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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

Clever use of "points" to obscure the actual spending. But I am skeptical of micropayments ever working. It's been tried so many times, in so many variations, but never taken off. I don't see any obvious secular shifts that would mean that its time has come. Including Twitter's gyrations.

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.

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> But I am skeptical of micropayments ever working.

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.

> The hardest thing is making sure you're not falling afoul of the money laundering laws or accidentally financing 'terrorism'.

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!

So to modify my view, it would be that it works in the specific case of parasocial relationships but not for impersonal things like news.

you dont think someone would, given the opportunity, throw some cash to an author who strongly supports their own biases? dont some people buy books just to that, never intending to even read them?

This already happens, we just call it "payments" or "subscriptions". I see micropayments as being a different species.

The rise of the paid newsletter and the prominence of the paywall leads me to be a little less cynical about the prospect of micropayments. A decade ago, when Flattr was prominent, the culture around paying for things on the internet was very different. I was initially excited about Flattr but grew disillusioned with it, and every iteration on the idea since has, as you say, never taken off...

...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 agree that the "sprinkle a little money towards the sites you used in the month" remains pointless.

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.

> The rise of the paid newsletter and the prominence of the paywall leads me to be a little less cynical about the prospect of micropayments.

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.

I think there’s a tipping point when purchasing articles individually becomes less attractive than paying for a single subscription even if it’s possible to spend less overall.

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!

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