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> You can give someone as little as a dollar via a service like PayPal. In the world today, that's pretty small. In theorie you can with "friends and family",

by herbst 6y ago

> You can give someone as little as a dollar via a service like PayPal. In the world today, that's pretty small. In theorie you can with "friends and family", but you can't charge a dollar. It costs 2.9% and $0.30 for any transaction. You end up with something like 0.68 before transfer costs to your actual bank.

DoreenMichele 6y ago
This is true. It also means the minimum you can practically give as a micropayment is 68x more money for the recipient than the piddling penny the OP claims they would like to be able to give content creators. I'm fairly confident this means that they don't actually want to pay. They just want to believe that if we got payments as close to zero as possible and got enough people to chip in a penny, magically it would be enough to live on and stop being slave labor. In reality, that doesn't align with how the world works. Once you get it down to a penny, then people can tell themselves that not paying at all won't really matter because it's such a tiny amount. And then we are right back where we started: with people wanting content for free while not wanting to admit this is an expectation of slave labor. The way to pay producers mere pennies for visiting thier site without having to pay them at all is via ads and the HN uses as blockers very aggressively and while they claim this is for reasons other than money per se, if you want ad-free content and don't want to be demanding slave labor, the way to do that is pry your wallet open and kick in a few bucks via Patreon, PayPal, etc. Based on my tendency to hit the front page here with my writing, my ongoing inability to make ends meet and the degree to which I get downvoted for talking about that late in the month when I'm stressed out because the bank account is empty and the cupboards are bare, I'm quite confident that the constant talk of how micropayments will solve this is just a BS excuse to help well-heeled people feel okay with expecting slave labor from writers and telling themselves it is not their problem that writers go hungry while journalism goes to hell, democracy suffers as a consequence, etc ad nauseum.
FalconSensei 6y ago
I remember reading a blog a few years ago, where the blogger said to not even bother sending less than (I think) 5~8 bucks (in BRL). He said that after all fees and everything, he would receive too little to make a difference, and the person donating would be basically wasting money

by herbst 6y ago

DoreenMichele 6y ago

This is true. It also means the minimum you can practically give as a micropayment is 68x more money for the recipient than the piddling penny the OP claims they would like to be able to give content creators. I'm fairly confident this means that they don't actually want to pay. They just want to believe that if we got payments as close to zero as possible and got enough people to chip in a penny, magically it would be enough to live on and stop being slave labor. In reality, that doesn't align with how the world works. Once you get it down to a penny, then people can tell themselves that not paying at all won't really matter because it's such a tiny amount. And then we are right back where we started: with people wanting content for free while not wanting to admit this is an expectation of slave labor. The way to pay producers mere pennies for visiting thier site without having to pay them at all is via ads and the HN uses as blockers very aggressively and while they claim this is for reasons other than money per se, if you want ad-free content and don't want to be demanding slave labor, the way to do that is pry your wallet open and kick in a few bucks via Patreon, PayPal, etc. Based on my tendency to hit the front page here with my writing, my ongoing inability to make ends meet and the degree to which I get downvoted for talking about that late in the month when I'm stressed out because the bank account is empty and the cupboards are bare, I'm quite confident that the constant talk of how micropayments will solve this is just a BS excuse to help well-heeled people feel okay with expecting slave labor from writers and telling themselves it is not their problem that writers go hungry while journalism goes to hell, democracy suffers as a consequence, etc ad nauseum.

FalconSensei 6y ago

I remember reading a blog a few years ago, where the blogger said to not even bother sending less than (I think) 5~8 bucks (in BRL). He said that after all fees and everything, he would receive too little to make a difference, and the person donating would be basically wasting money