Another attempt at monetisation, just like spill-app.com. Somebody start making a list, we are going to see a lot of “Twitter alternatives” in the near future.
Clever use of "points" to obscure the actual spending. But I am skeptical of micropayments ever working. It's been tried so many times, in so many variations, but never taken off. I don't see any obvious secular shifts that would mean that its time has come. Including Twitter's gyrations.
I'm sensitised to this topic because I once tried another spin on "pay us upfront and we'll sprinkle out your money to publishers". Heck, I even had the idea of using an invite list to create an air of exclusivity. But people before me thought of it. And people after me thought of it, including well-funded giants like Google. Where has this gone to date? Approximately nowhere.
The rise of the paid newsletter and the prominence of the paywall leads me to be a little less cynical about the prospect of micropayments. A decade ago, when Flattr was prominent, the culture around paying for things on the internet was very different. I was initially excited about Flattr but grew disillusioned with it, and every iteration on the idea since has, as you say, never taken off...
...but more recently, the last year or so, I have actively thought, when coming across a paywalled article, "I wish I could just pay for this article". I have subscriptions to the places I read every day, but it's a hard sell to start a new expensive subscription cold.
I am quite optimistic about the future of micropayments as an upsell strategy into paid subscriptions. Essentially, if I can pay for paywalled articles individually, and I start to consume a few per month, it'll make much more financial sense to start paying for a subscription than it would to keep going through these micropayments every time.
I agree that the "sprinkle a little money towards the sites you used in the month" remains pointless. Paying $10/month for a few pennies to go to all the different sites I've visited in the month is far less compelling than paying $1 per article for 10 articles in a month I wanted to read. I haven't used Post yet, but I am quite optimistic, I think they have a real shot at making this model work.
> The rise of the paid newsletter and the prominence of the paywall leads me to be a little less cynical about the prospect of micropayments.
I don't think of these as micropayments, whether the user-must-click-each-time or service-calculates-distribution types. These are bog standard subscriptions to a single publisher.
The idea of upselling to subscription is interesting, but a big part of how broad publications like a newspaper work is to bundle a number of things together that different audiences want into a single economic unit that can charged at a higher price. A user who can get only and exactly what they wanted at a lower price will do so.
What I believed when I started was that there was an in-between audience who weren't served - those who wouldn't subscribe but who would pay for individual consumption if it was frictionless. I did a lot of work on how that could be achieved across multiple websites without needing a central aggregator (even to the point of obtaining a patent on part of the technology). But so many efforts, like Flattr and many others, came and went that I've come to view the whole idea as a tarpit.
I think there’s a tipping point when purchasing articles individually becomes less attractive than paying for a single subscription even if it’s possible to spend less overall.
There’s interface friction associated with making a payment (clicking a button, entering card details / authorising with Apple Pay) but there’s also decision friction: do I want to spend $1 on this article? I think if someone is buying multiple individual articles per month from a publication, and thus trusts the publication is worth reading, then a subscription offers a compelling benefit — no more thinking, just reading!
Subscriptions can also offer other benefits: as you say, bundling is a way to increase perceived value, but it can also increase real value, if the publication understands the needs of their readers and bundles valuable things. Access to content earlier is a very common pattern employed across media subscriptions nowadays!
>I agree that the "sprinkle a little money towards the sites you used in the month" remains pointless.
This was kind of the idea between Brave Browser's "earn BAT, auto-contribute to sites you use automatically" concept, and I actually admired the effort. I think people just saw it as being able to earn free crypto, though. It barely gets used for stuff like tipping, auto-tipping, etc.
> But I am skeptical of micropayments ever working.
It works fine with sites like fansly and onlyfans. 'creators' lock their posts behind a subscription or a tip, you tip and get access.
Reddit has the same, with awards (although they keep it all for themselves) Twitch has the same with points etc, it's here.
All you do is top up your wallet, scroll your feed, see a post you like, press the tip button send them a $1 (virtual points from your account to theirs) then they can cash out.
The hardest thing is making sure you're not falling afoul of the money laundering laws or accidentally financing 'terrorism'.
Hopefully we see more of it on the mainstream platforms, but on other platforms it's been here for years already.
you dont think someone would, given the opportunity, throw some cash to an author who strongly supports their own biases? dont some people buy books just to that, never intending to even read them?
> The hardest thing is making sure you're not falling afoul of the money laundering laws or accidentally financing 'terrorism'.
i.e. complying with compulsory government regulation enacted for those ends, which is a huge barrier to entry.
for example, the platform can't commingle funds in a single bank account and use accounting to keep track of who is owned which beans. they have to set up separate bank accounts for each user!
They launched their beta way too early. It's missing a lot of features, it feels clunky -- like I can actually feel the API calls when I'm scrolling. I think there is a Twitter killer in the pipeline, but doubt it's going to be Post.
It'll be a Twitter clone with one extra killer feature... and dark mode.
I noticed that comment threads on posts are just using a third-party saas commenting platform that still has their branding (OpenWeb) on it. That being said they want to be in market ASAP to capitalize on the market sentiment and rushing a bit is forgivable.
I never thought about it. Users do indeed hate them. I've never participated in a modern micropayment and intuitively _do_ hate them. He's also right that it doesn't matter why, but I really want to know -- lol. Maybe it's just the added friction between me and content I might have some blanket subscription for?
bc we've been conditioned to expect everything online for free: email, news, social sharing, etc. its been subsidized by investors and access to our "data".
its also bad design/marketing. i hate paywalls, too. but i'd gladly throw a bone here or there if given the opportunity, just like hitting an upvote button. so dont call it a payment or implement a payment system; call it something else that conveys gratuity/gift/support/tip/whatever
It’s the anxiety of having my time metered, combined with the life experience of having been poor enough that even a few dollars here and there really matters.
there is a market for supporting content creators. most people dont want or cant afford to pay. of those who do and can, many would prefer to do so ad-hoc (vs subscription). offer them that power and i think you'd be surprised. just like a waitress who receives a $100 tip.
Aren't there examples against this nowadays? E-Scooters are payed by the minute, even though not provided by monopolists. Mobile games with in-app purchases are very similar to micro-payments, too and power a whole industry.
The monopolist examples, like mobile and power companies don't translate well, as these companies provide services, that are continuously consumed, vs. one of purchases. For these companies, micro payments maybe don't make sense. But for lot's of other one of content, micro payments seem far superior over subscriptions.
To me, it feels, the article proves, that micropayments are crap if used for the wrong kind of products...
By the reasoning of the article, we would probably say that e-scooters are a new market, and will trend towards subscriptions as the market matures and simplifies.
Still relevant 20 years later. People like predictably (it’s easier to budget) and use less of metered services. Hence bandwidth (phones and wired internet) went to bulk buys. There’s good data that people “irrationally” over purchase in bulk vs metered services (buy more minutes than they need) to avoid an unexpected cost.
Also with things like news you don’t even know if it’s I’ll be worth it until you’ve already paid.
In addition the tollbooth infrastructure is expensive. just look at how much of the old phone networks — hardware and bandwidth — was devoted to metering and payment.
So: bad for users and bad for business. Only really sustainable in a few early situations.
Prescient. I wish for their success because my eyeballs sell for $0.01 per view in ad subsidy, and I would rather directly pay for the subsidy myself and skip the ads. But reflecting on the twenty years since this was written, I'd say he was on the money.
Sidebar, at $0.50 per view it definitely would not work, but I figure at $0.01 a typical user would run up a tab of about $2-5/mo, which is small enough that unpredictability is not a big deal.
What is the difference for a journalist between writing articles that users pay $X for each view and articles that earn $Y in advertising for each click?
Both ends up creating incentives for click-bait. Get users to read (aka pay) for as many articles as possible without any regard to any meat in those articles.
Short term thinking will always win in companies run by hired guns.
I'm glad to see competition. With the winner take all nature of social media, innovation is very difficult.
Has the network effect of Twitter been seriously disrupted at this point? I know a lot of folks who disagree with Musk claimed to be leaving for mastodon. I'm curious if there are trustworthy engagement numbers available.
I actually believe this (probably the only thing I believe Elon says). As a user of both Mastodon and Twitter, and a solid Elon-hater, I’ve been wanting to leave Twitter ever since he took over. But it is simply impossible to look away from this garbage fire. Every day I log on to twitter hoping to see the flames go up, and I simply can’t stop it, no matter how hard I try. I believe this to be true for more people.
Although, if this is the main driver for the increased numbers, then it is hardly sustainable. There is only so much fuel a garbage fire can consume before it dies out.
Despite restoring some of the banned Twitter accounts, Twitter is still throwing a "Warning: this link may be unsafe" alert for Mastodon links, which seems to be a sign that they're afraid of people leaving and trying to stop them. Twitter was/is also preventing people from adding their Mastodon handle to their Twitter profile.
> Has the network effect of Twitter been seriously disrupted at this point?
My feeling as a long-time user is "no". That being said, we know Musk has no problem "spinning the truth", so as you imply it seems unlikely that we'll ever get trustworthy metrics again unless Musk were to allow independent auditors.
However, conversations have become boringly "meta" (lots of hot takes this morning about Musk unbanning everyone he banned), I'm getting tons of spam (where I got almost none in the years before the Musk-quisition), and the quality of the advertising I'm seeing has plummeted.
The primary thing Musk has going for him right now is that there's nowhere to go.
> Has the network effect of Twitter been seriously disrupted at this point?
In my niche of Apple platform software developers, it's definitely been disrupted. The migration from Twitter to Mastodon has been accelerating, especially in the past few days. A lot of abandoned Twitter accounts.
A significant number of these people had been on Twitter for over a decade.
Overall, it's not the total user base that matters, it's the prolific tweeters who matter, because most Twitter users are quiet consumers of tweets. There's nothing to consume if the tweeters leave... except Musk's own tweets, if you're into that.
Some of the people abandoning Twitter include developers of 3rd party Twitter clients and browser extensions, so that's going to matter a bit to the general user base. Also, alienating software developers isn't going to be great for any future hiring that Twitter may need, if it ever crawls back from the financial brink.
So the screeching voices of the minority techies that have 'left' with the remaining 200M+ daily actives normal users, still on Twitter every day then.
This so-called 'disruption' has been greatly exaggerated and has hardly made a dent on Twitter.
I think it's best to see Twitter as a network of networks. Some of those networks have moved (or at least lost enough members to Mastodon/Tumblr/wherever that the network effects are no longer strong for Twitter). Others not.
I'm an academic in computational political communication. I wasn't fond of Twitter before the move, but was there largely because my professional network was. Most or all of them are now on Mastodon, so the network effect driving me there has gone (and I've cheerfully left). My wife is an author, and book Twitter is mostly still there. Ditto the journalists.
I mean, my part of the job world was never on LinkedIn - while for others it was indispensable. This feels like the same.
Nostr is another protocol that is growing rapidly especially since Jack Dorsey discovered it a few days ago and is pushing it hard on twitter. He even made a 15 btc donation to its development fund.
Nostr is a more sane version of activitypub where your identity is just a public key and not dependant on any server, no signup required. Due to this it also natively support BTC payments and micropayments through the lightning network
To me, both being plugged by Jack Dorsey and taking cryptocurrency donations are indicators that this probably isn’t worth paying attention to. Anything that doesn’t start from a position of interoperability with ActivityPub is going to be an also-ran.
Yeah I don’t know why they did that. It makes it look like the network is not a generic social network but a community-fueled news site. But maybe it is? But then it’s not a Twitter alternative. That is a popular but still mere subset of Twitter.
I see people arguing that micropayments can't work.
I'll say I eagerly want to pay for interesting articles across a number of newspapers/blogs/magazines instead of paying for subscriptions to a few of them.
I really liked the original blendle, but didn't use it much because it didn't have the stuff I wanted.
I recommend thinking BIGGER than just micropayments for articles.
- Publish alongside the article the amount of $$$ support the post.news has collected for that author to-date. Provides transparency (perceived "relevance" by the readership).
- Create a currency, and interest groups/areas: individual users can pool their monies to support a pool of investigative journalists to focus on a topic area
52 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadI'm sensitised to this topic because I once tried another spin on "pay us upfront and we'll sprinkle out your money to publishers". Heck, I even had the idea of using an invite list to create an air of exclusivity. But people before me thought of it. And people after me thought of it, including well-funded giants like Google. Where has this gone to date? Approximately nowhere.
...but more recently, the last year or so, I have actively thought, when coming across a paywalled article, "I wish I could just pay for this article". I have subscriptions to the places I read every day, but it's a hard sell to start a new expensive subscription cold.
I am quite optimistic about the future of micropayments as an upsell strategy into paid subscriptions. Essentially, if I can pay for paywalled articles individually, and I start to consume a few per month, it'll make much more financial sense to start paying for a subscription than it would to keep going through these micropayments every time.
I agree that the "sprinkle a little money towards the sites you used in the month" remains pointless. Paying $10/month for a few pennies to go to all the different sites I've visited in the month is far less compelling than paying $1 per article for 10 articles in a month I wanted to read. I haven't used Post yet, but I am quite optimistic, I think they have a real shot at making this model work.
I don't think of these as micropayments, whether the user-must-click-each-time or service-calculates-distribution types. These are bog standard subscriptions to a single publisher.
The idea of upselling to subscription is interesting, but a big part of how broad publications like a newspaper work is to bundle a number of things together that different audiences want into a single economic unit that can charged at a higher price. A user who can get only and exactly what they wanted at a lower price will do so.
What I believed when I started was that there was an in-between audience who weren't served - those who wouldn't subscribe but who would pay for individual consumption if it was frictionless. I did a lot of work on how that could be achieved across multiple websites without needing a central aggregator (even to the point of obtaining a patent on part of the technology). But so many efforts, like Flattr and many others, came and went that I've come to view the whole idea as a tarpit.
There’s interface friction associated with making a payment (clicking a button, entering card details / authorising with Apple Pay) but there’s also decision friction: do I want to spend $1 on this article? I think if someone is buying multiple individual articles per month from a publication, and thus trusts the publication is worth reading, then a subscription offers a compelling benefit — no more thinking, just reading!
Subscriptions can also offer other benefits: as you say, bundling is a way to increase perceived value, but it can also increase real value, if the publication understands the needs of their readers and bundles valuable things. Access to content earlier is a very common pattern employed across media subscriptions nowadays!
This was kind of the idea between Brave Browser's "earn BAT, auto-contribute to sites you use automatically" concept, and I actually admired the effort. I think people just saw it as being able to earn free crypto, though. It barely gets used for stuff like tipping, auto-tipping, etc.
It works fine with sites like fansly and onlyfans. 'creators' lock their posts behind a subscription or a tip, you tip and get access.
Reddit has the same, with awards (although they keep it all for themselves) Twitch has the same with points etc, it's here.
All you do is top up your wallet, scroll your feed, see a post you like, press the tip button send them a $1 (virtual points from your account to theirs) then they can cash out.
The hardest thing is making sure you're not falling afoul of the money laundering laws or accidentally financing 'terrorism'.
Hopefully we see more of it on the mainstream platforms, but on other platforms it's been here for years already.
i.e. complying with compulsory government regulation enacted for those ends, which is a huge barrier to entry.
for example, the platform can't commingle funds in a single bank account and use accounting to keep track of who is owned which beans. they have to set up separate bank accounts for each user!
It'll be a Twitter clone with one extra killer feature... and dark mode.
its also bad design/marketing. i hate paywalls, too. but i'd gladly throw a bone here or there if given the opportunity, just like hitting an upvote button. so dont call it a payment or implement a payment system; call it something else that conveys gratuity/gift/support/tip/whatever
The monopolist examples, like mobile and power companies don't translate well, as these companies provide services, that are continuously consumed, vs. one of purchases. For these companies, micro payments maybe don't make sense. But for lot's of other one of content, micro payments seem far superior over subscriptions.
To me, it feels, the article proves, that micropayments are crap if used for the wrong kind of products...
Also with things like news you don’t even know if it’s I’ll be worth it until you’ve already paid.
In addition the tollbooth infrastructure is expensive. just look at how much of the old phone networks — hardware and bandwidth — was devoted to metering and payment.
So: bad for users and bad for business. Only really sustainable in a few early situations.
Sidebar, at $0.50 per view it definitely would not work, but I figure at $0.01 a typical user would run up a tab of about $2-5/mo, which is small enough that unpredictability is not a big deal.
Both ends up creating incentives for click-bait. Get users to read (aka pay) for as many articles as possible without any regard to any meat in those articles.
Short term thinking will always win in companies run by hired guns.
That feels like a bad sign for this model.
Has the network effect of Twitter been seriously disrupted at this point? I know a lot of folks who disagree with Musk claimed to be leaving for mastodon. I'm curious if there are trustworthy engagement numbers available.
No idea if similar metrics exist for Mastodon.
I mean, of course?
Although, if this is the main driver for the increased numbers, then it is hardly sustainable. There is only so much fuel a garbage fire can consume before it dies out.
Monthly Active Users 2.1M+9%
Servers Up 8.8K+46%
Data collected by crawling all accessible Mastodon servers on Dec 15, 2022.
https://joinmastodon.org/about
Despite restoring some of the banned Twitter accounts, Twitter is still throwing a "Warning: this link may be unsafe" alert for Mastodon links, which seems to be a sign that they're afraid of people leaving and trying to stop them. Twitter was/is also preventing people from adding their Mastodon handle to their Twitter profile.
My feeling as a long-time user is "no". That being said, we know Musk has no problem "spinning the truth", so as you imply it seems unlikely that we'll ever get trustworthy metrics again unless Musk were to allow independent auditors.
However, conversations have become boringly "meta" (lots of hot takes this morning about Musk unbanning everyone he banned), I'm getting tons of spam (where I got almost none in the years before the Musk-quisition), and the quality of the advertising I'm seeing has plummeted.
The primary thing Musk has going for him right now is that there's nowhere to go.
In my niche of Apple platform software developers, it's definitely been disrupted. The migration from Twitter to Mastodon has been accelerating, especially in the past few days. A lot of abandoned Twitter accounts.
A significant number of these people had been on Twitter for over a decade.
Overall, it's not the total user base that matters, it's the prolific tweeters who matter, because most Twitter users are quiet consumers of tweets. There's nothing to consume if the tweeters leave... except Musk's own tweets, if you're into that.
Some of the people abandoning Twitter include developers of 3rd party Twitter clients and browser extensions, so that's going to matter a bit to the general user base. Also, alienating software developers isn't going to be great for any future hiring that Twitter may need, if it ever crawls back from the financial brink.
This so-called 'disruption' has been greatly exaggerated and has hardly made a dent on Twitter.
This kind of comment degrades the conversation on HN. Please follow the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm an academic in computational political communication. I wasn't fond of Twitter before the move, but was there largely because my professional network was. Most or all of them are now on Mastodon, so the network effect driving me there has gone (and I've cheerfully left). My wife is an author, and book Twitter is mostly still there. Ditto the journalists.
I mean, my part of the job world was never on LinkedIn - while for others it was indispensable. This feels like the same.
Nostr is a more sane version of activitypub where your identity is just a public key and not dependant on any server, no signup required. Due to this it also natively support BTC payments and micropayments through the lightning network
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
Nostr is now on my radar. And I think it’s great because it lets me address the primary issue in social media today: identity management.
If it was signed by my public key, it’s me.
P.s: do you know of any desktop rss readers that are also nostr capable?
Cli preferred.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 (11 months ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 (22 days ago)
1. Loads of friction
2. Nasty surprises in credit card statements
I'll say I eagerly want to pay for interesting articles across a number of newspapers/blogs/magazines instead of paying for subscriptions to a few of them.
I really liked the original blendle, but didn't use it much because it didn't have the stuff I wanted.
- Publish alongside the article the amount of $$$ support the post.news has collected for that author to-date. Provides transparency (perceived "relevance" by the readership).
- Create a currency, and interest groups/areas: individual users can pool their monies to support a pool of investigative journalists to focus on a topic area
what others am I missing .. ?