Hacker News Reader

And then you're right back into the great micropayments hole. No one has "figured this out", in part because of the real-world payment logistics, and and I'll pose another part: because it's a bad idea from a UX standpoint.

Having to make a decision about whether to tip/donate to what would rapidly become nearly every site on the Internet would be a terrible user experience. "Decision energy" (aka willpower) is a scarce human resource; this would be an unparalleled waste of it.

I wish there were a great alternative to ads as well, but I believe action-required micropayments will always be a non-starter. The best we've got so far are tools like Patreon and Bountysource's similar system. These can be viewed as a kind of "preaggregated micropayments", which eliminate per-click decision making via a user-configurable subscription.

> the browser might "protect" monetized pages in some way

It's already possible to disable copy on web pages. Some blog themes do this, and I wish browsers would just unimplement it entirely. This is right up there with lame DRM schemes, in that view source (or else curl) are still going to work. Likewise, bots will be completely unaffected. Such an approach merely annoys users with legitimate needs (e.g. who must to look up a word or phrase), but will have zero impact on content piracy.

That's what I always enjoyed about the concept of flattr. Having to decide "Do I want to donate 10c to this page?" all the time is annoying. Specifying a fixed monthly amount, then dividing it between every site I liked reduces the incremental cost of liking something to 0, which reduces the needed decision energy (for me at least).

Of course, the downside is centralised tracking of what content you like, which is icky.

We've had "$0.99" buttons in iTunes and app stores for years so there's nothing foreign about pressing a button to pay for something. I'm usually pretty quick to gamble on small amounts. My "decision energy" will be reserved for things like the Mac App Store when the software is asking $79.99.

Similarly, App Stores have decided that a good way to handle payment logistics is to take a cut of the sell price. In theory, Mozilla and others could offer a service that essentially says "let us deal with Visa and Mastercard; register your blog with us and we'll give you 70% of the revenue from people visiting your site". Like a lot of security solutions, someone has to be trusted eventually; we obviously have to assume browser makers are on our side and being honest. That's already implied anyway; for instance, we assume browsers aren't secretly retransmitting web pages after authentication and decryption have opened up the data.

As far as piracy, I'm not saying that disabling Copy to the clipboard, etc. is sufficient by itself. Heck, to extend the App Store example, entire apps are still being ripped off and resold by 3rd parties for real money today. I'm only saying that a payment solution can't ignore the authenticity problem. Even so, at some point it's up to consumers on the web, just as it is for other merchandise. Does your web site look shady? Does the guy on the street selling you a "genuine" fancy watch seem trustworthy?

Actually the $0.99 hasn't been a successful business model. Consider that a majority of paid apps and songs cost less than a cup of shitty coffee, yet free apps filled with ads or free games that are pay-to-win are way more popular. You can't tell me that those people don't have the average price of an app or song to spare. Or that there aren't paid apps or songs that don't deserve the price that's being asked for the value provided.

Back to music, this is why subscription services are taking off. I personally don't like it, as I like to own my DRM-free purchased music forever, but you can't deny the increasing popularity of Spotify, Rhapsody, Google Play, Apple Music, etc. It's because you stop thinking about dimes and nickels, you just pay a fixed monthly sum and after that it's an all you can eat buffet.

A standard "tip" button on the browser may be an excellent feature. No willpower or cognitive load added, you just know the button is there, and use it when you decide to.

Not sure if it would generate any reasonable revenue, nor if it's actually viable in the presence of our current financial institutions. But I can't see any real downside.

> A standard "tip" button on the browser may be an excellent feature.

But that's my point entirely: this requires an action, a decision on the part of the user, to press it. For the most part, I expect that people will nearly unconsciously, instinctively avoid pressing it. Part of this will be to avoid the "decision cost", part of it is the huge extra psychological weight imposed on actions that are (perceived as) free vs. non-free. (cf. app store free vs IAP mechanics, etc.) The very fact that the button requires an explicit user action and "costs something" dooms it.

This problem isn't a technological one. It's not "add button". It's "devise and bootstrap a distributed culture that agrees with human psychology and that aligns user and producer needs better than what we have today (i.e. ads, subscriptions, etc.)"

>>But that's my point entirely: this requires an action, a decision on the part of the user, to press it.

So do "Like" buttons, but people seem to have no issue clicking those.

But a like is free. If Facebook started charging for clicking on likes, they'd get way less clicks.

"Like" doesn't cost you anything.

That might be tricky because you'd have to determine how much "one tip" (/click,submit) is. Even if a small amount was decided upon, I wonder if there would be too much added stress along the lines of "is reading this worth the X of a tip?" Which, also, is hard to know until you've actually consumed the whole item, at which point a lot of people have probably linked somewhere else, flowing their way across the web.

I think that this might be helped if it acted like playlists, or bookmarks, where clicking the button would add the site to a list. Later you can opt to donate to items on the list (or provide a single donation split evenly among everything on the list).

Of course, I doubt many would actually use such a feature either.

Reddit Gold seems to be working fairly well.

It doesn't even have to be used by many people. Most people rarely click on ads, and yet a lot of websites are doing just fine with ad revenue. You just have to ensure that the small percentage of people who do click generate enough money to compensate for hundreds of others who don't.

Reddit Gold is definitely a wonderful solution.

However, I was replying to a comment about a "donate" button on the browser, and trying to keep within the problem that it is trying to solve, which is (at least as far as I can tell) paying for the vast number of far smaller sites that make up the internet.

This pretty much describes flattr.

Yeah, totally. I had not previously read about flattr, but it appears to be exactly what I proposed! That's excellent, and I think that I'll read more about it, and likely sign up. I certainly hope that it doesn't also live up to the bleak outlook that I had.

Given that it was founded five years ago, I'd imagine it's almost dead now.

Your mind share is worth more to advertisers than your wallet. The consequence of advertising isn't getting your money; it's getting your attention.

Advertisers only get your attention because publishers want their money. It still boils down to money.

Why would I want to run a browser that hurt me to benefit other people?

Sometimes people forget that browsers are user agents. Sometimes that includes browser developers.

Umm, my computer, my processor, browser does what I want, not what a site owner wants.

You create your own stylesheets for each website you visit? What does HN look like for you?

LOL.

Usually what I want is to render the content in accordance with the suggestions given in the document, but not always, and that doesn't only apply to advertising.

Alt-V, Y, N has long been my very favourite Firefox finger-macro.

I know where you are coming from, and I myself would prefer something of this sort rather than the ad-choked pages _or_ the paywalls of today.

That said, paying _anything_ at all - even a fraction of a cent, is a problem for a very large portion of humanity.

* Poverty is one part of it. In India, the ARPU - Average Revenue Per User - of mobile providers is less than 2 USD/month. There are literally hundreds of millions of people who do have some sort of data access on their cheap android phones but cannot afford to spend even 10s of cents over and above their data charges. Its taking all our effort to get information services to them as cheaply as possible.

* Payment method - billions of people around the world do not have a method of making a payment online. No credit cards, no (usable) bank accounts. India is trying to get every adult a basic bank account, theres been some success there, but these are people who do not even have the equivalent of 2 USD to deposit in their govt provided free bank accounts.

* Regulatory hurdles - for the longest time, making a dollar payment from India involved running to the "foreign exchange branch" of your bank in the closest large city, filling out forms in triplicate, explaining why you needed the dollars, getting approvals, and then being issued a cashiers cheque for the exact amount already made out in the name of the recipient. This is no longer the case, but currency controls are part of most economies even today, and become tighter during economic crises. Any kind of mandatory payment would function way better than the Great Firewall in keeping people out. Such payments would also result in a massive privacy violation, because payment processors will want to keep a log of each transaction (sender, receiver, amount) pretty much forever, instantly killing any privacy benefits of TOR, VPNs, etc.

Yes, its possible to offer both, in theory. What would happen is either the micropayments would work or they won't. If they do, a very large number of sites will prefer going pay-only (like the WSJ) rather than deal with the nastiness of ads. If they don't, we are anyway back to where we started.

For some sites, it works I suppose - I know some forums offer a "subscriber mode" with benefits including ad-free versions. That is reasonable to an extent. But for a very large proportion of sites its not reasonable to go that way.

This seems like a very good use case for BTC, or some other cryptocurrency. One of the reasons micropayments are so hard to do is you need a payment processor to transfer the money, and authorizing the payment and coordinating it is a big pain in the ass. But with BTC, you could, in theory, press a "tip" button and immediately authorize a small transfer.

There was at least one company (tidbit.co.in) developing a JS Bitcoin mining client that websites can covertly run in readers' browsers as an alternative to ads.

In IE11: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn265021(v=vs.85).a...