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For a long time I've thought that we need a browser based universal tip jar. Some way that lets me read a blog post, and then tip the site with however much I w

by jerrac 7y ago

For a long time I've thought that we need a browser based universal tip jar. Some way that lets me read a blog post, and then tip the site with however much I want. 1 cent, 25 cents, 1 dollar, 200 dollars, any amount. From my understanding of things, the biggest thing in the way is that processing payments costs money. The second thing is making sure the money goes where it is supposed to. With services like Scroll, the site owner has to register with Scroll. Patreon requires the user register to send money to the site owner. So, here's a thought, Mozilla should create a tip jar non-profit organization. Tipping would be something built into Firefox. If you tip someone, it's sent to the non-profit's bank, and connected to the url. Site owners could then register with the non-profit, in manner similar to Google Webmaster tools, that would let them access the tips they've received. Anyway, implementation would be pretty difficult, but I'd rather something like that than hope that my favorite blogger is somehow able to get onto Scroll or another service like that.

99052882514569 7y ago
Tips are cool, but a browser-based micro-payments setup will create a more consistent alternative revenue stream.
- TylerE 7y ago
  People have been beating the micro-payments horse since at least the late '90s. I don't get it, at all. No one likes turning every action into a financial decision. History has shown that buffet-style pricing (Netflix, Spotify, et al) is much more appetizing - because you only have to make the decision ONCE. There is no financial pain for consuming content.
  - vimslayer 7y ago
    Sure, as long as the amount of those buffets stays within reasonable limits. If I stumble to a site from Google, there's no way I'm just going to register to their monthly subsciption plan, no matter how useful their content was. But if I was happy with the content, I could maybe make a one-time donation or payment. I'm afraid that embracing periodic "buffet-style" pricing also embraces big centralized platforms, like Medium, that can provide me enough content to consume for the whole billing period and then they can distribute the profits among content creators. Maybe that could work, but I'm sure HNers have a thing or two to say about the idea of making Medium the buffet where everyone's going to eat.
    - fwip 7y ago
      Micro-payments in this context doesn't refer to voluntary tips, but rather to automatically billing you, say, 1 cent per article you read.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    > History has shown that buffet-style pricing (Netflix, Spotify, et al) is much more appetizing For all we know, Netflix and Spotify might be special cases. Cable TV uses the same buffet-style pricing and plenty of people object to that, because it means funding content that they have zero interest in. I'd say the better solution is crowdfunding a la Patreon/Kickstarter, combined with free-and-open content release as an incentive for users to pitch in. This model can be problematic for some forms of media where full costs are hard to assess, especially in advance (feature video), but it would work wonders for "plain" text and other low-commitment stuff.
  - ska 7y ago
    People have been talking about it since the (mid) 90's, sure. But nobody has ever implemented it, at least not at any sort of scale. So we can't really say that buffet style has proven "better" - it's just been available. The problem isn't making things into a financial decision, it's making them into a non-trivial financial decision. If you want $10/mo for me to access your particular walled garden, I'm going to have to think about it. And if I'm already paying for a couple other walled gardens, the answer is probably "no". But micropayments are supposed to go the other way. If you have an article that looks interesting from the headline and it costs me a nickle to press "read", I'll probably do that without thinking about it at all. The problem isn't with the idea, the problem is that nobody knows (or wants to know?) how to get the transaction costs down low enough so that the payments are actually "micro". Regulatory bodies don't help here either, as it's not a scenario they've planned around or actually care about.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Eh. Netflix is a good example of buffet-style offerings, but you have to remember that Netflix was born out of cable, which is a much better example of buffet-style, and was largely despised because it was buffet-style. People hated paying for dozens of channels when they only wanted sports. I would add a caveat to this that people like paying a low price for a lot of content. If the price of a buffet is too high, then people will start to ask why they can't just pay for the small amount of food or content that they want to consume.
  - crispinb 7y ago
    > History has shown that buffet-style pricing (Netflix, Spotify, et al) is much more appetizing Maybe, but I don't think anyone could make the claim that a micropayments hypothesis has been tested (market or tech) with anything like the robustness or to anywhere near the scope with which those services have been. There's not yet a solid basis from which to compare. In any case, appetising or not, the subscription model is deeply antagonistic to the fundamental nature of the web. It's a model borrowed from prior tech. It works, but it retards the web's innate potential. > because you only have to make the decision ONCE That's the problem. The web is a web. Each link is a decision point. Portals are portals. Leaping through the locked gate is a single decision. They are different things. Portals can be built on the web, but much would be lost if the whole web were to only be portals. Micropayments may or may not be a solution to funding the web in its best potential form. We don't know - but the success of portals has little to say about it either way. They were just a known quantity from a previous world.
josteink 7y ago
> services like Scroll, the site owner has to register with Scroll. Patreon requires the user register to send money to the site owner. And the site has to not challenge the current political climate, or (leftist) political activist will pressure payment providers like MasterCard and Visa into banning the site in question from receiving payment from downstream payment services[1]. > Mozilla should create a tip jar non-profit organization. Tipping would be something built into Firefox. If you tip someone, it's sent to the non-profit's bank, and connected to the url. And the second a anti-religious/anti-Muslim website starts receiving significant money, Mozilla risks getting all payment processing frozen. > Anyway, implementation would be pretty difficult Actually that’s the easy part. Avoiding censorship and avoiding being made into a political puppet by the current payment-provider duopoly seems to be what’s difficult. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/aa5f3d/mastercard_forced_patreon_to_remove_a_users/ https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/aa5f3d/mastercard_...
- 0815test 7y ago
  This should not be downvoted. It's indeed beyond ridiculous that some sites, and even some individual content makers (such as the well known 'SexyCyborg'/'Machinery Enchantress'), are having trouble accepting funding online for what are unambiguously political reasons.
- Fellshard 7y ago
  You are spot on, in this case, I fear, given every partner Scroll lists is on the /hard/ left of the political spectrum. That's not a healthy partnership for Mozilla to take on, unless they proactively reach out to other mature publications across the spectrum. EDIT: Tell me where I'm wrong, please. The majority are the Vox collective and close Media Matters affiliates.
kdbg 7y ago
> So, here's a thought, Mozilla should create a tip jar non-profit organization. Tipping would be something built into Firefox. If you tip someone, it's sent to the non-profit's bank, and connected to the url. Site owners could then register with the non-profit, in manner similar to Google Webmaster tools, that would let them access the tips they've received. This is kinda what the Basic Attention Token is in the Brave browser. You can either tip directly/manually, or setup a monthly payment that gets split automatically among the places you most read. It doesn't require the creator already be a member, but rather it holds the funds until they register, or until 90days have passed. They've also built in some significant privacy features so that no one can determine who/what you're donating to. Though this leads to one of the contentious issues as refunds are not possible, so when the above mentioned 90 days passes without a donation being claimed, the funds go into the "User Growth Pool" which basically means they are given out to new people joining BAT as an incentive to join. The big controversy though was exactly the issue of not requiring people sign up before they started accepted BAT donations to them. They had a system of showing if a user was 'verified'[0] meaning they were registered to receive the donations, and nothing would be shown if they were not verified. This led to an issue where Tom Scott commenting that Brave was taking donations on his behalf without his consent. [1] Imho that was hugely damaging to the potential of BAT and I think really stemmed from people who didn't use BAT and didn't understand the Verified/Unverified aspect of it. They've added a Non-Verified statement and icon now to make it explicit, but the damage has been done. [0] http://se.ri0.us/2018-12-22-184516548-9adee.png http://se.ri0.us/2018-12-22-184516548-9adee.png [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > This is kinda what the Basic Attention Token is in the Brave browser The difference is in OP’s proposal one gets money. Brave sends people its token things.
  - lwb 7y ago
    You can redeem them for like, 30 cents, so that's something https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hiccuphippo 7y ago
What happens with the tips sent to a website that doesn't register with Mozilla? Maybe there should be a standard meta tag that websites can add to show they are looking for tips. And then they can even add a URL on the tag so they can use another provider if for some reason they don't want Mozilla to be the gatekeeper of their tip jar. But then again, they can just add the link in the website itself like they already do.
- decasteve 7y ago
  Perhaps a DNS TXT record with the info.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    A meta tag is better granularity because different pages on the same domain could be attributed to different authors. Also, if we put bank account numbers in DNS (metaphorically speaking), we will we a lot more DNS spoofing attacks.
    - decasteve 7y ago
      I was thinking more of an additional layer of verification or public key.
- vimslayer 7y ago
  The thing definitely needs to be opt-in instead of opt-out. BAT just recently got some backlash when Tom Scott tweeted that (I'm paraphrasing) he doesn't really like how Brave is using his identity to collect money without his consent.
- jboynyc 7y ago
  Beaker Browser has (a version of) this feature -- you can specify a donate link for your dat site, and the browser then displays a heart button that takes you to that page.
  - jerrac 7y ago
gibolt 7y ago
This would be difficult to target on sites that host content/articles. Would Medium get the tip, or the author of the article. How would the browser decide, and how would it differentiate ownership.
- admax88q 7y ago
  On the other hand it would incentive you to host your content yourself.
snambi 7y ago
It need not be a tip jar. It can be proper payments. But current credit based online payment system is too expensive for micropayments ( for a fraction of a penny) and it is too cumbersome to be used by the user. We need a modern payment system, that can process micropayments ( that is a fraction of a penny ) with higher security guarantees and cheaper (or free) than the credit cards.
- kaycebasques 7y ago
  Even the economics of $1 transactions under the current online payment systems can be hard to make work. $0.35 per transaction + 3% is typical, yes?
  - toast0 7y ago
    Some places have micropayment rates. For Paypal you can (maybe) sign up for 5% + $0.05 on purchases under $10. For $1, it's a lot more palettable. But still, the problem with micropayments is usually not the cost, but the hassle; and if you're going for worldwide coverage, you'll also add ability to pay in an accepted form, and for poorer countries, ability to pay in a meaningful amount.
celticmusic 7y ago
Are you me? About 2 years ago I was having a conversation with someone and this was roughly the idea I had. A wallet that users can fill up and apportion appropriately. So if someone really likes reddit, then they can automatically give say $5/month to reddit out of that wallet. And in exchange they get perks. And, as you said, if they come across a blog post they really like, they can also tip ad hoc. Patreon for the web essentially. We were throwing around ideas for a business, and this was one of mine. I still think it's viable, but I also think it requires a large, established entity, such as Mozilla, to do it.
- majewsky 7y ago
  You're describing Flattr.
fwip 7y ago
You're not the first person to think of this. You may want to look at Gittip/Gratipay (no longer active) or Flattr (still going), and the experiences they had while developing their solutions.
packet_nerd 7y ago
> browser based universal tip jar I like this idea, and would use it myself. I understand the Brave browser does this, essentially, and have been meaning to check it out. I wonder if a "tip" would be a better system for verifying a real human than Google's captcha (which really goes nuts if you've taken steps to protect your privacy)?
- amirhirsch 7y ago
  I work on hCaptcha which is essentially what you describe. Customers pay us for data annotation and we pay out to websites for human provided labels while also providing bot detection.
jerrac 7y ago
So, to address some of the comments referencing Brave, Flattr, and other similar sites, as far as I know, those are all for profit entities. My idea would be a non-profit. Initially they'd need to be bank rolled by someone, but I'd think that if they gained enough traction, operating costs could come out interest gains. Or just donations directly to the org. I'd also hope that any unclaimed tips would be kept for something like 50 years. They'd just be generating interest for use by the non-profit.
giaour 7y ago
Didn't Google try to do this a few years ago? IIRC, they had a service where you could put in a set amount of money a month, and Google would essentially use it to buy the ad slots on pages you visited. Bit of a conflict of interest since Google was also selling the ad slots at non-fixed costs, but it was a nice idea.
- dyarosla 7y ago
  So... like... not the same thing at all?
  - giaour 7y ago
    Completely different execution, same motivation and (desired) end result.
- kaycebasques 7y ago
  Any one got a link on this? Or remember the name? Edit: Contributor [1] seems to have been its name. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20340453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20340453
danShumway 7y ago
> From my understanding of things, the biggest thing in the way is that processing payments costs money. This is one of the largest problems (if not the largest problem) on the web that I've been thinking about recently. Services like Venmo aren't designed for commercial use. Paypal is a privacy nightmare, and it's bad for sellers too because their chargeback policy is a mess -- and that's even ignoring the fees. Bank transfers are insecure and cumbersome (and again, often come with fees). Bitcoin doesn't solve the problem for a metric ton of different reasons -- it's proponents are too concerned with worrying about inflation and investments and alternate currencies then with actually practical questions like, "can the payment reliably be completed in less than 1 minute", and "does it have fees associated with that kind of speed?". It's a very complicated situation, and I have no idea what the answers are or where to even start looking for the answers, but I'm increasingly frustrated by online payment systems, both as a consumer and as someone looking to accept payments. They're almost universally bad. I think this might be one of the big reasons why advertising works so well -- it's not that advertising is efficient, or that fraud isn't a problem, or that consumers like it. But advertising is an easy way to have a micropayment of as low as a cent or two linked to a page view. And as far as I can see, there is no alternative to that. In the absence of a way to do actual micropayments, paid subscriptions on the web are also far more costly than ads are. Your average website doesn't get 25 cents every time you load a page. But you have to scale everything up, because otherwise all of your gains just get eaten by fees. I'm convinced our lack of a decent payment system is seriously holding the web back.
- captn3m0 7y ago
  GNU Taler looks like an answer.
neves 7y ago
This 2009 argues that the cost cost for the user will prevent it to work: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont-save-publishers/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont...
xorcist 7y ago
The biggest obstacle is likely that you need to be a licenses money transmitter in all major jurisdictions to carry out what you describe. The second you let an American tip an Iranian there will be trouble somewhere. It's not an unsolvable problem but you probably need to limit the scope a bit. There's a lot of implementation details hiding behind "accessing the tips they've received". I believe Flattr started out limited to the SEPA area and slowly expanded from there.
- jerrac 7y ago
  Agreed, that is a large issue. You likely would need to limit by geographical region for a while.
  - chii 7y ago
    And all these compliance requirements start to rack up costs to do the tipping. Eventually, it'd be no better than using a credit card.
pkaye 7y ago
> From my understanding of things, the biggest thing in the way is that processing payments costs money. The biggest problem is people don't want to pay much for contents. They have no problem paying $2/day for a cup of coffee but then taking about online contents they will talk about cents.
- solstice 7y ago
  People are willing to pay if it's made easy. The idea of Flattr (which soundd similar enough to what is proposed here) was that you top up your flattr account with let's say 20 usd and designate a monthly pay-out, let's say 5usd. This means that for the next 4 months flatter will pay out 5$ to creators you flattr, divided by the number of times the user clicked on the flatter button. If the user flattrs a lot of sites, then each site gets sth like 10cts. If they only click a few times, each site gets proportionally more of the 5$. The basic idea is that the user doesnt have to deal with thinking about exact amounts of money ("is this article really worth 50cts? Or should it be 2$?"). They set a monthly limit they are comfortable with spending on online content and it reaches the content creators they like. Unfortunately Flattr didn't really catch on in the USA, I think and is now largely irrelevant and I haven't followed its development since several years. (Anecdotally, it was quite big in the German podcasting scene...)
lone_haxx0r 7y ago
I wouldn't trust Mozilla with such a thing. Actually, I wouldn't trust any silicon valley corporation. I predict that Mozilla would ban wrong-thinkers from their service using the excuse of hate speech. Want to donate to a progressive/leftist organization? Mozilla will gladly help you. Want to donate to a right wing conservative? Mozilla doesn't allow "bigots" on their platform. They did exaxtly that with the Dissenter extension. It has to be decentralized.
- metildaa 7y ago
  Advocating for assaulting and murdering fellow people in your country will result in Visa, Mastercard, American Express & Discover pulling the plug on your merchant account. All the payments networks have morals clauses in their payments contracts, InfoWars blatantly violated said contract and has kicked up a fit over First Data doing what they are contractually obligated to do. Some of the frontends like First Data can be very restricitive with their own morals clauses, banning bars, sex shops, book stores, and various other "wrong think". Bitcoin and other schemes will never have a reliable connection to the USA's current payments system due to this type of embedded moralizing.
- jerrac 7y ago
  I somewhat share your concerns. Mozilla has been pretty intolerant in the past (firing someone due to personal political views.) That said, I really can't see anything gaining traction unless it's centralized. There is no decentralized means of payments. Cryptocurrencies don't work because very very very few people use them. And fees from Visa/Mastercard/etc are high enough you have to have some form of a "tip wallet" for it to make financial sense. The non-profit doesn't have to be from Mozilla. It's something any of us with the organizational skills and other resources could do. Is there a way to make something like a legally binding charter? Part of it could say "Unless your content breaks the law, you can register." ('Course, not sure how you'd apply that to countries with governments that suppress free speech...) If anyone wants to try that, I'd be happy to help with ideas and Linux Sys Admin skills.
  - metildaa 7y ago
ErikBjare 7y ago
We're building something very similar to that with Thankful (https://getthankful.io/ https://getthankful.io/, https://github.com/SuperuserLabs/thankful https://github.com/SuperuserLabs/thankful). It's still early, but we have browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox (and are making a new release today with many long-awaited fixes and improvements). Unlike Brave, we aren't building an entire browser/ad platform, we don't have a special token (we currently use plain Ether), and our plan is to make it possible to donate using stablecoins (most likely Dai) to get rid of the issue of volatility. We'll solve the creator registration using a couple of smart contracts, one for handling the ESCROW-nature of pending donations (allowing for refunds if the creator chooses not register), and one for the address registry (that maps from emails/URLs to eth addresses). The details are still very much up in the air, but you can read the (early and unaudited) WIP contracts are on GitHub: https://github.com/SuperuserLabs/thankful-contracts/ https://github.com/SuperuserLabs/thankful-contracts/
ilaksh 7y ago
Cryptocurrency payments.
SergeAx 7y ago
Unfortunately, advertisement typically pays to publishers at least one order of magnitude more than subscribers, even with paywalls in place. For example, ARPU of Facebook is way north of one of Netflix.

by jerrac 7y ago

99052882514569 7y ago

Tips are cool, but a browser-based micro-payments setup will create a more consistent alternative revenue stream.

TylerE 7y ago
People have been beating the micro-payments horse since at least the late '90s. I don't get it, at all. No one likes turning every action into a financial decision. History has shown that buffet-style pricing (Netflix, Spotify, et al) is much more appetizing - because you only have to make the decision ONCE. There is no financial pain for consuming content.
- vimslayer 7y ago
  Sure, as long as the amount of those buffets stays within reasonable limits. If I stumble to a site from Google, there's no way I'm just going to register to their monthly subsciption plan, no matter how useful their content was. But if I was happy with the content, I could maybe make a one-time donation or payment. I'm afraid that embracing periodic "buffet-style" pricing also embraces big centralized platforms, like Medium, that can provide me enough content to consume for the whole billing period and then they can distribute the profits among content creators. Maybe that could work, but I'm sure HNers have a thing or two to say about the idea of making Medium the buffet where everyone's going to eat.
  - fwip 7y ago
    Micro-payments in this context doesn't refer to voluntary tips, but rather to automatically billing you, say, 1 cent per article you read.
- 0815test 7y ago
  > History has shown that buffet-style pricing (Netflix, Spotify, et al) is much more appetizing For all we know, Netflix and Spotify might be special cases. Cable TV uses the same buffet-style pricing and plenty of people object to that, because it means funding content that they have zero interest in. I'd say the better solution is crowdfunding a la Patreon/Kickstarter, combined with free-and-open content release as an incentive for users to pitch in. This model can be problematic for some forms of media where full costs are hard to assess, especially in advance (feature video), but it would work wonders for "plain" text and other low-commitment stuff.
- ska 7y ago
  People have been talking about it since the (mid) 90's, sure. But nobody has ever implemented it, at least not at any sort of scale. So we can't really say that buffet style has proven "better" - it's just been available. The problem isn't making things into a financial decision, it's making them into a non-trivial financial decision. If you want $10/mo for me to access your particular walled garden, I'm going to have to think about it. And if I'm already paying for a couple other walled gardens, the answer is probably "no". But micropayments are supposed to go the other way. If you have an article that looks interesting from the headline and it costs me a nickle to press "read", I'll probably do that without thinking about it at all. The problem isn't with the idea, the problem is that nobody knows (or wants to know?) how to get the transaction costs down low enough so that the payments are actually "micro". Regulatory bodies don't help here either, as it's not a scenario they've planned around or actually care about.
- danShumway 7y ago
  Eh. Netflix is a good example of buffet-style offerings, but you have to remember that Netflix was born out of cable, which is a much better example of buffet-style, and was largely despised because it was buffet-style. People hated paying for dozens of channels when they only wanted sports. I would add a caveat to this that people like paying a low price for a lot of content. If the price of a buffet is too high, then people will start to ask why they can't just pay for the small amount of food or content that they want to consume.
- crispinb 7y ago
  > History has shown that buffet-style pricing (Netflix, Spotify, et al) is much more appetizing Maybe, but I don't think anyone could make the claim that a micropayments hypothesis has been tested (market or tech) with anything like the robustness or to anywhere near the scope with which those services have been. There's not yet a solid basis from which to compare. In any case, appetising or not, the subscription model is deeply antagonistic to the fundamental nature of the web. It's a model borrowed from prior tech. It works, but it retards the web's innate potential. > because you only have to make the decision ONCE That's the problem. The web is a web. Each link is a decision point. Portals are portals. Leaping through the locked gate is a single decision. They are different things. Portals can be built on the web, but much would be lost if the whole web were to only be portals. Micropayments may or may not be a solution to funding the web in its best potential form. We don't know - but the success of portals has little to say about it either way. They were just a known quantity from a previous world.

josteink 7y ago

> services like Scroll, the site owner has to register with Scroll. Patreon requires the user register to send money to the site owner. And the site has to not challenge the current political climate, or (leftist) political activist will pressure payment providers like MasterCard and Visa into banning the site in question from receiving payment from downstream payment services[1]. > Mozilla should create a tip jar non-profit organization. Tipping would be something built into Firefox. If you tip someone, it's sent to the non-profit's bank, and connected to the url. And the second a anti-religious/anti-Muslim website starts receiving significant money, Mozilla risks getting all payment processing frozen. > Anyway, implementation would be pretty difficult Actually that’s the easy part. Avoiding censorship and avoiding being made into a political puppet by the current payment-provider duopoly seems to be what’s difficult. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/aa5f3d/mastercard_forced_patreon_to_remove_a_users/ https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/aa5f3d/mastercard_...

0815test 7y ago
This should not be downvoted. It's indeed beyond ridiculous that some sites, and even some individual content makers (such as the well known 'SexyCyborg'/'Machinery Enchantress'), are having trouble accepting funding online for what are unambiguously political reasons.
Fellshard 7y ago
You are spot on, in this case, I fear, given every partner Scroll lists is on the /hard/ left of the political spectrum. That's not a healthy partnership for Mozilla to take on, unless they proactively reach out to other mature publications across the spectrum. EDIT: Tell me where I'm wrong, please. The majority are the Vox collective and close Media Matters affiliates.

kdbg 7y ago

> So, here's a thought, Mozilla should create a tip jar non-profit organization. Tipping would be something built into Firefox. If you tip someone, it's sent to the non-profit's bank, and connected to the url. Site owners could then register with the non-profit, in manner similar to Google Webmaster tools, that would let them access the tips they've received. This is kinda what the Basic Attention Token is in the Brave browser. You can either tip directly/manually, or setup a monthly payment that gets split automatically among the places you most read. It doesn't require the creator already be a member, but rather it holds the funds until they register, or until 90days have passed. They've also built in some significant privacy features so that no one can determine who/what you're donating to. Though this leads to one of the contentious issues as refunds are not possible, so when the above mentioned 90 days passes without a donation being claimed, the funds go into the "User Growth Pool" which basically means they are given out to new people joining BAT as an incentive to join. The big controversy though was exactly the issue of not requiring people sign up before they started accepted BAT donations to them. They had a system of showing if a user was 'verified'[0] meaning they were registered to receive the donations, and nothing would be shown if they were not verified. This led to an issue where Tom Scott commenting that Brave was taking donations on his behalf without his consent. [1] Imho that was hugely damaging to the potential of BAT and I think really stemmed from people who didn't use BAT and didn't understand the Verified/Unverified aspect of it. They've added a Non-Verified statement and icon now to make it explicit, but the damage has been done. [0] http://se.ri0.us/2018-12-22-184516548-9adee.png http://se.ri0.us/2018-12-22-184516548-9adee.png [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> This is kinda what the Basic Attention Token is in the Brave browser The difference is in OP’s proposal one gets money. Brave sends people its token things.
- lwb 7y ago
  You can redeem them for like, 30 cents, so that's something https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hiccuphippo 7y ago

What happens with the tips sent to a website that doesn't register with Mozilla? Maybe there should be a standard meta tag that websites can add to show they are looking for tips. And then they can even add a URL on the tag so they can use another provider if for some reason they don't want Mozilla to be the gatekeeper of their tip jar. But then again, they can just add the link in the website itself like they already do.

decasteve 7y ago
Perhaps a DNS TXT record with the info.
- majewsky 7y ago
  A meta tag is better granularity because different pages on the same domain could be attributed to different authors. Also, if we put bank account numbers in DNS (metaphorically speaking), we will we a lot more DNS spoofing attacks.
  - decasteve 7y ago
    I was thinking more of an additional layer of verification or public key.
vimslayer 7y ago
The thing definitely needs to be opt-in instead of opt-out. BAT just recently got some backlash when Tom Scott tweeted that (I'm paraphrasing) he doesn't really like how Brave is using his identity to collect money without his consent.
jboynyc 7y ago
Beaker Browser has (a version of) this feature -- you can specify a donate link for your dat site, and the browser then displays a heart button that takes you to that page.
- jerrac 7y ago

gibolt 7y ago

This would be difficult to target on sites that host content/articles. Would Medium get the tip, or the author of the article. How would the browser decide, and how would it differentiate ownership.

admax88q 7y ago
On the other hand it would incentive you to host your content yourself.

snambi 7y ago

It need not be a tip jar. It can be proper payments. But current credit based online payment system is too expensive for micropayments ( for a fraction of a penny) and it is too cumbersome to be used by the user. We need a modern payment system, that can process micropayments ( that is a fraction of a penny ) with higher security guarantees and cheaper (or free) than the credit cards.

kaycebasques 7y ago
Even the economics of $1 transactions under the current online payment systems can be hard to make work. $0.35 per transaction + 3% is typical, yes?
- toast0 7y ago
  Some places have micropayment rates. For Paypal you can (maybe) sign up for 5% + $0.05 on purchases under $10. For $1, it's a lot more palettable. But still, the problem with micropayments is usually not the cost, but the hassle; and if you're going for worldwide coverage, you'll also add ability to pay in an accepted form, and for poorer countries, ability to pay in a meaningful amount.

celticmusic 7y ago

Are you me? About 2 years ago I was having a conversation with someone and this was roughly the idea I had. A wallet that users can fill up and apportion appropriately. So if someone really likes reddit, then they can automatically give say $5/month to reddit out of that wallet. And in exchange they get perks. And, as you said, if they come across a blog post they really like, they can also tip ad hoc. Patreon for the web essentially. We were throwing around ideas for a business, and this was one of mine. I still think it's viable, but I also think it requires a large, established entity, such as Mozilla, to do it.

majewsky 7y ago
You're describing Flattr.

fwip 7y ago

You're not the first person to think of this. You may want to look at Gittip/Gratipay (no longer active) or Flattr (still going), and the experiences they had while developing their solutions.

packet_nerd 7y ago

> browser based universal tip jar I like this idea, and would use it myself. I understand the Brave browser does this, essentially, and have been meaning to check it out. I wonder if a "tip" would be a better system for verifying a real human than Google's captcha (which really goes nuts if you've taken steps to protect your privacy)?

amirhirsch 7y ago
I work on hCaptcha which is essentially what you describe. Customers pay us for data annotation and we pay out to websites for human provided labels while also providing bot detection.

jerrac 7y ago

So, to address some of the comments referencing Brave, Flattr, and other similar sites, as far as I know, those are all for profit entities. My idea would be a non-profit. Initially they'd need to be bank rolled by someone, but I'd think that if they gained enough traction, operating costs could come out interest gains. Or just donations directly to the org. I'd also hope that any unclaimed tips would be kept for something like 50 years. They'd just be generating interest for use by the non-profit.

giaour 7y ago

Didn't Google try to do this a few years ago? IIRC, they had a service where you could put in a set amount of money a month, and Google would essentially use it to buy the ad slots on pages you visited. Bit of a conflict of interest since Google was also selling the ad slots at non-fixed costs, but it was a nice idea.

dyarosla 7y ago
So... like... not the same thing at all?
- giaour 7y ago
  Completely different execution, same motivation and (desired) end result.
kaycebasques 7y ago
Any one got a link on this? Or remember the name? Edit: Contributor [1] seems to have been its name. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20340453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20340453

danShumway 7y ago

> From my understanding of things, the biggest thing in the way is that processing payments costs money. This is one of the largest problems (if not the largest problem) on the web that I've been thinking about recently. Services like Venmo aren't designed for commercial use. Paypal is a privacy nightmare, and it's bad for sellers too because their chargeback policy is a mess -- and that's even ignoring the fees. Bank transfers are insecure and cumbersome (and again, often come with fees). Bitcoin doesn't solve the problem for a metric ton of different reasons -- it's proponents are too concerned with worrying about inflation and investments and alternate currencies then with actually practical questions like, "can the payment reliably be completed in less than 1 minute", and "does it have fees associated with that kind of speed?". It's a very complicated situation, and I have no idea what the answers are or where to even start looking for the answers, but I'm increasingly frustrated by online payment systems, both as a consumer and as someone looking to accept payments. They're almost universally bad. I think this might be one of the big reasons why advertising works so well -- it's not that advertising is efficient, or that fraud isn't a problem, or that consumers like it. But advertising is an easy way to have a micropayment of as low as a cent or two linked to a page view. And as far as I can see, there is no alternative to that. In the absence of a way to do actual micropayments, paid subscriptions on the web are also far more costly than ads are. Your average website doesn't get 25 cents every time you load a page. But you have to scale everything up, because otherwise all of your gains just get eaten by fees. I'm convinced our lack of a decent payment system is seriously holding the web back.

captn3m0 7y ago
GNU Taler looks like an answer.

neves 7y ago

This 2009 argues that the cost cost for the user will prevent it to work: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont-save-publishers/ http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont...

xorcist 7y ago

The biggest obstacle is likely that you need to be a licenses money transmitter in all major jurisdictions to carry out what you describe. The second you let an American tip an Iranian there will be trouble somewhere. It's not an unsolvable problem but you probably need to limit the scope a bit. There's a lot of implementation details hiding behind "accessing the tips they've received". I believe Flattr started out limited to the SEPA area and slowly expanded from there.

jerrac 7y ago
Agreed, that is a large issue. You likely would need to limit by geographical region for a while.
- chii 7y ago
  And all these compliance requirements start to rack up costs to do the tipping. Eventually, it'd be no better than using a credit card.

pkaye 7y ago

> From my understanding of things, the biggest thing in the way is that processing payments costs money. The biggest problem is people don't want to pay much for contents. They have no problem paying $2/day for a cup of coffee but then taking about online contents they will talk about cents.

solstice 7y ago
People are willing to pay if it's made easy. The idea of Flattr (which soundd similar enough to what is proposed here) was that you top up your flattr account with let's say 20 usd and designate a monthly pay-out, let's say 5usd. This means that for the next 4 months flatter will pay out 5$ to creators you flattr, divided by the number of times the user clicked on the flatter button. If the user flattrs a lot of sites, then each site gets sth like 10cts. If they only click a few times, each site gets proportionally more of the 5$. The basic idea is that the user doesnt have to deal with thinking about exact amounts of money ("is this article really worth 50cts? Or should it be 2$?"). They set a monthly limit they are comfortable with spending on online content and it reaches the content creators they like. Unfortunately Flattr didn't really catch on in the USA, I think and is now largely irrelevant and I haven't followed its development since several years. (Anecdotally, it was quite big in the German podcasting scene...)

lone_haxx0r 7y ago

I wouldn't trust Mozilla with such a thing. Actually, I wouldn't trust any silicon valley corporation. I predict that Mozilla would ban wrong-thinkers from their service using the excuse of hate speech. Want to donate to a progressive/leftist organization? Mozilla will gladly help you. Want to donate to a right wing conservative? Mozilla doesn't allow "bigots" on their platform. They did exaxtly that with the Dissenter extension. It has to be decentralized.

metildaa 7y ago
Advocating for assaulting and murdering fellow people in your country will result in Visa, Mastercard, American Express & Discover pulling the plug on your merchant account. All the payments networks have morals clauses in their payments contracts, InfoWars blatantly violated said contract and has kicked up a fit over First Data doing what they are contractually obligated to do. Some of the frontends like First Data can be very restricitive with their own morals clauses, banning bars, sex shops, book stores, and various other "wrong think". Bitcoin and other schemes will never have a reliable connection to the USA's current payments system due to this type of embedded moralizing.
jerrac 7y ago
I somewhat share your concerns. Mozilla has been pretty intolerant in the past (firing someone due to personal political views.) That said, I really can't see anything gaining traction unless it's centralized. There is no decentralized means of payments. Cryptocurrencies don't work because very very very few people use them. And fees from Visa/Mastercard/etc are high enough you have to have some form of a "tip wallet" for it to make financial sense. The non-profit doesn't have to be from Mozilla. It's something any of us with the organizational skills and other resources could do. Is there a way to make something like a legally binding charter? Part of it could say "Unless your content breaks the law, you can register." ('Course, not sure how you'd apply that to countries with governments that suppress free speech...) If anyone wants to try that, I'd be happy to help with ideas and Linux Sys Admin skills.
- metildaa 7y ago

ErikBjare 7y ago

We're building something very similar to that with Thankful (https://getthankful.io/ https://getthankful.io/, https://github.com/SuperuserLabs/thankful https://github.com/SuperuserLabs/thankful). It's still early, but we have browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox (and are making a new release today with many long-awaited fixes and improvements). Unlike Brave, we aren't building an entire browser/ad platform, we don't have a special token (we currently use plain Ether), and our plan is to make it possible to donate using stablecoins (most likely Dai) to get rid of the issue of volatility. We'll solve the creator registration using a couple of smart contracts, one for handling the ESCROW-nature of pending donations (allowing for refunds if the creator chooses not register), and one for the address registry (that maps from emails/URLs to eth addresses). The details are still very much up in the air, but you can read the (early and unaudited) WIP contracts are on GitHub: https://github.com/SuperuserLabs/thankful-contracts/ https://github.com/SuperuserLabs/thankful-contracts/

ilaksh 7y ago

Cryptocurrency payments.

SergeAx 7y ago

Unfortunately, advertisement typically pays to publishers at least one order of magnitude more than subscribers, even with paywalls in place. For example, ARPU of Facebook is way north of one of Netflix.