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The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads. The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what ne

The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads. The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what needs to die.

arcticbull 4y ago
The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Which is why micropayments aren't a thing despite us having had the infrastructure for decades. There's no reason PayPal can't support sub-dollar transactions now, or ever before. Nick Szabo and I disagree on probably everything else in this world, but we agree on micropayments. Nick's paper is worth a read and does a great job of explaining the issues [1]. tl;dr: around micropayments is that in reality users/customers don't actually want them. They run afoul of our fundamental human behavioral costing model. The reason ad-supported is so prevalent isn't because it's being forced on us by a shady cabal or anything, it's just the least-worst option we've compromised on. [1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-mental-transaction-costs.pdf https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-...
- freedomben 4y ago
  > The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Indeed. I wonder if something like Brave's idea of just creating a pot of money per month, and then paying that out is workable. As a user I'd love to throw $10 into my pot and not have to worry about cost exceeding that and not having to see ads. The network effect is a beast though. You need participation before you can get participation.
  - efreak 4y ago
    Flattr?
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    That's explored in section 5.1 of the Szabo paper. tl;dr: you basically have to cap how much the sites can charge to avoid the pot getting drained by a bad actor, but that just creates an incentive for every site to charge the maximum - why wouldn't they? There's no human deciding after all. So then you're basically deferring to, and trusting, a central actor to set the price for all this content. Then premium content makers have to demand a higher price to make the economics work, which in turn, means everyone sets their prices to the new upper tier. That has its own serious implications, and comes with much of the same hazard as Google has today, IMO. By eliminating the agency in making that purchasing decision you eliminate much of the benefit of a market for content.
    - tjoff 4y ago
      Why would it have to be all or nothing. Maybe I can spend an extra literal 2 seconds for content I adore and spend an hour on, than on something I barely skim.
    - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
      So you need to give the site a reason not to charge the maximum. Suppose the user can choose their monthly fee, but so can the site. Anyone paying $5/month can use any of the cheapest sites. Some sites require you to be paying $50/month. The sites that require a higher monthly fee get paid more per user, but they also lose out on any money at all from users paying less than that (because they don't have access). Mass market sites will choose low rates and make it up on volume. Specialized sites with premium content can choose higher rates and still get paid with a smaller number of users. But the user is still not getting nickle and dimed, because if you're paying $50/month, you get all the $50/month tier content.
      - mst 4y ago
        This sounds reminiscent of the Kindle Unlimited model, and author opinions as to its usefulness to them are ... varied. Then again my brain keeps generating what it's convinced are fairer ways to do it ... and all of them so far also introduce sufficient additional friction for the user that they'd be dead on arrival.
  - harikb 4y ago
    The collective value of your View/Clicks is far higher than $10 to advertizers per month. Most people wouldn't pay that amount. This is just like insurance. Old people are subsidized by young. A rich person's View in the developed country is subsidizing Google just being available to a poor person elsewhere. Don't assume that (a) people are ready to pay the true cost of running a site like Google without ads or (b) that it will even end up being a good thing for humanity overall.
    - freedomben 4y ago
      Very fair point. The Law of Unintended Consequences could be a beast.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      We should just let the market sort it out. If people don’t want to pay as much as a website needs to be run, they should just not use the website, it can go out of business if necessary, and space can be opened up for a more efficient service provider. I mean we’re basically allowing for an information asymmetry here, right? Which messes with supply and demand. Economists should be pissed.
      - ponector 4y ago
        Isn't is already sorted out? Current model full of ads is the best for business.
        bee_rider 4y ago
        The suppliers and the demanders can’t agree on an efficient price if the demanders don’t know what the price is.
        MereInterest 4y ago
        And while they haggle over the price of the megaphone, the rest of us who are about to be deafened don’t even factor into a market-based pricing.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    A company called Coil offered this. They shut down recently though.
  - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
    This would be really interesting in combination with some zero knowledge proofs, so you can allocate your subscription fees to sites without the payment processor (or the site) knowing who you in particular are patronizing.
    - mst 4y ago
      zcash's shielded pool is probably the closest to a solution for that that exists today, and at the very least a bunch of the cryptography/math/overall model should be re-usable in a more traditional setup. (I remain basically a crypto skeptic but zcash appear to at least be -attempting- something focused and interesting enough for me to continue to pay vague attention)
  - RandallBrown 4y ago
    Google actually used to offer this. I forget what it was called, but you put money in your account and it would big against other AdSense ads for display on websites. I think I remember being able to replace the ads with cat photos or whatever photos you wanted.
    - slongfield 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
      - RandallBrown 4y ago
        I could have sworn it existed prior to 2014, but I guess not!
- tjoff 4y ago
  > The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Why would I mind that? Seriously? It would be as smooth as voting on HN/submissions that you already do anyway. The infrastructure does not exist. And no, paypal only sounds more like a dystopia than micro transactions.
  - Eduard 4y ago
    Maybe also the legal framework does not exist (yet). Doing a payment, no matter how small, may require to first accept some legal terms - depending on jurisdiction.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - progmetaldev 4y ago
    You also have URL shortening services that could trick users into visiting a page that is charging per page view. Unless there were a way to authorize the payment, the system could be abused. Then we're back to managing 100 clicks per day.
    - tjoff 4y ago
      Charging per page view would only work for pre-approved sites and have many of the downsides as ads, not sure I like that idea at all. Also micro-transactaions are not necessarily about payments like we are used to them now, but could completely transform how donations worked. And also paying after the fact, did you like the content? Pay. Not have to wade through ads "paying" for something that turns out was only clickbait, tracking and garbage.
- uncletammy 4y ago
  Why would micropayments require users to make "a hundred purchasing decisions per day"? One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream. The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    > One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream. Sure, maybe. But different content producers are going to demand different pricing tiers. HBO isn't going to stream The Last of Us for the same per-second rate as a YouTube game streamer. Now if the "wallet software does the rest" and you have variable pricing, why wouldn't every content producer pick the top pricing tier? Without explicit decision making you lose the pricing signal. Ditto The New York Times and BuzzFeed. Suddenly your ecosystem fractures into a million pieces like Netflix did. > The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built. I suspect that's got a lot to do with Nick's motivations in publishing this, yes, but I think it's still correct regardless.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - olalonde 4y ago
    BTC didn't "decide" anything, it was never suited for micropayments at scale.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  100% disgree. Consumers do not want a micropayment system built on the same idea of "shopping cart" where you have to click 100 times and enter a bunch of info to may a payment for 30 cents.. That is part of the problem, Visa and mastercard nor the banks want to make an easy friction free micropayment system because their systems are soooo terrible they could not stop the fraud, and they love the $0.30 per translation fee that makes them the bulk of their money. The systemic issues finance systems prevents anyway from making a viable micropayment system
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    > That is part of the problem, Visa and mastercard nor the banks want to make an easy friction free micropayment system because their systems are soooo terrible they could not stop the fraud, and they love the $0.30 per translation fee that makes them the bulk of their money. What on earth gives you the idea their systems are "terrible." They seem to be quite capable and do an excellent job of all the world's commerce. In Europe card networks charge 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit, as required by regulation, so it's clearly not an efficiency thing. Heck an ACH payment costs 1/3 of a cent in volume, and that's going to instant/real-time next year with FedNow. It's been that way for 10 years in the UK, EU, AU with Faster Payments, SEPA and NPP respectively. However my point is that you just need a stored balance wallet, like Cash App, Venmo or PayPal, and we've had at least one of those for decades. Literally all a micropayment is, is increment(A) and decrement(B). There's never been a technical reason that isn't possible with pretty much any dollar amount. Do you have any reason to believe this is the case? I've seen a pile of dead bodies in the startup space over decades trying to do exactly this and nobody wants it. But every cycle people seem to convince themselves that there are no bodies, and Visa can't process payments, etc etc, and they give it a go. Only to end up in the graveyard with everyone else. What is it that all these failed startups missed? I'd love to know because intellectually I want micropayments too. I just don't think it's actually something people really want IRL.
    - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
      The problem isn't the technology, it's the regulatory environment. If you're the payment processor who accepts Visa/Mastercard, the customer can do chargebacks. Now you have some scummy site that scams a million people and uses your service to accept payments. By the time the scam is uncovered, the scammer has already withdrawn the money or paid it to someone else on your service. Holding the money in escrow for long enough to prevent this will piss off legitimate sellers and some jurisdictions prohibit it. The amount per user was like a dollar but in total it's millions of dollars, so you can't just eat it. But if you don't, the users issue mass chargebacks against your service and you get banned by the credit card companies. To make it work, transactions for small amounts have to be caveat emptor, but the existing system doesn't allow that.
- SirYandi 4y ago
  I mean, every time you use an electric device you're making a small purchasing decision.
  - ComodoHacker 4y ago
    It's wrong comparison. Flipping all switches in a room doesn't get you much added value beyond what's necessary.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  If we weren’t beholden to payment processors, we as users could simply set our browsers to pay $0.001 or $0.000001 for every website we visit with an additional button for “give this site more right now” or “send $ every month“ That would be transparent, cheap, and sustainable.
  - tempestn 4y ago
    But the vast majority of people don't want that! If there was a cost every time you visited a website, however small, there would be a constant mental load of evaluating whether each click was worth it. It would be a huge drag on the best aspect of the web. Not to mention that coordinating it internationally would be next to impossible. Sure, you could add it as an optional feature, and a tiny percentage of people would use it, but it wouldn't make any material difference to websites' bottom lines.
    - joshspankit 4y ago
      I think you missed the intent of what I said: let people set their payment settings in any way they want to
    - shard 4y ago
      I believe if the incremental cost is small, the mental load would mostly fade into the background, just as I am aware that there is a cost every time I turn on the lights or the faucet, but it doesn't have a large impact on my usage except that I remember to turn off the lights when I leave a room and don't leave the faucet running when I soap up the dishes.
    - saurik 4y ago
      Every time you turn a light switch on or use an appliance, you are being charged for the electricity used to run it; this cost is extremely difficult to track, is different for every device you own, and adds up such that at the end of the month the cost is non-negligible (at least to the point where you probably are paying more on utilities every month than streaming media services)... and yet, while people, in the abstract, care somewhat about reducing their usage of such things like water and electricity (and thereby put in at least a bit of effort to prevent the most egregious of wasted costs), almost no one is crippled by the "mental load of evaluating whether each" time they flip a switch or turn on a faucet is "worth it". It is kind of ludicrous that this argument against micropayments somehow holds as much traction with people as it does when essentially all people experience not only experience the obvious counter-example so often as to be nearly every waking minute of every day, it makes up a significant fraction of their overall expenses.
- zx8080 4y ago
  > The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. I wouldn't want to help hundreds of sites I visit every day to track me (with the payment system help). I have no doubts they will sell this info for some additional cents. It's not fear of lack of privacy. It just feels not fair that if I pay them, they will instantly get more money from advertisers. And I will just get more ads. Better targeted ones.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    What an odd position... you do understand to do targeted ads they have to track you, and google is already buying all of your transactions from your banks, and credit card companies and matching that to your online profile
- markdown 4y ago
  > The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. How is it different to the hundreds of upvote/downvote decisions we make every day on here and Reddit?
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    Upvotes and downvotes have zero real-world stakes. Imagine if your upvote button was wired directly into your wallet and extracted some amount of money with every press. Even if you control the amount, even if it is fractional cents per upvote, you now have to figure out how much it is costing you in real world dollars to upvote people each day/week/month whatever. Also "I liked this" is different from "This is worth $value to me"
    - markdown 4y ago
      > Imagine if your upvote button was wired directly into your wallet and extracted some amount of money with every press. Every press? Nobody has ever proposed that. All I want is a button in my browser (not on websites) that I can configure ahead of time. Perhaps I'd set it to $0.10. Then, when (and only when) I want, I can click on that button, knowing it will attempt to send $0.10 to the website I'm currently viewing, if that website has set up the ability to receive money in this way. Maybe I won't click it for a week, but then click it ten times on one article (or website) to send a dollar to that site.
      - bluefirebrand 4y ago
        > Every press? Nobody has ever proposed that I was just using it as an example to illustrate why a micropayment button press is a different and more difficult decision than an upvote, because you asked why those decisions were different. If you would not use them interchangeably, then of course they are different.
- colinsane 4y ago
  given the context of this article, if you ever get the chance to study the economics of private torrent trackers, i think you’d find it interesting. every private tracker ends up with an economy of some sort: users have to upload so many bytes if they want to continue downloading bytes; certain content might be gated to users who have only uploaded so many bytes… but there’s always a way to get those credits without actually uploading bytes: submitting new torrents, reviewing new torrents, seeding inactive torrents to keep that content alive, etc. naturally, many trackers frequently run donation drives. you can be sure the hosting costs for most trackers isn’t really $50,000/year. yet any successful tracker can bring more than that in via “donations”. the trick, of course, is that these “donations” serve to tie the internal economy to the global economy: you can expect to get some form of upload credits in exchange for your donation. but the point here is that this is exactly your micropayment ecosystem: only it’s seamless enough (and at certain key points obscured by plausible cover stories) that casual users might not comprehend that they’re making micropayments every time they download a file.
- na4ma4 4y ago
  I would think it would work better in some kind of system like how I believe Youtube Premium works. You pay $10/mth, and then that $10 gets split into $1 overhead and $9 allocated to the sites you tip/visit/use during the month. So you visit 100 sites, each site gets $0.09, you visit 10 sites, each site gets $0.90 and if somehow you only visit 1 site, it gets $9 from you. So you're not paying hundreds of dollars a month without realising, you don't need to go through payment processing for every site it's just invisible. It could probably be tracked the same way ads are, so instead of an advertisement the section is removed (or the first ad block in the page is replaced with "thanks for the tip" and the rest are just removed). So technically you're not paying the site, you're paying for "ad-free browsing" on those sites.
- andrepd 4y ago
  > The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Sure, that's why there should be a model like Flattr, but automated: you pay a flat subscription, say 5 or 10$ a month, and that is divided by services/content you use, weighted by time spent.
ComodoHacker 4y ago
If I remember correctly from reading those who tried, the problem with 'viable micropayments' is compliance. If you cut on it and make transactions cheap, your service will be heavily abused for fraud and laundering. Preventing that makes transactions cost nearly as much as traditional card payments, thus not viable.
kamel3d 4y ago
is not that what Brave browser was trying to solve?
- minsc_and_boo 4y ago
  They were but it was done through trying to push their own crypto on everyone. Realistically for adoption there just needed to be a micropayment using existing currencies.
sfmike 4y ago
The fact there is none is because humans are inherently heuristic and ads are the non invasive answer to being around and letting business models happen as any manual micro payments just wouldn't happen. What's our closest buy me a cup of coffee? And that's niche and really only adopted by those who have thought about this problem.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  Wikipedia for example gets generous donations from all kinds of people. So paying freely for beneficial services is also known in non nerd circles. Micropayments would really help, spread that to smaller projects/sites, that cannot afford to also build a foundation structure.
nerdponx 4y ago
I disagree. Ads are fine as long as they're actually just passive ads. Sometimes they even show me things I want to buy! It's the surveillance and general impunity around responsibility with people's data that is problematic.
minsc_and_boo 4y ago
Google tried this already, where you could pay $0.02 or something to not see ads on websites. Instead, they would show cat pictures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor IIRC the problem was is that their network wasn't universal. While it works on some ads on some websites, there were still non-Google ads that it didn't work on.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
autoexec 4y ago
> The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads. A better candidate for "biggest injustice" would probably be the RIAA/MPA and the copyright laws they paid for and continue to abuse for profit and control. It sounds like that was even what actually finally made this torrent site more trouble than it was worth (assuming that's why his site was null-routed by the host). It threatens every single user, no matter if they deal in copyrighted material or make money doing so or not. The industry continues to push and push for more power and control over what we're allowed to see and hear. They already have the power to force ISPs to kick people offline and never provide service for them again over nothing but unproven accusations that never see a courtroom. They want the ability to force ISPs to block any website at any time within minutes - again because of unproven claims. They already have this ability in several countries around the globe, and until recently all of their attempts to enforce this in the US have failed. (https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/who-needs-sopa-judge-orders-every-us-isp-to-block-entire-websites-accused-of-enabling-piracy/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/who-needs-sopa-judge-ord...) but while they haven't been fully successful in the US yet, they keep trying. They want the semi-anonymous access to the internet we have via VPNs and TOR eliminated They want to eliminate or restrict any devices, technologies, components, and services that might facilitate the circumvention of DRM or allow the copying of content including things like youtube-dl, debuggers, and decompilers along with any site offering them or even just instruction on how to bypass DRM. They want to force website operators to automatically filter uploads and remove content at their request. They want to make streaming copyrighted material (like a song or video game) a felony punishable with imprisonment and they want some acts of piracy to carry life imprisonment as well as harsh criminal penalties for "attempted copyright infringement" They want increased use of wiretaps and police resources for piracy investigations. They've argued that ISPs offering faster internet speeds makes them liable for severe penalties under copyright law since it encourages pirates to use their service to commit infringements. They have spent millions every year on lobbying. They have judges and lawmakers in their pocket. They've had their lawyers installed throughout the US justice department and they chip away every year at our freedom. There's basically no push back against them from anyone other than ISPs which have been losing in courts badly, and a handful of people on the internet who are even aware all of this has been going on and escalating.
eek2121 4y ago
Well no. Micropayments imply you pay authors. Adsense and other platforms do not require that. Apples and oranges, fyi. Micropayments are suffering because most folks aren't willing to pay for content. Paywalls have shown that depending on the few is a viable strategy. You say that an ad supported web needs to die, but I will point out that such a move would even kill Wikipedia, as they rely on their ad-driven donations to keep them alive.

The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads. The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what needs to die.

arcticbull 4y ago

The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Which is why micropayments aren't a thing despite us having had the infrastructure for decades. There's no reason PayPal can't support sub-dollar transactions now, or ever before. Nick Szabo and I disagree on probably everything else in this world, but we agree on micropayments. Nick's paper is worth a read and does a great job of explaining the issues [1]. tl;dr: around micropayments is that in reality users/customers don't actually want them. They run afoul of our fundamental human behavioral costing model. The reason ad-supported is so prevalent isn't because it's being forced on us by a shady cabal or anything, it's just the least-worst option we've compromised on. [1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-mental-transaction-costs.pdf https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-...

freedomben 4y ago
> The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Indeed. I wonder if something like Brave's idea of just creating a pot of money per month, and then paying that out is workable. As a user I'd love to throw $10 into my pot and not have to worry about cost exceeding that and not having to see ads. The network effect is a beast though. You need participation before you can get participation.
- efreak 4y ago
  Flattr?
- arcticbull 4y ago
  That's explored in section 5.1 of the Szabo paper. tl;dr: you basically have to cap how much the sites can charge to avoid the pot getting drained by a bad actor, but that just creates an incentive for every site to charge the maximum - why wouldn't they? There's no human deciding after all. So then you're basically deferring to, and trusting, a central actor to set the price for all this content. Then premium content makers have to demand a higher price to make the economics work, which in turn, means everyone sets their prices to the new upper tier. That has its own serious implications, and comes with much of the same hazard as Google has today, IMO. By eliminating the agency in making that purchasing decision you eliminate much of the benefit of a market for content.
  - tjoff 4y ago
    Why would it have to be all or nothing. Maybe I can spend an extra literal 2 seconds for content I adore and spend an hour on, than on something I barely skim.
  - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
    So you need to give the site a reason not to charge the maximum. Suppose the user can choose their monthly fee, but so can the site. Anyone paying $5/month can use any of the cheapest sites. Some sites require you to be paying $50/month. The sites that require a higher monthly fee get paid more per user, but they also lose out on any money at all from users paying less than that (because they don't have access). Mass market sites will choose low rates and make it up on volume. Specialized sites with premium content can choose higher rates and still get paid with a smaller number of users. But the user is still not getting nickle and dimed, because if you're paying $50/month, you get all the $50/month tier content.
    - mst 4y ago
      This sounds reminiscent of the Kindle Unlimited model, and author opinions as to its usefulness to them are ... varied. Then again my brain keeps generating what it's convinced are fairer ways to do it ... and all of them so far also introduce sufficient additional friction for the user that they'd be dead on arrival.
- harikb 4y ago
  The collective value of your View/Clicks is far higher than $10 to advertizers per month. Most people wouldn't pay that amount. This is just like insurance. Old people are subsidized by young. A rich person's View in the developed country is subsidizing Google just being available to a poor person elsewhere. Don't assume that (a) people are ready to pay the true cost of running a site like Google without ads or (b) that it will even end up being a good thing for humanity overall.
  - freedomben 4y ago
    Very fair point. The Law of Unintended Consequences could be a beast.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    We should just let the market sort it out. If people don’t want to pay as much as a website needs to be run, they should just not use the website, it can go out of business if necessary, and space can be opened up for a more efficient service provider. I mean we’re basically allowing for an information asymmetry here, right? Which messes with supply and demand. Economists should be pissed.
    - ponector 4y ago
      Isn't is already sorted out? Current model full of ads is the best for business.
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        The suppliers and the demanders can’t agree on an efficient price if the demanders don’t know what the price is.
        MereInterest 4y ago
        And while they haggle over the price of the megaphone, the rest of us who are about to be deafened don’t even factor into a market-based pricing.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  A company called Coil offered this. They shut down recently though.
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  This would be really interesting in combination with some zero knowledge proofs, so you can allocate your subscription fees to sites without the payment processor (or the site) knowing who you in particular are patronizing.
  - mst 4y ago
    zcash's shielded pool is probably the closest to a solution for that that exists today, and at the very least a bunch of the cryptography/math/overall model should be re-usable in a more traditional setup. (I remain basically a crypto skeptic but zcash appear to at least be -attempting- something focused and interesting enough for me to continue to pay vague attention)
- RandallBrown 4y ago
  Google actually used to offer this. I forget what it was called, but you put money in your account and it would big against other AdSense ads for display on websites. I think I remember being able to replace the ads with cat photos or whatever photos you wanted.
  - slongfield 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
    - RandallBrown 4y ago
      I could have sworn it existed prior to 2014, but I guess not!
tjoff 4y ago
> The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Why would I mind that? Seriously? It would be as smooth as voting on HN/submissions that you already do anyway. The infrastructure does not exist. And no, paypal only sounds more like a dystopia than micro transactions.
- Eduard 4y ago
  Maybe also the legal framework does not exist (yet). Doing a payment, no matter how small, may require to first accept some legal terms - depending on jurisdiction.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- progmetaldev 4y ago
  You also have URL shortening services that could trick users into visiting a page that is charging per page view. Unless there were a way to authorize the payment, the system could be abused. Then we're back to managing 100 clicks per day.
  - tjoff 4y ago
    Charging per page view would only work for pre-approved sites and have many of the downsides as ads, not sure I like that idea at all. Also micro-transactaions are not necessarily about payments like we are used to them now, but could completely transform how donations worked. And also paying after the fact, did you like the content? Pay. Not have to wade through ads "paying" for something that turns out was only clickbait, tracking and garbage.
uncletammy 4y ago
Why would micropayments require users to make "a hundred purchasing decisions per day"? One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream. The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream. Sure, maybe. But different content producers are going to demand different pricing tiers. HBO isn't going to stream The Last of Us for the same per-second rate as a YouTube game streamer. Now if the "wallet software does the rest" and you have variable pricing, why wouldn't every content producer pick the top pricing tier? Without explicit decision making you lose the pricing signal. Ditto The New York Times and BuzzFeed. Suddenly your ecosystem fractures into a million pieces like Netflix did. > The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built. I suspect that's got a lot to do with Nick's motivations in publishing this, yes, but I think it's still correct regardless.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- olalonde 4y ago
  BTC didn't "decide" anything, it was never suited for micropayments at scale.
- deleted 4y ago
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phpisthebest 4y ago
100% disgree. Consumers do not want a micropayment system built on the same idea of "shopping cart" where you have to click 100 times and enter a bunch of info to may a payment for 30 cents.. That is part of the problem, Visa and mastercard nor the banks want to make an easy friction free micropayment system because their systems are soooo terrible they could not stop the fraud, and they love the $0.30 per translation fee that makes them the bulk of their money. The systemic issues finance systems prevents anyway from making a viable micropayment system
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > That is part of the problem, Visa and mastercard nor the banks want to make an easy friction free micropayment system because their systems are soooo terrible they could not stop the fraud, and they love the $0.30 per translation fee that makes them the bulk of their money. What on earth gives you the idea their systems are "terrible." They seem to be quite capable and do an excellent job of all the world's commerce. In Europe card networks charge 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit, as required by regulation, so it's clearly not an efficiency thing. Heck an ACH payment costs 1/3 of a cent in volume, and that's going to instant/real-time next year with FedNow. It's been that way for 10 years in the UK, EU, AU with Faster Payments, SEPA and NPP respectively. However my point is that you just need a stored balance wallet, like Cash App, Venmo or PayPal, and we've had at least one of those for decades. Literally all a micropayment is, is increment(A) and decrement(B). There's never been a technical reason that isn't possible with pretty much any dollar amount. Do you have any reason to believe this is the case? I've seen a pile of dead bodies in the startup space over decades trying to do exactly this and nobody wants it. But every cycle people seem to convince themselves that there are no bodies, and Visa can't process payments, etc etc, and they give it a go. Only to end up in the graveyard with everyone else. What is it that all these failed startups missed? I'd love to know because intellectually I want micropayments too. I just don't think it's actually something people really want IRL.
  - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
    The problem isn't the technology, it's the regulatory environment. If you're the payment processor who accepts Visa/Mastercard, the customer can do chargebacks. Now you have some scummy site that scams a million people and uses your service to accept payments. By the time the scam is uncovered, the scammer has already withdrawn the money or paid it to someone else on your service. Holding the money in escrow for long enough to prevent this will piss off legitimate sellers and some jurisdictions prohibit it. The amount per user was like a dollar but in total it's millions of dollars, so you can't just eat it. But if you don't, the users issue mass chargebacks against your service and you get banned by the credit card companies. To make it work, transactions for small amounts have to be caveat emptor, but the existing system doesn't allow that.
SirYandi 4y ago
I mean, every time you use an electric device you're making a small purchasing decision.
- ComodoHacker 4y ago
  It's wrong comparison. Flipping all switches in a room doesn't get you much added value beyond what's necessary.
joshspankit 4y ago
If we weren’t beholden to payment processors, we as users could simply set our browsers to pay $0.001 or $0.000001 for every website we visit with an additional button for “give this site more right now” or “send $ every month“ That would be transparent, cheap, and sustainable.
- tempestn 4y ago
  But the vast majority of people don't want that! If there was a cost every time you visited a website, however small, there would be a constant mental load of evaluating whether each click was worth it. It would be a huge drag on the best aspect of the web. Not to mention that coordinating it internationally would be next to impossible. Sure, you could add it as an optional feature, and a tiny percentage of people would use it, but it wouldn't make any material difference to websites' bottom lines.
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    I think you missed the intent of what I said: let people set their payment settings in any way they want to
  - shard 4y ago
    I believe if the incremental cost is small, the mental load would mostly fade into the background, just as I am aware that there is a cost every time I turn on the lights or the faucet, but it doesn't have a large impact on my usage except that I remember to turn off the lights when I leave a room and don't leave the faucet running when I soap up the dishes.
  - saurik 4y ago
    Every time you turn a light switch on or use an appliance, you are being charged for the electricity used to run it; this cost is extremely difficult to track, is different for every device you own, and adds up such that at the end of the month the cost is non-negligible (at least to the point where you probably are paying more on utilities every month than streaming media services)... and yet, while people, in the abstract, care somewhat about reducing their usage of such things like water and electricity (and thereby put in at least a bit of effort to prevent the most egregious of wasted costs), almost no one is crippled by the "mental load of evaluating whether each" time they flip a switch or turn on a faucet is "worth it". It is kind of ludicrous that this argument against micropayments somehow holds as much traction with people as it does when essentially all people experience not only experience the obvious counter-example so often as to be nearly every waking minute of every day, it makes up a significant fraction of their overall expenses.
zx8080 4y ago
> The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. I wouldn't want to help hundreds of sites I visit every day to track me (with the payment system help). I have no doubts they will sell this info for some additional cents. It's not fear of lack of privacy. It just feels not fair that if I pay them, they will instantly get more money from advertisers. And I will just get more ads. Better targeted ones.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  What an odd position... you do understand to do targeted ads they have to track you, and google is already buying all of your transactions from your banks, and credit card companies and matching that to your online profile
markdown 4y ago
> The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. How is it different to the hundreds of upvote/downvote decisions we make every day on here and Reddit?
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  Upvotes and downvotes have zero real-world stakes. Imagine if your upvote button was wired directly into your wallet and extracted some amount of money with every press. Even if you control the amount, even if it is fractional cents per upvote, you now have to figure out how much it is costing you in real world dollars to upvote people each day/week/month whatever. Also "I liked this" is different from "This is worth $value to me"
  - markdown 4y ago
    > Imagine if your upvote button was wired directly into your wallet and extracted some amount of money with every press. Every press? Nobody has ever proposed that. All I want is a button in my browser (not on websites) that I can configure ahead of time. Perhaps I'd set it to $0.10. Then, when (and only when) I want, I can click on that button, knowing it will attempt to send $0.10 to the website I'm currently viewing, if that website has set up the ability to receive money in this way. Maybe I won't click it for a week, but then click it ten times on one article (or website) to send a dollar to that site.
    - bluefirebrand 4y ago
      > Every press? Nobody has ever proposed that I was just using it as an example to illustrate why a micropayment button press is a different and more difficult decision than an upvote, because you asked why those decisions were different. If you would not use them interchangeably, then of course they are different.
colinsane 4y ago
given the context of this article, if you ever get the chance to study the economics of private torrent trackers, i think you’d find it interesting. every private tracker ends up with an economy of some sort: users have to upload so many bytes if they want to continue downloading bytes; certain content might be gated to users who have only uploaded so many bytes… but there’s always a way to get those credits without actually uploading bytes: submitting new torrents, reviewing new torrents, seeding inactive torrents to keep that content alive, etc. naturally, many trackers frequently run donation drives. you can be sure the hosting costs for most trackers isn’t really $50,000/year. yet any successful tracker can bring more than that in via “donations”. the trick, of course, is that these “donations” serve to tie the internal economy to the global economy: you can expect to get some form of upload credits in exchange for your donation. but the point here is that this is exactly your micropayment ecosystem: only it’s seamless enough (and at certain key points obscured by plausible cover stories) that casual users might not comprehend that they’re making micropayments every time they download a file.
na4ma4 4y ago
I would think it would work better in some kind of system like how I believe Youtube Premium works. You pay $10/mth, and then that $10 gets split into $1 overhead and $9 allocated to the sites you tip/visit/use during the month. So you visit 100 sites, each site gets $0.09, you visit 10 sites, each site gets $0.90 and if somehow you only visit 1 site, it gets $9 from you. So you're not paying hundreds of dollars a month without realising, you don't need to go through payment processing for every site it's just invisible. It could probably be tracked the same way ads are, so instead of an advertisement the section is removed (or the first ad block in the page is replaced with "thanks for the tip" and the rest are just removed). So technically you're not paying the site, you're paying for "ad-free browsing" on those sites.
andrepd 4y ago
> The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Sure, that's why there should be a model like Flattr, but automated: you pay a flat subscription, say 5 or 10$ a month, and that is divided by services/content you use, weighted by time spent.

ComodoHacker 4y ago

If I remember correctly from reading those who tried, the problem with 'viable micropayments' is compliance. If you cut on it and make transactions cheap, your service will be heavily abused for fraud and laundering. Preventing that makes transactions cost nearly as much as traditional card payments, thus not viable.

kamel3d 4y ago

is not that what Brave browser was trying to solve?

minsc_and_boo 4y ago
They were but it was done through trying to push their own crypto on everyone. Realistically for adoption there just needed to be a micropayment using existing currencies.

sfmike 4y ago

The fact there is none is because humans are inherently heuristic and ads are the non invasive answer to being around and letting business models happen as any manual micro payments just wouldn't happen. What's our closest buy me a cup of coffee? And that's niche and really only adopted by those who have thought about this problem.

hutzlibu 4y ago
Wikipedia for example gets generous donations from all kinds of people. So paying freely for beneficial services is also known in non nerd circles. Micropayments would really help, spread that to smaller projects/sites, that cannot afford to also build a foundation structure.

nerdponx 4y ago

I disagree. Ads are fine as long as they're actually just passive ads. Sometimes they even show me things I want to buy! It's the surveillance and general impunity around responsibility with people's data that is problematic.

minsc_and_boo 4y ago

Google tried this already, where you could pay $0.02 or something to not see ads on websites. Instead, they would show cat pictures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor IIRC the problem was is that their network wasn't universal. While it works on some ads on some websites, there were still non-Google ads that it didn't work on.

deleted 4y ago

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autoexec 4y ago

> The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads. A better candidate for "biggest injustice" would probably be the RIAA/MPA and the copyright laws they paid for and continue to abuse for profit and control. It sounds like that was even what actually finally made this torrent site more trouble than it was worth (assuming that's why his site was null-routed by the host). It threatens every single user, no matter if they deal in copyrighted material or make money doing so or not. The industry continues to push and push for more power and control over what we're allowed to see and hear. They already have the power to force ISPs to kick people offline and never provide service for them again over nothing but unproven accusations that never see a courtroom. They want the ability to force ISPs to block any website at any time within minutes - again because of unproven claims. They already have this ability in several countries around the globe, and until recently all of their attempts to enforce this in the US have failed. (https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/who-needs-sopa-judge-orders-every-us-isp-to-block-entire-websites-accused-of-enabling-piracy/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/who-needs-sopa-judge-ord...) but while they haven't been fully successful in the US yet, they keep trying. They want the semi-anonymous access to the internet we have via VPNs and TOR eliminated They want to eliminate or restrict any devices, technologies, components, and services that might facilitate the circumvention of DRM or allow the copying of content including things like youtube-dl, debuggers, and decompilers along with any site offering them or even just instruction on how to bypass DRM. They want to force website operators to automatically filter uploads and remove content at their request. They want to make streaming copyrighted material (like a song or video game) a felony punishable with imprisonment and they want some acts of piracy to carry life imprisonment as well as harsh criminal penalties for "attempted copyright infringement" They want increased use of wiretaps and police resources for piracy investigations. They've argued that ISPs offering faster internet speeds makes them liable for severe penalties under copyright law since it encourages pirates to use their service to commit infringements. They have spent millions every year on lobbying. They have judges and lawmakers in their pocket. They've had their lawyers installed throughout the US justice department and they chip away every year at our freedom. There's basically no push back against them from anyone other than ISPs which have been losing in courts badly, and a handful of people on the internet who are even aware all of this has been going on and escalating.

eek2121 4y ago

Well no. Micropayments imply you pay authors. Adsense and other platforms do not require that. Apples and oranges, fyi. Micropayments are suffering because most folks aren't willing to pay for content. Paywalls have shown that depending on the few is a viable strategy. You say that an ad supported web needs to die, but I will point out that such a move would even kill Wikipedia, as they rely on their ad-driven donations to keep them alive.