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Comment by Enginerrrd | Hacker News Reader

It's too much for the value for me. $12/mo. The problem is everyone on the web is like this. I'd be paying $300+/month if I subscribed to every service like that when I want to occasionally watch a video, or read 1-2 articles a month from a bunch of different sources. It doesn't work, I'm getting ripped off compared to the amount advertisers are spending to show me ads. Why do I have to be the one who gets screwed?

I'd MUCH rather just have a system where I can just choose to either get ads, or to debit the amount the advertisers spent to show me an add to get an ad-free experience on a per-article or per-video basis where the provider (or host) isn't trying to bend me over compared to the deal they offer advertisers.

The problem is that would "disincentivize engagement" and no one would ever offer such a thing. Well, ok then, screw you, I'll use adblock and you get no benefit.

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> The problem is that would "disincentivize engagement" and no one would ever offer such a thing.

It's actually a slightly different problem.

Advertisers want the people who are willing to pay for stuff.

If the advertiser pays $0.03 to show you the ad and you could get out of watching it by paying the same amount, the only people watching the ad would be the most aggressive of cheapskates who never buy anything. Nobody wants to advertise to them, so there would be no point in even trying to sell advertising. But that's not even the problem.

The problem is in order to collect $0.03 you would need a functioning micropayments system that both doesn't charge prohibitively high transaction costs and doesn't invade everybody's privacy by de facto giving the bank your browsing history.

It’s always seemed to me that this would be fairly easy by just setting up a “wallet” model. I.e fill up wallet with $20, browser extension has a “tip” button where your wallet gets deducted however many cents and the site owner’s gets added the same amount (challenge is identifying the site owner). You re-up every so often, perhaps automatically, and everyone goes on their merry way.

Then people pay for things and don't like what they received. The cardholder wants their money back, and you have two choices.

Choice one, you have a dispute resolution system which costs money which requires high transaction costs, and can't have $0.03 transactions. Choice two, you don't, the user gets mad, disputes the charge with the credit card company and then the browser extension goes out of business due to chargebacks.

What you need is something that works like cash. Money is exchanged for goods and services, the end. If somebody steals from you or rips you off, your recourse is by recovering it from the person who ripped you off, not the bank. If that makes people stop doing business with shady people using this payment method, fine. Still works for the local newspaper.

Or just make the tips refundable for a short time period with no formal process (submit a short sentence about why for later review in case of abuse suspicion maybe). If people abuse the system, ban them (eta: identity banning should be pretty easy given you need to provide a credit card) If sites frequently get refunds requested, disable the app for them.

> Or just make the tips refundable for a short time period with no formal process

Then you get the fraud the other way. People get content and then ask for a refund.

> If people abuse the system, ban them

So now you're back to needing an expensive dispute resolution process.

> If sites frequently get refunds requested, disable the app for them.

Which punishes the sites who are the most common victims of buyer fraud.

There are three options. Option one, dispute resolution process, high transaction costs. Option two, caveat emptor, no refunds. Option three, caveat venditor, totally unconditional refunds.

And option three doesn't really work either, because if readers are anonymous they could all ask for a refund with no consequences, but if they're not it's a privacy problem. So what you really need for small transactions is option two. Which isn't really a problem for small transactions, because they're small -- if somebody rips you off to the tune of $0.03, whatever, lesson learned, don't do business with them again.

> if somebody rips you off to the tune of $0.03, whatever, lesson learned, don't do business with them again.

They won't need you to do business with them again. 10k viewers being ripped off is $300, and let the site fail, onto the next domain to do it over again.

Now it's the email spam problem - every site gets to rip you off $0.03, you add them to your blocklist, but there are so many you never hear of that site again anyway.

I don’t think people would pay 3 cents to every site? Or pay the money before even seeing content?

I envision this as more of a European style tipping than American: I read an article, watch a video, cline a GitHub repo, etc. I find that the content is well made and I’d like to support the creator. I press the “tip” button in my browser and top them some small amount (<$1 in most cases).

This way there’s no need to deal with refunds, bad actors, etc.

> Now it's the email spam problem - every site gets to rip you off $0.03, you add them to your blocklist, but there are so many you never hear of that site again anyway.

We already have this problem with clickbait. They get the $0.03 from filling their site with spamvertisements and then waste your time getting you to click on it. Whether the $0.03 is from you or advertisers is irrelevant.

Though you could add a "screw those guys" button where you don't get your money back but they don't get it either. That might even allow there to be no transaction costs, by using that money to fund the system.

A "give the money to their competitors" button, I like the sound of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr

Been around for a decade, run by the old Piratebay guys.

So many problems on the web at least partially stem from the fact that we have still not come up with a fundamentally good way to move money around digitally. There is no equivalent to cash on the web.

- The amount of hoops we jump through to get around the problem that credit card numbers are fundamentally insecure is absurd. Transactions can be arbitrarily canceled up to a month after they happen, and platforms like Paypal will then happily charge you an extra fee for the privilege of reversing the payment.

- Bitcoin was also obviously a dumpster fire in this regard. It's not clear Bitcoin was ever going to be anything but a dumpster fire; the transaction fees were always going to make it terrible for micropayments, and they were baked into the design pretty early.

- GNU Tailor has been occasionally making the rounds for years, but I don't see any kind of timeline for getting real banks to adopt it.

It's a difficult problem.

But I suspect a truly decent micropayments system that didn't suffer from all of the privacy/gatekeeping/transaction-fee problems of credit cards and Paypal would fundamentally change the web.

You can help in shaping web monetization api - https://webmonetization.org/

> The problem is in order to collect $0.03 you would need a functioning micropayments system

And a functioning microdecision system that didn't wear you down from making decisions about whether everything you try and do is really worth spending or not spending $0.03, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day.

Same here. I can't subscribe to dozens of newspapers, but I'd happily pay even 50¢/article, if the payment process were seamless.

Blendle was doing this in the Netherlands and they expanded to the us. For some reason they have since moved to an unlimited monthly fee. They do carry a lot of articles from newspapers and magazines.

I’ve been hoping for, years, probably at least a decade, that Apple would solve this. I’d gladly let them manage micropayments for good content.

It's actually $9.99/mo. (Edit: apparently they increased it and I'm grandfathered in on an older rate)

Do you not value your time? If you watch content on there on a fairly regular basis it'll easily save you 1 hr+ of your time/sanity over the course of the month.

Also some of the money goes to help support the creators of content you consume (apparently even demonetized channels).

Google had a program similar to that, though it seems it was pretty small and died off several years ago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

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