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"People assume today's consumer has to make a deal with a marketing machine to get stuff for 'free,' even if they're horrified by what happens with their data.

"People assume today's consumer has to make a deal with a marketing machine to get stuff for 'free,' even if they're horrified by what happens with their data. Imagine a world where paying for things was easy on both sides." I can't see that friction is the problem. It's easy to implement payment on the web nowadays. The issue is getting people to want to actually pay, rather than going and looking elsewhere for the same thing for free. The challenge with the web is as is noted at the end, not one of technology, but one of society. Making a better web means making how people work with each other through the web, what we expect of it, and how we want it to work better. Unfortunately, time and time again we've seen people prefer free, lousy web content to even a ludicrously small payment for something really good. How you fix that (getting people to value what they get from the web and to be willing to pay for it), I don't know. Spotify, Netflix, The FT et al have shown that it's possible to get people to pay, but I can't imagine even the majority of the web going that way for now. Hopefully that changes in the future.

OscarCunningham 10y ago
I think that the problem isn't paying per se, but rather just the inconvenience. After all people already pay plenty for their web connection. Something like Flattr might be the solution.
- elcapitan 10y ago
  As a flattr user from both sides (site owner and site visitor), I can't say I was entirely happy with it. Although it's well implemented. I find it difficult that they constrained the concept to payoff = $monthly_amount/$number_of_clicks. From both sides I would prefer to be able to set and see prices, not arbitrary equal results for all the sites I click. That had kept me from clicking in most cases, because I wouldn't want to give the equal amount to go to some 1-paragraph blogpost as to a 1 hour podcast. Even though I would want to contribute for both.
  - splatcollision 10y ago
    Potential to integrate the amount of micropayment as a star rating - think a combined "donate & rate" action after reading / watching. Let people contribute from 0.01 to 5.00 units of currency, in easy increments, that also indicate how much they liked it. Automatically bill and aggregate monthly.
    - elcapitan 10y ago
      I guess the charm of their solution is that they don't have to put these complex semantics into place. It sounds like a good idea, but rating and paying are two very different things - in my example, I would merely want to reward more effort (1h podcast) with more money. That doesn't mean I didn't like the short blogpost.
  - porsupah 10y ago
    Wouldn't one solution be to simply Flattr the podcast more than once? Click three times, and the podcaster will get three times the slice your blogposter will.
    - elcapitan 10y ago
      That's also not possible, unfortunately. There's the option to also flattr the side-wide button, but that also kind of defies the idea of putting it where you want it to be (because that's also feedback for the publisher, obviously).
- Dirlewanger 10y ago
  >the inconvenience Which is why something like Brave is so exciting.

OscarCunningham 10y ago

I think that the problem isn't paying per se, but rather just the inconvenience. After all people already pay plenty for their web connection. Something like Flattr might be the solution.

elcapitan 10y ago
As a flattr user from both sides (site owner and site visitor), I can't say I was entirely happy with it. Although it's well implemented. I find it difficult that they constrained the concept to payoff = $monthly_amount/$number_of_clicks. From both sides I would prefer to be able to set and see prices, not arbitrary equal results for all the sites I click. That had kept me from clicking in most cases, because I wouldn't want to give the equal amount to go to some 1-paragraph blogpost as to a 1 hour podcast. Even though I would want to contribute for both.
- splatcollision 10y ago
  Potential to integrate the amount of micropayment as a star rating - think a combined "donate & rate" action after reading / watching. Let people contribute from 0.01 to 5.00 units of currency, in easy increments, that also indicate how much they liked it. Automatically bill and aggregate monthly.
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    I guess the charm of their solution is that they don't have to put these complex semantics into place. It sounds like a good idea, but rating and paying are two very different things - in my example, I would merely want to reward more effort (1h podcast) with more money. That doesn't mean I didn't like the short blogpost.
- porsupah 10y ago
  Wouldn't one solution be to simply Flattr the podcast more than once? Click three times, and the podcaster will get three times the slice your blogposter will.
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    That's also not possible, unfortunately. There's the option to also flattr the side-wide button, but that also kind of defies the idea of putting it where you want it to be (because that's also feedback for the publisher, obviously).
Dirlewanger 10y ago
>the inconvenience Which is why something like Brave is so exciting.