coyier So exactly. It's a five by five grid of random people and there's clues on the cards where you don't get to see the clue until you've essentially answered the previous clue or something or figured Out who's a criminal or an innocent. And you can always figure it out. Always a logical next choice. You can click anybody on the grid and just guess if they're a criminal or innocent. But if you guess this pop up comes up that says like, eh, nope, this one was not one that. Yeah, you're guessing because the logic in the puzzle so far has not given you permission to click this one yet. And then when you hit it, you're so like, oh, it takes one of your little check marks away. Dave Rupert Yeah. You feel like a dummy. Yeah. Today was a day where everyone's getting all five check marks. No, no misses. It was an easy day on Samster? Chris Coyier Okay. Dave Rupert No, it was a hard day for me. I was one out of five. Chris Coyier Oh my gosh. I like almost failed because I was like. Have not solved one yet with, I've only done like four or something, but yeah, without, without one little frustrating moment where I'm like, I'm just going to guess real quick, you Dave Rupert Know, makes you feel like a genius when you do get it though. You know? Chris Coyier Yeah. Yeah. It was unclear. There was some speculation whether they, you know, is it, did they get little AI help? It seems like to do it every day and it's absolutely free and there's absolutely no business model. Seems like an awful lot of work without some assist. Dude, if that's like AI keeps those puzzles coming, I'm fine. Dave Rupert I'm fine with that. But like, it's the logic that's kind of interesting. I actually kind of want to talk to the person who made it or read something about ([Time 0:00:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9b32692b-43ed-4aa2-8975-2dba4c05d123)) - **Use Design Tokens Systematically** - Avoid winging design tokens; establish a systematic approach from the start. - Invest time learning from experts to prevent bloated and inefficient style systems. Transcript: Chris Coyier So we didn't plan this, but we had Brad and Ian on the other day, and they were talking about design tokens and the fact that they have a brand new course called designtokencourse.com. They are interested in sponsoring the show, so we're happy to announce them as sponsors of the show. It's been a minute since we've been a sponsor. Thanks, brothers. And we didn't plan this either. This show happens to be kind of perfect, talking about web components and design systems and all that stuff. That's what they talk about in their course, too, but specifically about the concept of design tokens. Listen to that show if you want to deep dive into it. But I'm like I'm like sold that having some pretty strong expertise in this matter is good to have instead of what is my brain is likely to do and I suspect some of your brains is likely to Do just be like oh yeah design tokens cool let's wing it you know let's just set some up even if you're just making websites only which I do think this this stuff probably has a little bit Extra bonus value if you're making websites and you're making native apps and you're making billboards and you have some style api i don't know there's just the more there is the more Like things that you target just like with web components like dave is saying the more like targets there are for those web components the more value they have the same is true of design Tokens but i'll tell you as somebody who has winged it with design tokens one time, where I'm just like, eh, let's just set up a whole bunch of custom properties and see how it goes. It went okay, but I really wish I could go back and refactor the whole thing according to the system that Brad and Ian lay out in this course, because it's straight up better. There are some bloating problems with our system that I really didn't foresee. And having some like expertise would have totally prevented that. And that's what you're going to get in this course, among many other things. So it's design tokens course.com. It's a course that you can buy where you get a bunch of stuff. You know, no big surprises there, but use the coupon code. Shop talk is awesome when you buy the course and we'd appreciate that. Okay. Thank you. ([Time 0:06:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/03820a57-d9ba-406a-ba22-b7830c9e1e0d)) - **JSON Munging for Design Tokens** - JSON munging is vital when converting design tokens between formats. - Validators and defaults are required to handle type constraints and data inconsistencies during transformation. Transcript: Dave Rupert And I'm turning it into another lump of JSON or into a CSS file, which is kind of just a lump of JSON, if you think about it. But yeah. Yeah. Cool. So that's work, huh? At the moment? Yeah. I just take JSON. I'm a JSON munger. That would be my honest to God title right now. Chris Coyier JSON munger. Dude, yeah. I have that word as literally in our code base as well. That there's a munging. I mean, how we look at it, I guess, is that it can be, there can be stuff wrong with Jason, as you know, or it needs to be reformatted or cleaned up in some way. Especially because it's not particularly typed, you know, and in our world, Jason, you know, usually needs to go through Go code at some point and Go's tools for dealing with Jason are, In my opinion, ([Time 0:09:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b0186885-61f0-4922-93d0-ca7529a148cb)) - **CSS Flexibility vs Rigid Tools** - CSS is highly flexible, resisting strict rules and rigid tools. - Attempts to tightly constrain CSS risk undermining its expressive power and developer creativity. Transcript: Dave Rupert Dude. But anyway, that's what it is. There's some CSS is very flexible, man. That's that's what people don't get. And they want to, like, put a box around CSS and make it the perfect little box. And you can only do this. You can't do that with CSS, man. Don't put baby in a corner. Yeah. Yeah. Chris Coyier Well, there's ([Time 0:14:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9b2512ae-047a-4350-a098-ab0ebc34a68d)) - **CSS Module Scripts and Shadow DOM** - Native CSS module scripts allow importing CSS into JavaScript with assertions for style scoping. - This approach makes Shadow DOM styling more ergonomic and efficient, awaiting broader browser support. Transcript: Dave Rupert Don't put baby in a corner. Yeah. Yeah. Chris Coyier Well, there's what we could do. Random news. I happen to I don't even know how I clicked on the link, but I went to the web platform tests dashboard, which is the dashboard for tracking Interop 2025. I'm already at 56% of the way so far. And we're about halfway through the year, wouldn't you say? Starting the seventh month of the year. So good job. We're officially Q3 right here. We're Q3, maybe. Q3. Maybe. Yeah, just started it. So good interop team i'd say uh assuming you started at zero percent i think you did because you picked the list because the thing isn't done so they're halfway through the year and halfway Done pretty sweet it keeps coming up for me because i um my talk at css day was about scope and I wanted to talk about all things scope, but of course I think people want to know about and hear About at scope and CSS. Um, which I'm, you know, I'm, I keep saying I'm like lukewarm. I'm not really, I like it. It's good. I've convinced myself, but it's also just, you'll just never reach for it. I, I know nobody's going to, you know, like nobody's going to use it. It's just not useful enough. Yeah. Dave Rupert Yeah. See, I would, but I'm also that kind of crazy, I think, is also my deal. Yeah, you are a little unique in this world. Yeah. I heard you're talking shit about the Shadow DOM, Chris. I heard you said it wasn't useful. Did I say that? I don't know. Chris Coyier Maybe Twitter misappropriated it uh in your talk you just weren't the fan like i'm i'm even more and more convinced that i don't even dislike it as much as i thought i will forever think That there needs to be a better styling solution for it but even that i'm softening on because of the um browsers need to ship it maybe it'll be interrupt 2026 but there's the idea of CSS Module scripts, which is just a way to import with an... I think they stopped calling them type assertions, but I think of them as type assertions, how you can import JavaScript in ESM, you can import JSON, and at the end you used to say assert. That is no longer the case, and it's very hard to find information on this in my experience, but you have to say with. Yeah. Are you, you've seen the syntax? With squiggly type colon JSON. JSON. And then you get the JSON kind, but you can say with type equals C or type colon CSS too. Only Chrome supports that. So that's the part it's not it's little features like this they're not really polyfillable they're just like a weight it's just a weight feature so what you get then is a constructible Style sheet and a constructible style sheet you can be like this dot shadow dom dot sheets or whatever it is and then it's an array and you just put it in the array and then boom the styles Are there so it's not like all mega mega mega mega ergonomic but it's pretty close so you can just say hey this style sheet put it in this shadow down to me that's pretty good well it allows Dave Rupert You to inject whatever globals you want or whatever you know i you know, I think good CSS hygiene is to have like a, a set of utility styles, you know, whether that's, you're doing like A full tailwind MT3, MT4, or if you just really want like some, like, you know, type styles, like semi bold this, or if you want some like, yeah, you know, heading ramps, like title 100, Title 200 or something like that, that you want to use in your components without like spinning up another component. I think that's like a totally valid use case, you know, to have a pass a global style sheet into us, into a component. So, yeah. Chris Coyier And I don't know, you know, the word global is heavy there. I don't maybe what what i like is the document structure idea that my component is card or slider or whatever ([Time 0:14:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dda68e3f-ffde-4b37-a908-dde4a08ae562)) - **Web Components Enable Cross-Framework Reuse** - Web components excel at reuse across multiple frameworks or sites, avoiding framework lock-in. - They provide a separation where app frameworks evolve while components remain stable and reusable. Transcript: Dave Rupert Without fast or anything, it could just be like that. Chris Coyier So, um, I feel like my thinking's on web component stuff is so baby now because you live it and breathe it every single day. Right. Dave Rupert Like how do you make it web components every day? Interfacing heavily. Chris Coyier Yes. Yeah. So is it, is it, you know, it's whatever, you're a long time into it. Have you gotten stronger opinions about anything, softened opinions? Dave Rupert No, I think I feel the same, which is kind of surprising. Like I think they're a really good technology choice for people who are building systems or components that have to go to different places, right? They have to go to the.NET site. They have to go to the, even the React app or the Angular site. And I feel like they are. Chris Coyier Yeah, you've always been big on that. Like the second it goes to two places, it's like the perfect tool. Dave Rupert Yeah, I think, you know, and I even have, like, you know, like, you know how hard it is to update from react like 16 to 18, you know, I'm not, this, this isn't a pick on react thing, but like, I know people in this predicament, right. You're trying to move to rack 16 to 18. Oh, now we have to update all the components. That's a big juke, right? So there's this... It's true. There's this poetry to me in this idea that you could have your framework, your app written in React, but your components are web components so that every time you want to change the application, You don't have to change the componentry. Now that goes against like all of React basically, because the whole React's whole thing is everything's a freaking component, you know, but I think what is good about React, breaking News, I think what is good about React is that it became a very good tool for application development, if that makes sense. It became a very familiar tool for people and highly supported community effort to build things. If you've built all your application and built all these, you know, you know, what, 40 to 70 UI widgets in React, like now updating your component or you're updating your whole like application Now becomes this updating all of your UI components, which can be a heavier lift. I think then it's pretty involved, right. Then like, you know, a page component. So, yeah, I think web components are a really good solution for that. That's sort of where I was going with that. And I think, you know, they have problems. They have problems. Yeah. You know, I think server-side rendering is like, or declarative rendering is kind of what people are gravitating to in the web components community group. Just this more like, if you have a header that doesn't do anything, how do I get it, you know, on the page or how can I use that? You know, and maybe HTML includes like we talked about with Jake a couple of weeks ago is the solution to that. Maybe you don't use a web component, right? I think as long as you have components, you kind of want like the same component interface, you know? I'm calling this a header. Chris Coyier And so I want it to be labeled a dash header, you know? Yeah. I was hoping ([Time 0:20:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0d87bbf8-9747-4d5d-b94a-12060495ef1f)) - **Shadow DOM Prevents CSS Side Effects** - Shadow DOM enforces strong style encapsulation, preventing CSS bleed and unintended side effects. - This containment is critical in large design systems to avoid the "bar stool problem" of CSS impacting unrelated parts. Transcript: Chris Coyier Well, that's what actually was in my talk, Dave, is that I said like, the, because I was talking about scope, dude, web components or a shadow dom, I should be specific is scope. It's really hardcore scope. That's what it's for. It's hardcore scope. Yeah. That's the reason that exists is scoping. Right. And so, okay, that exists. Maybe you reach for it because of its ability to scope. Many people do. And hey, doesn't that sound nice as a way to build kind of a design system that doesn't, you know, that makes naming easier. You don't have to worry about what I called in my talk, the bar stool problem, which is an old Thomas Fuchs joke where writing some CSS has implications all over the app that maybe you weren't Prepared for. E.g. Some CSS walks into a bar and a barstool and a completely other bar falls over or whatever. That was the silly joke. That old joke, yeah. Yeah. But it's relevant. It makes it feel like CSS has unintended consequences sometimes. Well, it doesn't if it's in the shadow DOM. You cannot reach out of it. So like there's all them bar stools are just upright, like they should be, you know, and not only is this theoretical, it's not theoretical at all. Every single design major design system is built with web components that use Shadow DOM. All of them. So yeah, it's one of those things about web components, like they don't need you to like them or your permission. It's already happening. Yeah, there's this weird like, oh, web components aren't great for design system posts or whatever. Dave Rupert And I'm like, I'm confused because literally that's ([Time 0:25:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/56858fd4-60c7-4037-918d-9e18e50b3609)) - **Shadow DOM Boosts Performance** - Shadow DOM performance is high because it deals with smaller DOM subtrees. - This segmentation results in faster style invalidations and rendering compared to global CSS handling. Transcript: Chris Coyier Your id selector pitiful oh do you have any other topics dave you want to toss one out or do you want me to keep sprinkling at you well so our friend brian cardell wrote about web monetization Dave Rupert On his uh blog did he really yeah a little bit like uh yeah you gotta go to the is it b cardell b cardell yeah b ([Time 0:29:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3b85505d-6138-4c9b-9533-4a612af84cab)) - **Potential of Web Monetization APIs** - Web monetization can enable direct micropayments to creators through browser APIs. - This system facilitates new business models like pay-per-download or ad-free content without invasive ads. Transcript: Dave Rupert But it was a bird jumped on my shoulder after i posted about web monetization i think i was on the p and b uh blog like uh okay manuel's uh p and b blog thing uh and i mentioned web monetization I just was sort of saying like hey like what um you know it would just be cool if web monetization came back maybe right let's do it for the users real quicker i called you users sorry listeners Chris Coyier Friends of the show, Shoppa Maniacs. Web monetization as an actual web platform feature is what we're talking about here, which has never happened despite lots of efforts. And it's not dead, but I don't know. It's one of those things where like sometimes it gets progress and then it gets stalled and whatever. But it has some really cool ideas in it. It was essentially like expressed itself as a meta tag. Isn't that right? Or at least that was part of it. And that would be like, okay, this meta tag is attached to an online wallet. And that would unlock the ability to like ask for payment to that wallet. And then there was API so that kind of stuff could talk together. Like ask the user for $1 and they can be like, okay, or no. And then you would get the answer, okay, or no. And if they said, okay, the payment would be tried. And if the payment was successful, you'd get responses back. This all happened in JavaScript, you know? And what was cool is then if you get like, oh, that user actually paid, you could use that in JavaScript to unlock stuff. So I always thought like, hey, on this show, not that we would do this, but this is just an example. It's like, hey, do you want to download the MP3 for this show? Well, you got to give us a quarter. And if you give us a quarter, then you can download the MP3 because it costs us a few cents in bandwidth. And then, you know, we mark it up a little bit because that's how business works. And then you can download the thing. That's kind of a micropayment concept, you know, where it could even be like, oh, you know, to remove ads from this site, it costs you a penny, or you could give us, you know, 10 bucks. And then we'll remember that you've paid us 10 bucks. And even anonymouslyously which is another miracle of how all this works you'll never see ads again on the site wouldn't that be cool there was some rough edges there was some speed concerns There's some you know the fact that this ties really nice to crypto and not everybody likes crypto there's concerns lots of stuff but it was pretty cool and interesting and certainly Would become a bigger deal if these actual browser apis and specs went through and they never really did so no and and it was just kind of this idea you know i think we both signed up for coil Dave Rupert We were kind of hot on it you know we could just like we could just do you know send pennies to people you know and at first i was like getting a bunch of pennies and then slowly i was getting No pennies, which is a little bit sus. Kind of like they boosted it. Chris Coyier Like YouTube views get boosted. It turned into actual money for me. Just because CSS Tricks was just a fairly high traffic. And I put them on CodePen, too. So whatever few Coil users there were, there was enough that it turned into like hundreds and thousands of dollars, you know, never like mega, mega, but you know, pennies worked at a High enough, at a high enough level they worked. And that was with just coil. And we always thought, oh, this will a hundred X or thousand X or million X if it was actually in browsers. Dave Rupert Yeah. Wouldn't it be cool? And yeah. So I just always thought that was like, you know, if we're in an intention economy, like I'm giving my pennies to people I'm giving attention to now, what all my pennies go to dumb YouTubers. Yeah. But you know, like maybe that's fine too. You know, like I kind of want my money to disperse that way, you know, like to people I watch, you know, if I watched, I guess my money does do that because I don't pay for YouTube. I'd watch ads and then ads run and those people get paid when ads run. And, but like, you know, if I was paying for premium, you know, they would just reward people based on how much I watched. Right. So, um, so sort of that, but for the entire internet, you know, it's sort of like YouTube premium for the entire internet is how I sort of think of it. You know, it's like, if I'm on your website and I'm reading it and referencing it, like you take my pennies, man, take, take them, you know, like, or if I like that idea of like, if you could Like, just be like, Hey, this costs $2. I put a lot of effort into this and I'm not going to send you to like a gumroad thing, but this costs $2 to view, you know, I'm way more interested in that than the pennies thing. Chris Coyier I just feel like the pennies thing is neat, but probably has like limited adoption just because of how weird it is. Uh, but yeah, but like the two bucks and then you can download my comic book is just, there's all the evidence in the world that people want to do that. Dave Rupert Yeah. I just think like, you know, and it's kind of just a one offer or a, like a, you know, I, I get an instant gratification. Cause I just clicked my browser button to like, give you a dollar and then you come back. Anyway. So the, the drama, I guess is, you know, I, a bird flew by me and told me, Hey, I heard you on Manuel's thing, which has like a Ko-Fi link, right? Like a coffee link at the top. Right. So like, obviously this is something we need, but he was just like, Hey, how do you feel about web monetizing your blog and, you know, generating revenue? And I was like, I don't, I don't care, but like a perfect world web monetization would exist. And somebody saw that and sent me, um, a link to a Chrome PR, like a PR to Chromium from a Gallia that was like, Hey, we are kind of working on this. And so I reached out to Brian and then thankfully he wrote on his blog so we can talk about it now. But it's called web bucks is the post, but you know, he has like this whole history of micro payments going back to the nineties and how people are like, it will never work. This is so stupid, you know, but he's kind of making the case like brave has the basic attention tokens. Chris Coyier It's not the same, but it's a similar concept you know um that worked great for me too because as a back in the day i think they still have this i'm not sure i do anymore but i was like it was One of those things where just with a few clicks or a meta tag or whatever you kind of claim your own site and then the the bats of uh and this was specific to the brave browser but there's A lot of people that use the brave browser. You'd get their pennies. That was the agreement when you set it up. And I got a lot of pennies. It was good for me. It was just another thing. And there's like, look at this stuff actually ([Time 0:29:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f6613da9-0f85-42cb-91b5-f81b4e354756)) - **Micropayments in Action with Coil** - Coil users sent small payments that accumulated into meaningful revenue for sites like CSS Tricks. - Automated micropayments can feel rewarding and encourage continued content creation. Transcript: Dave Rupert Dave Rupert, like even on a small scale, if my blog made me 30 cents a month or bought me a liquid death like $3, dude. Chris Coyier That's still kind of cool. I'm so motivated to keep doing it. Especially if it goes into the same wallet. Like the same wallet that you use to buy liquid deaths is where it goes into. Dave Rupert Then I'm sending money out. Yeah. Yeah. Chris Coyier Oh, it's so great you know what's neat too is that they thought about it at least coil did and i know we're going to about to talk about some different services but they allowed you to hook It up to your youtube channel too which i thought was clever because some people are like yeah that's neat and all but like i don't have my own web enterprise of my own. I have Instagram and I have other stuff. That's, you know, and most people do. Most people don't own their own, you know, web enterprise. But that was a smart thing that coiled it is like, if you hook it up to your YouTube channel, then like when you watch videos of that YouTube user, you are getting the pennies there too. Dave Rupert That's smart. I remember I was like on Twitch or something and it's like, Dave gave three bits or something. And I was like, I did what? Like, I was like, did I get hacked? And it was like, no, that was coil doing the thing. ([Time 0:36:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f8f7c044-85e6-4d41-b13a-2129cacb8c48)) - **Monetizing Bot Crawling and Its Issues** - New monetization tools like pay-to-crawl enable content owners to charge bots for data access. - However, most revenue tends to go to platform owners rather than individual content creators. Transcript: Dave Rupert Like it was just like dropping money in the wallet. And I just was like, that's so great. So, um, uh, Brian's post mentions Bing has Bing rewards, which he's calling Bing bucks. And I think we've talked about it on the show before. But you do a search, you get a little point, and you can turn that point into Robux for your kids. And everyone's happy. Who gives you the buck? Microsoft? Microsoft, yeah. It's kind of like their incentive to use their thing instead of somebody else's thing yeah yeah so cool ecosia is a thing where you do searches and then they go off and plant trees i watched A really good video about this tree planting is a little sus but like i watched a video yesterday about and they support it because there's ads yeah yeah they run ads and then that's where The ads turn into trees basically they're not cool yeah b corp non-profit but they like but then i watch one where they're digging these like foxhole things which are better than like Than like tree planting in some areas you know so anyway but then brian mentioned this thing product from google uh so google ad tech so like you know take that uh but it's a called offer Wall and it hooks up into a thing called super tab google made this thing or is it a third party deal i think it's a google thing um and it lets you you know like throw up a little paywall which Sort of sucks but like you know it gives you like three or four options to pay i was gonna try it like you can view a short ad you could select interests you know um you know for 12 hours that Chris Coyier Was spicy the second one i don't like that one because that's like it's proving me daddy it's smurf out of me yes yeah yeah it's like what's your skin color you know like that's what it's Dave Rupert Saying basically yeah you're like no thank you that's weird these four people who do you most identify with you know yeah right it's like a veiled way of being like do you have any money Chris Coyier Or not i'm going to use a really crappy proxy to figure that out yeah if you were to uh point to your net worth on this chart what would it be um and then uh put it on my tab is like access for 25 Dave Rupert Cents for 24 hours is what it says here on this little screenshot you pay later what do you mean pay later like is it does it accumulate interest yeah does it yeah i think no i think it just Like racks up a bill a tab like it like you know it's like hey which you'll forget to pay and they'll report it to your credit agency? Chris Coyier No, they got your credit card, dude. Dave Rupert They're charging you every month. You know what I mean? They're running it at the end of the month. Well, pay later is just, I'm just, I bristle at that term. Chris Coyier But I know I'm being negative here, but I actually kind of think this looks cool in a weird way. It's Klarna for articles. Assuming you can pick the ones that you want, you know? Dave Rupert Yeah. And then the other one was like subscribe to a newsletter or subscribe. Just straight up give us money. Like a monthly sub or whatever. Which is, you know, that's interesting too. I'd be curious. Like, you know, there's all this back end stuff. Like, how do you like, you know. Offer wall. You're my offer wall. Chris Coyier Well, it kind of turns the tables. Like, publishers have to decide how are we going to monetize this? Are we going to do ads? Are we going to do memberships? Are we going to do a combination? What are we going to do? And this says like, well, we I don't care which one we do. The users get to pick which one they want to do. Yeah, that's neat. Dave Rupert Yeah. Well, and then they, you know they also have this idea of like uh i'm looking at the super tab website super tab.co they have this idea of like a bot paywall like okay llm you want to crawl Chris Coyier My site guess what that's 99.99 to do that trick you know that super tab is doing that because cloudflare announced that this week as well a little pay to crawl thing yeah i totally signed Up for it immediately i was like yeah i'm down like we did not block bots on code pen mostly because like we're really busy and sometimes when we like that type of thing is of course interesting And worth talking about but you need to balance it you're like if all of a sudden every day you're like oh now we have to have a meeting about how we're going to handle bots. It's like, dude, we're too small. We can't have a meeting about every getting thing, you know? No, you can only zone, right? Dave Rupert You can only zone. You can't, you can't like put everybody on a defense every time they get the ball. Chris Coyier Yeah, yeah, totally. But then this came up and we talked about it enough that we're like, you know what? Why don't we just sign up for this? And by sign up, it means signal your interest to Cloudflare that you would be perhaps willing to do this when they're ready. So pretty lightweight. But Cloudflare, because they, you know, as I said frequently, is there is a genius move has your, you know, they're dns or whatever between you and your website could they know what bots Look like and when the bot comes you can be like nope they already have a block blocking tool but this would wouldn't respond with nope it would respond with sure you can come on through Give me a quarter give a quarter. You can come right in here. You know, 999. Very theoretical whether that would work. But you know, I like offering a hat out to these companies, you know, these companies, they didn't ask us to crawl our content, not a little bit. And now they're not even crawling it how Google used to crawl it. They're crawling the absolute bejesus out of it. You know, so now they're not, is it not cool that they're crawling it at all, but they're just crawling it constantly and just tons of them and they're hiding themselves and they don't Respect the bots.txt and all this. So if we found a way to actually block it and be like, hey, though, it's cool, just give me a corridor, I think that's hilarious. That's just an amazing way to turn the tables, but do it on the high ground. Don't just do what they did, but just be like, hey, no, just give me a quarter. I mean, I keep saying a quarter, but more like give me $50,000. Dave Rupert Well, you know, or, you know, whatever the, I'm sure there's going to be a rate or like a market rate or something, you know, like. Chris Coyier Yeah. Eventually, if it actually took off, I do want to say that it doesn't, it doesn't fix this other interesting problem. Because ([Time 0:37:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/769d4ecd-5b37-4978-bbf6-f83b4e4cb301)) - **Empower Creators With Monetization APIs** - Web monetization APIs should empower creators by linking wallets directly to their content. - This gives creators direct control over receiving payments without intermediaries diluting revenue. Transcript: Chris Coyier That. But you know who gets the money from that? Automatic does. Guess who produced the content for them? Just people. You and me did. You know what I mean? So now it's, you know, it was rich people doing a thing to benefit rich people. Now it's again, the rich people. You know, it's not like the money that come, let's say OpenAI is like, fine, we're going to, we'll pay your pay to crawl thing. Where else is all that money going to go? Not to the people who wrote the words. Dave Rupert No, to the silo. It goes to the silo, right? Right. Chris Coyier So I want to be like conscious of that as code pen, that if we do that, I don't know what, what's going to happen or if the money will be significant or not. But it's like, again, like, yes, we're doing a lot of the work. Believe me, it's a lot of work running this business. And maybe it does make sense for us to benefit from the money in this way. But the content came from people who made stuff on CodePen. Yeah. So I always want to be like very careful and conscious. Dave Rupert That's where the web payments or web monetization API was interesting. Just because it's in the hands of the creator. Yeah, like, because you could offer people to the creators to be like, put your wallet here, you know, and like let people like, you know, I think I have pens that have my wallet on it, you Know, just to see what would happen, you know, and like my now defunct wallet, so I should remove it. But, you know, like that's like a, you know, is that cool? That was cool. Like that would be a cool way for people to get paid, you know? Like maybe it's not through offer wall specifically or some Google content thing, but like maybe. Yeah. Chris Coyier Was just Brian, you know, shouting out some new tools or did he have a other point no dumping ([Time 0:44:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d7b7d22f-3457-477f-b05f-1a2cea126c6a)) - **Money Follows Money Dynamics** - Money tends to flow to where it is already concentrated, creating a snowball effect. - For web monetization to succeed, the ecosystem must enable money to reach creators fairly and efficiently. Transcript: Dave Rupert Oh, they're making money. I should go put my money at the thing that makes money. Right. Like, I think it's just good for the web. You know, we've done so much about like, it's exactly right. Chris Coyier I think that's why the snowballing looks so appealing to people is they can imagine what happens when money follows money. Yeah. Dave Rupert Like, like if suddenly you can make money on the internet again, like in a non-invasive way that respects privacy and, you know, like, man, more money bucks from companies might go to The website or go to, you know, like, you know, like, I think like, I know ad blocking is such a sensitive topic, especially around privacy. Like it is generally pretty horrific. Right. Like, if we all block ads, like 60% on smashing and CSS tricks, right. Guess what? Those sites don't have as much money and, you know, may go away, you know, like, it's just, that's how it is, man. It's like, so we need to make sure money keeps going into creators hands people we care about you know or else i mean i could get full uh full uh bernie sanders here uh otherwise it's going To the billionaires you know yeah if it's not going to the people it's going to the billionaires i also think that there's innovation happens when you give people primitives like this Chris Coyier That it's not just like hey look at it could be like offer wall offer ([Time 0:46:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1a725ff5-c3e8-4f13-8164-be4a88253291))