Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by nlawalker on Monday October 30, 2017 @11:58PM (#15591005)

>> don't think it's worth paying $1

Key word there is paying. A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the functionality doesn't work as described.

Has anyone made any real progress in solving this problem?

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by ambrosite on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:07AM (#15591032)

This is exactly the problem, and it's a difficult one to solve. I've seen research suggesting that the cognitive cost of filling out payment forms and giving out credit card information makes it easier to pay $10 than $1, since it doesn't feel "worth" all that effort to pay only one dollar. Unfortunately this is part of what reinforces the market dominance of mega-retailers like Amazon, because if you already have an account with them, the cognitive cost of signing up has already been paid.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by mysterypie on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:09AM (#15591211)

> cognitive cost of filling out payment forms, etc.

That's exactly the case for me. I spend physical cash with much less hesitation than for online purchases. I'd probably spend way more freely online if I didn't have to keep track of the purchase just in case something goes wrong, like getting mis-charged, double-billed, a continuing subscription I wasn't expecting, or just to remember why that $1 debit appears on my statement.

As an aside:

It's curious to see that this made it to the HN front page and already has more than 25 comments, yet nobody has commented on the original article's own page which does allow commenting. Well, there is one comment that says, "Great analysis", but that was me just to check if commenting actually works. I suppose that ties in with the same idea -- it's not worth the "cognitive cost" to make a comment no one will read.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by ambrosite on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:44AM (#15591327)

> it's not worth the "cognitive cost" to make a comment

Their comment form requires login or signup. I'm already signed up and logged in here. That's reason enough for me to post here and not there. I would never create an account just to leave a comment unless it was someplace where I intended to visit and comment often.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by miranda_rights on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @02:47AM (#15591481)

Not only that, but by now I've figured out that the comment sections of most sites are toxic with little, if any, moderation. HN has a good moderation set-up, respectful members, etc. I try to avoid even reading the comments of other websites since they just end up being depressing.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by test1235 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @05:12AM (#15591857)

BBC is especially depressing.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by redblacktree on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @10:51AM (#15593630)

You should try Fox News.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by sitkack on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @02:29AM (#15591447)

So if true federated non-statist, non-corp entity login actually worked we would probably comment freely and purchase stuff in 0.10-0.50 increments? Mozilla should be a payments platform.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by pjc50 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:38AM (#15592158)

The browser vendors are the only actors who might be able to make this work.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by majewsky on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @03:24PM (#15595819)

Seeing how Google makes basically all its money from internet ads, I don't think they have any interest to enable other monetization schemes. (Unless, of course, something makes them believe that ads are going to become unattractive and they need to pivot.)

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by thinkloop on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @04:05AM (#15591671)

I like the idea of no registration by having the browser locally generate a public/private key pair for use on the site.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by gldalmaso on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:03AM (#15592028)

The mobile stores come closer to that less hesitation scenario I think. Your card info is already there, you only need to input your pass to spend the money.

Though PayPal doesn't feel like that, I guess being in the browser is off-putting in terms of spending because of added risk.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by untog on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:04AM (#15591021)

Apple Pay and Android Pay are one touch, authenticated by thumb print and IIRC uses a temporary credit card number.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by kobeya on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:41AM (#15591118)

That's not going to work given that it is still CC on the back end -- per-tx fees will eat you alive at the $1/tx level.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by jchw on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @05:36AM (#15591939)

I'd guess it'd eat $0.50 of a $1.00 transaction, maybe a bit less if you're lucky. That's bad, but it's workable if you have low operating costs - it certainly isn't a loss. Most people seem to think $5.00 is when credit transactions start making more sense.

Amusingly, Amazon charges me $0.14 every single month for my usage of Amazon S3. I wonder if they've got some sort of sick deal where they don't pay per-tx.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by garblegarble on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:17AM (#15592082)

>Amusingly, Amazon charges me $0.14 every single month for my usage of Amazon S3. I wonder if they've got some sort of sick deal where they don't pay per-tx.

Off-topic but I had this (except I have a non-US card, so the foreign transaction fee was larger than the S3 bill). I contacted Amazon and asked if I could prepay $50 and they added a small balance to my account for free that'll cover my tiny S3 usage for the next few years

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by gruez on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @09:33AM (#15593079)

Aren't foreign exchange fees calculated by %?

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by garblegarble on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @09:51AM (#15652929)

My bank charges a flat fee of £0.75 per transaction for foreign currency transactions - not a big deal for a normal transaction but pretty significant if you're paying a $0.03 bill every month!

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by unreal37 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @10:43AM (#15593576)

Some credit card companies charge $3 or $5 for transactions made in other currencies, with exchange rate being separate.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by oneeyedpigeon on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @04:53AM (#15591801)

Are those fees > $1? Depending on the rest of your model - huge volume of transactions for a free-to-reproduce product? - even a massive cut might still be workable.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by qzxvwt on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @05:14AM (#15591868)

I disagree, I think the keyword is $1, because at least for me as strictly a user (not a stakeholder or business owner) generating a meme is simply not worth that cost no matter how easy it is to pay it.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by cstrat on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:03AM (#15591017)

> Has anyone made any real progress in solving this problem?

Wouldn't be too hard to implement in an iOS app with a IAP for credits. All the other places I can think where this has been done and it is relatively streamlined are other walled gardens like Steam.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by Gaelan on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:16AM (#15591235)

Don't know about refunds, but for the rest Apple Pay (available via web) is literally click button, scan finger (on your nearby iPhone if you're on desktop and not using a tbMBP), done. I guess you can use credit card chargebacks, but beyond that refunds are hard to solve without making abuse possible.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by defined on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:50AM (#15591150)

I use privacy.com to generate merchant or burner cards. Funds come out your bank a/c, and Chrome integration makes it seconds to generate a card and fill out the details in the web page. And the card is locked to the merchant if it's not a burner.

Would this work for you?

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by pjmlp on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @04:46AM (#15591781)

In Portugal ATM systems are like tiny Internet, so some websites generate a one time ID number that you can use for an ATM transfer.

Basically you get the ID, then either make use of online banking or go to the next ATM machine around the corner and make the transfer.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by beojan on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @05:05AM (#15591831)

So we've gone from filling out a form to either switching to a new tab and logging in to online banking to make the transfer, or even worse, leaving the building to go to an ATM?

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by pjmlp on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @05:57AM (#15592005)

Depends how much paranoid one is about securiy.

Online banking and mobile phone app are still an option as well.

Also we don't charge for ATM operations, so they are available on almost every street, at least on major cities.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by rozenmd on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:04AM (#15591025)

Pretty sure Stripe does this - webmaster has to enable refunds on the Stripe side though.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by anotherelise on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:26AM (#15591266)

Bitcoin

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by devdoomari on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:02AM (#15591016)

um... bitcoin? heard like 3 years ago that bitcoin will handle all sorts of micro-transactions...

anyone know what happened?

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by cstrat on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:06AM (#15591026)

I haven't used BTC in a long time but last I read transactions take a very long time to process because the blocksize is too small to contain all the transactions that took place. I read (not sure if this is correct) that transaction fees needed to be upwards of $20 to ensure the transaction was included in the next block.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by SAI_Peregrinus on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:10AM (#15591039)

Bitcoin transactions have something like a $5 average transaction fee. You can offer less but your transaction won't get processed as quickly. Bitcoin is already slow at processing transactions.

Disclaimer: I don't use bitcoin. The $5 number is outdated, but from the graphs I could find in a quick search it seemed to be rising consistently.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by anotherelise on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:24AM (#15591259)

I never spend more than $0.10 on transaction fees for bitcoin. I mean, you could give $5 if you wanted to, but why would you? If I was sending a dollar I wouldn't pay more than $0.01 or less for the transaction fee. And for something so cheap the merchant shouldn't bother waiting on confirmations. Exploiting 0 confirmations isn't easy, and it's not worth the work to anyone for a dollar. Even with sub cent transaction fees they'll still settle faster than 3-5 business days.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by freeloop3 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:56AM (#15591159)

Stop spreading FUD. I spent 10c sending a transaction for $20 a month ago.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by michaelt on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:50AM (#15592212)

Smallest transaction I've seen is 191 bytes; [1] says right now to get a transaction in the next block the minimum fee is 240 satoshis/byte; and that today the 251-260 satoshis/byte has been the most common fee.

That's $2.82 according to [2].

And that's with current levels of demand - if there was a transaction every time someone visited a website, demand would be much, much higher.

[1] https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ [2] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=(191*240%2F100000000)+BTC+...

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by freeloop3 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @05:51PM (#15596907)

Yes, you're right. I miscalculated the fee. I actually paid $1 and was not trying to get it in the next block.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by kobeya on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:43AM (#15591122)

That's why you would use an off-chain solution like lightning payment channels with sub-cent transaction fees. Transactions are faster than credit cards too.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by kobeya on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:41AM (#15591116)

> Has anyone made any real progress in solving this problem?

Bitcoin micro-transactions via lightning:

http://lightning.network

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by KyeRussell on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:52AM (#15591152)

> real progress

Let's not pretend that consumer-facing cryptocurrency-backed anything is little more than something for speculators, libertarians, and nerds.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by chx on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:24AM (#15591262)

Don't bother, the HN crowd will downvote this hard, bitter truth. I had this conversation N times, my argument is roughly this: "There's no legit use of bitcoin. Main usages are a) pyramid-like hold-and-hype b) illegal money transfers out of China. No, ordinary people don't want to use it for international transfer because you need to go through hops to get Bitcoin on the sender end, even worse the receiver needs to do something to get money and at the end of the day you have no idea how much money the receiver actually gets. And let's not even discuss outsourcing the security from banks to customers."

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by sli on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @11:14AM (#15593809)

The community here is much more reasonable than, say, reddit. Notice the comment hasn't been killed as you expected it would. People here understand pretty well the barrier between cryptocurrency and "regular people."

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by chx on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @08:35PM (#15598000)

Want me to collect the links of my downvoted comments which said this exact same thing?

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:17AM (#15591239)

> Has anyone made any real progress in solving this problem?

The reason they haven't is that the law puts the burden of fraud on the payment processors. The dispute resolution overhead is the same for a $.10 transaction as a $100 transaction, but if that average cost is $.30 then you can't have $.10 transactions and the fee on $1 transactions is onerous.

Using some cheaper less effective dispute resolution for micro-transactions doesn't work because if it's possible to consistently scam it but only for a dime then people will just scam it for a dime in a for loop.

This is why the off-chain Bitcoin processors have lower transaction fees -- they don't have this problem. But then the problem is that the customer has to get some Bitcoin and if they have to buy it with a credit card we're back to square one.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by s73ver_ on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:32PM (#15594472)

BTC processors don't have that problem because they do absolutely no fraud detection. That's a pretty big no-go for most consumers.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @03:49PM (#15604848)

If it was actually the consumers who were averse to the risk then we could get rid of the law and nothing would change.

The problem is the law is inefficient because the consumer is the lowest cost avoider. They can do things like using a good pass phrase and not reusing passwords and not holding large sums of money in uninsured accounts for unnecessarily long periods of time.

Payment processors can't stop customers with no skin in the game from making poor decisions, so they have to sum up the cost of the resulting fraud and make everyone pay it as transaction fees, and then we can't have micro-payments.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by eat_veggies on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:59AM (#15592262)

I feel like this is great for middle class adults, but it alienates a huge section of the population. Anyone can afford a dollar, but that's not the same thing as affording a dollar every time you visit a site. A minimum wage worker can afford a dollar, but can't afford to browse more than 8 pages an hour, and that's before you factor in the cost of living and America's high monthly costs just to access the internet.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by thomastjeffery on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:03AM (#15591019)

> Anyone can afford a dollar.

I can't.

Source: broke and unemployed.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by freeloop3 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:28AM (#15591273)

Anyone heavily invested in making memes on the internet that they can't stand having a watermark should be able to afford a dollar.

If not, maybe a deep intersection into what one does during the day would be warranted.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by tyingq on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @08:53AM (#15592822)

It's the friction. Facebook gets people to pay for stupid games, over and over again, largely because once you pay the first the time, the friction is gone.

The WebPayments API might solve this: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/payments/

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by bearbearbear on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:32AM (#15591097)

> Anyone can afford a dollar

At the moment I'm unemployed and I'm literally living day to day just waiting for some kind of break.

It's easy to say "anyone can afford a dollar" while you sit in your $4,000 apartment sipping a late` that was just brought to you in less than five minutes by any of fifty different food delivery services available to you.

But consider that there are plenty of people who have a basic computer or smartphone and internet access who actually can't afford a dollar.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by ballenf on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:00AM (#15591169)

> But consider that there are plenty of people who have a basic computer or smartphone and internet access who actually can't afford a dollar.

Sure. But none of them need a meme generated that is logo-free.

If you said you don't have a credit card or other means to pay, I would get that.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by tehwebguy on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:04AM (#15591188)

The point wasn’t that no one is broke, it’s that even if the price was $0.01 or even $0.0000001 perhaps it would still be priced too high for the actual value.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by s73ver_ on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:34PM (#15594487)

Your situation certainly sucks, but I still have bills to pay. I still have to pay for hosting and content creation and all that.

If you can't afford to pay the price I ask, well, then you shouldn't get it. Like anything else in the world.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by jbigelow76 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:46AM (#15591328)

If you can't, or choose not to, afford $1 to generate a gif meme without a watermark then so be it. But the $0-$1 meme market also cannot afford the cost of righteous indignation.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by vintageseltzer on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:27AM (#15591269)

That's a pretty rude comment. I'm sure cpncrunch understands that, literally, not everyone on the planet can afford to pay a dollar. Please adjust your tone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

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[dead]

Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by vintageseltzer on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @02:55AM (#15591504)

> Fuck off with your tone policing [0] of the downtrodden. Oppression makes people angry, if you don't want people to be angry like that then stop oppressing them.

Take a breath and relax. No one is oppressing you. I simply ask that you adhere to this community's guidelines and use a civil tone.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by SolarNet on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @03:43AM (#15591616)

It's not about anyone oppressing anyone here. My reference to oppression was as a society and in general, not to this comment chain. It's about you claiming that being angry about oppression - specifically the dismissal of that oppression as valid - is for some reason disqualifying of the arguments contained with in. It's a fallacy, it's called tone policing, and you are doing it.

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by phyzome on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:07AM (#15592047)

It's definitely not clear to me that they understand that. shrug

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Re:Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology by vacri on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:30AM (#15591089)

I think it's more about the friction of engaging a payment method. For me at least, there is a bigger gap between free and $0-but-fish-out-a-credit-card than there is between $1 and $10.

True, I wouldn't pay either $1 or $10 to generate a meme, but I wouldn't 'pay' $0 either.

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