Post, the latest Twitter alternative, is betting big on micropayments for news
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
its also bad design/marketing. i hate paywalls, too. but i'd gladly throw a bone here or there if given the opportunity, just like hitting an upvote button. so dont call it a payment or implement a payment system; call it something else that conveys gratuity/gift/support/tip/whatever
The monopolist examples, like mobile and power companies don't translate well, as these companies provide services, that are continuously consumed, vs. one of purchases. For these companies, micro payments maybe don't make sense. But for lot's of other one of content, micro payments seem far superior over subscriptions.
To me, it feels, the article proves, that micropayments are crap if used for the wrong kind of products...
Also with things like news you don’t even know if it’s I’ll be worth it until you’ve already paid.
In addition the tollbooth infrastructure is expensive. just look at how much of the old phone networks — hardware and bandwidth — was devoted to metering and payment.
So: bad for users and bad for business. Only really sustainable in a few early situations.
Sidebar, at $0.50 per view it definitely would not work, but I figure at $0.01 a typical user would run up a tab of about $2-5/mo, which is small enough that unpredictability is not a big deal.
Both ends up creating incentives for click-bait. Get users to read (aka pay) for as many articles as possible without any regard to any meat in those articles.
Short term thinking will always win in companies run by hired guns.
That feels like a bad sign for this model.
Nostr is a more sane version of activitypub where your identity is just a public key and not dependant on any server, no signup required. Due to this it also natively support BTC payments and micropayments through the lightning network
Nostr is now on my radar. And I think it’s great because it lets me address the primary issue in social media today: identity management.
If it was signed by my public key, it’s me.
P.s: do you know of any desktop rss readers that are also nostr capable?
Cli preferred.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 (11 months ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 (22 days ago)
Has the network effect of Twitter been seriously disrupted at this point? I know a lot of folks who disagree with Musk claimed to be leaving for mastodon. I'm curious if there are trustworthy engagement numbers available.
No idea if similar metrics exist for Mastodon.
I mean, of course?
Although, if this is the main driver for the increased numbers, then it is hardly sustainable. There is only so much fuel a garbage fire can consume before it dies out.
Monthly Active Users 2.1M+9%
Servers Up 8.8K+46%
Data collected by crawling all accessible Mastodon servers on Dec 15, 2022.
https://joinmastodon.org/about
Despite restoring some of the banned Twitter accounts, Twitter is still throwing a "Warning: this link may be unsafe" alert for Mastodon links, which seems to be a sign that they're afraid of people leaving and trying to stop them. Twitter was/is also preventing people from adding their Mastodon handle to their Twitter profile.
My feeling as a long-time user is "no". That being said, we know Musk has no problem "spinning the truth", so as you imply it seems unlikely that we'll ever get trustworthy metrics again unless Musk were to allow independent auditors.
However, conversations have become boringly "meta" (lots of hot takes this morning about Musk unbanning everyone he banned), I'm getting tons of spam (where I got almost none in the years before the Musk-quisition), and the quality of the advertising I'm seeing has plummeted.
The primary thing Musk has going for him right now is that there's nowhere to go.
In my niche of Apple platform software developers, it's definitely been disrupted. The migration from Twitter to Mastodon has been accelerating, especially in the past few days. A lot of abandoned Twitter accounts.
A significant number of these people had been on Twitter for over a decade.
Overall, it's not the total user base that matters, it's the prolific tweeters who matter, because most Twitter users are quiet consumers of tweets. There's nothing to consume if the tweeters leave... except Musk's own tweets, if you're into that.
Some of the people abandoning Twitter include developers of 3rd party Twitter clients and browser extensions, so that's going to matter a bit to the general user base. Also, alienating software developers isn't going to be great for any future hiring that Twitter may need, if it ever crawls back from the financial brink.
This so-called 'disruption' has been greatly exaggerated and has hardly made a dent on Twitter.
This kind of comment degrades the conversation on HN. Please follow the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm an academic in computational political communication. I wasn't fond of Twitter before the move, but was there largely because my professional network was. Most or all of them are now on Mastodon, so the network effect driving me there has gone (and I've cheerfully left). My wife is an author, and book Twitter is mostly still there. Ditto the journalists.
I mean, my part of the job world was never on LinkedIn - while for others it was indispensable. This feels like the same.
It'll be a Twitter clone with one extra killer feature... and dark mode.
I'm sensitised to this topic because I once tried another spin on "pay us upfront and we'll sprinkle out your money to publishers". Heck, I even had the idea of using an invite list to create an air of exclusivity. But people before me thought of it. And people after me thought of it, including well-funded giants like Google. Where has this gone to date? Approximately nowhere.
...but more recently, the last year or so, I have actively thought, when coming across a paywalled article, "I wish I could just pay for this article". I have subscriptions to the places I read every day, but it's a hard sell to start a new expensive subscription cold.
I am quite optimistic about the future of micropayments as an upsell strategy into paid subscriptions. Essentially, if I can pay for paywalled articles individually, and I start to consume a few per month, it'll make much more financial sense to start paying for a subscription than it would to keep going through these micropayments every time.
I agree that the "sprinkle a little money towards the sites you used in the month" remains pointless. Paying $10/month for a few pennies to go to all the different sites I've visited in the month is far less compelling than paying $1 per article for 10 articles in a month I wanted to read. I haven't used Post yet, but I am quite optimistic, I think they have a real shot at making this model work.
I don't think of these as micropayments, whether the user-must-click-each-time or service-calculates-distribution types. These are bog standard subscriptions to a single publisher.
The idea of upselling to subscription is interesting, but a big part of how broad publications like a newspaper work is to bundle a number of things together that different audiences want into a single economic unit that can charged at a higher price. A user who can get only and exactly what they wanted at a lower price will do so.
What I believed when I started was that there was an in-between audience who weren't served - those who wouldn't subscribe but who would pay for individual consumption if it was frictionless. I did a lot of work on how that could be achieved across multiple websites without needing a central aggregator (even to the point of obtaining a patent on part of the technology). But so many efforts, like Flattr and many others, came and went that I've come to view the whole idea as a tarpit.
There’s interface friction associated with making a payment (clicking a button, entering card details / authorising with Apple Pay) but there’s also decision friction: do I want to spend $1 on this article? I think if someone is buying multiple individual articles per month from a publication, and thus trusts the publication is worth reading, then a subscription offers a compelling benefit — no more thinking, just reading!
Subscriptions can also offer other benefits: as you say, bundling is a way to increase perceived value, but it can also increase real value, if the publication understands the needs of their readers and bundles valuable things. Access to content earlier is a very common pattern employed across media subscriptions nowadays!
This was kind of the idea between Brave Browser's "earn BAT, auto-contribute to sites you use automatically" concept, and I actually admired the effort. I think people just saw it as being able to earn free crypto, though. It barely gets used for stuff like tipping, auto-tipping, etc.
It works fine with sites like fansly and onlyfans. 'creators' lock their posts behind a subscription or a tip, you tip and get access.
Reddit has the same, with awards (although they keep it all for themselves) Twitch has the same with points etc, it's here.
All you do is top up your wallet, scroll your feed, see a post you like, press the tip button send them a $1 (virtual points from your account to theirs) then they can cash out.
The hardest thing is making sure you're not falling afoul of the money laundering laws or accidentally financing 'terrorism'.
Hopefully we see more of it on the mainstream platforms, but on other platforms it's been here for years already.
i.e. complying with compulsory government regulation enacted for those ends, which is a huge barrier to entry.
for example, the platform can't commingle funds in a single bank account and use accounting to keep track of who is owned which beans. they have to set up separate bank accounts for each user!
- Publish alongside the article the amount of $$$ support the post.news has collected for that author to-date. Provides transparency (perceived "relevance" by the readership).
- Create a currency, and interest groups/areas: individual users can pool their monies to support a pool of investigative journalists to focus on a topic area
what others am I missing .. ?
I'll say I eagerly want to pay for interesting articles across a number of newspapers/blogs/magazines instead of paying for subscriptions to a few of them.
I really liked the original blendle, but didn't use it much because it didn't have the stuff I wanted.
1. Loads of friction
2. Nasty surprises in credit card statements