[HN Gopher] Flattr is closing down
___________________________________________________________________
Flattr is closing down
Author : pabs3
Score : 179 points
Date : 2024-01-18 10:12 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (flattr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (flattr.com)
| mstade wrote:
| I hate to be this guy, but 410 seems a more appropriate code:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/410
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Also the page actually returns 200, disappointingly.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Don't, I had no idea there was a dedicated status for that. I'm
| part of today's lucky 10,000 :D
| devnine wrote:
| first thing I noticed also.
|
| I would suggest is a 417 Expectation failed.
| https://http.dog/417
| teddyh wrote:
| No, that would not be appropriate, since there is no "Expect"
| header you could send in the request to get a successful
| response.
|
| From RFC 9110, _HTTP Semantics_ :
|
| _The 417 (Expectation Failed) status code indicates that the
| expectation given in the request 's Expect header field
| (Section 10.1.1) could not be met by at least one of the
| inbound servers._
|
| -- <https://www.rfc-
| editor.org/rfc/rfc9110#name-417-expectation-...>
| xwowsersx wrote:
| > If you don't know whether this condition is temporary or
| permanent, a 404 status code should be used instead.
|
| Maybe they come back!
| pavlov wrote:
| Someone could buy the flattr.com domain and then the site would
| be live again.
|
| IMO, "410 Gone" is only appropriate for URLs that contain
| unique identifiers because those are guaranteed to never be
| recycled.
| kevincox wrote:
| I thought the same thing. You aren't the only one.
| Zobat wrote:
| Kinda tempted to say 424 or 402 and you should always consider
| 418.
|
| Actually 418 might be appropriate as the service was clearly
| not built to solve the problem as it exists today.
|
| "The HTTP 418 I'm a teapot client error response code indicates
| that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is,
| permanently, a teapot."
| taspeotis wrote:
| (2023)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr
| skerit wrote:
| Oh wow, I completely forgot about Flattr. Thinking about it
| again, I quite liked the idea. But I guess it never really caught
| on enough.
| mhitza wrote:
| I've used Flattr for a short period of time in early 2010s. I
| think it's unfortunate that the service picked up steam when
| most of the published content was moving from self-hosted to
| centralized social media platforms. Actually with a bit of
| marketing Flutter would have been better suited nowadays than
| at that time.
| Kiro wrote:
| Flattr, not Flutter. Flutter is another popular thing on HN.
| mhitza wrote:
| Thanks. Flutter is almost muscle memory at this point :)
| onli wrote:
| Was Flattr big in the US? It was a "future big thing" in my part
| of Europe for a while, driven by discussions in Blogs and
| experiments with using it for bigger projects, iirc. It seemed
| like it never achieved much success of leaving that bubble
| though. After a while I never noticed it again. I thought about
| it recently when noticing that a gaming journalist used Steady
| for his incomes, and Patreon would be the other service to
| mention.
|
| Looking at the timeline though, it confuses me that this was only
| 14 years ago. But no, that lines up with how old my own blog is.
| Feels far away! The web was a different place back then, and
| Flattr a part of that past, with a slightly different version of
| the future than the future we got.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I signed up for it when it was announced. I don't remember any
| websites I used actually using it.
| cleansy wrote:
| No wonder given the company that acquired the project is rather
| hotly debated for "removing ads from websites just to reinsert
| their own."
|
| Edit: Not reinsert their own, but having advertisers pay for the
| pleasure to not be blocked in their "acceptable ads" program.
| pvorb wrote:
| I somehow link this practice to the Brave browser, but I'm not
| sure about it. Does anyone know more about it?
| gertop wrote:
| He's talking about Adblock Plus, they whitelist "acceptable
| ads" and vendors need to pay them to be classified as such.
|
| Apparently Adblock Plus makes enough money from that practice
| that they managed to buy flattr in 2017.
| ffpip wrote:
| Brave blocks ads on pages you browse, and then sends ad
| notifications to user who opt into their earning program
| (disabled by default). It pays them in BAT, a crypto coin
| they developed. If you want to, you can use these earnings to
| contribute to sites who have signed up to accept their crypto
| coin.
|
| It does not replace ads on pages with it's own.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Seems more likely that they tried this as a desperate last
| attempt when things were already going down the drain.
| colesantiago wrote:
| This is very unfortunate and surprising, goes to show that even
| after 14 years Flattr didn't find any market.
|
| I was hoping for bitcoin and crypto to show low usage after
| around 15 years of no legitimate use cases other than
| speculation, ransomware and other scammy things, but Flattr's
| shutdown was a surprise.
|
| Flattr billed itself as the RSS of donations to really get rid of
| those ugly PayPal buttons on blogs, websites and the indie web,
| but unfortunately that didn't happen.
|
| Why is that? What was Flattr missing here?
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Maybe one thing that held them back was that one of the
| founders was also founder of The Pirate Bay. Maybe potential
| big clients didn't want the association.
| teekert wrote:
| Could also work _for_ him, like SBF in his hoodie playing
| fortnite impressing bankers and such.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Flattr was trying to bootstrap a sort of two-sided market from
| scratch. They needed to get both hosts/"content providers" and
| clients/"users" to sign up.
|
| This is just a very, very hard problem, and if we're being
| honest about it, most of the success stories that come to mind
| got there through burning venture capital, which perhaps Flattr
| didn't have enough of?
|
| I don't think the idea is fundamentally flawed, it's just very
| difficult to do this kind of thing.
| hnbad wrote:
| Well, they also made the mistake of initially trying to force
| both sides of the market to be one, i.e. you had to be a
| contributor (pay money to others) to collect money (let
| others pay you money). Also collecting money on behalf of
| others and then distributing it after sitting on it is an
| easy way to run afoul of anti money laundering laws in
| various jurisdictions. Also they did take investments which
| means they had to not only build a sustainable business but
| actually create a considerable ROI for their investors or
| risk them pulling the plug and cut their losses (which is
| presumably what happened given the lack of detail and "our
| wonderful journey" speak).
|
| So in other words they decided to play in hard mode (infinite
| growth) and then kneecapped themselves (to avoid "begging").
| It's a miracle they survived this long. I had forgotten about
| them longer than I had used them.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love
| talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every
| website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are
| fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable
| business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you
| visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from
| until you follow a link somewhere else, do not feel the kind of
| loyalty to that might make you subscribe to something.
| infecto wrote:
| Sadly agree. I still wish when it came to news sites there was
| a micropayment option so I could read a single article for
| $0.10 or something along those lines.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > still wish when it came to news sites there was a
| micropayment option so I could read a single article for
| $0.10 or something along those lines.
|
| Same. I'm shocked that the NYT didn't use Flattr on their
| articles for this.
|
| To access the full version of the NYT currently costs $0.50 a
| week so it would have been possible the NYT could charge
| $0.50 per article, or $5 for the year (one time no
| subscription) through Flattr or something along those lines.
|
| I could definitely see this working at scale.
| eknkc wrote:
| I come across paywalled articles at least a couple of times
| a week. I'd gladly pay $0.50 for most of them to access the
| single article.
|
| It just needs to be easy, don't make me create an account a
| subscription and shit like that. Things like
| cryptocurrencies could work great for these kinds of
| transactions. Shame it became what it is now.
| infecto wrote:
| Thats the boat I am in. I don't even care if they show me
| ads too, I just want to get around the paywall but I
| don't want to pay for a subscription.
| dageshi wrote:
| We have to assume they have considered this in the past and
| come to the conclusion it just doesn't work.
|
| I suspect tying a purchasing decision to every page visit
| just leads to people automatically backing out of the page
| with a very low conversion rate because it's just too
| annoying to decide whether to pay for something you're not
| sure the value of.
|
| Despite all the gnashing of teeth, nothing competes with
| ads on the web.
| infecto wrote:
| Since most news publications are failing businesses I
| would not immediately assume they have considered all
| avenues of monetization.
|
| I agree that ads have historically made a lot of
| money...but I am thinking of the paywalled industry. I am
| probably in the minority but I would be interested if any
| of the major publications had data on this kind of
| strategy. I realize there have been products including
| Flattr that did this but again I never saw it being using
| on a NYT level publication.
|
| Instead of me reading an archive link or just not reading
| the article at all I would be happy to pay some cents to
| consume it.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| The NYT is very much not a failing business.
| sgerenser wrote:
| The $0.50 weekly price for NYT is a teaser rate. The full
| price for digital only was recently raised to $195/year. I
| imagine they make too much money from people who subscribe
| at the teaser rate and forget to cancel (like all
| newspapers/magazines) to make it worth exploring other
| business models.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Since we have to assume that they assessed it, I suspect that
| they concluded the math would not work out.
|
| A possible explanation: News websites are cross financing
| their content. You spending a dollar on the paper, that only
| interests you in parts, is part of a model that makes it work
| (and probably also part of a model, where papers still feel
| wiggle room to editorialize for stuff they think is
| important, even though it might not click)
| rchaud wrote:
| News websites are not independently owned. NYT is publicly
| traded, Wash Post is owned by Bezos, Time Magazine is owned
| by Benioff, etc.
|
| They survive on patronage outside of their subscriber base.
| vintermann wrote:
| You _want_ to be nickeled and dimed?
|
| That was the whole problem Flattr was trying to solve. You
| decided up front how much you could afford to spend
| supporting artists and pursuits of creativity and public
| goods, and it got distributed evenly between everyone you
| choose to support. It was a great idea, and I was an early
| user.
|
| However, they had the problem that most of the people who you
| might want to support, were not on Flattr. And Flattr made a
| poor move early on: in a bid to avoid getting spammed by low
| effort/beggars, they demanded that you give and take: If you
| wanted to be able to receive, you had to use the service
| yourself.
|
| This was eminently _fair_. It was also a disaster, because it
| exposed a fact that 's obvious when you think about it, but
| which is a crush to most "creatives"' ego: The vast majority
| of us are net consumers! We watch way more than we create
| ourselves. Most minor bloggers/youtubers/podcasters wouldn't
| want to admit that, they'd just see "I pay more than I get
| out of this? This sucks!"
|
| Later they backed down from this demand, and then they got
| the problem with low effort/begging. All along they had the
| problem that some influential people really wanted to see
| them fail, due to their association with The Pirate Bay.
| nradov wrote:
| Yes, I want to be nickeled and dimed for content. There's
| no way I'm going to sign up for any more subscriptions. But
| I would be happy to pay a few cents for individual articles
| or videos or podcasts if it was a single click process.
|
| https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-
| micropayments/
| LadyCailin wrote:
| There is, or anyways there was, but the model didn't work.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
|
| It still exists, sort of, you can download the app, but it's
| all in Dutch now, and doesn't work on a pay-per-article model
| anymore, it's unclear to me what their model is now, since I
| don't speak Dutch. In any case, what you're asking for
| exactly was a thing before, and failed, so I assume that's
| why you can't do it - it was tried, and people didn't use it.
| infecto wrote:
| This is one of those things where I wonder if it was too
| early for its success? I don't know the answer but it feels
| like it could have been. I have never seen it used on US
| based media unfortunately.
| rchaud wrote:
| Are you able to purchase anything for 10 cents today? The
| price of a short self-published ebook on Amazon is 30x that,
| $2.99, and plenty of people buy those.
|
| I understand that low-quality blog posts are worth nothing
| but if a viable micropayment option existed, those lazy posts
| would disappear (they only exist for SEO and collecting ad
| impressions). Websites and blog content would be more like
| what Substack has, which is semi-longform stuff that doesn't
| need to be padded with "blog" style posts.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something
| along those lines._
|
| But there is "something along those lines"; it's called
| becoming a paid subscriber. When you amortize the expense
| across every article, you may even be getting a deal!
|
| The fact that the example expense you'd be willing to incur
| to read content you actually enjoy is _ten cents_ speaks to
| why this model won 't work.
| apantel wrote:
| Content just isn't worth a lot because nobody really needs
| any particular piece of information all that much; and if
| they do really need a piece of information, chances are it
| is available in many places.
| Thrymr wrote:
| Sure, but we all have subscription fatigue. Say I subscribe
| to the New York Times and the Atlantic. But sometimes I
| like to read articles in the Washington Post or the New
| Yorker. How many subscriptions are enough? It's just like
| streaming fragmentation with Netflix, Apple+, Amazon Prime,
| Hulu, ad infinitum.
| teekert wrote:
| Sadly disagree, I've put some BTC on my Podcasting 2.0 player
| (Podverse) and stream it to every creator that wants them (via
| the Bitcoin Lightning network).
| thfuran wrote:
| And you think more than about 0% of web users do the same?
| teekert wrote:
| I was reacting to the generalization.
|
| There are communities where the creators are well under way
| to becoming sustainable with this method. Granted, it's
| very early days.
| TheFragenTaken wrote:
| Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you bind a
| website/project to a creator, and you get benefits for
| donating/subscribing, that you can have a very viable business
| model. Both as a creator, and as a platform to facilitate it.
|
| Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty
| faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator. I
| believe, if you somehow "solve" that problem first, people will
| beg to donate/subscribe.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Isn't Twitch very much a net loss?
| jmyeet wrote:
| Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make
| Twitch lose money. Why? Because Amazon is charging
| themselves for the infrastructure Twitch uses (ie AWS).
|
| It does that to justify cutting revenue splits (of
| subscriptions and ads) and increasing ad density. The
| minimum ad density now is generally 4 minutes per hour.
|
| Example: say I'm Pottery Barn and I sell furniture in the
| US. I sell a table for $500. It costs $100 to make in
| China, $50 to ship to the US and $150 in store costs (eg
| utilities, staffing, rent, amortized capex, etc). You might
| say I've made $200 profit.
|
| But let's say my corporate structure is to have 2
| subsidiaries: PB Manufacturing and PB Retail. The first
| makes the table. The second manages the stores and sells
| the table.
|
| If PBM charges PBR $150 for the table then PBM makes $50 in
| profit and PBR makes $150. If PBM charges $300 for the
| table then PBM makes $200 in profit and PBR breaks even.
|
| This is what I mean when I say Twitch's profitability is a
| chosen narrative.
|
| There are many reasons to do this. Tax is a big one. Maybe
| you pay less tax in China so you prefer to take profit
| there. Maybe you want to argue stores aren't profitable to
| resist demands for higher wages or higher rents.
|
| The above is an example of "transfer pricing" or "profit
| shifting". What's the difference? Transfer pricing is
| illegal. Profit shifting isn't (within limits; it
| technically has to be "at arm's length" and other
| requirements).
| snapcaster wrote:
| Can you expand on this? You're saying Twitch is only
| unprofitable in an accounting sense but would be a viable
| business if on its own? Saying their AWS costs are $0
| seems like it would be even more "fake"
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| So Twitch is only a viable business model once you own
| enough data centers.
| wongarsu wrote:
| A video streaming platform isn't a natural fit for a
| hosting service famous for charging outrageous rates for
| outgoing traffic. If they were neither owned by Amazon
| nor had a special deal with AWS (like Netflix presumably
| has) they wouldn't be using AWS for anything touching
| actual videos.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Twitch runs its own data centers and does not use AWS for
| the video streaming platform. There are probably some
| incidental expenses which are actually Amazon profits,
| but they're much smaller than you're making them out to
| be.
| Quarrel wrote:
| Say what?
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/ivs/
|
| "Use the same live streaming technology and global
| infrastructure that powers Twitch."
|
| Did IVS grow out of Twitch? Sure. That core is now a
| piece of AWS infra though, even though the team was
| initially built at Twitch.
|
| (Obviously these things are weird to talk about in a
| vacuum, because all the pieces are 100% owned by the same
| parent. The splits we see can be changed with the wave of
| a CFOs pen, usually when they want to change how we view
| some overarching piece of the business.)
| Solvency wrote:
| How does a government meaningfully and objectively
| determine what is transfer pricing vs profit shifting in
| practice? Are they even capable of distinguishing the
| difference in a case like Twitch:Amazon?
|
| Furthermore... isn't this the crux of Hollywood
| accounting..?
| jedberg wrote:
| > Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make
| Twitch lose money.
|
| This is totally untrue but keeps getting repeated. Yes,
| within Amazon, the non-AWS business units pay AWS to use
| AWS. But they pay cost plus a small percent, not retail
| rates.
|
| The cost to non-AWS businesses is the same as if they had
| to do it all on their own (actually a little less since
| they get to leverage AWS's economies of scale).
|
| The profitability of the other business units is actually
| _improved_ this way. They would be paying more if they
| were independent and doing it on their own. This is why
| Amazon is so allergic to spinning out AWS as its own
| business.
| stefan_ wrote:
| That seems impossible to determine. AWS retail charges
| for things that have an impossible relation to actual
| costs (think traffic) to begin with.
| jedberg wrote:
| AWS knows how much it costs to deliver their own service.
| How do you think they determine their own profits and
| prices? They use those same calculations to bill internal
| customers.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Obviously AWS knows how much it costs to run all of AWS.
| But that doesn't translate to accurately knowing the
| marginal costs of a gigabyte of outbound traffic. They
| probably do know, but it isn't necessary at all to
| determine their profit, or to set their prices. "Just"
| set prices to what the market is willing to pay, and
| determine profit as total income minus total expenses
| over the whole operation.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _The above is an example of "transfer pricing" or "profit
| shifting". What's the difference? Transfer pricing is
| illegal. Profit shifting isn't (within limits; it
| technically has to be "at arm's length" and other
| requirements)_
|
| You have it backwards: transfer pricing is legal, profit
| shifting is not.
|
| Transfer pricing is the legal term used to refer to the
| establishment of prices between related entities pursuant
| to regulations. The transfer pricing regulations were
| created to cut down on profit shifting.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Yes and no. They jump around the profit-point. They made
| some profit in 2019 or so, but the pandemia peaked them,
| not just in views and income, but also costs. The thing is,
| Twitch's business-model is very frail. A streamer with too
| many viewers can cost them more money than it brings them
| money. Similar, are there millions of small streamers who
| barely make them a dollar. And then are there also too many
| side-costs, like South-Korea's network-fee recently, or the
| too many law cases where come cranky person sues them for
| some nonsical reason.
|
| And we don't know for real how much Amazon is charging
| them. Rumors are going, Amazon is charging them a hefty
| amount for servers, while other says AWS is irrelevant for
| their Service, so nobody knows for real, officially.
|
| But the recent move to a different handling of video-
| streams is supposed to change this, as it reduce the costs
| on Twitch's side, and lets the Streamers pay for it
| themself. By which I mean AV1(?), where the streamer is
| encoding all streams in all resolutions, and only sends it
| to Twitch which then acts as a relay. Claim is, Video-
| Encoding was the biggest cost for them, after employees,
| which seems kinda strange.. But maybe it will change their
| game in the next years, we will see.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Twitch did successfully push a subscription model for
| creators that allowed a lot of small creators to make an
| income. For anyone unfamiliar, Twitch subscriptions are
| $5-25/month (viewer's choice) and give access to emote,
| subscription badges in the chat and, perhaps most
| importantly, give you an ad free experience with that
| creator.
|
| One cannot understate how important Amazon Prime (as Twitch
| Prime) is to the Twitch subscription ecosystem. IIRC roughly
| half of all Twitch subscriptions are Twitch Prime.
|
| Twitch is aupser aggressive with ads. Youtube has skippable
| pre-roll ads. Twitch does not and might have 4+ pre-roll ads
| plus in-stream ads every 30-60 minutes. The ad density Twitch
| aims for is 4+ minutes per hour. But Twitch doesn't like the
| subscription model anymore. They've cut the revenue split.
| Previously many creators got a 70/30% split, now almost
| everyone gets a 50/50% split.
|
| The big problem is that ad revenue scales in a way that
| subscriptions don't. Ad CPMs can go up, you can increase ad
| desnity easily (to a point) and ad revenue scales with view
| count in a way that subscriptions don't (eg a creator with
| 100K concurrent viewers won't have 100 times the
| subscriptions of someone with 1000 CVC).
|
| You're seeing the same trend with streaming services. Netflix
| killed their basic tier and wants you to watch ads because
| it's more profitable than the subscription. Prime Video has
| thinly veiled a price hike by adding an extra ad-free monthly
| fee.
|
| My point is that subscriptions, or any form of voluntary
| payment, is icnredibly hard to make work and even the most
| successful examples, like Twtich, require great effort and a
| supporting ecosystem like Amazon Prime.
| bot347851834 wrote:
| I agree with your general point: people generally
| donate/buy/subscribe much more if there's a benefit tied to
| it.
|
| On the other hand, I'd like to point out that Twitch is still
| losing money so I wouldn't really call _their_ business model
| "very viable". I'd say it's viable for the content creators,
| because there's very little risk in trying out Twitch
| streaming, sure the chances of making it big are insanely
| small but the worst case scenario is losing time and a
| relatively small amount of money on a PC setup + microphone
| and camera.
|
| Patreon is a different beast but there's a caveat here as
| well. I don't have numbers so this is just my PoV but I'd
| guess that the vast majority of creators that use Patreon
| aren't hosting, sharing or creating mainly on Patreon.
| They're called YouTubers, streamers, bloggers for a reason.
| Sure they may share BtS or some other kind of additional
| content but it's not their main platform. So while the
| Patreon business model works it's not really comparable to
| Twitch or any other platform where you actually start and
| continue to create content and also get paid by.
| jerrre wrote:
| It's important to make the distinction between:
|
| - Twitch is losing money because the costs of running the
| platform are higher then the revenue
|
| - Twitch is losing money because they're aggressively
| investing in growth
|
| if you want to know about the viability of the concept, I'm
| not sure which one it is, video streaming and small payment
| processing could both be quite costly
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| > Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you
| bind a website/project to a creator
|
| > Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty
| faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator
|
| This is ultimately a polite way of saying that the "author"
| (which can be a content creator, a OSS maintainer) needs to
| establish a parasocial relationship, use a self-aggrandizing
| approach, and create drama to entertain its users.
|
| This does work for content creators on Youtube, Patreon or
| Onlyfans, but ultimately detracts from the mission of
| delivering quality content that is useful or positively
| entertaining for the consumers of said content. The fans
| created in this way can go on to defend your failings or can
| be taken advantage of in a weakness, as can be seen in the
| case of the LTT sexual harassment allegation case and the
| health situation of Physics Girl.
|
| However, I see no way for this to work in an open-source
| project, because users of an open source project mostly care
| about the functionality provided. Creating a parasocial
| relationship is mostly not viable in this space due to
| limited interaction, as you pointed out.
|
| I've seen a few instances of OSS project maintainers using a
| chest-thumping, holier-than-thou approach to create drama,
| and said projects have either mostly become irrelevant over
| time or the open source project has continued to get
| attention only because the character of the maintainer has
| been buried and not well known to most.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > and create drama to entertain its users.
|
| You don't need Drama, but you should indeed communicate and
| deliver something worth the peoples' money. I mean, there
| are many big and small creators who just steadily and
| silently deliver their work and have usually no drama at
| all.
|
| Drama is just popular because it's cheap, fast, and any
| idiot can create it. So people who have nothing else of
| worth, tend to live from this.
| bawolff wrote:
| Sometimes i feel like people make too much of the
| "parasocial" buzzword, as if its new.
|
| Entertainers have been doing the pass the hat thing for
| hundreds of years. It is not a new phenomenom.
|
| Historically, it has generally worked for entertainers, and
| i guess religion. I don't think there are historical
| paralells to open source really. Maybe it just doesn't work
| for that sort of thing.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Yes but entertainers always remained on stage, they
| didn't enter your home (as smart phones allow) and talk
| to you 1 on 1.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Personally, when I watch a big stream, the screen being
| in my house doesn't make it feel any less like the
| entertainer is on stage.
|
| And when there's 15 people watching, that _does_ enable
| real conversations.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Entertainers aren't pretending to be your friend, or
| lover, in exchange for money.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| But I don't want to solve that problem. I don't want to have
| a parasocial relationship with the author of every blogpost
| that I read.
| k__ wrote:
| To quote something I literally read 5 minutes ago in
| "Perhaps the Stars":
|
| _" everyone has relationships with people far away, who
| inspire, entertain, role models, and also the people we
| work so hard for: fans, viewers, the next generation, kids
| somewhere, posterity. I think those asymmetrical
| relationships are part of what it means to be human, part
| of the teamwork. Humanity is teamwork. And the asymmetry
| doesn't for a second make those relationships any less
| valid, or less important, or less real"_
| mh- wrote:
| I don't know the book beyond the quick google I just did,
| but I disagree with:
|
| _> And the asymmetry doesn't for a second make those
| relationships any less valid, or less important, or less
| real._
|
| I think that people developing these so-called parasocial
| relationships is probably not harmful until it becomes a
| substitute for them developing "real" ones. But I see
| that growing rapidly, and I think it's a problem in the
| future.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Just because you can magically send some digits to
| someone thousands miles away you never saw IRL doesn't
| mean your brain is designed for it nor is able to handle
| it without disruptions to its operation. Whether you
| believe in creation or evolution. Nobody lived like this.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| >And the asymmetry doesn't for a second make those
| relationships any less valid, or less important, or less
| real.
|
| Not in a author/reader sense, no. But in a social media
| age where influencers use specific language to appear
| friendly and familiar? At the very least it's blurring
| the lines.
| lelanthran wrote:
| That's just sugar coating hero worship and trying to make
| it more acceptable.
|
| Just because something is written in flowery language
| doesn't make it profound.
| xeromal wrote:
| In his comments, he points to this not working for ephemeral
| websites. Twitter subs and patreon are just the opposite
| Mc91 wrote:
| I donate monthly to five Patreons. One of them is LineageOS (
| https://www.patreon.com/LineageOS ). Two of them are
| community spaces. Two are podcasts, only one of which I
| listen to. I really only get Patreon benefits from one of the
| five (I get each podcast). Some tech-related, some not.
|
| I subscribe to one Twitch feed. Actually the main Twitch feed
| I watch is one I do not subscribe to. I also sometimes watch
| other Twitch feeds, like John Romero's, or notch, or another
| random programmer who livestream codes. Again, some tech-
| related, some not.
|
| Generally I subscribe on Patreon and Twitch more to be
| supportive than to get something, although I do appreciate I
| get podcasts from one of the podcasts I subscribe to.
| geokon wrote:
| I know HN froths at the mouth on this topic.. But
| Cryptominers/Hashcash are also an alternative. It's only been
| made non-viable due to the major players who depend on ad-
| supremacy making sure all browsers fingerprint and block them
| scrollaway wrote:
| It's also a huge waste of energy at a time when the planet is
| on fire.
| geokon wrote:
| it's got some downsides - but so does the alternative. Have
| you considered the harmful effects of advertisement on
| society? I think people's cellphone warming up a bit is a
| smaller price to pay
| rcxdude wrote:
| It's a terrible option. Cryptomining in a browser is pure
| banditry: it's incredibly inefficient to the point the user
| loses way, way more than the site gains, and it provides
| basically nothing to crypto.
| geokon wrote:
| Why is it banditry.. you can opt out of going to the
| website. I think you're not looking at the alternative
| objectively..
|
| Ads are pure brain rot that just make society worse while
| providing virtually nothing useful to "the user"
| Jochim wrote:
| If you're robbed by bandits you can choose not to travel
| on that road again. That doesn't mean that you weren't
| robbed the first time.
| stonogo wrote:
| Your description of ads is my description of
| cryptocurrency.
| colesantiago wrote:
| No.
|
| We shouldn't have to make the world infinitely worse place
| and waste billions in energy just to squeeze out a cent in
| 'magic internet money' to give to another person.
| teekert wrote:
| I think you're not wrong. There is the BTC Lightning network
| which burns A LOT less energy and the low transfer costs make
| it feasible to stream fractions of cents. Ie. when listening
| to a podcast via Podcasting 2.0 app (like Podverse). Btw, I
| upvoted you, all the frothing was fading out your reply.
|
| BTC Lightning is one of those babies people want to wash away
| with the bathwater. Or perhaps it's the only one I know so
| far. I do agree 99.99% of "crypto" is shitcoin scams.
| blub wrote:
| There's an overabundance of content/apps/sites. Most websites
| and projects are worth zero to most people.
| bigbluedots wrote:
| Ok, hear me out: Here is how to remove all unwanted ads from
| the Internet. ISPs move to subscription-based billing - a flat
| base fee to cover their own costs and some profit, plus a
| 'content' fee that is divided among the sites visited and the
| bandwidth used. The 'content' fee goes to a global rights
| association that distributes it to creators.
| stonogo wrote:
| Why is the answer to "how to remove ads" always "track the
| hell out of everyone at some other layer"
| bigbluedots wrote:
| If such a scheme we're to compensate content creators
| there'd have to be some way to determine how to slice up
| the revenue for them. Hits and data is one way. Your ISP
| probably already does that - at least re sites visited and
| data used.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I see a lot of people either proposing using paypal, patreon or
| ko-fi to receive donations.
|
| How did flattr differ from these services?
| amelius wrote:
| Maybe adblockers could take the role of microdonation
| platforms.
|
| I'd pay $100/yr to have ads removed from every site I visit,
| and have my $100 distributed among the websites that I visit
| most.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Google actually used to have this as a service. They canned
| it a few years ago though.
| mminer237 wrote:
| This is essentially Brave browser's entire proposition for
| its existence.
| amelius wrote:
| When clicking "Private advertising" on the Brave website
| you get:
|
| > Powerful Ad Formats (...)
|
| > Diversify from Big Tech channels, and get the first-mover
| advantage of advertising in the fastest-growing search
| engine since Bing. Search ads are privacy-preserving, text-
| based ads that appear at the top of a user's search engine
| results page (SERP).
|
| > (...)
| mminer237 wrote:
| Yeah, they themselves serve ads on their search engine.
| That's wholly separate from Brave Rewards and you can
| block their ads just the same.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That was Google Contributor. It would pay min required to win
| the bid. Wasn't too successful. People very soon realized
| that you get the same for free with ad blockers.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| IMHO their main problems were: they delivered too early, and
| failed in what they offered. When they started, there was no
| donation-economy like we have today on Twitch, Ko-fi, and
| others, nor was there an established support-hivemind like we
| have with Patreon, Github and others. So people did not know
| what they should do with it. And on the other side was Flattr a
| bit annoying to use in the beginning, and had percentage-based
| donations, instead of fixed values IIRC. People are selfish,
| but also willing to share, if you give them enough reason.
|
| But thinking about, maybe the lack of a social component and
| some virtual rewards would have been beneficial. But I guess,
| after the first fail, nobody cared anymore for it, and they
| somehow failed to find their market.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Having experience with donation only stuff, I can tell you
| something with the straightest face: Almost nobody who uses a
| service, even if they use it a lot, actually goes on to
| donate.
|
| It's a real hockey stick graph where 90% of your donations
| come from 5% of users.
|
| Trust me, everyone _says_ they prefer paying /donating over
| ads, but when you look at the numbers, just about everyone
| prefers no compensation (and no ads) and chooses that if
| given the option.
| BottingRocks wrote:
| I believe that in the last couple of years the line between
| donation and begging has been blurred.
|
| You have things on the extreme side like people begging on
| tiktok live doing shoutouts to every viewer that donates a
| significant gift.On the IRL side you also have people
| donating to the craziest streamers doing the most
| outrageous stuff outside. Then you also have super
| donations on Youtube on live podcasts.
|
| When donations are incorporated on a social app it fosters
| an environment that makes donating acceptable and fun.
| Hardly anyone is going to trust their debit card/credit
| card details to a random site, but the masses will trust
| buying credits/donations/subscriptions through
| tiktok,youtube, twitch, patreon etc.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| I think the one trick is using subscriptions that people
| opt into one time and just forget about. Using the dodgy
| psychology tricks of gym memberships to actually help
| people.
| PreachSoup wrote:
| If that's the case, not sure if that's better than ads.
| I'd rather workout in an ads filled gym for free than
| paying for la fitness gym membership
| technofiend wrote:
| Even something like Patreon is a hard sell. I donated for a
| couple of years to an author I liked because he had a proven
| track record of delivery, so helping him concentrate on
| writing rather than a day job let him create more works. But
| him aside, I mostly see Patreon used to fund authors that are
| stringing along patrons with promises of "You'll be a few
| chapters ahead of free readers" vs "This can make the
| difference that will let me finish." To that end, at least
| for me, I just go between a few so there's usually something
| new to read, and if not, oh well.
|
| If I were to publish in that space, I'd stream chapters
| slowly but regularly for free and the top donation tier would
| yield the completed work, but priced at the median payment
| I'd expect to get stringing people along for a few months.
| That's probably not a good business model, but I think it
| would prove less frustrating.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Also Patreon. The real failure was adopting a panhandling
| model of giving "each time" you consume content. Not only is
| this high friction, but people don't like doing it.
|
| They should have aggressively pushed a subscription model ($2
| a month or less) that reoccured so creators actually could
| have reliable income.
| bdhcuidbebe wrote:
| i used flattr since it released for some websites i ran. had
| maybe 100 dollar there, mostly from an adblock filter list i
| used to maintain.
|
| eventually they just deleted my account due to "inactivity" in
| maybe 2017 or so.
|
| this made me stop recommending them
|
| they just kept my money
| seydor wrote:
| Rather , because it's still too difficult to put money in a
| computer. Arcade machines in the 70s had the perfect impulse-
| purchase-compatible usage model
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _but that doesn 't work because people are fundamentally too
| selfish._
|
| That's an odd definition of "selfish". Why is there an
| obligation to hand someone money? If you are running a
| business, be up front and charge money for it.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| There is no obligation. That's the point.
| sneak wrote:
| This is wrong. Laws around money transmission, as well as
| egregious rentseeking from payment processing networks, not
| "people [being] fundamentally too selfish" are why this doesn't
| work.
|
| The tech and will is there. It's just illegal to build it.
| diggan wrote:
| > if only they could make a small donation to every website
| they liked - but that doesn't work because people are
| fundamentally too selfish.
|
| Hear hear, this is exactly why bittorrent trackers is just a
| fad that will disappear as quickly as it appeared. What, are
| people supposed to just share data freely without getting paid
| for it? Good luck I tell them, it's impossible because every
| single person is just too selfish.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Not seeding a torrent requires more effort than seeding, it's
| also basically free.
| opengears wrote:
| This argument does not take bandwidth into account. If the
| goal is to download a lot of different files, you will be
| effectively limiting your download with keeping (especially
| very popular) torrents seeded. I stand corrected if
| somebody could please disprove me.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Isn't bandwidth up- and download independent usually, so
| seeding (uploading) would not affect your downloads?
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| As the other commenter said, upload and download speeds
| are separate. And if you mean data caps, most internet
| connections have "unlimited" bandwidth unless you're
| torrenting off your phone.
| ikrenji wrote:
| torrents are viable with a few dozen seeders. you can't build
| a business on a few dozen 1$ donations
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Isn't this why many groups look at how much one uploaded and
| you can get lower priority or lose access if you don't seed
| enough?
| opengears wrote:
| this is called "tragedy of the commons"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
| freediver wrote:
| I'd like to push back on this.
|
| It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not
| much content truly worth paying for. This is because ads
| proliferated not just creation of giant amounts of content but
| they also incentivize quantity over quality.
|
| Second thing that is holding this back is no seamless way to
| send a payment from your browser to the website (owner). This
| has to be native in the browser, user-centric and web-centric.
| skybrian wrote:
| Perhaps "truly worth paying for" is setting too high a bar
| for some kinds of content that people do find useful?
| sbarre wrote:
| It's also subjective down to the individual, so how would
| you even quantify it properly?
| sethhochberg wrote:
| I think its also just really hard for people to quantify on
| a small scale. Its much easier to reason about whether or
| not you get, on average, $25 a month worth of value from a
| subscription to the New York Times than it is to try and
| guess whether someone's review of a vacuum you're
| considering is worth $2 to you or $0.37 or anything in
| between.
|
| Or if the stakes are even lower and you're not avoiding a
| lemon of a vacuum, you're getting marginal improvement to
| an experience - what is it worth to read someone saying
| "don't go to Jim's Ale House when on vacation there, its
| fine but Jacks' is nearby and better"? Clearly that
| information has some value, but... how much? Whats the cost
| of a tip that helps turn a serviceable meal on a vacation
| into a better one?
| paulddraper wrote:
| > It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is
| not much content truly worth paying for.
|
| That's two ways of saying the same thing.
|
| But people are (at a much greater rate) willing to pay with
| ads.
| shon wrote:
| The second one is the larger issue. Patreon is working well
| for many things but still not easy or integrated enough.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| A good with a massive supply and a relatively small demand is
| therefore worth little. It's a great thing that we've
| succeeded in producing an enormous amount of information, and
| art/entertainment...but it's all well past post-scarcity.
| strbean wrote:
| "Is the content worth paying for?" feels like the wrong
| metric wrt. tipping.
|
| I think a more accurate question is "Does the content make me
| want to support the creator?"
|
| This is why tipping thrives in settings like Twitch, which is
| heavily geared around engendering parasocial relationships.
| squidbeak wrote:
| I don't follow... If the content isn't good enough to pay
| for, why would you want to support its creator?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| It's not that I'm too selfish to give someone a dollar
| for content that I liked, it's that I'm too lazy
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| I don't like the music my friend makes, but I'll support
| him by buying his album and sharing it with others who
| might like it more.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| What does it mean for content to be truly worth paying for?
| That someone pays, voluntarily, after already having consumed
| the content? How could we distinguish selfishness from
| content not worth paying for?
| fidotron wrote:
| Even acknowledging the state of crypto today the dev and
| payment experience of Metamask as a browser extension beats
| any conventional payment system I've encountered. What's
| needed is Metamask but not necessarily crypto.
| indymike wrote:
| Most of the time, it's more painful to receive money than to
| donate it.
| shpx wrote:
| Ads also physically influence the world. More humans become
| aware of something other humans want them to be aware of, more
| people end up buying some things (thereby incentivizing more of
| them to be created) or spending their lives on the most
| addictive mobile gambling thing or whatever. Whereas a system
| that just lets people say "this thing entertained me enough for
| 0.00023% of my economic output for the year doesn't do anything
| else, and deciding typing in how much something is worth to you
| is work. Not a lot of work, but it's still work that might even
| be worth more than your micro donation, depending on how you
| value your time and the neurons you dedicate to thinking about
| it. So obviously the system that actually does something is
| more viable.
| pflenker wrote:
| I had multiple discussions with German news projects around
| micropayments, and they list other, much simpler reasons why
| they don't accept it: - depending on the payment method, the
| transaction cost is too high and eats up almost the full
| payment - the administrative overhead to maintain micro
| transactions is huge - it creates the incentive to create
| articles that sell well, e.g. clickbait, which contradicts the
| values of these projects - you need to plan ahead and for that
| you need to have a somewhat predictable flow of income, which
| is not a given with micropayments.
| lencastre wrote:
| That sounds about right!
| lefixx wrote:
| its not fair to call people shelfish when the only subscription
| option given to them is 10000x the value of an ad shown to
| them. Flattr was a good idea and if it was integrated to
| youtube I would have easily pay more than the ads would have.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| I'm not sure how to talk about this without using the word
| selfish. It's not an insult. Most people are mostly selfish.
| There's no way of talking about the world without taking that
| into account.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I just something I can subscribe to and money goes to sites I
| visit in a reliable way. And the sites should stop showing me
| ads, but I'll even take that as optional right now.
|
| Ideally something like youtube premium, but not youtube.
|
| Google ran some services that at a very surface level had the
| same idea, but actually worked in a messy and bad way, and then
| they gave up on it. Which is a real shame because they have the
| ad presence to actually make it work.
|
| Every other attempt I've seen has way too close to 0% of the
| sites I visit able to receive money.
| sunshine_reggae wrote:
| No explanation at all. Something seems kind of "fishy", some
| aspect of it being hidden...
| hnbad wrote:
| "We ran out of money and our investors wanted to cut their
| losses and pulled the plug" isn't something you usually spell
| out in a post like this to avoid burning bridges or appearing
| "unprofessional".
| goda90 wrote:
| I had an idea just like this several years ago and seriously
| considered doing it as a startup but somehow never heard of
| Flattr. I'm curious what kind of marketing to website creators
| did they try.
|
| Did anyone try Google Contributor, which was a similar idea?
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| I've had a similar idea simmering in my head for over 10 years,
| I even purchased a fitting domain name for it. It's always been
| a "one of these days" kind of project. My idea is different
| enough that it might have a shot where Flattr fell flat, but
| it's exceptionally hard to gather users, even if you build a
| superb product.
| kiddjones wrote:
| Same here. Similar, but different. It's been one that I've
| started building out a couple times over 10ish or so years.
|
| I'm pretty sure I'd have a way to combat the issues that
| Flattr faced, but also, I may be wrong, so is it worth my
| risk?
| pikrzyszto wrote:
| I used Flattr for a while but struggled with:
|
| - flattr support discovery: Instead of having a "Flattr" button
| on the webpage I visit I need to navigate to flattr website and
| search there... but I'm not going to do that. Maybe adblocker
| removed that button?
|
| - ownership confirmations - I wanted to donate to person $PERSON
| and found them on flattr. But I had no idea whether this flattr
| account actually belongs to $PERSON. I reached to $PERSON about
| that and never heard back so I stopped donating.
| manx wrote:
| A browser extension sounds like a potential solution here.
| gaiagraphia wrote:
| I currently "subscribe" to the Financial Times because I use
| Revolut Metal. I understand it has higher quality content than
| elsewhere, and enjoy reading articles from there now and again,
| but I never would've paid for it.
|
| I wonder if 'bundling' is a way forward for content creators? Use
| x bank/isp/ridesharing app/delivery service, and you
| automatically get subscriptions to these creators.
|
| Instead of governments spending PSbil on their cultural budget,
| surely offering the same amount to companies in tax breaks if
| they support cultural projects would achieve a far greater
| impact?
|
| Brief search showed PS345m Uber Eats revenue in UK. If PS3.45mil
| of that made its way to supporting 100 people who all had
| channels/sites inspiring families to eat healthier/more
| locally/promote local business,etc, surely this 'organic'
| approach could yield more than layers of civil service?
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| News should be paid for by people using it, making news
| dependent on government funding is bad, making news dependent
| on corporations is even worse, I tend to point the start of the
| decline of information and so democracy and plurality to the
| advent of blogs, free websites etc.
|
| Independent information that serves people, is funded by the
| people
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >making news dependent on government funding is bad
|
| I wonder if having the government hand out tokens that you
| can spend on whatever media you want would be better.
| gaiagraphia wrote:
| Always been a huge fan of this as opposed to a "Tv license"
| type system. Being able to choose where 1% of your tax
| money goes each year.
|
| IIRC, Poland does something similar: "Individual taxpayers
| of personal income tax have an opportunity to allocate 1%
| of their annual tax liability to specific Polish public
| welfare organizations. It is an easy way of supporting a
| charitable initiative and it does not require additional
| cost or a lot of effort."
|
| https://www2.deloitte.com/pl/pl/pages/tax/articles/tax-
| news-...
| potyarkin wrote:
| Just the other day I was trying to remember "this weird
| micropayment site I used to donate to What.CD" and could not
| describe it coherently to a friend. It's kinda cool it was around
| this long
| dewey wrote:
| Was looking for someone to mention that. I remember that I
| wrote parts of the wiki entry on how to donate through Flattr
| back then!
| felixg3 wrote:
| I think you've been my interviewer at what.cd, ~ 2011. Glad
| to see you here!
| dewey wrote:
| Yes, I remember your name (also from last.fm I believe!).
| Small world!
| felixg3 wrote:
| If you want to grab a cold or hot beverage in Berlin, I'm
| about to visit my wife in Berlin-Charlottenburg (she's
| there for a few months) soon
| dewey wrote:
| Let's do it, I messaged you on Session!
| stl_fan wrote:
| Brave is building this functionality into the browser.
| sneak wrote:
| Unless you have some new information, I think that was like 6
| Brave pivots ago, and isn't the case any longer.
| ystvn wrote:
| Where did you get that information from? I've never used that
| functionality myself, but haven't seen info indicating it got
| deprecated so I assumed it's still supported?
| neom wrote:
| Never heard of the service before, but fun to learn the guy
| behind it was one of the dudes behind The Pirate Bay.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sunde
| diggan wrote:
| Which speaking of, ran/runs a bunch of other useful services.
| IPredator (sadly no longer with us) was an alright VPN service
| and Njalla is (still with us) a really great domain name
| registrar for people who care about their privacy.
|
| Seems RIAA and MPA are still trying to go after Njalla as far
| as I can tell, so you get some hints that it's actually working
| as advertised :)
| vcoelho wrote:
| I'd like to have a service where I can purchase credits and then
| this gets distributed between sites that I can choose to support
| as I visit them.
| canpolat wrote:
| For a moment I perceived that as "Flutter" and immediately
| thought, "Of course, Google is shutting down another project."
| Perhaps that's enough screen time for today.
| jkingsman wrote:
| Flattr was the first time anyone paid me money for my open
| source/freely-hosted passion projects. It made my heart glow for
| a week.
| neom wrote:
| Curious, do you still have your NFC implant?
| night-rider wrote:
| A few alternatives for micro donations that people have
| mentioned:
|
| https://ko-fi.com/
|
| https://github.com/sponsors
|
| https://www.patreon.com/
|
| https://www.buymeacoffee.com/
|
| https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/
|
| Any others, let me know
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#statemen...
| theodorewiles wrote:
| I don't want to throw yet more GenAI crap at this, but could RAG
| be a possible innovation that unlocks microtransactions?
|
| I'm imagining a backend database of creator-submitted content.
| The LLM runs RAG on it, pays the creators it relied on to
| synthesize answers a microtransaction. Then also sells the
| Q-and-A as a subscription service to the end user. Maybe payouts
| are conditional on positive user feedback. The solution can also
| flag queries it sees that don't have great answers yet.
|
| Same moat as search, not reliant on advertising.
| jrflowers wrote:
| "We're using AI to build the Spotify of Yahoo Answers!"
| ben_w wrote:
| > I'm imagining a backend database of creator-submitted
| content. The LLM runs RAG on it, pays the creators it relied on
| to synthesize answers a microtransaction.
|
| That sounds like you're describing Mechanical Turk? (And also
| "let's train an LLM on Reddit/StackOverflow). Problem is, the
| humans in Mechanical Turk loop were economically motivated to
| outsource to AI even before LLMs.
| boplicity wrote:
| I don't see creators clamoring for micropayments. The reason is
| simple: It's not a good way to actually earn an income. Creators
| need stable and predictable support. Subscriptions work much
| better for them. It's a tried-and-true business model.
|
| What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something
| that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a
| commodity. That's the fundamental failure here, and it's a big
| one.
| notatoad wrote:
| >What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns
| something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative
| work), into a commodity.
|
| as an advocate for microtransactions: yes, i see this. but i
| think you've got it backwards. nobody is "turning creative work
| into a commodity". it already is, and creators and marketplaces
| are both happy to treat it like one when they're selling their
| work. Creatives don't like micropayments because they don't
| like to so explicitly acknowledge that their work output is a
| commodity.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Pff, I love Patreon and I feel like that is basically
| "micropayments that actually work". If you look at Scott
| McCloud's original proposal for micropayments ([1], parts
| 5/6), the only thing that's really not viable is the idea
| that _every_ reader paying 25C/ /mo would work - in practice,
| transaction fees mean that about $2/mo is the minimum viable
| payment to actually mean something, especially when you
| factor in that you are _not_ going to get every reader to
| pay. Luckily it turns out that you can also get _some_
| readers to pay $5 /$10/$50/mo, or even more.
|
| (Factoring in inflation, that $2/mo now was about $1.12 back
| in 2000 when McCloud proposed the idea.)
|
| 1: http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/index.html
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > in practice, transaction fees mean that about $2/mo is
| the minimum viable payment to actually mean something
|
| another person who doesn't know about PayPal's micropayment
| account fees. They save us (ardour.org) about 23c per US$1
| transaction, and we get the majority of our income from
| US$1 transactions. Instead of the usual 3.5% + 49c fixed
| fee on the order of 30c, PayPal' structure for this is more
| like 9c fixed + 4.99%.
|
| If I was a believer in some deity that paid attention to
| such things, I would pray daily that PayPal does not decide
| to end these at some point.
|
| Good news is that they now offer something called Dynamic
| Pricing, where instead of maintaining two accounts and
| choosing which one to use based on the transaction value,
| they will now do this automatically for you. Subject to
| approval, they say.
| kevingadd wrote:
| 9c fixed + 4.99% is ~10.2 cents fee for the proposed 25
| cents/mo micropayment in the post you're replying to. How
| is that good? It's better, sure, but that's still handing
| over 41% of your income to PayPal.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The number cited in the parent comment was US$2/month. We
| have roughly 3k subscriptions at US$1/month, and although
| we'd love to collect more of the revenue, I don't find
| myself thinking that PP's micropayment structure is
| untenable for this.
|
| Yes, for 25c payments, especially one-off's, the systems
| are not there at this time.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Subscriptions work much better for them. It's a tried-and-
| true business model.
|
| But it does exclude a portion of the potential customer base.
| Whether or not that matters to a business is a different issue,
| of course.
| ryanwhitney wrote:
| Looking at you, small town newspapers.
| seydor wrote:
| > I don't see creators clamoring for micropayments.
|
| How do you know that? I 'd use micropayments any day, but they
| are practically a nightmare to implement so we have to use
| third parties or subscriptions in order to justify the
| transaction costs.
|
| It's not either-or, subscriptions have always existed, but the
| current (lack of) payment tech makes them more useful.
| JeffSnazz wrote:
| Ads (along with nazis and pedophiles) are the root of almost
| all issues on the internet and it looks like a very bleak
| future if we can't build an alternative form of compensation
| into our protocols. I don't understand why we can't at least
| outbid the advertisers for our own attention.... what a waste
| of time and money and attention and culture all around.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| So what are the greatest swedish tech stories?
|
| Spotify, soundcloud, DICE?
| INTPenis wrote:
| If you're going to mention DICE you should mention Massive too.
| takinola wrote:
| Micropayments struggle because they add friction to the process
| of consuming content. Right now, if I see a great blog post,
| video, whatever, I spend a bit of time taking it in and then move
| on. With micropayments, I now have to think about how much it is
| worth to me (is this blog post, comment, sketch worth $0.50?
| $0.10?). You just turned a brainless moment of enjoyment into a
| value judgement where I now have to become a critic and try to
| create some kind of inner framework for assigning value, etc.
|
| Ads avoids all these by (relatively) frictionlessly converting
| attention into money. Subscriptions bundle the friction into a
| single event (the conversion) and remove it for all future
| interactions. Micropayments are just constant papercuts.
| jbaber wrote:
| Flattr style micro-payments doled out based on impressions of a
| page (or their evil twin, ads) seem more honest than subscribing
| a la patreon. (I subscribe to a lot of creators with patreon.)
|
| I frequently hear and read people not wanting to sponsor some
| youtube channel or podcast they consume for hours a week because
| it's "not that good". If you spent the time there, they deserve
| your money. I really feel for creators who produce popular
| material, but don't get as much remuneration as content that
| people are prouder of liking.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| In the 1980s, I was briefly involved with AMIX, the American
| Information Exchange.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Information_Exchange
|
| As an experiment, I wrote a short article and offered it for ten
| cents.
|
| And one person paid me that dime! Exciting times.
|
| (The Wikipedia article says that $1 was the minimum price, but
| this must have been before that was set.)
|
| Microsoft was paying me a dollar a word for my MSJ (Microsoft
| Systems Journal) articles, so that worked out better.
| tech234a wrote:
| Note: They've been owned by Eyeo since 2017 [1].
|
| [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/05/adblock-plus-acquires-
| flat...
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