You can give someone as little as a dollar via a service like PayPal. In the world today, that's pretty small.
I think the endless discussion of a desire for "micropayments" is just another excuse for "We don't really want to pay for content and we imagine if you get it down to a penny, that's so close to zero, we think it would basically be free."
I imagine if someone solved it, there would be some new complaint (like "Do you know how many articles I click into each week? I am getting charged a penny for every single one! This is killing me!")
The internet doesn't like paying writers/content producers. The internet loudly objects to every means to pay content producers: ads, content marketing, tip jars, etc. It all gets decried by someone, somewhere for existing at all.
People basically think content producers are supposed to be slave labor and then don't like it if you put it that way.
Edit: to be clear, I think chasing the mythical beast of "If only we had micropayments, then we could pay for content!" is like friends who say "If I won the lottery, I would give you half." What they really mean us that in theory they would like to do something for you, but in reality they aren't going to do anything for you in the here and now and probably would change their mind if they really won.
Both winning the lottery and solving the micropayments problem are sufficiently long shot that you probably won't have to pay up. It's frequently code for "I wish you people could get paid. It's sad that writing is slave labor. But I don't want to give you my hard earned money."
> You can give someone as little as a dollar via a service like PayPal. In the world today, that's pretty small.
In theorie you can with "friends and family", but you can't charge a dollar. It costs 2.9% and $0.30 for any transaction. You end up with something like 0.68 before transfer costs to your actual bank.
This is true. It also means the minimum you can practically give as a micropayment is 68x more money for the recipient than the piddling penny the OP claims they would like to be able to give content creators.
I'm fairly confident this means that they don't actually want to pay. They just want to believe that if we got payments as close to zero as possible and got enough people to chip in a penny, magically it would be enough to live on and stop being slave labor.
In reality, that doesn't align with how the world works. Once you get it down to a penny, then people can tell themselves that not paying at all won't really matter because it's such a tiny amount. And then we are right back where we started: with people wanting content for free while not wanting to admit this is an expectation of slave labor.
The way to pay producers mere pennies for visiting thier site without having to pay them at all is via ads and the HN uses as blockers very aggressively and while they claim this is for reasons other than money per se, if you want ad-free content and don't want to be demanding slave labor, the way to do that is pry your wallet open and kick in a few bucks via Patreon, PayPal, etc.
Based on my tendency to hit the front page here with my writing, my ongoing inability to make ends meet and the degree to which I get downvoted for talking about that late in the month when I'm stressed out because the bank account is empty and the cupboards are bare, I'm quite confident that the constant talk of how micropayments will solve this is just a BS excuse to help well-heeled people feel okay with expecting slave labor from writers and telling themselves it is not their problem that writers go hungry while journalism goes to hell, democracy suffers as a consequence, etc ad nauseum.
I remember reading a blog a few years ago, where the blogger said to not even bother sending less than (I think) 5~8 bucks (in BRL). He said that after all fees and everything, he would receive too little to make a difference, and the person donating would be basically wasting money
I think the endless discussion of a desire for "micropayments" is just another excuse for "We don't really want to pay for content and we imagine if you get it down to a penny, that's so close to zero, we think it would basically be free."
I imagine if someone solved it, there would be some new complaint (like "Do you know how many articles I click into each week? I am getting charged a penny for every single one! This is killing me!")
The internet doesn't like paying writers/content producers. The internet loudly objects to every means to pay content producers: ads, content marketing, tip jars, etc. It all gets decried by someone, somewhere for existing at all.
People basically think content producers are supposed to be slave labor and then don't like it if you put it that way.
Edit: to be clear, I think chasing the mythical beast of "If only we had micropayments, then we could pay for content!" is like friends who say "If I won the lottery, I would give you half." What they really mean us that in theory they would like to do something for you, but in reality they aren't going to do anything for you in the here and now and probably would change their mind if they really won.
Both winning the lottery and solving the micropayments problem are sufficiently long shot that you probably won't have to pay up. It's frequently code for "I wish you people could get paid. It's sad that writing is slave labor. But I don't want to give you my hard earned money."