[mizay7]

I really like her commentary and glad she is getting more attention.

I think the issue is the magic of free and the irrationality of humans. Free creates irrational responses. People will use a lot of a thing if its free even if its bad rather than dealing with the perceived loss of paying 2 cents for something better.

So as long as no one figures out how to make micro-transactions cognitively easier than free stuff then free tech will prevail. And payment will be harvested via information and attention.

The dystopia we are building is not because we want free stuff, but because we are too lazy to make the choice about spending 2 cents.

I am trying to change that with oalrus.com but we shall see if i mange to build a large enough of a list of alpha users to give the network a chance.

[invalidOrTaken]

I don't think people are averse to 2-cent payments. I can imagine a scenario where I regularly spend money on the Internet besides Amazon. I don't know how much I've spent on Steam, for instance.

What people are guarding against is optimization. I don't mind paying 2 cents. I do mind paying 2 cents and then becoming marked for upsell and becoming subject to a full-fledged marketing campaign, or having some recurring 2-cent payment be changed to $20. Cognitively, I know that I am no match for the kilonerds out there trying to extract money from my wallet. So the only move is not to play.

[mizay7]

Fear of uncertainty makes sense and something I haven't thought about too much in this project. Sad that the modern net has created such a 'gotchya' impression. I would think that this comes from everyone promising free but actually desperately looking for revenue somewhere.

I feel like this is solvable with smart policies and good institutional culture. One thought that I had was that a user commits to depositing say $2 to use for micro payments for the month, but doesn't actually get charged until the end of the month. This delays the pain point of spending money (thereby reducing it) but also may minimize the sensation of risks.

[dasyatidprime]

There's a secondary common-knowledge/coordination effect here, though, it's not just “individuals being lazy”: if someone gets antsy about whether ey will look awkward in front of eir friends for making the assumption that they will be willing to spend on something, then that feeds into the feedback spiral of “I don't really believe it'll work and I feel reluctant and don't want to tell people about this in case it's uncool”.

A colleague of mine said that this suggested what was really necessary was to allow simple prosocial spending that wasn't too in-your-face, along the lines of how it's possible for one person to rent a game server for several people. Less individual anxiety over spending, since among other things there's enough of a social script for that.

[mizay7]

Yeh, this is one of the reasons network effects are so powerful and so effective market capture. Anybody who wants to push against that is going to have to spend a lot of time and resource getting enough users to create even an echo of a network effect and overcome those individual insecurities that you mention.