Mastodawn

Literally the only thing I want from the internet is some way to put €100 into my browser wallet and when I navigate to a paywall site they can prompt me and say “give us €.50 and we’ll show you the article without ads or a login” and I hit yes and then I read the goddamn article.

I don’t know if this is a W3C thing or a browser thing. I have no idea how to make such a thing happen. But there must be a way to pay people for stuff they put on the internet that doesn’t involve me signing up for 60 different services.

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Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug ah

so this was investigated heavily about 25 years ago. many people put it forward very seriously as the answer to how to fund independent authors and artists online.

the short answer to why it never happened is that payment processors have a lot of transaction fees that would drastically outweigh the payment itself, and neither payment processors nor financial reporting laws make it easy on the recipient's end to deal with a very large number of very small payments.

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Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug to some extent the reason it failed was also that browser vendors had no interest in it*, and effectively vetoed it

but browsers being interested isn't enough to make it happen. there have to be real answers to the actual payment processing problems.

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Irenes (many)

@matdevdug * the thing Brave does, today, is more in the nature of a cryptography-themed pyramid scheme rather than a real way to compensate anyone for their work, but we're not immersed in the details, this is just the impression we've gotten from afar. also, that didn't exist back in the day.

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Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug apologies if this is stuff you knew, it just seemed like it might be helpful context

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matdevdug May 16

@ireneista No it’s a totally valid point. I have worked quite a bit in credit card processing and payment processing in general so this is definitely a known issue to me where you cannot really have micropayments.

I assumed it would work similar to Google Ad Network in that the user would put in €100 or whatever and then a third party using JS or ideally a browser API would allow for a person to pay €.10 or whatever to see a page and then the mediator would initiate a wire transfer when the amount crossed a threshold where it made sense to pay them out.

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Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug yeah.... we're an ex-google privacy person (the company is our abusive alma mater, but at one time we believed it made sense to fight for change from within the system)

while we were there, we took an interest in this topic because the similarity did strike us

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Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug but the answer is what you'd think: there's a single company counting up all the ad impressions and paying them out at the end of the month (or whenever). each advertiser who pays money is paying a significant chunk, and each publisher who receives it is, too, and meanwhile it sits in the ad network's giant bank account, earning interest for them.

not really compatible with grassroots options.

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Irenes (many)May 16

@matdevdug with that said, liberapay is trying to be... not a micropayment option, but at least their own aggregator in that respect. it's possible it'll work out.