7 ms·

This should be the standard business model on the web, instead of the advertising middlemen that have corrupted all our media, and the adtech that exploits our

by imiric 1y ago

This should be the standard business model on the web, instead of the advertising middlemen that have corrupted all our media, and the adtech that exploits our data in perpetuity. All of which is also serving to spread propaganda, corrupt democratic processes, and cause the sociopolitical unrest we've seen in the last decade+. I hope that decades from now we can accept how insidious all of this is, and prosecute and regulate these companies just like we did with Big Tobacco. Brave's BAT is also a good attempt at fixing this, but x402 seems like a more generic solution. It's a shame that neither has any chance of gaining traction, partly because of the cryptocurrency stigma, and partly because of adtech's tight grip on the current web.

lofaszvanitt 1y ago
Because this must be done on the gov level. As I've written about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40972106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40972106
hhh 1y ago
crypto seems like a massive waste for what can just be a regular transaction
- trollbridge 1y ago
  Something like BAT isn't that wasteful, and without crypto you'd be stuck never getting paid by bad actors in the scheme.
  - gessha 1y ago
    But why exactly does it have to be on an append-only ledger where transactions are processed/validated for a fee? Why can’t it be a more conventional transaction processor like VISA on top of the banking system?
    - baobun 1y ago
      Bitcoin Lightning Network works and roughly maps to that.
    - dboreham 1y ago
      Because Visa doesn't (hasn't) wanted to do microtransactions, ever, since the beginning of the internet.
      - tzs 1y ago
        You still don't need cryptocurrencies. You just need a middleman that aggregates micropayments into large enough amounts to work with non-micropayment systems. Some might object to having to get middlemen involved, but the thing is that even with cryptocurrency payments you are going to need middlemen because the web is international. If your website is directly charging crawlers to crawl and you get crawled and paid by any crawler from another country, congratulations! You are now engaged directly in international trade and have a whole slew of regulations to deal with, probably from both your country and the country the crawler is from. If you go through a middleman you can structure things so it is the middleman that is buying crawler access from you. Pick a middleman in your country (or anywhere in the EU of you are in the EU) and most of your regulatory headaches go away.
        imiric 1y ago
        A middleman is not strictly required for cryptocurrencies. Regulations around them and how international transactions are taxed will depend on each country, just like anything else. These matters can be handled by lawyers and accountants as usual. While I agree that cryptocurrencies are not strictly required for this, the infrastructure already exists to support micropayments, and is well understood and trusted. What infrastructure could support the same use cases for fiat micropayments? Would it be as low friction to setup and use as cryptocurrencies are today? Would it be decentralized and not depend on a single company? I'm as tired as anyone else about the cryptocurrency hype and the charlatans and scammers it has enabled. But I also think it's silly to completely ignore the technology and refuse to acknowledge that it has genuine use cases that no other system is well suited for. Micropayments and powering novel business models on the web is one clear example of that.
- bo1024 1y ago
  Much cheaper than using a credit card processor.
  - rswail 1y ago
    Not cheaper than using one of the instant net settlement services like FedNow (UPI in India, PromptPay in Thailand, PayID in Australia)
    - jdminhbg 1y ago
      Do you see what the issue might be with the parenthetical there?
      - rswail 1y ago
        Of course, but are you aware that there are already cross-country agreements that allow these systems to work, for example, UPI is accepted in Singapore? https://support.google.com/pay/india/answer/13949170?hl=en https://support.google.com/pay/india/answer/13949170?hl=en There are also alternatives like WePay, AliPay, LINE Pay and other wallet providers that are generally accepted across Asia. The use of the Visa and MC networks is primarily a US/EU/APAC environment, where the alliance of bank issuers has controlled that market for decades. This is essentially a "legacy" network, with a lot of issues related to the interchange and other fees, as well as any number of 3rd parties, hidden from the consumer, that "clip the ticket" of each transaction.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
squigz 1y ago
Even if advertising were to disappear over night, why do you think that would stop the spread of propaganda, corruption of democratic processes, and social unrest? I don't really see a connection between the two?
- 4b11b4 1y ago
  It's more like the tech that allows middlemen to insert into everything and be very hyper personalized/targeted
- imiric 1y ago
  Where did I say that all of those things would stop? What I said is that adtech systems are also used for it. So if they were to disappear overnight, a _proportion_ of those activities, and a pretty large one I reckon, would also disappear.
  - squigz 1y ago
    Okay, but my question remains - why? What is the connection between those things and advertising? It seems way more likely to me that they would simply adapt, as they always have.
    - imiric 1y ago
      The connection is that those wishing to influence public opinion can do so by running ad campaigns that target precisely the demographic they wish to manipulate. Adtech doesn't care whether you're promoting products or ideas. This connection should be obvious after the Cambridge Analytica leak. Social media and any media platform also enables the spreading of propaganda, but it's not as systematic as the tools built for advertising.
      - heresie-dabord 1y ago
        In support of your position: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
giantrobot 1y ago
> This should be the standard business model on the web, instead of the advertising middlemen that have corrupted all our media, and the adtech that exploits our data in perpetuity. People with content will still want to maximize their money. You'll get all the same bullshit dark patterns on sites supported by microtransactions as you will ad supported. Stories will be split up into multiple individual pages, each requiring a microtransaction. Even getting past a landing page will require multiple click throughs each with another transaction. There will also be nothing preventing sites from bait and switch schemes where the link exposed to crawlers doesn't contain the expected content. Without extensive support for micro-refunds and micro-customer service and micro-consumer protections, microtransactions on the web will most likely lead to more abusive bullshit. Automated integrations with browsers will be exploited.
- imiric 1y ago
  Maybe. But at least transactions could be performed directly between consumers and publishers, and there wouldn't be incentives for companies to violate privacy laws and exploit user data. Of course, we would need to figure out solutions to a bunch of problems adtech companies have had decades to do, but micropayments would be the first step in the right direction. A larger hurdle would be educating users into paying for content, and what "free" has meant thus far, so that they could make an informed decision. And even then I expect that many people would prefer paying with their attention and data instead. But giving the option for currency payment with _zero_ ads is something that can be forced by regulation, which I hope happens one day.
ashdksnndck 1y ago
Microtransactions are the perfect solution, if you have an economic theory that assumes near-zero transaction costs. Technology can achieve low technical costs, but the problem is the human cost of a transaction. The mental overhead of deciding whether I want to make a purchase to consume every piece of content, and whether I got ripped off, adds up, and makes microtransactions exhausting. When someone on the internet tries to sell you something for a dollar, how often do you really take them up on it? How many microtransactions have you actually made? To problem with microtransactions is they discourage people from consuming your content. Which is silly, because the marginal cost of serving one reader or viewer is nearly zero. The solution is bundling. I make a decision to pay once, then don’t pay any marginal costs on each bit of content. Revenue goes to creators proportionally based on what fraction of each user’s consumption went to them. People feel hesitation toward paying for the bundle, but they only have to get over the hump once, not repeatedly for every single view. Advertising-supported content is one kind of bundle, but in my opinion, it’s just as exhausting. The best version of bundling I’ve experienced are services like Spotify and YouTube Premium, where I pay a reasonable fixed monthly fee and in return get to consume many hours of entertainment. The main problems with those services are the middlemen who take half the money.
- johanyc 1y ago
  > the problem is the human cost of a transaction. The mental overhead of deciding whether I want to make a purchase to consume every piece of content […] > When someone on the internet tries to sell you something for a dollar, how often do you really take them up on it? It depends on how micro they are. Your example of $1 is quite big. It should be cents or even less. Several examples. When using chatgpt api, do you really worry how much a short q&a session will cost you? Do you stress whether to turn on the light in your room or not (electricity cost is also micro-transaction if you think about it)?
  - ashdksnndck 1y ago
    For the examples you gave, there is a lot of marginal cost to provide more of the product. ChatGPT and your utility would be bankrupt if they gave infinite usage. Although ChatGPT’s consumer product is flat rate (users greatly prefer that model), rumor is that they lose money if you use the big models a lot, and they do cap usage.
jahewson 1y ago
Sorry but the sociopolitical unrest of the last decade has been caused by the problems we have created not by people talking about it. Money need not be involved, just look at how corrupt and biased Wikipedia has become.

by imiric 1y ago

lofaszvanitt 1y ago

Because this must be done on the gov level. As I've written about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40972106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40972106

hhh 1y ago

crypto seems like a massive waste for what can just be a regular transaction

trollbridge 1y ago
Something like BAT isn't that wasteful, and without crypto you'd be stuck never getting paid by bad actors in the scheme.
- gessha 1y ago
  But why exactly does it have to be on an append-only ledger where transactions are processed/validated for a fee? Why can’t it be a more conventional transaction processor like VISA on top of the banking system?
  - baobun 1y ago
    Bitcoin Lightning Network works and roughly maps to that.
  - dboreham 1y ago
    Because Visa doesn't (hasn't) wanted to do microtransactions, ever, since the beginning of the internet.
    - tzs 1y ago
      You still don't need cryptocurrencies. You just need a middleman that aggregates micropayments into large enough amounts to work with non-micropayment systems. Some might object to having to get middlemen involved, but the thing is that even with cryptocurrency payments you are going to need middlemen because the web is international. If your website is directly charging crawlers to crawl and you get crawled and paid by any crawler from another country, congratulations! You are now engaged directly in international trade and have a whole slew of regulations to deal with, probably from both your country and the country the crawler is from. If you go through a middleman you can structure things so it is the middleman that is buying crawler access from you. Pick a middleman in your country (or anywhere in the EU of you are in the EU) and most of your regulatory headaches go away.
      - imiric 1y ago
        A middleman is not strictly required for cryptocurrencies. Regulations around them and how international transactions are taxed will depend on each country, just like anything else. These matters can be handled by lawyers and accountants as usual. While I agree that cryptocurrencies are not strictly required for this, the infrastructure already exists to support micropayments, and is well understood and trusted. What infrastructure could support the same use cases for fiat micropayments? Would it be as low friction to setup and use as cryptocurrencies are today? Would it be decentralized and not depend on a single company? I'm as tired as anyone else about the cryptocurrency hype and the charlatans and scammers it has enabled. But I also think it's silly to completely ignore the technology and refuse to acknowledge that it has genuine use cases that no other system is well suited for. Micropayments and powering novel business models on the web is one clear example of that.
bo1024 1y ago
Much cheaper than using a credit card processor.
- rswail 1y ago
  Not cheaper than using one of the instant net settlement services like FedNow (UPI in India, PromptPay in Thailand, PayID in Australia)
  - jdminhbg 1y ago
    Do you see what the issue might be with the parenthetical there?
    - rswail 1y ago
      Of course, but are you aware that there are already cross-country agreements that allow these systems to work, for example, UPI is accepted in Singapore? https://support.google.com/pay/india/answer/13949170?hl=en https://support.google.com/pay/india/answer/13949170?hl=en There are also alternatives like WePay, AliPay, LINE Pay and other wallet providers that are generally accepted across Asia. The use of the Visa and MC networks is primarily a US/EU/APAC environment, where the alliance of bank issuers has controlled that market for decades. This is essentially a "legacy" network, with a lot of issues related to the interchange and other fees, as well as any number of 3rd parties, hidden from the consumer, that "clip the ticket" of each transaction.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]

squigz 1y ago

Even if advertising were to disappear over night, why do you think that would stop the spread of propaganda, corruption of democratic processes, and social unrest? I don't really see a connection between the two?

4b11b4 1y ago
It's more like the tech that allows middlemen to insert into everything and be very hyper personalized/targeted
imiric 1y ago
Where did I say that all of those things would stop? What I said is that adtech systems are also used for it. So if they were to disappear overnight, a _proportion_ of those activities, and a pretty large one I reckon, would also disappear.
- squigz 1y ago
  Okay, but my question remains - why? What is the connection between those things and advertising? It seems way more likely to me that they would simply adapt, as they always have.
  - imiric 1y ago
    The connection is that those wishing to influence public opinion can do so by running ad campaigns that target precisely the demographic they wish to manipulate. Adtech doesn't care whether you're promoting products or ideas. This connection should be obvious after the Cambridge Analytica leak. Social media and any media platform also enables the spreading of propaganda, but it's not as systematic as the tools built for advertising.
    - heresie-dabord 1y ago
      In support of your position: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

giantrobot 1y ago

> This should be the standard business model on the web, instead of the advertising middlemen that have corrupted all our media, and the adtech that exploits our data in perpetuity. People with content will still want to maximize their money. You'll get all the same bullshit dark patterns on sites supported by microtransactions as you will ad supported. Stories will be split up into multiple individual pages, each requiring a microtransaction. Even getting past a landing page will require multiple click throughs each with another transaction. There will also be nothing preventing sites from bait and switch schemes where the link exposed to crawlers doesn't contain the expected content. Without extensive support for micro-refunds and micro-customer service and micro-consumer protections, microtransactions on the web will most likely lead to more abusive bullshit. Automated integrations with browsers will be exploited.

imiric 1y ago
Maybe. But at least transactions could be performed directly between consumers and publishers, and there wouldn't be incentives for companies to violate privacy laws and exploit user data. Of course, we would need to figure out solutions to a bunch of problems adtech companies have had decades to do, but micropayments would be the first step in the right direction. A larger hurdle would be educating users into paying for content, and what "free" has meant thus far, so that they could make an informed decision. And even then I expect that many people would prefer paying with their attention and data instead. But giving the option for currency payment with _zero_ ads is something that can be forced by regulation, which I hope happens one day.

ashdksnndck 1y ago

Microtransactions are the perfect solution, if you have an economic theory that assumes near-zero transaction costs. Technology can achieve low technical costs, but the problem is the human cost of a transaction. The mental overhead of deciding whether I want to make a purchase to consume every piece of content, and whether I got ripped off, adds up, and makes microtransactions exhausting. When someone on the internet tries to sell you something for a dollar, how often do you really take them up on it? How many microtransactions have you actually made? To problem with microtransactions is they discourage people from consuming your content. Which is silly, because the marginal cost of serving one reader or viewer is nearly zero. The solution is bundling. I make a decision to pay once, then don’t pay any marginal costs on each bit of content. Revenue goes to creators proportionally based on what fraction of each user’s consumption went to them. People feel hesitation toward paying for the bundle, but they only have to get over the hump once, not repeatedly for every single view. Advertising-supported content is one kind of bundle, but in my opinion, it’s just as exhausting. The best version of bundling I’ve experienced are services like Spotify and YouTube Premium, where I pay a reasonable fixed monthly fee and in return get to consume many hours of entertainment. The main problems with those services are the middlemen who take half the money.

johanyc 1y ago
> the problem is the human cost of a transaction. The mental overhead of deciding whether I want to make a purchase to consume every piece of content […] > When someone on the internet tries to sell you something for a dollar, how often do you really take them up on it? It depends on how micro they are. Your example of $1 is quite big. It should be cents or even less. Several examples. When using chatgpt api, do you really worry how much a short q&a session will cost you? Do you stress whether to turn on the light in your room or not (electricity cost is also micro-transaction if you think about it)?
- ashdksnndck 1y ago
  For the examples you gave, there is a lot of marginal cost to provide more of the product. ChatGPT and your utility would be bankrupt if they gave infinite usage. Although ChatGPT’s consumer product is flat rate (users greatly prefer that model), rumor is that they lose money if you use the big models a lot, and they do cap usage.

jahewson 1y ago

Sorry but the sociopolitical unrest of the last decade has been caused by the problems we have created not by people talking about it. Money need not be involved, just look at how corrupt and biased Wikipedia has become.