Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

Neat! I'm of the opinion that journalism, open source development, etc. would be much closer to self-sustaining if only users had the option of dropping a quarter in the hat — performing a one-click micropayment — when visiting a webpage. I'm not likely to subscribe to the NYT, but I'd gladly pay 25 cents after reading a great article if it didn't require entering CC info and bouncing between three different webpages. Unfortunately, this would require immense coordination between web standards, browsers, OS vendors, and banks to implement. Taler sounds like it's targeting a similar use case; I hope it sees wide adoption so that at least the idea could be tested at scale!

(Sadly, with most traffic coming from mobile these days, I'm not sure how well the wallet concept would play with iOS's closed ecosystem. Is it against the App Store guidelines to release a wallet-type extension? Sigh, I miss the days when hacky tech like Napster and BitTorrent would set the world on fire without anyone having to gatekeep...)

> but I'd gladly pay 25 cents after reading a great article if it didn't require entering CC info and bouncing between three different webpages... Unfortunately, this would require immense coordination between web standards, browsers, OS vendors, and banks to implement

If you're okay with customers choosing to make piece-work payments after consuming the material, the problem becomes much easier because micro-payments don't have to be instantaneous or binding.

All you need is a not-terribly-insecure ledger that the consumer has full read/write access to, and approves of every month (perhaps implicitly for bills under $X). This removes a lot of the security/trust/coordination issues -- an 90% solution is good enough if you just double-check with the consumer before doing anything actually important. Similar to the proposal here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/17/the-learned-helplessness-o... Micro-payments made by browser software (sim. SSNs) become spam-reducing mechanisms rather than trusted tokens.

Of course, this doesn't work if you want true micro-payments; i.e., where the consumer pays for access to the material, instead of making a piece-work contribution after having already consumed the material.

And american signature-less swipe transactions and now the contactless sub-30-quid payment thing in .uk seem to make it pretty clear that below a certain amount, consumers really don't give a shit about explicitly approving things.

TBH I don't think conscious micro-payments would work well. Something like spotify where you pay a flat fee for 'all you can eat' and proceeds are distributed via what you consume would be more practical. Medium is going towards that, but they still require you to press a like button to pay someone.

Most people will choose free with ads, but a significant amount will chose premium if it is compelling enough and that can represent a lot of money.

I don't know — I think many people have an allergic reaction to subscriptions of any kind. (I know I do.) Also, no one service could possibly encompass every blog, project, or publication that one might want to "tip", and people aren't going to subscribe to more than a handful of services at once. (Especially when things like Medium posts are already provided for free.)

Ultimately, I think people are very charitable when it comes to trivial transactions, but not when they're inconvenienced, and so I think it would be best for everyone to make that usability gap as tiny as possible. Even better if you could actually get something for your quarter: stats showing your tip% compared to peers or friends? Different site styles for high tippers? Personal stats tracking your interests over time? Monetized, unskeezy, free-as-in-freedom "likes": lots of possibilities here.

> I think many people have an allergic reaction to subscriptions of any kind.

Many people? I don't think it's a lot. Look at the subscriber numbers for Netflix. Or consider how many are willing to sign a contract for their cell phone. People will pay if the value is high.

I think the truth is most people don't care very much about the news. Time is scarce and people have a lot of choices about how to spend their time.

Yes, because Netflix and Spotify are amazing, amazing deals. The news? You can read that anywhere. Why would anyone subscribe to a service that offers them what they already have?

And yet, people are more than happy to tip a busker or leave a few bucks for the waiter or bartender. (Even outside the US, where tipping isn't expected.)

There's more than one thing at play here though.

Netflix and Spotify are giving people something they want without a lot of friction. I can get everything on those services for free other places but the experience is worse.

People are tipping buskers because they are sharing a physical location with that person. Put the video of the street performance on YouTube with a tip button and the dollars per view number is going to drop drastically.

Bartenders and waiters are tipped well because they are providing personal service.

The news fails because to be useful these days you need to consume news from a variety of sources. And you explicitly don't want to only get news from one media empire because then you're just getting whatever bias the CEO wants distributed.

I haven't heard a subscription news model which doesn't feel like its also trying to sunk-cost me into being less critical of the reporting.

I subscribe to Netflix, cable TV, MLBtv, Amazon Prime Video, and YouTube Red. The only newsy thing I subscribe to is New Yorker magazine.

Subscribing to multiple services isn't that unusual. There just has to be some value to it.

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