I read an article once that argued the big problem with microtransactions was the transaction cost imposed on users.

For the sites, sure, everything can be automated. But even in the best case of good browser ui/ux support the burden shifted to users would be massive.

The cognitive cost of trying to decide whether to spend 10c on an article I haven’t read yet costs me way more than 10c. Man that article sucked. Did I just get ripped off by clickbait again?

This argument is what convinced me that straight per-article “microtransactions” will never take off for very low value things on the web.

EDIT: found it: http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/31/costs-of-micropayme... - Think it was Nick Szabo.

What’s scary to me is that the one “successful-ish” application we have for microtransactions is mobile gaming. Imagine a huge ecosystem of different beans, gems, flooz, widgets or whatever, and all the dark ux patterns to get people to spend them, and also to hide how much they are spending from people.

I would absolutely pay $10 a month to an aggregator like HN or /. that then paid publishers a portion of that based on article rank and/or number of clicks through.

Yes, agree that fixed-price deals with publishers / aggregators are tenable. Spotify works for people, for example.

The original argument was essentially that there was a minimum transaction size that was cognitively viable at scale.

I understand it's about cognitive costs. What I propose makes the cognitive load of actual monetary payment a single decision per month. I pay X. Let the aggregator and the publishers automatically figure out every little fractional detail.

If the objective of paying is to make the web better and reward quality content, you don't want two pages of clickbait to pay more than one page of watergate-level investigative reporting.

And any automated system to tell clickbait from quality journalism will incentivise people to trick it.

So at the very least, you need a refund button.

they could do it like medium “claps”.

No claps, no money.

Clap as long as you want.

At the end of each month your $10 is divided up by the number of claps you gave.

And if this isn’t for you, then go with ads or be paywalled.

An upvote button and a flag button I think might do the trick.

Well, Spotify works for the consumer. For the musicians, it's mostly advertising, not a useful source of income.

Would it change if there was a button at the bottom of the article, that you could click for an instant refund, no questions asked?

Honestly it almost seems to be worth trying, the potential upshot is _huge_.

blendle.com, which I mentioned earlier in this thread, has this instant-refund feature. I've used it a few times when an article was disappointing, or when there were technical problems (digitized article cut off the second half of the print version).

Seems to work for them, though I don't know their revenue/profit numbers.

Scaling cryptocurrencies would absolutely address this issue, but that's an enormous challenge.

A simple, centralized service could easily fill this role with batched transactions. Each reader pays once a month, each publisher gets payed once a month, and those payments can be shuffled about a database trivially. O(n) vs. O(n^2)

Patreon kind of did/does this. There was a big stink not long ago where this appeared to fall apart. The issue Patreon faced was that it was not so trivial to bundle transactions like this. Some creators wanted to get paid in a piecemeal fashion for each video uploaded, etc. For patreon supporters, they would each be on their own separate billing cycle because they decided it would be bad UX to have the first month be pro-rated or whatever.

As much as Patreon is best situated to provide a service like this, I'm not encouraged that they'll do so.

A transaction on bitcoin cash costs 1 to 2 sat, which is less than 0.01 penny.

It is true that the cost can vary greatly (which sucks, please tell me of a crypto coin that is 1:1 with dollars), but you can adjust the price in real time and since you are selling a digital product even in an extreme situation you are not going to lose money (remember the transaction fee is pretty much going to be 1-2 sat always).

I suggest looking at Lightning Network for micro-transactions. Still emerging tech, but it shows great promise.

Or bitcoin cash! ;)