Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pipo234 1089 days ago
I'd pay a little if we could get rid of the pop ups and cookie banners, advertisements and click bait content. But after 30 years we're still missing the infrastructure for micro payments.

For news sites and netflix we now have subscriptions shielded by paywals, which really is incompatible with hyperlinked sites or search engines. Even if you subscribed to 1000 services, the experience would probably be horrible. The internet was designed to be free, but evidently that's not a good business model if you want to make a living.

1 comments

> But after 30 years we're still missing the infrastructure for micro payments.

Sad but true. The closest we have to a solution right now is PressReader, which is just too expensive in my opinion at $30 per month.

Micro payments only make sense if the intrinsic transaction costs are (near) zero. Like reaching for your wallet to pick a coin to give to a homeless person.

With trusted third parties or block chains, the transaction costs are unfortunately much, much higher, especially initially without proper scales economics.

It could be as simple for the user as a button in your web browser to donate or pay for the site currently open in your tab. And a third party intermediary that once a month collects payment/donations and distributes. The problem with Visa/MC is the minimum transaction fee of 10-25c

But a lot of work and planning would be needed to get anywhere with such an idea.