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Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

How would decentralized finance affect the advertising driven business model of web applications?

Micropayments have been suggested since Internet was young, but now that's available on top of the right cryptocurrent (eg SOL). Whether that's actually a model people want (vs saying they want) remains to be seen, but Substack seems to be doing well enough for their writers. 3 cents from each of 100,000 likes on Twitter/Insta/tt starts to add up for those with a large enough following to make several of those a month. If the transaction costs are close enough to nil to make that worthwhile for everyone involved, that's a different web than we've grown up with, with 30-cent per-transaction fees being the industry standard for credit cards.

If Web3 becomes popular, it frees the online tip jar from a particular platform (eg Patreon) and decentralizes it so anyone can set it up for themselves, with far lower network effects required.

We've already had actually nil transaction costs for micropayments to eliminate ads offered by Google and... nobody used it. If advertising is driving facebook/twitter/youtube/etc to prioritize content that angers people then micropayments to support some small blogger isn't what is needed. Instead, what is needed is for facebook/twitter/youtube etc to operate on micropayments.

But... advertising isn't why these services trend towards angering content. Engagement is why. Whether you are paying with ad views or micropayments, if services want you to keep engaged then they will be incentivized to promote this kind of content. And since things like youtube premium (or whatever it is currently called) exist today and per-view payment systems have been set up by Google in the past (and already died), I don't think that funding these websites with BTC donations or whatever would change a thing.

Micropayments are an interesting topic. I don't want to pay 5 cents per article I read, I'd much rather pay $10 a month for unlimited articles, even if I end up paying more than I would with the first scheme just because with the first one, I make a decision to spend money with every click. I know there are projects trying to streamline this, but it really should be as close to the UX of the latter as possible, pay a set amount and never think about how many things I can read.

I though the point of personal computing was to make it easy to think, not to make it unnecessary?

If you think the firehose of self-referential click-bait needs to be made even more addictive, I'm really not sure what Web3 can offer.

OTOH, reintroducing the friction of having to decide whether the next click is worth your time and attention (i.e. money) is where it's at.

I've been using Blendle for a long time now, and one interesting thing that I've noticed is that it doesn't make me think hard about the decision to spend money every time I read some article, even though that's technically what it is.

How many people even say they want micropayments? It seems like a relatively niche position even in my circles — most people seem relatively happy with the idea that their monthly costs are fixed and they don't need to think about how much it'll cost to open a link.

The proposed web3 model seems far more likely to be like those abusive micro-payment games with constant prompts to pay for something, with a page's worth of content moved behind successive paywalls since publishers aren't going to switch to a system which pays even less and you'd need to ask permission before charging someone.

This also adds problems with people who don't have money or aren't allowed to spend it (children, elderly, etc.) or the same scandals when those people are taken advantage of, not to mention the privacy impacts of effectively creating a super-cookie which can be used to track people all over the web.

Perhaps even more relevantly, how would any sort of decentralization help when the issue is an excessively unregulated market simply moving to the logical conclusion of its evolution?

I quite liked the coinhive approach of having the user run a blockchain workload as an alternative to ads. The project and economics didn’t work out for them but it was an interesting approach.

But that doesn't change a thing. Engagement is still the key metric for a service in this world. And that leads to the same problems.

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