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I think we need something like micro payments. Take lichess for example it's the biggest open source chess website completely ad free and runs by donations. If

I think we need something like micro payments. Take lichess for example it's the biggest open source chess website completely ad free and runs by donations. If you divide the total monthly costs to run the servers by the number of games and you get a tiny fraction of a dollar cent. I don't remember the exact number, but it has been in the order of 1k chess games equals 1$. If you could charge 0.1 cent per game, then this website could run without any extra donations. Another idea that comes to mind is that the server side could be somehow run by the connected users. Users have storage + cpu cycles. Similar to torrent as long there's enough users (seeders) the game server will continue to work. Lichess for instance has tens of thousands players online 24/7.

zamadatix 5y ago
"How to pay" always seemed like the easy half of the problem to solve, "how to manage what should be paid" seems much harder as nobody wants to deal with sorting through fraction of a penny payment approvals. Is 0.01 cent per game acceptable? 0.05? If you accept at 0.01 and it goes to 0.05 do you have to re-accept? If everyone decides sets 0.1 cents as an auto-approve boundary does that mean every site is now going to try to charge 0.0999 cents? Does some centralized entity try to set these rates instead? How does the system protect against the equivalent of collect call scams? Does it protect against that in a way that doesn't limit actually using a service very quickly? It's like the permissions problem (really easy to prompt, really annoying to do so, really really bad to just assume yes or no all the time) except worse. In regards to distributed serving using the client endpoints it has a strong tendency to be more work, less reliable, and not as scalable (see peertube). What has seemed to work is offloading as much of the functionality for that user as you possibly can to that user's device. E.g. want to play a game against the computer? Run the chess engine WASM bundle on your device instead of the server (lichess does this).
- ggeorgovassilis 5y ago
  > "How to pay" always seemed like the easy half of the problem to solve With the cut payment providers currently keep it still seems like an unsolved problem for micropayments
f0e4c2f7 5y ago
A model that is similar to donations that I feel has not been fully explored is charging for cosmetic items. Reddit essentially does this now by allowing people to buy reddit gold, silver, or other awards. This revenue model has turned out to be quite profitable in gaming and creates an experience where most people can use the software for free but a long tail of users spend lots of money to have icons next to their name or elsewhere on the site. For chess you can imagine how this might work, for other software it is not always as clear.
zzzzzzzza 5y ago
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220127005808/en/Federal-Reserve-Announces-FedNowSM-Service-Pricing-Approach-Credit-Transfer-Limit https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220127005808/en/Fed... still has a 5.5 cent overhead but that's a lot better than whats currently on offer
MrDresden 5y ago
The micro donations idea kind of exists for the use case you mention in the form of the service Flattr.

zamadatix 5y ago

"How to pay" always seemed like the easy half of the problem to solve, "how to manage what should be paid" seems much harder as nobody wants to deal with sorting through fraction of a penny payment approvals. Is 0.01 cent per game acceptable? 0.05? If you accept at 0.01 and it goes to 0.05 do you have to re-accept? If everyone decides sets 0.1 cents as an auto-approve boundary does that mean every site is now going to try to charge 0.0999 cents? Does some centralized entity try to set these rates instead? How does the system protect against the equivalent of collect call scams? Does it protect against that in a way that doesn't limit actually using a service very quickly? It's like the permissions problem (really easy to prompt, really annoying to do so, really really bad to just assume yes or no all the time) except worse. In regards to distributed serving using the client endpoints it has a strong tendency to be more work, less reliable, and not as scalable (see peertube). What has seemed to work is offloading as much of the functionality for that user as you possibly can to that user's device. E.g. want to play a game against the computer? Run the chess engine WASM bundle on your device instead of the server (lichess does this).

ggeorgovassilis 5y ago
> "How to pay" always seemed like the easy half of the problem to solve With the cut payment providers currently keep it still seems like an unsolved problem for micropayments

f0e4c2f7 5y ago

A model that is similar to donations that I feel has not been fully explored is charging for cosmetic items. Reddit essentially does this now by allowing people to buy reddit gold, silver, or other awards. This revenue model has turned out to be quite profitable in gaming and creates an experience where most people can use the software for free but a long tail of users spend lots of money to have icons next to their name or elsewhere on the site. For chess you can imagine how this might work, for other software it is not always as clear.

zzzzzzzza 5y ago

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220127005808/en/Federal-Reserve-Announces-FedNowSM-Service-Pricing-Approach-Credit-Transfer-Limit https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220127005808/en/Fed... still has a 5.5 cent overhead but that's a lot better than whats currently on offer

MrDresden 5y ago

The micro donations idea kind of exists for the use case you mention in the form of the service Flattr.