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the main holdup i think is truly effortless and secure, private, and widely accepted micropayments. there's plenty of stuff i'd be willing to pay for if it did

the main holdup i think is truly effortless and secure, private, and widely accepted micropayments. there's plenty of stuff i'd be willing to pay for if it didn't involve creating yet another account and giving them my credit card info.

jrd259 5y ago
Ted Nelson was very explicit on this point in his visionary book "Dream Machines".
criddell 5y ago
How would it work with not creating an account? Low-friction payment methods are here. Apple and Google Pay for example work pretty well. But if I pay for access to something today, how do you know it's me when I return a year later and want access again? A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> Apple and Google Pay for example work pretty well. But if I pay for access to something today, how do you know it's me when I return a year later and want access again? Yet another reason why identity verification by default would make the net better. No spam, easy payments, elimination of middle-men for many use cases.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Of course, now you're talking about essentially eliminating anonymity on the web which not everyone would want.
- ipsi 5y ago
  Maybe browsers should looking at adding a "create account" API or something? Similar to "Login with Apple ID", but instead password managers could hook into it and create an account semi-automatically. This could also allow automation of "user+sitename@domain.com"-style rules. I know that creating an account isn't adding _much_ friction, but there is some and I could see myself appreciating this.
- fouric 5y ago
  > How would it work with not creating an account? Notice that they said "yet another account" - I'm pretty sure that they're not objecting to the idea of creating a single account for the micropayments service, but instead creating a separate account for each individual service that they could instead use micropayments for. > A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution. That was already excluded by their comment - "and giving them my credit card info" - wherein it's made clear that part of the problem is the proliferation of private data among a very large number of individual sites/services/systems. A password manager doesn't do anything at all to help secure your private information from these services that you would be signing up for.
  - abacadaba 5y ago
    Now that you mention it though, there was some service i saw ads for that generates a new cc for each use. i forget the name maybe some here works there :) There is the privacy aspect too. Maybe I don't want [big sketchy data] to be able to buy my CC purchases and see know which creators i support.
    - criddell 5y ago
      Apple Pay does this. Merchants get a token which looks like a credit card number but isn't. If you are using an Apple Credit Card, then the processor (Goldman Sachs) is not allowed to use your purchase data in that way.
  - criddell 5y ago
    I don't know about Google Pay, but I believe Apple Pay uses the payment tokenization scheme from EMVCo. Sites don't get your primary account number (PAN), they get a generated number that is linked to that number. SecurityNow did a podcast about it (episode 477).
    - fouric 5y ago
      Right - that's an argument to use a centralized payment service (which Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, etc. (probably) fulfill). I (might have mis-)read that part of your post as being about micro-payment systems not being necessary. I'm not sure whether or not Google & Apple pay are "micro-" enough, though. Do they charge per-transaction fees that are significant enough that 5 cent transactions are infeasible? What's the transaction time like? Can you set up 1-click payments?
ghaff 5y ago
Clay Shirky wrote a couple of decades ago about the problem of mental transaction costs associated with paying a few cents to read an article or consume some other sort of media. I still tend to agree with that. If it were just a technology or network effect problem, I have to believe it would have been solved given how many media payment issues could in principle be solved by micropayments.
- andai 5y ago
  Here is Clay Shirky's article on Micropayments: https://web.archive.org/web/20030911092002/http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030911092002/http://www.shirky...
- fouric 5y ago
  I don't buy this argument, for a couple of reasons. First, for large classes of media, the energy required to consume the media is much larger than the mental cost of even an explicit microtransaction - e.g. the energy required to decide whether or not I want to pay 10c to watch a 10 minute educational video is dwarfed by the energy spent watching the video itself, and probably comparable to the cost of watching 10 seconds of ads beforehand. Second, for many of the media for which the opposite is true (e.g. short TikTok videos), you can make an argument that the value of those media is very low anyway. Third, for short media that is still valuable, the cost can be amortized through either buying chunks all at once (e.g. the algorithm pre-computes a feed of 30 minutes of video and tells you the cost, and you can decide whether to watch or not), or through other technical solutions like setting a "payment limit" for the day - there are lots of ways that you can get creative with this. Fourth, as for "I have to believe it would have been solved" - there are many, many problems that could be solved through technically superior solutions that aren't, because of external forces (monopolies on a market, manufacturing difficulties, lack of a market, economic dis-incentives for either sellers or buyers, band-wagoning/legacy baggage that people are emotionally attached to, etc). I think that the answer is much simpler - people don't want to pay for content. People want it to be free. And, currently, most people (at least based on my interpersonal experiences) either don't know how much of their data is being harvested in order to pay for their zero-dollar-cost services, don't care, or do care but not enough to push for a micropayment solution. EDIT: As an entirely separate point from what I wrote above, I think that the mental transaction costs would actually be useful (even if people hate them), because they'd disincentivize tiny chunks of content (due to the overhead of the decision being much higher relative to the length of the content), and incentivize long-form, thoughtful content, which would have a number of beneficial effects.
duxup 5y ago
I wonder about this often. I've certainly imagined a central micropayment system that I could just see what is being used, how much, manage it all... but otherwise just use services seamlessly (the traditional cart experience seems a bit jarring in many cases) and still pay the creators for their work .
Filligree 5y ago
There once was such a system —Google Contributor. It was supposed to be expanded into a full micropayment system once there was a baseline market activity to set the prices by, using the price of ads to bootstrap. It didn’t work, obviously, but mostly because people just don’t want to pay. Not even if a typical cost is single digit dollars per month, or less.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  I like Blendle for the occasional paywalled news article I really want to read. But, yeah, mostly I just bounce if something’s not free and, I think people need to be honest with themselves about the consequences of removing ads from the internet: it’ll be significantly harder for new sites to both be profitable and attract an audience and they’ll have to choose between giving away unmonetized content to attract people and putting content behind some sort of paywall so that they can cover their operational costs. We’re already starting to see this model with Substack and Medium, and I’m not sure if it’s a better model, or just a different one.
- iaml 5y ago
  >It didn’t work, obviously, but mostly because people just don’t want to pay. Are you sure about that? I reckon a lot of people didn't know it existed.
- bluescrn 5y ago
  Nobody has managed micropayments that are actually micro. Even F2P games rarely allow you to spend less than about $1 at a time - it's all about chasing whales who'll spend $99.99 repeatedly... In the case of something like YouTube, they'd want vastly more (and as a monthly subscription) to remove the ads than they'd earn from an average user watching the ads. The alternative might have been a 'watch without ads' button, allowing a truly small transaction (a few cents) to watch a specific video without ads.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    For charging just a few cents to work, it would have to be normed across a wide range of media to the degree that a meter just transparently clicked against a payment balance in essentially the same manner as turning on a faucet or a light switch. And that's a really high bar in an online world where people are used to either free or a relative handful of all-you-can-eat subscription services that cost enough that people sign up for them fairly deliberately.
briefcomment 5y ago
I wonder if Bitcoin Cash or something similar can fit that void. It's already possible to send cents for reasonable fees.
- duxup 5y ago
  As an end user, and even imagining receiving payments, I'd be annoyed with a micropayment service that has some sort of conversion of what I'm paying into something else and then ... who knows how it goes from there...
- abacadaba 5y ago
  LBRY is what had me thinking a lot about this
xscott 5y ago
I was even willing to create accounts and provide my credit card info for sites with good value, but not being able to cancel online (and being forced to wait on hold for 40 minutes to cancel over the phone) has me unwilling to subscribe to almost anything any more.

jrd259 5y ago

Ted Nelson was very explicit on this point in his visionary book "Dream Machines".

criddell 5y ago

How would it work with not creating an account? Low-friction payment methods are here. Apple and Google Pay for example work pretty well. But if I pay for access to something today, how do you know it's me when I return a year later and want access again? A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.

phkahler 5y ago
>> Apple and Google Pay for example work pretty well. But if I pay for access to something today, how do you know it's me when I return a year later and want access again? Yet another reason why identity verification by default would make the net better. No spam, easy payments, elimination of middle-men for many use cases.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Of course, now you're talking about essentially eliminating anonymity on the web which not everyone would want.
ipsi 5y ago
Maybe browsers should looking at adding a "create account" API or something? Similar to "Login with Apple ID", but instead password managers could hook into it and create an account semi-automatically. This could also allow automation of "user+sitename@domain.com"-style rules. I know that creating an account isn't adding _much_ friction, but there is some and I could see myself appreciating this.
fouric 5y ago
> How would it work with not creating an account? Notice that they said "yet another account" - I'm pretty sure that they're not objecting to the idea of creating a single account for the micropayments service, but instead creating a separate account for each individual service that they could instead use micropayments for. > A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution. That was already excluded by their comment - "and giving them my credit card info" - wherein it's made clear that part of the problem is the proliferation of private data among a very large number of individual sites/services/systems. A password manager doesn't do anything at all to help secure your private information from these services that you would be signing up for.
- abacadaba 5y ago
  Now that you mention it though, there was some service i saw ads for that generates a new cc for each use. i forget the name maybe some here works there :) There is the privacy aspect too. Maybe I don't want [big sketchy data] to be able to buy my CC purchases and see know which creators i support.
  - criddell 5y ago
    Apple Pay does this. Merchants get a token which looks like a credit card number but isn't. If you are using an Apple Credit Card, then the processor (Goldman Sachs) is not allowed to use your purchase data in that way.
- criddell 5y ago
  I don't know about Google Pay, but I believe Apple Pay uses the payment tokenization scheme from EMVCo. Sites don't get your primary account number (PAN), they get a generated number that is linked to that number. SecurityNow did a podcast about it (episode 477).
  - fouric 5y ago
    Right - that's an argument to use a centralized payment service (which Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, etc. (probably) fulfill). I (might have mis-)read that part of your post as being about micro-payment systems not being necessary. I'm not sure whether or not Google & Apple pay are "micro-" enough, though. Do they charge per-transaction fees that are significant enough that 5 cent transactions are infeasible? What's the transaction time like? Can you set up 1-click payments?

ghaff 5y ago

Clay Shirky wrote a couple of decades ago about the problem of mental transaction costs associated with paying a few cents to read an article or consume some other sort of media. I still tend to agree with that. If it were just a technology or network effect problem, I have to believe it would have been solved given how many media payment issues could in principle be solved by micropayments.

andai 5y ago
Here is Clay Shirky's article on Micropayments: https://web.archive.org/web/20030911092002/http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030911092002/http://www.shirky...
fouric 5y ago
I don't buy this argument, for a couple of reasons. First, for large classes of media, the energy required to consume the media is much larger than the mental cost of even an explicit microtransaction - e.g. the energy required to decide whether or not I want to pay 10c to watch a 10 minute educational video is dwarfed by the energy spent watching the video itself, and probably comparable to the cost of watching 10 seconds of ads beforehand. Second, for many of the media for which the opposite is true (e.g. short TikTok videos), you can make an argument that the value of those media is very low anyway. Third, for short media that is still valuable, the cost can be amortized through either buying chunks all at once (e.g. the algorithm pre-computes a feed of 30 minutes of video and tells you the cost, and you can decide whether to watch or not), or through other technical solutions like setting a "payment limit" for the day - there are lots of ways that you can get creative with this. Fourth, as for "I have to believe it would have been solved" - there are many, many problems that could be solved through technically superior solutions that aren't, because of external forces (monopolies on a market, manufacturing difficulties, lack of a market, economic dis-incentives for either sellers or buyers, band-wagoning/legacy baggage that people are emotionally attached to, etc). I think that the answer is much simpler - people don't want to pay for content. People want it to be free. And, currently, most people (at least based on my interpersonal experiences) either don't know how much of their data is being harvested in order to pay for their zero-dollar-cost services, don't care, or do care but not enough to push for a micropayment solution. EDIT: As an entirely separate point from what I wrote above, I think that the mental transaction costs would actually be useful (even if people hate them), because they'd disincentivize tiny chunks of content (due to the overhead of the decision being much higher relative to the length of the content), and incentivize long-form, thoughtful content, which would have a number of beneficial effects.

duxup 5y ago

I wonder about this often. I've certainly imagined a central micropayment system that I could just see what is being used, how much, manage it all... but otherwise just use services seamlessly (the traditional cart experience seems a bit jarring in many cases) and still pay the creators for their work .

Filligree 5y ago

There once was such a system —Google Contributor. It was supposed to be expanded into a full micropayment system once there was a baseline market activity to set the prices by, using the price of ads to bootstrap. It didn’t work, obviously, but mostly because people just don’t want to pay. Not even if a typical cost is single digit dollars per month, or less.

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
I like Blendle for the occasional paywalled news article I really want to read. But, yeah, mostly I just bounce if something’s not free and, I think people need to be honest with themselves about the consequences of removing ads from the internet: it’ll be significantly harder for new sites to both be profitable and attract an audience and they’ll have to choose between giving away unmonetized content to attract people and putting content behind some sort of paywall so that they can cover their operational costs. We’re already starting to see this model with Substack and Medium, and I’m not sure if it’s a better model, or just a different one.
iaml 5y ago
>It didn’t work, obviously, but mostly because people just don’t want to pay. Are you sure about that? I reckon a lot of people didn't know it existed.
bluescrn 5y ago
Nobody has managed micropayments that are actually micro. Even F2P games rarely allow you to spend less than about $1 at a time - it's all about chasing whales who'll spend $99.99 repeatedly... In the case of something like YouTube, they'd want vastly more (and as a monthly subscription) to remove the ads than they'd earn from an average user watching the ads. The alternative might have been a 'watch without ads' button, allowing a truly small transaction (a few cents) to watch a specific video without ads.
- ghaff 5y ago
  For charging just a few cents to work, it would have to be normed across a wide range of media to the degree that a meter just transparently clicked against a payment balance in essentially the same manner as turning on a faucet or a light switch. And that's a really high bar in an online world where people are used to either free or a relative handful of all-you-can-eat subscription services that cost enough that people sign up for them fairly deliberately.

briefcomment 5y ago

I wonder if Bitcoin Cash or something similar can fit that void. It's already possible to send cents for reasonable fees.

duxup 5y ago
As an end user, and even imagining receiving payments, I'd be annoyed with a micropayment service that has some sort of conversion of what I'm paying into something else and then ... who knows how it goes from there...
abacadaba 5y ago
LBRY is what had me thinking a lot about this

xscott 5y ago

I was even willing to create accounts and provide my credit card info for sites with good value, but not being able to cancel online (and being forced to wait on hold for 40 minutes to cancel over the phone) has me unwilling to subscribe to almost anything any more.