4 ms·

Micropayments keep failing over and over again. I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is

by k099 4y ago

Micropayments keep failing over and over again. I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious. "Should I click on that link? What if it's not what I want Hmm, better not for now." Biggest recent push was Blendle, which pivoted: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pioneer-blendle-is-pivoting-from-micropayments/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pio...

bentcorner 4y ago
They work well within ecosystems. See the any number of video games and gaming platforms that invent their own micro-currency. My kid plays roblox and every month or so asks for some of their allowance to go into their ecosystem. They spend pennies on different cosmetics with nearly no friction. That said, I don't think even "Web Points" would work for links. Maybe something like buying "Member Status" with "Web Points" for a month on a site could work.
dehrmann 4y ago
I think the only micropayment people are usually willing to make is watching an ad.
saurik 4y ago
And yet most people I know don't get microdecision fatigue every time they decide whether to turn on a light or use an appliance due to the electricity transactions. I claim that--to the extent to which this was ever an issue--this is due to the notion of "micropayment" really being too large still: the industry has often used this term to describe transactions on the order $1-$10. Instead, this discussion is about hosting fees for a chat app that will add up to almost nothing for light usage, not the $1 per article news companies keep wanting to charge. My company (Orchid) has been calling these fees for incremental hosting costs--which are on the order of $0.001-$0.10--"nanopayments".
- philsnow 4y ago
  Look at tarsnap's pricing: https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/ currently it says "250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data"
  - tweetle_beetle 4y ago
    I can't tell what stance is being taken on Tarsnap here, but for the interested the background is worth a read. https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-04-01-tarsnap-pricing-change.html https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-04-01-tarsnap-pricing-...
- arlcode 4y ago
  There isn't a price tag on my light switch. Also light is of course a must have, news articles or chatrooms aren't. If I could use micropayments this way and be sure that the final price is a) somewhat predicable b) usually not ruinous It would work better. Cloud Services for companies like AWS are using this mode and it's working well for them. But I have a feeling it's not easy/legal to do away with the immediate price tag for consumers. At the very least it would require the a constant price per "thing" and a hard spending limit.
- hnaccount_rng 4y ago
  But that's not the correct comparison right? It's not that you have to initiate a transfer for the flipping-on of the light. You pay integrated, at the end of the month (or really, the utility trusts you to not change your behaviour dramatically and you pay an expected usage, which is then corrected at the end of the year). That's my main gripe with all those transactions. If you need to initialise a complex utility that involves the trust of multiple parties and the need to verify identities on multiple people. That kind of thing costs macroscopic amounts of money (the going rate seems to be O(20ct)). Unless your average transaction size is much above that, you'll loose to friction.
imron 4y ago
> I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious. I think Brave has the right general idea. Fund an account and then split that per month among the sites I visit, or according to a breakdown of my own preference.

by k099 4y ago

bentcorner 4y ago

They work well within ecosystems. See the any number of video games and gaming platforms that invent their own micro-currency. My kid plays roblox and every month or so asks for some of their allowance to go into their ecosystem. They spend pennies on different cosmetics with nearly no friction. That said, I don't think even "Web Points" would work for links. Maybe something like buying "Member Status" with "Web Points" for a month on a site could work.

dehrmann 4y ago

I think the only micropayment people are usually willing to make is watching an ad.

saurik 4y ago

And yet most people I know don't get microdecision fatigue every time they decide whether to turn on a light or use an appliance due to the electricity transactions. I claim that--to the extent to which this was ever an issue--this is due to the notion of "micropayment" really being too large still: the industry has often used this term to describe transactions on the order $1-$10. Instead, this discussion is about hosting fees for a chat app that will add up to almost nothing for light usage, not the $1 per article news companies keep wanting to charge. My company (Orchid) has been calling these fees for incremental hosting costs--which are on the order of $0.001-$0.10--"nanopayments".

philsnow 4y ago
Look at tarsnap's pricing: https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/ currently it says "250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data"
- tweetle_beetle 4y ago
  I can't tell what stance is being taken on Tarsnap here, but for the interested the background is worth a read. https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-04-01-tarsnap-pricing-change.html https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-04-01-tarsnap-pricing-...
arlcode 4y ago
There isn't a price tag on my light switch. Also light is of course a must have, news articles or chatrooms aren't. If I could use micropayments this way and be sure that the final price is a) somewhat predicable b) usually not ruinous It would work better. Cloud Services for companies like AWS are using this mode and it's working well for them. But I have a feeling it's not easy/legal to do away with the immediate price tag for consumers. At the very least it would require the a constant price per "thing" and a hard spending limit.
hnaccount_rng 4y ago
But that's not the correct comparison right? It's not that you have to initiate a transfer for the flipping-on of the light. You pay integrated, at the end of the month (or really, the utility trusts you to not change your behaviour dramatically and you pay an expected usage, which is then corrected at the end of the year). That's my main gripe with all those transactions. If you need to initialise a complex utility that involves the trust of multiple parties and the need to verify identities on multiple people. That kind of thing costs macroscopic amounts of money (the going rate seems to be O(20ct)). Unless your average transaction size is much above that, you'll loose to friction.

imron 4y ago

> I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious. I think Brave has the right general idea. Fund an account and then split that per month among the sites I visit, or according to a breakdown of my own preference.