People don't like to do transactions. It taxes our brains and makes us make decisions constantly. We like all you can eat and watch as much as you like. Paying for things sucks even if you just pay small amounts.
Yeah. For example, thats why people like all-inclusive hotels. The reason is that you dont have to think about the prices all the time. You just go through the package only and thats it.
The less tranactions, the better. At least for the majority of us. It is very rare to prefer doing many small transactions over one big.
The main reason I don't sign up for more paywalled things is not concerns about money, it's sheer inertia. Signing up takes effort, and it's yet another subscription to manage.
That extends to relatively low-friction cases like Patreon. The number of podcasters and bloggers where I've thought, quite earnestly, "I really like what this person is doing, I should kick a few quid their way," and then just not done that is near infinite. And it's never because I was feeling stingy; it's because I couldn't be arsed.
Yes, because they want you to pay for a monthly or yearly subscription and you just want to read one article and maybe never come back to their site. But if I can do a 1-click "pay 1/2 cent" to read the rest of the article that would be totally fair
That's not the only thing. It's the hassle as well.
First they want you to sign up for an account. Give a lot of personal data. Then set up a payment model, often recurring. Just to read one article? No way.
Micropayments will save some of that hassle but I don't want to have an account with every news site linked to by HN.
If the alternative to a x% chance of upselling someoone to a yearly subscription is "read one article and maybe never come back to their site" then the price that the vendor will want to charge for that article is x% of that yearly subscription. You mention 1/2 a cent in multiple comments, but that's not a realistic expectation - if the paywalled sites would offer a per-article payment, they would definitely want to charge much more than that for that single article, closer to a dollar or so. They don't offer per-article pricing because the currently paywalled sites can earn more otherwise - the micropayment challenges aren't relevant, they will not sell their goods so cheaply (as it would devalue and 'cannibalize' their main revenue) even if there was a zero-fee micropayment mechanism.
Half a cent per article is a plausible target for all the weak/cheap sources who can't possibly afford to put up a paywall right now because nobody would pay. It's not going to be used by the currently paywalled sites, their business model relies on getting a not-micro amount from each customer.
For the longest time I thought there was just something wrong with me. Rarely would you find a comment in an article about micropayments that pointed out that micropayments sound, stressful!
It causes me anxiety just having to think about having to consider making payments everytime I click on an article, for example, even if it's a tiny $0.01 amount each time.
Really? Rarely? I remember this being one of the few top-billed reasons why micropayments "will never work", to the point where it was the #1 thing I would always have to address in every discussion of our product.
So, on such note; when you turn on the light when entering a room, do you have anxiety thinking about how that costs money? We are constantly making tiny momentary transactions without thinking about it at all: the issue is UI, not transactions.
I get this, but also there's a class of things where we know we're constantly being charged by use, and we don't constantly think about it.
Gas, electricity, water are all cases where my use is metered, I _could_ try to micromanage it on a daily basis, but so long as my bills don't vary wildly from month to month, I don't pay especially close attention. To the degree that I self-regulate my use, it's more about the environment than the dollar cost. I don't think about it every time I take a shower or turn up my thermostat.
The amount of online stuff from for-profit institutions I read from month to month doesn't vary that much, and if I knew from habit what the typical range was, I think I could learn to be ok with that. But the current experience, where whenever someone links to something in a _different_ paywall than the ones I'm already in, I do have to think "would it be worth it to pay for this source?" and often the answer is "no".
The difference is that (1) metering is mostly done for limited resources and (2) you don't really have a choice but to not mind for any of the services mentioned. If someone came about and offered a flat-fee electricity connection, the majority would switch in an instant even if their bills remained about the same.
Many utilities in the US have this. The utilities charge a fixed monthly fee based on estimated usage. Each year the amount is adjusted based on the previous year. It's not that popular overall but serves lower income households well.
maybe whats needed is a system that tallies up the sites you've visited and at the end of the month you can just say, allocate 5 bucks among them. Or if you've had a rough month, maybe don't give anything. Maybe you can distribute you payments once a year. Or make slight adjustments to it and not give a site any money if you feel.
There've been several projects that did exactly that. Like Brave with their BAT tokens. But it never took off.
Personally I don't like them because these things don't normally opt you out of ad tracking as well. When I pay I want to be the customer and not be tracked. I also don't want to give any personal details. They know nothing about me when I buy a newspaper in the shop. It should be like this :)
Yeah, this is sort of a deal breaker. Another response to my original comment was a link to Flattr and from wikipedia it's a site "that records which websites they frequent and shares this data with Flattr" -- no thanks.
Not Brave itself, but the sites that you visit don't have to give up tracking per se (for participating users, of course). They should have to in order to participate IMO.
Brave will block tracking to some extent but we know it's not perfect.
