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Comment by drivingmenuts | Hacker News Reader

We need to also then figure out how to handle a situation where a purchaser is unsatisfied in some way with the paid-for content. How do you refund their money (regardless of the amount)?

It's all well and good to tell someone that their idea sucks in the comments, but they still have your money.

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Exactly. Microtransactions don't have microdisputes. Not to mention that payment with user intervention is annoying if it's on every page and payment without user intervention is wide open to fraud.

Yup. Payment is a decision. Even if it's a small one, it annoys users to stop and think "hmm, is this worth X" every time. That said, cellphones give us the same frustration since many of them have hyper-complex automatic payment schemes. But does anybody like the way cellphone bills work?

My cell phone bill is awesome. $35/mo prepaid, unlimited everything.

I don't like the way other cellphone bills work. My previous cell phones were AT&T and Sprint, and they were awful enough for me to permanently swear off of them. Maybe more people should quit trying to bend over backwards to convince their cell carrier to 'allow' them to have an iPhone.

Bingo this and similar.

Not only is it $35/mo, but I can top-up the account for several months at a time, so that I simply don't have to worry about it.

My one complaint is that my provider still "warns" me every month that my plan is about to expire, even if there are multiple pre-paid months to go. They really need to fix that.

Which phone company?

Virgin Mobile.

Do you ask for a refund when you bought a newspaper and, after reading it, you don't like what you read? Do you ask for a refund when you bought an app on the app store and you stop using it after 1 hour because it doesn't fit your need? I think it probably depends on the amount you paid, though...

>Do you ask for a refund when you bought a newspaper and, after reading it, you don't like what you read?

No, because i know what to expect from different newspapers and in the very very rare cases where i buy them, i do that only after skimming the front and relevant pages.

>Do you ask for a refund when you bought an app on the app store and you stop using it after 1 hour because it doesn't fit your need?

Yes, all the time.

What's your point?

Asking because it seems unusual to me, and I think those situations are really similar to what GP was referring to: "I paid to see what you had to say, but I don't like it so I'd like my money back". I can think of a lot of similar situations (movies, digital music, books, ...) where I wouldn't consider asking for a refund after I have consumed the content, whether I liked it or not.

> Do you ask for a refund when you bought an app on the app store and you stop using it after 1 hour because it doesn't fit your need?

A lot of people do, yes.

It may be in the interest of content providers to provide refunds. Although I don't have any studies that say so, I suspect users will more willing to purchase content if they know they can get a refund.

Perhaps optional refunds can be baked into the protocol, so content providers can decide if they give refunds, and users can decide if a purchase is worth the risk.

If I already know that I can’t get a refund if the newspaper sucks, then I will stick to the known / reputable newspapers and avoid paying for small time newspapers.

So? If the payment is less than $10 or less than $50, who cares? The best you can do is warn other people and that sends a stronger message than just getting your money back.

Reputation is what counts and you can see this on Amazon and ebay where a poor rep means no future earnings. Good rep means higher potential future earnings.

IF someone rips you off you have multiple forums in which to vent your frustration and lower the seller's potential future earnings. That's a lot of power. That's more power than most corporations and countries have when they over-pay for a costly piece of shit system. Hell this is more power than you have when it comes to taxes! When your tax dollars are misspent there's absolutely no chance for a refund and you have an election every 4 years but you ain't getting a dollar back.

There may be short lived websites that exist only scam a large number of people out of small amounts of money. What makes this worse is that most people would (rationally) not consider it worth pursuing the website operator unless recourse were very easy. Is it really worth your time to chase down $0.25 from a scammy website, other than perhaps doing it on principle?

Any mircropayment protocol design should take this into account.

Yea but even looking at an aggregate score of a site before deciding to pay to read an article adds a lot of friction to the process.

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