Any solution that requires the user to bust out a credit card and put down his billing address has way too much friction for the median user to get through.
Advertising isn't even about getting people to open their wallet, it's more about influencing their decision when they do go to spend money or make a purchase.
Another way he could benefit from this is when people want his skills to build them similar things, so it's basically already an advertisement for his skills.
> Looking for an architect who builds things that still look great even in November rain? Reach out to classical architect Jorian Egge.
Flattr took one approach without much success. They represented the problem well though. When someone does something that is of a small but not insignificant benefit for a large number of people, how should they be rewarded? When the reward due, divided by the number of people paying for it, gets low enough it seems to not reach a threshold that it makes sense for any individual to pay.
You could charge a fee above the threshold, and many people do take this path. It is essentially requiring a small number of people to massively overpay to cover those who don't pay at all.
A Universal Income takes the approach that if everyone gets what they need there is no particular requirement to be monetarily rewarded. You essentially have been rewarded for whatever it is you do.
Advertising plays the small threshold thing both ways, They offer you a chance to sell a little corruption below your threshold for thinking it is damaging, and in return they accumulate the corruption and the money and send you the money and deliver the requested corruption to their customers.
Part of the fundamental difficulty is in determining the size of the reward due. How is that determined? There are plenty of people who will offer services to do that if it means they can take a cut. I don't see that path going well unless it is a mechanism governed by strict non-profit rules, and even then I would have doubts.
A purely rule based system would be intrinsically unfair and subject to gaming, but often times this turns out to be the least worst solution. By agreeing to a set of rules people can accept that while flawed, adhering to them by agreement can make a system that cannot be taken over by a malicious individual.
In short, right now, No I don't think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.
Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn't depend on it going viral.
I'm a psychiatry resident and developper. I have never been paid for my dev work but have produced quite a lot on my free time (site: w.olicorne.org ). I would do psychiatry pretty much no matter how much I'm paid for it.
In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway. UBI would free up time and cognitive load of the most productive people I believe. Following a 80/20 kinda rule.
Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not *have to* monetize.
The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking. Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
> Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not have to monetize.
Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.
It's alright. Those who would like to monetize can. There are others who wouldn't and UBI would utilize that surplus talent, which otherwise had to perform tasks they weren't skilled at to earn a living.
With UBI I wouldn't be surprised if those would be even more productive doing something else they want. And others who couldn't do the CS curiculum even though they would have loved to because they had to find a job quickly would plausibly be at their place instead.
I really view UBI as something that puts oil in the society: people have less friction to be at the spot they're better at. People who want to do nothing will not slow us down anymore. And jobs that nobody wants to do would finally be paid by how much they suck instead of how much money your parents had to educate you.
> Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question
I don't really see the issue. We're far from having shortage of ways to make people pay: ads, paywall, soft paywall, begging, rate limits. What's the issue with those? I certainly don't like them as a user and as a member of society but am fine with people doing that.
Especially with UBI in place: if the dev is putting a paywall, they have to compete with people that have plausibly much more freedom of time and mind to allocate to another free foss project. So in the end it becomes less profitable to be adversarial against end users.
Unfortunately, also wishful thinking. A particular kind of wishful thinking endemic to naturally highly curious, academic achievers (not a dig, I am one). But -- and if you don't understand this, spending some time teaching at universities makes it abundantly clear -- most of the world is nothing like this. They aren't being held back from their natural passions and curiosities by the demands of living. They would not suddenly flourish under UBI.
> With UBI I wouldn't be surprised if those would be even more productive doing something else they want.
For the people that do naturally love creating and are good at it, they might "even more productive" in one sense -- creating more stuff that they, personally, value. And personally I'd love to do that, but it doesn't maximize value across society. That's one of the main things money is. It's a constraint forcing the production of consensus value. In a world of infinite resources that ceases to matter, but we're still very far from that.
> People who want to do nothing will not slow us down anymore.
Who do you think is supporting them? Until we have robots taking care of everyone for free, support is still a cost levied on other humans.
> it doesn't maximize value across society
Well you'd have to define "value" here. I am sure GDP would plummet because bullshit jobs would plummet. The current society is doing maybe a decent job at producing but a terrible job at making it "across society". We still have millions of people dying every year of very preventable causes just because of the lack lf coordination. I think this would be better if we had less noise in our daily lives caused by the system so inefficient that we have bullshit jobs.
It is obviously an incentive. But I think it's not an effective one and has many morally bad side effects.
I highly recommend taking a look at the work of Daniel Pink related to money as an incentive. See The Puzzle Of Motivation (~20min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
Somehow I can imagine that a world where a the brightest minds of a generation didn't spend their prime optimizing ad clicking wouldn't necessarily be a complete disaster.
It's good to talk about UBI, but people taking it seriously have no idea how to fund it.
Seems inefficient to pay for everyone to have kitchens in their house and pay them cash to get ingredients to cook. Couldn't we just employ some of these people as cooks and have them make meals in a centralised kitchen in every neighbourhood? A bit like the British Restaurant idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Restaurant
- soup kitchen are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_kitchen
- community fridges too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_fridge
- and historically in france where I'm from, when we started having freezer technology it first appeared in shared houses for the whole village. People would go there once a day to fetch what they needed and would eat it. Can't find english sources but it seems very efficient. A least much more than every one having a fridge. https://france3-regions.franceinfo.fr/pays-de-la-loire/mayen...
Like it seems like people are ideologically for or against UBI, but I’ve never seen anyone discuss how the mechanism would avoid this outcome. Like I’m not saying it’s 100% the outcome that would happen on whatever time frame, just that even e.g. a 10% chance of that happening would make it too risky to attempt at scale. And like I don’t accept “some people just love farming” or “a lot of stuff that isn’t needed gets made now”, I need an actual mechanism description.
Pay higher when someone does things. UBI + income. If you want to live better, try doing something that will bring you money, but if you fail, you can still live and try something other next time.
Current model: if you try something and fail, you are homeless and starving.
On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live, and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically, even across plausible variable configurations such as “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming” etc.
We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
This is why people who work critical jobs never go hungry.
What was vital yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow (see hospital secretaries vs ambient scribes for instance). I assume when you think of people taking a potentially "destitution-risky" decision, you think "entrepreneur without savings or backup income", not "hospital secretary". Yet here we are.
Also, in many professions, "production" is multi-level. Who is the producer in a hospital, the nurse, or the hospital manager? Yet I can assure you nurses, as vital as they are, get fixed term contracts or get fired all the time. Same with teachers and academics.
So, no, the system rewarding the hospital manager and the university deans for the "vital" work of their nurses and teachers isn't "cleverly recursive"; it's exactly the failure mode both you and OP speak of, except it's somehow both systemic and personal, depending in what angle you're looking at.
Say that to farmers struggling to make meets end. We managed to make production of vital goods so efficient, that we don't need as many producers, so they are becoming not-producers-of-vital-goods en masse. So, now that they don't produce vital goods, they can safely go into destitution?
> only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically
Individual level failure means individual is to blame. But UBI is meant to give them safety net, so that when they fail, they don't go into destitution.
> So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure
Nice, but when you get rid of 20% of people and move them into "not usable, you won't eat now" category, each single one for personal reasons, then another 20% for other personal reason, you have to train them somehow. You could of course say that they should retrain on their own, but that's currently done typically after several years of giving them too low prices, so they used up their safety reserve.
> On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live
The people who feel they have the skills for this. Just like right now.
> and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically,
We have enough people to make food. We have to make artifical limits on how much food they produce or they would flood the market with food. We pay them to keep their fields unused for some time, kept in reserve. UBI would just be a guarantee that they won't go into destitution when they can't sell the food at good price.
> “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming”
I think birth rate might decrease even more. As people become more and more comfortable and stopped having to work as much as previously, they don't need children to secure their future.
> We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
I agree we should. Who would do it? Who would pay for such characterisation? Maybe you should try to do it? A lot of people think about it already.
If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the general populace will be the failure that you're saying can't happen. This seems inevitable without an intervening event to reset things.
With that said, I don't think your concerns are unreasonable, and I'm not sure UBI by itself could solve anything. At a minimum price controls or government administering of food and housing would be necessary to keep prices from rising in response to the influx of cash everyone would receive, but the problem of people not working does seem like a big potential issue.
I believe there have been studies to the contrary, but those studies necessarily miss the universal part of ubi, so they don't have the negative feedback loops that could spring up in a real implementation.
If we positively mandate full reserve free banking with no central bank and no state issued currency, that would eliminate I think all of the banking corruption I have in mind. I’m not sure about usury under the classical definition, if we run into problems still that might have to go too (though I do see downsides to innovation because loans are like crack cocaine for innovation, complete with the overdose deaths).
Lobbying is more difficult to make illegal because influence is much more nuanced than first-order* banking and influence will route around basically any protections given enough time. But today we don’t even try to make it illegal. Perhaps a meta-scheme where the lobbying rules periodically change according to some secret sequence could disrupt things enough to make it difficult to route around.
* First order in the sense that much of the complexity comes from playing with the primitives we have today and not from the primitives themselves, and the primitives I prefer are much clunkier to play with.
On the surface, they sound the same
> Current mode...
Or, ya know, save money or get a job. Failure rarely leads to homeless and starvation. Most people are far more resilient than that, the current US homeless rate is ~1/500
If we need/want UBI to be a thing, educating people on the difference is going to part of the effort and debate
If you don't trust people enough to do that, then you don't trust them enough to do UBI.
I think people working in agriculture and in the industry includes people who clean there.
Once you have control of the money to give out, literally every way of redistribution is as good as UBI. If you calculate how much money would be required for a reasonable UBI.. then imagine what could be done if that money was spent on communal, humane, services then it would be able to revolutionise the world every bit as much.
Everyone will agree with this, but it isn't even close to enough. Or do you mean end all high revenue companies as well?
Like, haven't got your 22nd cocksuckie virus booster? Get lost and die from hunger.
That's not a practical answer but it's my two cents.
I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version
If one's visitors are gamers, perhaps one might use gaming payment providers to sell an "supporter badge"? But that's perhaps be pushing their envelope.
If one's visitors are from the "rapidly-developing world", with well-adopted candybar-scale micropayment systems - China, India, Indonesia, Brasil, Kenya, SK, Sweden... hmm. Direct access from elsewhere seems still very limited, but perhaps one might use a global payment gateway like Adyen? My impression is transaction cost is more than $0.10 but less than $1.
In the "less-rapidly-developing world", X.com has been working towards a similar superapp with Visa for the US. The Visa/MC duopoly seems to have shifted from its years of preventing US micropayments, to something like "maybe 2030-ish".
It would be more about covering the cost than about making someone rich, but I think that is what most of the people who build stuff care about. Sadly, I don't know a service yet that offers this model.
The whole "subsidize for other visitors" concept is weaker than "pay <creator>".
Maybe a bad example, but tipping in a restaurant is an example?
This person doesn't just do that though. Right after the part where you've uploaded your own examples, there's a reminder: if you had fun buy me a coffee.
Though this is slightly offset by the fact that they state you have 2 free trials and then you pay. It's a complete incentives mismatch if you ask for coffee for something you explicitly presented to them as a marketing offer. Though, I suppose leaving the donation option on doesn't hurt in this case either.
In my experience, donationware works best when the donation request is polite, personal, uncoercive, unintrusive, and comes at a moment of surprise right after you would have seen actual value from a product, and from a product that has not otherwise asked you for any money so far (including showing you ads).
KeepassXC Android is a good example: the guy asks for a beer during octoberfest :)
If the demand continues after this blip I’ll try add ads or make real payments work.
1. Those who just want to see more examples.
2. Those who actually want to use this as a tool. (Even though it may have started as a bit of a gag.)
By having a gallery you'd save a lot of needless tokens so that you can satisfy user 1.
By having a paid actual SAAS option you can get $$ from user 2.
By showing a few tasteful ads as well as buy me a coffee you can get income from user 1.
Is there a better way? Asking for myself, also.