The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads.
The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what needs to die.
The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what needs to die.
Nick Szabo and I disagree on probably everything else in this world, but we agree on micropayments. Nick's paper is worth a read and does a great job of explaining the issues [1].
tl;dr: around micropayments is that in reality users/customers don't actually want them. They run afoul of our fundamental human behavioral costing model.
The reason ad-supported is so prevalent isn't because it's being forced on us by a shady cabal or anything, it's just the least-worst option we've compromised on.
[1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-...
Indeed. I wonder if something like Brave's idea of just creating a pot of money per month, and then paying that out is workable. As a user I'd love to throw $10 into my pot and not have to worry about cost exceeding that and not having to see ads. The network effect is a beast though. You need participation before you can get participation.
tl;dr: you basically have to cap how much the sites can charge to avoid the pot getting drained by a bad actor, but that just creates an incentive for every site to charge the maximum - why wouldn't they? There's no human deciding after all. So then you're basically deferring to, and trusting, a central actor to set the price for all this content. Then premium content makers have to demand a higher price to make the economics work, which in turn, means everyone sets their prices to the new upper tier.
That has its own serious implications, and comes with much of the same hazard as Google has today, IMO. By eliminating the agency in making that purchasing decision you eliminate much of the benefit of a market for content.
Maybe I can spend an extra literal 2 seconds for content I adore and spend an hour on, than on something I barely skim.
Suppose the user can choose their monthly fee, but so can the site. Anyone paying $5/month can use any of the cheapest sites. Some sites require you to be paying $50/month. The sites that require a higher monthly fee get paid more per user, but they also lose out on any money at all from users paying less than that (because they don't have access).
Mass market sites will choose low rates and make it up on volume. Specialized sites with premium content can choose higher rates and still get paid with a smaller number of users.
But the user is still not getting nickle and dimed, because if you're paying $50/month, you get all the $50/month tier content.
Then again my brain keeps generating what it's convinced are fairer ways to do it ... and all of them so far also introduce sufficient additional friction for the user that they'd be dead on arrival.
This is just like insurance. Old people are subsidized by young. A rich person's View in the developed country is subsidizing Google just being available to a poor person elsewhere.
Don't assume that (a) people are ready to pay the true cost of running a site like Google without ads or (b) that it will even end up being a good thing for humanity overall.
I mean we’re basically allowing for an information asymmetry here, right? Which messes with supply and demand. Economists should be pissed.
I like having my mind turned upside down. Thank you for broadening my perspective.
(I remain basically a crypto skeptic but zcash appear to at least be -attempting- something focused and interesting enough for me to continue to pay vague attention)
Why would I mind that? Seriously? It would be as smooth as voting on HN/submissions that you already do anyway.
The infrastructure does not exist. And no, paypal only sounds more like a dystopia than micro transactions.
And also paying after the fact, did you like the content? Pay. Not have to wade through ads "paying" for something that turns out was only clickbait, tracking and garbage.
One of many counter examples is the streaming media use case. The user agrees once to a certain price per minute/second streaming rate then the wallet software does the rest until the user is out of money or decides to stop watching/listening to the stream.
The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built.
Sure, maybe. But different content producers are going to demand different pricing tiers. HBO isn't going to stream The Last of Us for the same per-second rate as a YouTube game streamer. Now if the "wallet software does the rest" and you have variable pricing, why wouldn't every content producer pick the top pricing tier? Without explicit decision making you lose the pricing signal.
Ditto The New York Times and BuzzFeed.
Suddenly your ecosystem fractures into a million pieces like Netflix did.
> The reason micropayments aren't a thing is because BTC decided to pivot away from being cash in favor of being a speculative asset so the software that would make use of micropayments never got built.
I suspect that's got a lot to do with Nick's motivations in publishing this, yes, but I think it's still correct regardless.
Consumers do not want a micropayment system built on the same idea of "shopping cart" where you have to click 100 times and enter a bunch of info to may a payment for 30 cents..
That is part of the problem, Visa and mastercard nor the banks want to make an easy friction free micropayment system because their systems are soooo terrible they could not stop the fraud, and they love the $0.30 per translation fee that makes them the bulk of their money.
The systemic issues finance systems prevents anyway from making a viable micropayment system
What on earth gives you the idea their systems are "terrible." They seem to be quite capable and do an excellent job of all the world's commerce. In Europe card networks charge 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit, as required by regulation, so it's clearly not an efficiency thing. Heck an ACH payment costs 1/3 of a cent in volume, and that's going to instant/real-time next year with FedNow. It's been that way for 10 years in the UK, EU, AU with Faster Payments, SEPA and NPP respectively.
However my point is that you just need a stored balance wallet, like Cash App, Venmo or PayPal, and we've had at least one of those for decades.
Literally all a micropayment is, is increment(A) and decrement(B).
There's never been a technical reason that isn't possible with pretty much any dollar amount.
Do you have any reason to believe this is the case? I've seen a pile of dead bodies in the startup space over decades trying to do exactly this and nobody wants it. But every cycle people seem to convince themselves that there are no bodies, and Visa can't process payments, etc etc, and they give it a go. Only to end up in the graveyard with everyone else.
What is it that all these failed startups missed? I'd love to know because intellectually I want micropayments too. I just don't think it's actually something people really want IRL.
Now you have some scummy site that scams a million people and uses your service to accept payments. By the time the scam is uncovered, the scammer has already withdrawn the money or paid it to someone else on your service. Holding the money in escrow for long enough to prevent this will piss off legitimate sellers and some jurisdictions prohibit it. The amount per user was like a dollar but in total it's millions of dollars, so you can't just eat it. But if you don't, the users issue mass chargebacks against your service and you get banned by the credit card companies.
To make it work, transactions for small amounts have to be caveat emptor, but the existing system doesn't allow that.
Many have tried building it out of all the pieces that exist, it's just they didn't get any users.
It has to be something that puts a reasonable amount of the risk on the user, rather than either none or an unlimited amount.
Maybe we're just talking past each other.
What you need is something that has irreversible transactions but also has a monthly total transfer limit and a "routing number" which is unique to the merchant and can be revoked for further transactions at any time. Ideally also something that allows people to make purchases on credit and earn "points" so it's competitive with credit cards.
That way people would actually be willing to use it, instead of having to give a startup with no reputation (or a company with the foul reputation the likes of PayPal) access to their entire bank balance.
That's not actually true, they allow both ACH and debit cards.
But either way it's irrelevant, revocation risk can simply be offset with a fee.
The system doesn't suddenly stop working if you can only pass on 95% of the deposited amount. Or even 90%. Or 80%. If people want it, they'll use it anyways. The thing is they don't.
Or maybe they didn't start with the right customers set. I mostly hear about microtransactions related to media, press, blogs... What if the application that can ignite their use is nothing of the sort?
Collective subscriptions are terrible. You don't a voice to ask for the things you like. Ads brought us private surveillance, as if we don't have enough with nosy governments.
Even if it were seamless, I think many people would rather just scroll past some crappy ads vs paying even a few cents to read an article
Every time I hear about micropayments is about people trying to sell, not people trying to buy. And most often it's people trying to sell articles and quickly giving up and using ads.
A monthly sub works better, but the content that I'm actually excited to pay for comes from folks like YouTube creators with Patreons.
All of Substack blogs I've seen have a minimum paid option of something like $4/mo and it's all literature or opinion. I want something that's useful for me and needs works and yes, it's more likely to be found on YouTube.
Which juridictions?
The United States..... because I can assure you the rates you indicated are no where near what we have here. Card Present transactions are 1.5% + 0.15 cents per transactions Card not present it normally 2x that, ACH takes days and is not a fraction of a cent for the normal person, etc.
After all it's also not something people in countries with lower interchange or instant payments want.
They did not want social media until someone created a platform
judging everything by what people claim to want is foolish
With iPhones, nobody wanted it until they got it, but then they couldn't get enough of it - even though it started out only doing a fraction of what people wanted to use it for.
With micropayments they've had it several times and each time they said "no thank you please."
In my mind, the issue is trust. If I pay for something on the web, I need to trust I'll receive what was promised. How can I? Micro payments have no room for refunds. Without any system to refund bad purchases, fraudulent actors will run wild. By their nature, small transfers don't produce large value, of their small value is offset by relatively larger chance of being scammed, what's the point?
With the inflation people don't have money laying around to spend on non-essential things.
You seem to be head through wall determined that it's just matter of accessibility. It's not. Ads are ok. 1 company dominating the ad scene is what's wrong.
There should be an open alternative to Adsense. Without shady dealings. A public ad marketplace that keeps 1%, which should be enough to pay for the cost of running it and maintaining it. A non-profit.
That would be transparent, cheap, and sustainable.
Not to mention that coordinating it internationally would be next to impossible. Sure, you could add it as an optional feature, and a tiny percentage of people would use it, but it wouldn't make any material difference to websites' bottom lines.
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/flattr2.html
(I guess the advertising industry, including Google, lobbied hard against a potential competitor, especially already at the time owned by an adblock company?)
Heck, already Flattr 1.0 did that with its Flattr buttons on websites, but it got pretty much killed off by the 2013 Twitter APIpocalypse...
I wouldn't want to help hundreds of sites I visit every day to track me (with the payment system help). I have no doubts they will sell this info for some additional cents.
It's not fear of lack of privacy. It just feels not fair that if I pay them, they will instantly get more money from advertisers.
And I will just get more ads. Better targeted ones.
you do understand to do targeted ads they have to track you, and google is already buying all of your transactions from your banks, and credit card companies and matching that to your online profile
How is it different to the hundreds of upvote/downvote decisions we make every day on here and Reddit?
Imagine if your upvote button was wired directly into your wallet and extracted some amount of money with every press.
Even if you control the amount, even if it is fractional cents per upvote, you now have to figure out how much it is costing you in real world dollars to upvote people each day/week/month whatever.
Also "I liked this" is different from "This is worth $value to me"
Every press? Nobody has ever proposed that. All I want is a button in my browser (not on websites) that I can configure ahead of time. Perhaps I'd set it to $0.10. Then, when (and only when) I want, I can click on that button, knowing it will attempt to send $0.10 to the website I'm currently viewing, if that website has set up the ability to receive money in this way.
Maybe I won't click it for a week, but then click it ten times on one article (or website) to send a dollar to that site.
I was just using it as an example to illustrate why a micropayment button press is a different and more difficult decision than an upvote, because you asked why those decisions were different.
If you would not use them interchangeably, then of course they are different.
every private tracker ends up with an economy of some sort: users have to upload so many bytes if they want to continue downloading bytes; certain content might be gated to users who have only uploaded so many bytes… but there’s always a way to get those credits without actually uploading bytes: submitting new torrents, reviewing new torrents, seeding inactive torrents to keep that content alive, etc.
naturally, many trackers frequently run donation drives. you can be sure the hosting costs for most trackers isn’t really $50,000/year. yet any successful tracker can bring more than that in via “donations”. the trick, of course, is that these “donations” serve to tie the internal economy to the global economy: you can expect to get some form of upload credits in exchange for your donation.
but the point here is that this is exactly your micropayment ecosystem: only it’s seamless enough (and at certain key points obscured by plausible cover stories) that casual users might not comprehend that they’re making micropayments every time they download a file.
You pay $10/mth, and then that $10 gets split into $1 overhead and $9 allocated to the sites you tip/visit/use during the month.
So you visit 100 sites, each site gets $0.09, you visit 10 sites, each site gets $0.90 and if somehow you only visit 1 site, it gets $9 from you.
So you're not paying hundreds of dollars a month without realising, you don't need to go through payment processing for every site it's just invisible.
It could probably be tracked the same way ads are, so instead of an advertisement the section is removed (or the first ad block in the page is replaced with "thanks for the tip" and the rest are just removed).
So technically you're not paying the site, you're paying for "ad-free browsing" on those sites.
Sure, that's why there should be a model like Flattr, but automated: you pay a flat subscription, say 5 or 10$ a month, and that is divided by services/content you use, weighted by time spent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
IIRC the problem was is that their network wasn't universal. While it works on some ads on some websites, there were still non-Google ads that it didn't work on.
A better candidate for "biggest injustice" would probably be the RIAA/MPA and the copyright laws they paid for and continue to abuse for profit and control. It sounds like that was even what actually finally made this torrent site more trouble than it was worth (assuming that's why his site was null-routed by the host).
It threatens every single user, no matter if they deal in copyrighted material or make money doing so or not. The industry continues to push and push for more power and control over what we're allowed to see and hear.
They already have the power to force ISPs to kick people offline and never provide service for them again over nothing but unproven accusations that never see a courtroom.
They want the ability to force ISPs to block any website at any time within minutes - again because of unproven claims. They already have this ability in several countries around the globe, and until recently all of their attempts to enforce this in the US have failed. (https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/04/who-needs-sopa-judge-ord...) but while they haven't been fully successful in the US yet, they keep trying.
They want the semi-anonymous access to the internet we have via VPNs and TOR eliminated
They want to eliminate or restrict any devices, technologies, components, and services that might facilitate the circumvention of DRM or allow the copying of content including things like youtube-dl, debuggers, and decompilers along with any site offering them or even just instruction on how to bypass DRM.
They want to force website operators to automatically filter uploads and remove content at their request.
They want to make streaming copyrighted material (like a song or video game) a felony punishable with imprisonment and they want some acts of piracy to carry life imprisonment as well as harsh criminal penalties for "attempted copyright infringement"
They want increased use of wiretaps and police resources for piracy investigations.
They've argued that ISPs offering faster internet speeds makes them liable for severe penalties under copyright law since it encourages pirates to use their service to commit infringements.
They have spent millions every year on lobbying. They have judges and lawmakers in their pocket. They've had their lawyers installed throughout the US justice department and they chip away every year at our freedom. There's basically no push back against them from anyone other than ISPs which have been losing in courts badly, and a handful of people on the internet who are even aware all of this has been going on and escalating.
Micropayments are suffering because most folks aren't willing to pay for content. Paywalls have shown that depending on the few is a viable strategy.
You say that an ad supported web needs to die, but I will point out that such a move would even kill Wikipedia, as they rely on their ad-driven donations to keep them alive.
Realistically for adoption there just needed to be a micropayment using existing currencies.