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Comment by therealmarv | Hacker News Reader

There is absolutely no shortcut in this things. As soon as you are paying users there will be all sort of legal requirements/side effects which you need to be aware of. Starting with money laundering, taxes (yours and from your users even!), pleasing your payout provider that your content is not illegal, beeing able to payout in US&Europe or even global and ending with costs (you will probably never be able to compete with 5% from patreon). The thing is that all this risks apply mostly to your payout provider (this is why it is a hard problem, it's not only your risk alone). Good luck in finding a good partner. I'm betting that sites like Patreon have developed this things from scratch and in-house.

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One question (since I do like shortcuts) -- what about if you have uses pay each other (through whatever means is available to them), and only act as the sort of negotiation point? Here's what I'm thinking:

- user signs up

- user registers x supported payment accounts (Paypal, Venmo, etc)

- when a user wants to pay another user on their site, you send them to the appropriate payment provider with the details of the other user

- take confirmation from user that received payment and use it to update "trustworthiness" scores for both users.

This seems like it could work as a way to sidestep some of the legal requirements?

Though the amount of value the OP's company offers is a little lower (since you're not handling payments), I think the other benefits (discoverability, concentration of information, etc) that patreon offers are still seemingly on the table. Fraud of course is still an issue, but the upside is you can punt that to whatever payment provider they specify.

Patreon does this automatically. I, as a patreon, do not want to be sent somewhere each month to confirm my payment.

You're saying that patreon provides this for you automatically right -- I wasn't disagreeing with that... That's part of the value that patreon provides and I recognize that.

With regards to your comment, you're right that it's inconvenient but that can be worked on (API integrations?), and even if it can't, the people who are willing to confirm monthly payments to things they support might not be 0.

How would you get paid in that scenario?

A subscription might work, or trying to get payment from the creators to be on the system.

It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem of course -- as the service needs to be popular to justify a creator paying anything, but that's the same regardless, and if the price is right then you can at least get people in the door. for example $12 (so $1/month) for a high quality patreon funnel that you don't maintain and also (theoretically) helps people discovery you doesn't seem like an impossible sell.

Won't work for sure.

Alternative: The only shortcut (which is also interesting from a technical standpoint) I know of is going with this things 100% into crypto (but not develop your own crypto currency, use established ones like BTC, XRP, LTC, ETH). I'm not a big crypto fanboy but this is an area where it shines, of course it will make your audience smaller!

Could you discuss why?

You are not directly dependent on banks, financial companies and all the regulations they have. Actually you only need to concentrate then mostly on the software side and keep sure that nothing really illegal happens on your platform (sooner or later you also need legal advice with this thing!). And it will lower your costs because no middleman needs to be payed here (except maybe you alone)

I think I'm misreading your response, those sounds like benefits, not reasons that it definitely wouldn't work?

I've edited my response once again. Yes it could definitely work with crypto :) at the cost that your audience will be smaller. At least you are less dependent on good working financial partners/banks/visa etc. for this setup.

Gotcha, thanks for clarifying!

I agree that crypto honestly exactly is what would have solved this problem, if it had come to be used as it was intended, as a currency versus a store of value. It's still early days in the course of human history (hopefully), I'm cautiously optimistic about bitcoin at every moment when I'm not bashing it :)

https://streamlabs.com/ does exactly this with PayPal. It goes directly to the streamer, and shows the name of the streamer’s PayPal account. For Chess Grandmaster Benjamin Finegold whose stream I watch on Twitch, that’s some chess education center in Atlanta. It also shows their email address and possibly a physical address, and it might show mine to them. I think the privacy issue might not make it work well for casual users like Patreon has, but for commercial users it would probably work better. I feel like I’m more likely to get my PayPal account flagged by donating to random streamers on StreamLabs than with an intermediary like Twitch or Patreon. I’m not too worried about it but I am more careful.

It also helps that tipping is just a minor feature of the product. Their product is an OBS which shows overlays and stuff in the stream, including an animation when someone leaves a tip. They also sell merchandise much like CafePress. I have a coffee mug with Hikaru Nakamura on it. Some info: https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/07/how-streamlabs-is-helping...

If you can find a way to make tipping part of a larger product/service, it seems less likely to be used for money laundering, and to be more likely to work without a huge amount of expertise in the area of payment platforms.

Exactly what streamlabs does is a thing I thought I might make some day -- now I can wipe it off my list since it seems like they are already producing a fantastic product.

I really think that the streaming world could benefit from a decentralized streaming application but this seems like something streamlabs could easily pursue in a pivot or as a new feature so I think it could happen some day.

Thanks for sharing how you feel using the service as well (being a bit more careful) -- I'm sure it will help OP a bunch

Decentralization would require the streamer to have enough bandwidth to upload to each viewer. Uploading one stream to a CDN is ideal.

Right, except that decentralization is also the solution to fast data delivery -- CDNs work by decentralizing data, and if the people who built this were smart, they'd work in a way where users could get discounts for helping to spread/rehost paid streams (for a discount to their sub fee, for example), or choose to help a streamer out by replicating their stream for free.

I personally think you could find a lot of people who would be willing to help CDN/share/host for streamers they support, a nice step between watch for free and upvote/like and send the streamer money.

Even if you didn't want to go the P2P route, there's no reason that streamlabs can't step in to help provide that infrastructure if it's cost effective (i.e. if the streamer is paying) -- surely a streamer is going to be willing to drop $50 on extra resources for a stream if they think it's going to bring them >$50 worth of recognition/good content for their streamers. Streamlabs wouldn't even have to keep these resources on hand, they could spin them up on demand and just charge a slight premium. Even better, streamlabs could give streamers easy tools to enable purchasing cloud resources for better stream quality, and charge them for the convenience (and let them know of course that they pay the AWS bills at the end of the day).

There is, read my last comment on this thread.

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