Comment by imiric
11 days ago
This should be the standard business model on the web, instead of the advertising middlemen that have corrupted all our media, and the adtech that exploits our data in perpetuity. All of which is also serving to spread propaganda, corrupt democratic processes, and cause the sociopolitical unrest we've seen in the last decade+. I hope that decades from now we can accept how insidious all of this is, and prosecute and regulate these companies just like we did with Big Tobacco.
Brave's BAT is also a good attempt at fixing this, but x402 seems like a more generic solution. It's a shame that neither has any chance of gaining traction, partly because of the cryptocurrency stigma, and partly because of adtech's tight grip on the current web.
Microtransactions are the perfect solution, if you have an economic theory that assumes near-zero transaction costs. Technology can achieve low technical costs, but the problem is the human cost of a transaction. The mental overhead of deciding whether I want to make a purchase to consume every piece of content, and whether I got ripped off, adds up, and makes microtransactions exhausting.
When someone on the internet tries to sell you something for a dollar, how often do you really take them up on it? How many microtransactions have you actually made? To problem with microtransactions is they discourage people from consuming your content. Which is silly, because the marginal cost of serving one reader or viewer is nearly zero.
The solution is bundling. I make a decision to pay once, then don’t pay any marginal costs on each bit of content. Revenue goes to creators proportionally based on what fraction of each user’s consumption went to them.
People feel hesitation toward paying for the bundle, but they only have to get over the hump once, not repeatedly for every single view.
Advertising-supported content is one kind of bundle, but in my opinion, it’s just as exhausting. The best version of bundling I’ve experienced are services like Spotify and YouTube Premium, where I pay a reasonable fixed monthly fee and in return get to consume many hours of entertainment. The main problems with those services are the middlemen who take half the money.
I disagree, bundling is the problem. That strategy created the fragmented landscape that we now see in streaming video, which is pretty much universally hated.
The ideal solution would involve a flat rate which I pay monthly, and at the end of the month that money goes towards the content that I consumed during that month. If I only read a single blog, they get all of it.
Then we build a culture around preferring to share content which is configured to cite its sources, and we discourage sharing anything which has an obvious source with which it doesn't share its inbound microtransactions.
We already need to do our due dilligence re: determining if an information source is trustworthy (and if its sources are trustworthy, and so on). Might as well make money flow along the same structures.
It's not an ideal solution because any fixed cost solution is begging for a middle man/reseller to be introduced.
Like I pay the $5 monthly flat fee (or $500, $5k, $500k, whatever it's known fixed cost for me) for the system, turn around and resell all content for a $1 monthly flat fee.
There is a real cost to the content you're consuming with that flat-fee. So either the flat fee is more of "credit" system or it's relying on a middle man to do the oversubscribing calculation/arbitrage or whatever to balance the cost.
And no, introducing any form of rate limits or "abuse reduction" doesn't work because it's basically changing your flat-fee into a credit based system.
A credit system has advantages over pure micropayment system (in terms of mental overload. I know I charged my "internet content" card with $50 for this month. A movie on Netflix is selling for $2 tonight. Normally it's $0.5 a movie, but it's Valentines and everyone is "Netflix and Chilling" so surge charging)
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So, Flattr 2.0 ?
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/flattr2.html
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> I disagree, bundling is the problem. That strategy created the fragmented landscape that we now see in streaming video, which is pretty much universally hated.
> The ideal solution would involve a flat rate which I pay monthly, and at the end of the month that money goes towards the content that I consumed during that month. If I only read a single blog, they get all of it.
You just described bundling - that’s how YouTube Premium works. I’m not sure what the distinction you are drawing is here. Is it the existence of multiple separate bundling services? If so, I agree that creates friction, but the solution is more bundling, ie. everything should be in the same bundle.
Btw I don’t hate the fragmentation of streaming that much. The value proposition for TV/movie consumption is the best it’s ever been. For what it used to cost to buy a single season of a TV show on DVD, I now get access to watch hundreds of shows on-demand. It would be even better if all the streaming services merged together, but antitrust law will probably prevent that.
I think what most people hate more is when the specific thing they want isn’t in the bundle - ie. paying $4 to watch one movie.
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> the problem is the human cost of a transaction. The mental overhead of deciding whether I want to make a purchase to consume every piece of content […] > When someone on the internet tries to sell you something for a dollar, how often do you really take them up on it?
It depends on how micro they are. Your example of $1 is quite big. It should be cents or even less.
Several examples. When using chatgpt api, do you really worry how much a short q&a session will cost you? Do you stress whether to turn on the light in your room or not (electricity cost is also micro-transaction if you think about it)?
$1 is not a micro-transaction, it's just a regular transaction. It's not micro until it's only several cents at most.
I'm not the parent, but when I use the OpenAI API (not ChatGPT API, that stuff is very cheap in comparison), I do keep an eye on my spend. For the more variable models like o3, o3-pro, GPT-4.5, expenditure can quickly exceed what you decided to spend. I'm glad you can set spending limits if you choose to do so.
For the examples you gave, there is a lot of marginal cost to provide more of the product. ChatGPT and your utility would be bankrupt if they gave infinite usage. Although ChatGPT’s consumer product is flat rate (users greatly prefer that model), rumor is that they lose money if you use the big models a lot, and they do cap usage.
While I agree with most of your comment, there is a pitfall - bundling is often used as an extractive pricing strategy, where you force the consumers to buy goods they do not want to access the one they want.
This is problematic when the seller is a monopoly, and has a strong market power that prevents the consumer to seek alternatives.
https://www.concurrences.com/en/dictionary/bundling
I would pay for YouTube premium in a heartbeat if they didn’t also include YouTube music, which I have zero interest in paying for.
The whole point of bundling is that you combine many things together because the marginal cost is zero. If you pay for YouTube premium, you are also paying for all of the videos on YouTube that don’t interest you. That’s irrelevant as long is there is enough content you want. The fact that the bundle includes a music app you don’t care to use is the same way, it doesn’t detract from the value proposition.
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crypto seems like a massive waste for what can just be a regular transaction
Much cheaper than using a credit card processor.
Not cheaper than using one of the instant net settlement services like FedNow (UPI in India, PromptPay in Thailand, PayID in Australia)
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Something like BAT isn't that wasteful, and without crypto you'd be stuck never getting paid by bad actors in the scheme.
But why exactly does it have to be on an append-only ledger where transactions are processed/validated for a fee? Why can’t it be a more conventional transaction processor like VISA on top of the banking system?
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Even if advertising were to disappear over night, why do you think that would stop the spread of propaganda, corruption of democratic processes, and social unrest? I don't really see a connection between the two?
It's more like the tech that allows middlemen to insert into everything and be very hyper personalized/targeted
The finiancial connexion is explained here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Really? They're quite connected.
If the architecture of the web changes to one where people only see content that they've asked to see, and that kills advertising, it would also put a significant damper on anyone else whose business involves injecting unwanted content into a viewer's consciousness. Propagandists are the first to come to mind.
If it can become prohibitively expensive to sway an election by tampering with people's information, then the alternative (policies that actually benefit the people) will become more popular, leading to reduced unrest.
Democracy is having a bad time lately because its enemies have new weapons for use against it. If we break those weapons, it starts working again.
Where did I say that all of those things would stop?
What I said is that adtech systems are also used for it. So if they were to disappear overnight, a _proportion_ of those activities, and a pretty large one I reckon, would also disappear.
Okay, but my question remains - why? What is the connection between those things and advertising?
It seems way more likely to me that they would simply adapt, as they always have.
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> This should be the standard business model on the web, instead of the advertising middlemen that have corrupted all our media, and the adtech that exploits our data in perpetuity.
People with content will still want to maximize their money. You'll get all the same bullshit dark patterns on sites supported by microtransactions as you will ad supported. Stories will be split up into multiple individual pages, each requiring a microtransaction. Even getting past a landing page will require multiple click throughs each with another transaction. There will also be nothing preventing sites from bait and switch schemes where the link exposed to crawlers doesn't contain the expected content.
Without extensive support for micro-refunds and micro-customer service and micro-consumer protections, microtransactions on the web will most likely lead to more abusive bullshit. Automated integrations with browsers will be exploited.
Maybe. But at least transactions could be performed directly between consumers and publishers, and there wouldn't be incentives for companies to violate privacy laws and exploit user data.
Of course, we would need to figure out solutions to a bunch of problems adtech companies have had decades to do, but micropayments would be the first step in the right direction. A larger hurdle would be educating users into paying for content, and what "free" has meant thus far, so that they could make an informed decision. And even then I expect that many people would prefer paying with their attention and data instead. But giving the option for currency payment with _zero_ ads is something that can be forced by regulation, which I hope happens one day.
Because this must be done on the gov level.
As I've written about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40972106
Sorry but the sociopolitical unrest of the last decade has been caused by the problems we have created not by people talking about it.
Money need not be involved, just look at how corrupt and biased Wikipedia has become.