Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshspankit | Hacker News Reader

If we weren’t beholden to payment processors, we as users could simply set our browsers to pay $0.001 or $0.000001 for every website we visit with an additional button for “give this site more right now” or “send $ every month“

That would be transparent, cheap, and sustainable.

View on HN

But the vast majority of people don't want that! If there was a cost every time you visited a website, however small, there would be a constant mental load of evaluating whether each click was worth it. It would be a huge drag on the best aspect of the web.

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.

I think you missed the intent of what I said: let people set their payment settings in any way they want to

I believe if the incremental cost is small, the mental load would mostly fade into the background, just as I am aware that there is a cost every time I turn on the lights or the faucet, but it doesn't have a large impact on my usage except that I remember to turn off the lights when I leave a room and don't leave the faucet running when I soap up the dishes.

Every time you turn a light switch on or use an appliance, you are being charged for the electricity used to run it; this cost is extremely difficult to track, is different for every device you own, and adds up such that at the end of the month the cost is non-negligible (at least to the point where you probably are paying more on utilities every month than streaming media services)... and yet, while people, in the abstract, care somewhat about reducing their usage of such things like water and electricity (and thereby put in at least a bit of effort to prevent the most egregious of wasted costs), almost no one is crippled by the "mental load of evaluating whether each" time they flip a switch or turn on a faucet is "worth it". It is kind of ludicrous that this argument against micropayments somehow holds as much traction with people as it does when essentially all people experience not only experience the obvious counter-example so often as to be nearly every waking minute of every day, it makes up a significant fraction of their overall expenses.

That's a good point. Obvious in retrospect, but I hadn't considered it. So clearly "micropayments" can work in some situations. That said, I still think when people are used to something being completely free, it will be difficult for them to adjust to paying for it; I do still expect it would add stress for a lot of people in the web context.

That's roughly what Flattr 2.0 did, as a browser extension :

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com