[dynm]

There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And in practice, the answers are often garbage, and I have to pay anyway. I find this annoying, but--to my surprise--only very mildly annoying. This has made me much more open-minded about micropayments for news / articles.

[contravariant]

There's a particular part in the discussion that rubs me the wrong way (which is more about micropayments as alternative to ads, rather than micropayments themselves)

It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments.

But I don't like the way ads are presented as inevitable. Usually in some alarmist fashion listing all the stuff that would work should this revenue cease.

Ads are a way for the incumbent to seek rent, the eventual return on investment after destroying all alternatives.

So don't complain to me what will happen when I decline to download ads over _my_ network, send tracking from _my_ devices, show them on _my_ screens. When people start listing the giants that will topple the only word that crosses my mind is

Good.

[zeta0134]

The irritating thing to me here is that I actually don't mind the concept of advertising. Mostly it's the implementation. Newspaper ads don't bug me one bit, because they're not physically capable of moving, animating, dancing, and trying to get my attention. They're not physically capable of tracking my habits and reporting them back to the mothership. They're just... there. Passive. Occasionally interesting, or at least pleasantly designed.

If internet advertising was more like newspaper advertising, I wouldn't feel quite so compelled to go out of my way to block it. But no, someone somewhere along the way decided it had to be actively distracting, and track those impressions, and the industry just can't help itself. It's rotten to the core.

[wolvoleo]

They didn't bug me in the 90s but 3 decades of deeply annoying internet ads have kinda made me allergic to them.

I don't think I'll ever stop using an adblocker. Even if ads would become less annoying or if it would become illegal to use an adblocker or something.

[nabbed]

100% agree!

The other day I was thinking how pleasant it was to read a newspaper (26 years ago) compared to reading the news online today.

With a newspaper, the paragraph you are currently reading doesn't suddenly jump out of view just because some ad finally loaded or was replaced by a different sized ad. The ads were static and so inoffensive back then, but they still made the newspapers lots of money.

There are downsides to newspapers, of course: they are unwieldy on the train, they kill trees, and they get out-of-date really fast.

If some decent publication could replicate the good parts of a newspaper for a modern tablet device ($0.50 or whatever per issue, the ads are static images and never replaced after the page is loaded, and no jumping content), I think I would pay.

[nicoburns]

It's more expensive than you suggest you are looking for, but the financial times does this pretty well.

[dylan604]

Magazines on the other hand could get annoying, especially with the scratch-n-sniff perfume/cologne ads.

Otherwise, I agree with the bad thing about ads is adTech and not ads themselves. The internet just allowed our worst selves to run rampant with the obvious result coming to fruition.

[jstrong]

I don't know, man, glossy magazine ads were glamorous. sure there was stupid stuff, but the comparison between the "one weird trick" era and magazine ads of someone looking cool so you have a positive impression with some brand name is pretty stark.

[HoldOnAMinute]

Anyone who visited a Wendy's in the 1980s or 1990s knows that newspaper ads can also make for interesting tabletop decorations

[SllX]

You gotta punch the monkey though! Isn’t that fun?!

But no, that is how we got here. Internet ads were novel until they were just irritating.

[vladms]

But do you think the concept of advertising is the best solution to the problem it tries to solve? I have serious doubts.

Sure, 100 years ago you had no other way to make something known, but today with everybody having a smartphone there might be other ways. I always would like to see reviews of stuff from my immediate network of friends (or, let's say 2-3 connections) - wouldn't that be much better? Of course, the whole ad industry will have zero interest to promote something like this, where they loose control and the process might be actually efficient.

[zeta0134]

Sorta depends on how you define the concept. A sign on the side of a storefront is definitely marketing. If I walk into a department store, every product on the shelf is wrapped in advertising, from its packaging to the brand name to the picture of what the product is for. When I visit Amazon, and start searching for something to buy, every single thing that comes up could be thought of as an ad for itself, since otherwise I wouldn't be able to find it in the first place.

These are contextually relevant ads. Of course they are, right? The task is buying stuff. That's the time, and the place. The best time, really. My wallet is out and I'm ready to go with the purchase.

If it's a little hard for me to discover that a product exists, so that I know to seek it out, I think that's okay. We could do with more curation and less firehose-of-attention in that department. Needing to coordinate those sponsorships ahead of time should act as a stronger filter. The newspaper knowing which ad it is running alongside today's article might not have been such a bad idea. The ones that cheapen out and print nonsense damage their reputation in the process, right?

[bonoboTP]

Why would ads go away just because you pay? Print newspapers and magazines have had ads forever and they cost money. Even expensive glossy magazines like National Geographic have full page ads, half page ads, etc.

There is no natural law that ads will go away. Ads will only disappear if their presence would make the company lose more customers than they gain on ads. Ads make them money. If people don't mind it so much to abandon the service/website, there will be ads. Publications are businesses and want to maximize profits. They don't just want to cover some fixed ongoing costs, like hosting and journalist salaries. As a business they use the available tools to make more profits. There is no "enough" in business.

[jdejean]

Exactly, we see this play out clearly with streaming apps. Disney sells a subscription to remove ads, then one day they change their mind and now you only see “less ads” and they introduce an even more expensive plan that removes ads. The behavior should be criminal yet every major streaming app does this.

These companies like to pretend ads are the pro-consumer approach when in reality they’d much rather scale through advertising than anything else. They get to increase revenue without touching acquisition cost. The only loser is the poor chump trying to watch their favorite TV show.

[dd8601fn]

Prime is worse.

Pay for the service. Then pay more to remove ads. But then a massive amount of their catalog remains “only with ads.” And then they pack half the usable screen with media that must be bought and titles that require add-on subscriptions.

It’s a real cesspool.

Hulu does a lot of this garbage too, but not quite as obnoxiously.

[jstrong]

I feel like the less tolerance I have for ads (as time goes on), the more desperate they get in trying increasingly aggressive ways of making you watch ads. I'm never watching ads again, ever! I'm willing to pay, but not with my time for your terrible, horrendous, bullshit ads!

[hn_acc1]

True, but also, businesses have used "coupons" for a long time. I saw one article where this was described as "selling the same product at multiple tiers".

eg. if you're rich, you don't bother with coupons (in general) - your time is more valuable than clipping the coupon and remembering to take it. if you're middle class, you use the coupon to feel like you're getting a deal, but if you forget, oh well. if you're lower class, you wait for a sale and then use the coupon to be able to afford it at all.

Similar with ads - if you won't let me access your site without showing me ads (even with an adblocker) - I really don't need your product that badly. Sell to those who have a lot of spare attention or willpower to look past your ads.

I don't mean I click on ads - EVER - but they're distracting. VERY distracting. I mean, the few times I've had to use yahoo mail from a browser without an ad blocker, it was an unbelievably bad experience. (yes, I still use yahoo. I got at least one of those accounts right around the time "BackRub" was renamed "Google")

[michaelt]

When people are trying to justify ads, they often lean on "our servers cost $X per month and we have Y journalists paid $Z per month, therefore we need revenue from ads" which makes it sound like they need to raise a fixed, finite amount.

That sounds much more persuasive than "our billionaire owner paid a lot of money for this for-profit business, and he'd really like a return on his investment"

But you're right, of course - the fact someone pays a lot of money for something doesn't mean it won't be plastered with tawdry ads.

[kelvinjps10]

I don't mind sponsored ads that are mostly static inside the video or text. Also if creators accept sponsors that are too bad their reputation might be affected.

The only thing that can be in some cases it's influencing the content and the creator not providing genuine content because conflict of interest

[atoav]

A particular aspect of the discussion is also: What makes you trust that once micropayments are around ads will stop? Look at other services, like Netflix for example. They will happily have you pay and show you ads if they feel they can get away with it.

I am not at all against paying for journalism (I already do in many ways), but IMO, it would be best if there was a way to pay money to one place and then have it go to all journalistic media that deserves that name and has a track record of not being factually wrong multiple times per day.

Thinking about how journalism ought to be payed in this day and age also means to think about what kind of journalism we want to incentivise and which one we want to disincentivise. What we need is the kind that is factually correct and a check to the most wealthy and powerful people, organisations, companies and countries on earth. What we don't need is the kind that is captured by exactly those people, the kind that bends reality to stoke the lowest impulses etc.

With this in mind, we should think about how to design a incentive structure that makes that result benefitial, while all others are unsupported.

[rjbwork]

I don't think most people mind ads. Throw up an animated gif or a jpg banner that you serve from your domain. Nobody is blocking that.

What people dislike are mountains of javascript that track everything you do across broad swathes of the internet and then sell that to businesses and governments that are effectively engaging in mass psychological experiments on us.

[TheGRS]

Well, people legitimately hated banner ads and pop-ups. When I get linked to some small news publisher I'm often reading the article between these giant ads, sometimes I don't realize there's actually more content to an article because the ads take up so much space! I typically close those sites out and try to find what I'm looking for elsewhere.

[mrighele]

I think that most people don't really care about tracking, but the fact that often ads make their experience miserable.

You open a link, you get a full screen ad, and have to wait 10 seconds or more. When you finally can close the ad, a popup appears asking if you want to subscribe to their newsletter. you close that too. A cookie banner reminds you that they care about your privacy, that's why they share your details with 1000+ partners. When you find the hidden button to say that you don't accept finally the article appears, but the bottom half is occupied by an overlay with a video ad. All the while the page scrolls terribly because of the amount of javascript loaded.

Or, sometimes, you get ad, cookie banner and then they tell you that you have to pay to access the content.

I suspect that if people had to choose between ads without tracking and tracking without the ads, they would choose the latter.

[giantrobot]

This is exactly my problem with ads. They've turned into a spying mechanism that eats my battery, bandwidth, and privacy. Not only do the ad platforms want to track me but then sell their data to an innumerate number of "partners". I have no control or influence over how any of the data is used. I also have no meaningful way to opt out.

Clicking a link on the web is not tacit permission to endlessly surveil me. Viewing a blog post is not informed consent to be tracked. Even a cookie banner isn't informed consent.

While I never enjoyed magazine or television ads I never minded them. Some were even useful and introduced me to a product I ended up wanting/needing. They also didn't track me all over the web. I don't mind ads, I do mind surveillance.

[enaaem]

When I had my first smartphone I had dataplan for 500mb per month and that was enough to read news sites. That’s impossible now.

[airstrike]

Feels like there's an opportunity for an "ethical ads" platform

[1bpp]

For a few years in the webcomic & blog space there was Ryan North's Project Wonderful, which served unintrusive auctioned banner ads that were usually advertising another creator's genuinely interesting work; I have no problem at all seeing ads for things sincerely made by humans.

[AuthAuth]

Mozilla tried this. But the only people who want this is consumers. Advertisers want as much info as possible to target ads so would never choose this option unless heavily pressured by consumers.

[davidfischer]

Founder of EthicalAds here. In my view, this is only partially true and publishers (sites that show ads) have choices here but their power is dispersed. Advertisers will run advertising as long as it works and they will pay an amount commensurate with how well it works. If a publisher chooses to run ads without tracking, whether that's a network like ours or just buyout-the-site-this-month sponsorships, they have options as long as their audience generates value for advertisers.

That said, we 100% don't land some advertisers when they learn they can't run 3rd party tracking or even 3rd party verification.

[calebkaiser]

There is a platform called ethical ads for developer focused advertising: https://www.ethicalads.io/

[nemomarx]

does Google AdWords still exist? text only ads solves a lot of these issues

[Loughla]

My favorite forum has ads on every page. One header and one footer. Text only as a link to the site or product being advertised. The advertisers pay the site owner himself.

I've bought things from those ads because they're targeting the demographic on that site, not targeting me specifically. They're actually more relevant.

Now that's not probably sustainable, but I have to imagine that the roi for the advertisers is higher than general targeted ads. I've never even clicked on one of those except by accident.

[nemomarx]

I don't understand why more companies don't do contextual ads, yeah. Why track users all around the web when you can go to a website about cars and put in car ads, or a website about music and sell concert tickets or etc? You already know everyone on that website is interested in the topic, and the analytics would be much cheaper this way.

[tcfhgj]

Oxymoron

[akoboldfrying]

Not only news giants need revenue. Everyone producing news needs it, including any hoped-for smaller, more democratised new entrants to the industry.

Where will that revenue come from?

Should we expect high-quality journalism for free?

[contravariant]

Should people expect high quality journalism if revenue is based on the number of views?

Good journalism costs money, people should expect to pay.

Though I'd point out that publishing news is now cheaper than ever, and people were more than willing to pay for access before, so why shouldn't they be willing to pay less now?

Or perhaps more to the point, why are they _not_ willing to pay now? And is the reason something ad-based perhaps?

[akoboldfrying]

I interpreted your original post to mean that you found none of micropayments, ads or subscriptions to be acceptable. Now I have the impression that I misinterpreted you -- but I still can't tell what kind(s) of payment you would actually find acceptable.

What kind(s) of payment would you find acceptable?

[contravariant]

My preference would be free, single payment, subscription. Probably in that order.

I don't mind micropayments as a _method_ to achieve any of those, but I don't like them as a replacement for ads. And I don't accept the premise that ads should be replaced with something similar.

[akoboldfrying]

Thanks. By "single payment", do you mean one payment for lifetime access? I'm aware of a personal cloud storage provider that offers this, but I don't think it could work for news.

[charcircuit]

Those are not mutually exclusive. You can have a site that requires a subscription, includes ads, and requires a micropayment for each article read.

[SllX]

Newspapers were already bundled that way: you got national news, local news, business news, sports, the funny pages, classifieds, wire stories from AP & Reuters, etc.

Then they went onto the web and were forced to prioritize, but where the entire bundling idea falls apart is you’re suggesting that we bundle the bundles.

Here’s the harsh reality: most news is already priced appropriately for the value that it delivers to most people, and for most people, most news is worth $0.00.

I pay for the news I want to read already, both websites and podcasts, and I pay directly for it. But no matter how many New York Times or USA Today or other random news links my friends send me, or whatever else I run into on the open web when I’m checking someone’s sources, I will never pay greater than $0.00 for it. Not $0.99, $0.01, not $0.001, not even $0.0001. If I have to engage in a financial transaction just for clicking a link, then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn. Other people will do the same.

And for those rare publications that people both want to read and also are willing to pay for en masse? Stuff like the Wall Street Journal? They’re never going to devalue themselves by getting in the bundle. Even with Apple News which famously has a partnership with the WSJ specifically, they withhold their most valuable stories, the stuff that people buy the Wall Street Journal for because they’re the value drivers in any potential partnership. Almost every other publication that would stand to benefit would in effect be free-riding off the WSJ’s largesse.

[tyre]

> then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn.

I’m going to go out on a feedback shaped limb and say that demanding things like this from friends isn’t an appealing trait. If they are suggesting it to you, that’s not enough to justify 1/100th of a cent?

Brother.

Read what they send you or don’t, and by all means communicate your preferences, but saying that you’re not going to share with others in retaliation is… I mean it’s definitely a vibe!

[SllX]

Demanding your friends engage in a financial transaction with a third party is a different vibe. The reality of what would actually happen is this: if I can’t read it, I can’t read it. If I ask and they’re willing to provide it, then I’ll read it, and I would do the same with them.

But the truth is, that would grate on people, and not just with me and mine, but for everyone if we all had to engage in financial transactions to read the links that are shared with us or posted on the web. So people would just stop sharing links. I’d think twice before sending someone a link, and others would as well. We’d probably just swap to copying the whole article in another form and sharing that instead, but the extra steps would reduce the amount we would be willing to share over time cuz trading PDFs we have to generate ourselves is not as much fun as trading links.

[kelvinjps10]

There is some publications that manage this by letting paying person to share it and the other person can see it too

[SllX]

I subscribe to a couple of these already. :) It’s not micro-transactions though, it’s a feature built off a subscriber-provider relationship.

[SauntSolaire]

What if the sender covered the micro transaction on the behalf of the receiver? People might be more inclined to send what they see as micro-gifts, rather than micro-obligations.

[Paracompact]

Are you assuming the current landscape where engaging in a financial transaction, even if only for $0.01, is a tedious and unquantifiably dangerous gambit? (Sale of your info, leaking of your info, dark pattern subscription TOS's, etc.)

Or would you still hold your opinions even in a theoretical landscape where paying $0.01 is just consenting to that amount being deducted from your bank account, with no friction or danger?

[hn_acc1]

If I could EASILY click "yes" to say, pay $0.01 from a pre-filled anonymous wallet that I have to manually refill (say, in $10 increments) and there's no way to hack payment information in any way, OR to figure out what info I've paid for, that would help a LOT.

Of course, they would probably have to accept visa gift cards paid for in cash for this to actually be truly anonymous. I mean sure, I have nothing nefarious to hide - but who is to say what the current administration will decide is nefarious tomorrow? Reading too many NY Times articles, and not enough National Review articles? "You are in violation of the internet news fairness doctrine"...

[Paracompact]

Indeed this is what I was getting at. I think you're far from the only one whose market behavior would change given such technology.

This is somewhat ironic to me, given that I normally despise everything about fintech. But this seems like a product/practice that could actually change the world for the better. The closest we have is crypto wallets and that's far from perfect.

[hn_acc1]

Yeah, I wouldn't touch ANYTHING from current fintech with a 100 foot pole.

[SllX]

My stance is exactly what I said: most news is priced correctly for most people at $0.00.

If they value it at more than that, they will pay for it.

[Paracompact]

Then I don't understand the bitter line in the sand you've drawn between $0.00 and $0.0001. You could spend a whole lifetime paying this latter amount multiple times per day, and it would cost you about as much as a box of bandaids.

If you really value the information contained in these articles at $0.00, then neither would you spend that much more valuable resource—time—in order to digest it, even if it were given to you for free.

So I don't think you're hung up about the actual financial cost in this analysis. You're either like most people, who simply don't want to deal with the rigmarole of patiently providing payment info to a hundred different vendors who will act irresponsibly with your data, or you have some purely symbolic and emotional connection to the notion that you're providing exactly zero dollars and zero cents to your enemies.

[SllX]

The vast majority of the time that I read the news, it’s from a publication I pay for. They get far far more than a box of bandaids over a lifetime.

The rest can be worth my time, sometimes, under limited circumstances, but usually it isn’t. Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?

If you put a financial cost on links though, people just won’t pay. And they won’t click links. We might waste less time too, but just because something got my time doesn’t mean I’m going to also give it money for having had the privilege of my time.

[Paracompact]

> Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?

Certainly many of them are time wasters! But before you've clicked on these links, I should think they are best modeled as a random variable payout (P) as measured against the monetary (M) and temporal (T) cost of clicking and reading through them. If the expected value calculation doesn't work out (E(P) < E(M) + E(T)), this is when I say nope and don't click. If it does work out, then it works out in such a way that there is at least some very small micropayment value ε > 0 that I would (in a ideal and frictionless environment) also be willing to endure on top of the temporal cost.

What most "free" content providers decided to converge on in order to extract epsilons from consumers so that they can continue to do business is ads, rather than honest micropayments.

I would be fine with most businesses that rely on ad revenue burning to the ground. And there are a few businesses that I will go far out of my way to patronize with more-than-a-box-of-bandaids. But for the majority of the free content providers that are not steaming garbage, but are also not in the privileged group of content providers that I deeply approve of and consciously think about, then in a frictionless environment I think I would prefer that they survive off rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus.

[BikiniPrince]

I price most news sites at negative value.

[carlosjobim]

Okay, but why would newspapers looking for revenue sources concern themselves with the opinions of somebody who would never pay them no matter what circumstances? You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.

[SllX]

> You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.

A small correction: I am a potential customer, at least in the general sense. I am someone that subscribes to news publications as I already pointed out. Who I pay in any given month is not set in stone, and the news market is still somehow strangely dynamic with new options replacing old ones all the time.

But if I’m paying, then it’s a subscriber-provider relationship; not a virtual bazaar transaction made by clicking a link.

[ipaddr]

He is because they make money from ads.

I wouldn't pay .000001 cents either. If they did charge this way the amount of generated clickbait titles would surpass anything we've seen before. At least now they have to backup the clickbait title with content that causes you to stay longer for more ads with micropayments they already took your money.

[SauntSolaire]

New micro payment scheme that charges .000001 cents every time you page down. Like the old listicles that make you click into a new page for every number, but instead you have your credit card tied to your scroll wheel.

[J_Shelby_J]

There are articles that have changed my outlook and life so much that months, years, decades later I would value them in the thousands.

[landl0rd]

They didn't change most people's life, though, and/or most people's lives were changed by other articles. Publishers cannot meaningfully price-discriminate on this basis. The closest version is republishing a longer version as a book.

So, consumers are left with some amount of surplus. The horror.

[SllX]

Did you go on to write checks in the thousands to the writers or publications that produced them?

[oblio]

Worse than that, what was the percentage of these amazing articles?

[AuthAuth]

Completely disagree that news is already priced appropriately for the value it delivers to people. I dont pay for the news I read because its not valued at $10 a month for me but I still do value it. For me $2 a month is what i value it but since they dont offer that as an option I cant pay. If you're to broke to click on a link because it might cost 0.0001 cent just say so. Maybe your friends can give you a cent so you can read news for the rest of your days.

[SllX]

$2/month or $10/momth is apparently not the actual price then if you’re able to get it for $0/month.

[ipaddr]

Most people are not paying per call or paying anything. If the goal is to reduce half a million readers to a core group of thousands who will pay then this idea might work.

[salawat]

There isn't so much hate, as it's fundamentally DoA based on the financial system architecture of the United States, which creates strict liability, and a licensing requirement for digital money transmission. You do not get to opt out of that responsibility. Micropayments are therefore a pipedream that undermines all progress at making any type of AML or KYC possible, which then in turn makes fighting any type of financial crime nigh-impossible.

The entire thing is held together through third party legal fictions that do the law enforcement as a pre-req of doing business. The government, and by extension the populace, would have to accept the intractibility of chasing down criminal financial networks were any sort of micropayment framework ever able to exist outside the regulatory regime.

It's a perennial dream of the up and coming technologist, who has not been exposed to enough humanity to understand we can't have nice things. Sorry to be yet another buster of bubbles. I was you-adjacent once. Then I actually worked at a money transmitting firm. Boy, did that come with some reality checks.

[hathawsh]

Please help me understand better, because it feels like part of the problem has already been solved. Specifically, I've been told that the independent journalists that I watch on YouTube Premium receive a portion of my subscription fee. Is that not a form of micropayments? The system seems to work well enough for videos. Isn't there some way to adapt that kind of system to other media?

[yunohn]

The solution is called centralization by a middle man that takes a massive cut - eg YouTube Premium. Only Google makes real money off that, and the content creators rely on sponsors instead for their own revenue. So does it really work? I would despise a future where we solve micro transactions by giving up control to yet-another unnecessary body. Especially not even at the level of Visa or Mastercard, despite how much I dislike crypto.

[TylerE]

No, that is absolutely 100% not micropayments, as the consumer is not paying per view/article/video whatever. They're paying a fixed fee and are not metered.

[hathawsh]

Good to know. Now I think I know why micropayments for news media never took off: because people who want to read news media probably don't want to waste mental cycles on keeping track of a micropayments account. They want a set-and-forget solution with a predictable cost. If micropayments can't fit those expectations, then the market probably wants something other than the thing we're calling micropayments.

[salawat]

Goes like the following: Google/YouTube have a userbase to track accounts for; they go to a bank (licensed money transmitter, with OFAC/KYC/AML programs implemented). Google gets paid by people looking to advertise, and that money goes into Google's master account. Google's finance system translates views/impressions to money movements to creator accounts hosted at other banks (same deal, OFAC/KYC/AML program in place). The main thing is, every party that actually moves around money, operates in such a way that the entire transaction chain is followable. It's not point to point, it's hub and spoke. The hubs keep track of everything to keep the Osama Bin Laden's or Russian Oligarch's, or Cuban nationals out of the U.S. financial system.

"Micropayments" have always been something different. We technologists just figured there would be a way we could whip up some accounting software, or a spec, and allow people a way to store and transact without relying on a custodial holder, with all the extra regulation burden. Point is though, government and law enforcement don't want that, because with that, it becomes a great deal more difficult to follow the money, or to get away with things like mandating everyone report money movements over some amount to the tax authority; something easy to do when it's tacked on to the condition of maintaining your license to do business. Every money transmitter being well behaved and integrated with the state maximizes the risk for anyone attempting to utilize the financial system for illegal activity.

Ergo... What you think of as already solved isn't "micropayments". It's traditional finance in the U.S. What we refer to when we say Micropayments, is a way to store value, maintain accounts, and run point to point transactions "blessed" or recognized by the world et al without an intermediary.

[mvc]

> The hubs keep track of everything to keep the Osama Bin Laden's or Russian Oligarch's, or Cuban nationals out of the U.S. financial system.

Yeah I don't think that worked:

https://marker.medium.com/how-russian-oligarchs-stow-away-th...

[salawat]

Nope! That's the fun part! All the misery from the downsides, none of the upside! But imagine how much worse it could be! /s

There's a reason I'm doing anything possible to avoid going back into finance. I never developed the knack to just sit back quietly doing stupid things that don't work for the purpose everyone says it's for.

[pzmarzly]

Decentralized or direct P2P micropayments are unlikely to work, true. But why are there so few attempts at centralized micropayments providers? The only success stories I see in the space are GitHub Sponsors and LiberaPay, where their entire thing is aggregating payments together (so you have 1 big card transaction a month per user, not 20 small ones) and doing KYC procedures with donation receivers (once GitHub, or rather Stripe, says you are legit, you can take money from any GitHub user).

[salawat]

That's called starting a bank, or financial services company, and lots of places do it, but the bar to do so, and remain able to do so is fairly high. The margins, however, are exquisite. The middlemen eat fat off the percent they skim off the top.

[dynm]

Everything you say makes sense. But can you help me understand why this doesn't also apply to the LLM service I use today? Doesn't that service, in effect, makes a "micropayment" to the LLM providers every time I make a query? Is the key difference that there are only a small-ish number of LLM providers? (Not doubting, just interested!)

[salawat]

As mentioned above, it's not a micropayment. It's just a payment. You can transact in whatever amounts you want, and backend systems will bump the numbers around just fine, even for fractions of a cent. Hell, that's how interest and currency exchange settle out. The LLM provider runs a meter. The meter tallies your activity, wraps it in a transaction, hands it to the backend, backend talks to other banks/payment gateways, an ACH happens, done. That isn't a "micropayment". That's just a payment. In fact, if you pay attention, some of the biggest winners in tech, namely cloud providers or AI providers, are as darling as they are because they figured out how to turn everyday compute tasks into billable transactions. We're exceptionally good at tracking the build up of value, even if your atomic unit of transaction is a thousandth of a cent, but x however many million customers you have, it quickly adds up.

Micropayments have always, as long as I've been in the industry, implied a level of disintermediation on the behalf of sender/receiver. The chance to have that kind of utility died September 11th, 2001, when the U.S. and western world suddenly got the bright idea that the only way to protect themselves from terrorists was to modify the system to be able to surveil everybody l, all at once. Bringing us to a codger explaining why P2P micropayments are pretty much a pipedream in the finance world as she is legally practiced.

[dynm]

Not too interested in debating the semantics of "micropayment", but it sounds like if we swap in "news sites" in place of "LLM providers" everything should still still be possible? Consumers could pay tiny amounts of money for individual articles?

[salawat]

You already can with traditional finance. The only thing stopping that from being the case is that the news orgs don't want to sell their product that way, and you can't force them to. That's kind of a them thing. They get to dictate their terms, you don't like them, that's fine. Their answer would be you aren't their target demographic. Besides which, do you really want to create an arrangement by which someone sneaking in an XSS driven script will drive your browser to visit their entire catalog, and piping the content to /dev/null or similar, you getting charged for every GET?

The technical possibility is there. The desire to operate the business that way is not. You're a victim of the conspicuously absent feature implementation, and all I can say is... Well... Welcome to the club. Here's your "Fuck MBAs" hat, and an Occupy Wall Street T-Shirt, because the perpetrators inflicting your suffering all pretty much as a whole wear suits.

[hn_acc1]

Would love to hear about some of those reality checks. Note: I'm not currently in favor of micropayments, but am willing to listen.

[salawat]

Well, there's OFAC, for one. In the U.S. alphabet soup, that's the Office of Foreign Asset Control, and they maintain the master sanctions list operated by the Federal government. This is a list, that as a matter of law, must be checked against every transaction. If there is a match on the receiving end of funds to a sanctioned individual, the transaction is immediately halted. If a sanctioned party is the originator, a flag may be raised for the institution to deal with otherwise. You do not want to end up on that list, because if you do, the U.S. financial system turns into a roach motel. Assets flow into the custodianship of the service provider, but are unable to move out. A very highly controversial feature to have implemented if I dare say so myself. Then there are the SAR's and CTR's, which are reports that must be filed by banks in the event of "suspicious activity". I.e. structuring, withdrawal of large amounts of cash, etc. They are specifically prohibited from informing you as a customer about these processes.

Then there's the risk department integration. It is mandatory to hand over transaction information on request by law enforcement. The process is mandatory, and continued licensure is conditional on maintaining a program through which financial surveillance can be conducted by the State.

Now, are these features inherently bad? No. Not at first blush. Do they have the potential to become horrifying? Well... Look at what happened to the ICC judge who got added to the sanctioned entities list. It doesn't just effect bank accounts. It involves anything that you engage in a digital transaction to maintain access to. That means entire sectors suddenly go from situation normal, to persona non grata, your business is not welcome here, at threat of massive fines for doing business with a sanctioned entity.

I went into finance looking for a boring, uncontroversial line of work, and came out after a few years realizing the entire sector is so damn wired for power projection it's not even funny. Once you see it and understand how the bounds of what you can do are constrained by these people who are authorized to digitally transact on your behalf... Well... It can't really be unseen.

[hn_acc1]

Thanks. As someone who has lived in 3 countries (2 as an adult) and is considering leaving the US again.. Any hints on how NOT to end up on that list? I.e. avoid large transfers? What's the best way to transfer some $$ out of the US? I have no red flags in my background other than some speeding tickets 10+ years ago and have dual citizenship.

How far does this extend? I read the ICC judge had her credit cards canceled - which would be bad, but, has she been prevented from just going to her bank / withdrawing funds / writing a cheque to pay for her bills? Which western countries are more / less integrated into this?

[salawat]

Don't want to end up on the Sanctioned Entity List? Avoid anything that might make you controversial to a Federal Bureaucrat, and never do business with or on behalf of anyone already on the list. That's pretty much the only criteria to get on it. It's considered to be under the auspices of "Foreign Policy" so is under the sole discretion of the Federal Executive.

A few years ago, I'd tell you if it's a NATO ally, odds are at some point they are wired into OFAC. The choice is, do business with the American financial system, or get added to the sanctioned. There's a reason why I said the American Financial system is wired for soft power projection. We were big and trustworthy enough where just going along with it to maintain access to things made the act of checking a list that thusfar, no one had too many objections to the people who ended up getting added to it was just a no brainer.

Then... an ICC judge got sanctioned, finally making apparent how the U.S. really intended the mechanism to be used; as an "our way, or the highway" sort of thing. So I'm far from able to make any informed guesses on who is still honoring the commitment or not. The Cheeto-in-Chief has done a marvelous job at encouraging everyone to reassess the longevity or reliability of Pax Americana, sooo...

As for how to move assets out? If you aren't on the list, just move em somewhere else. Just not to anywhere on the list. If you are on the list, kiss your assets custodially held goodbye til the ole' U.S. of A decides to take you off the list, which at a minimum is probably going to require some very uncomfortable chats with people you don't want to be alone with.

Again, there is a reason I left. There is a reason I have no desire to return, and why I've basically opted to live life extra hard mode, because I can't just accept that it's okay for the Government to orchestrate financial lockout; and even less reason why we should all be gungho to implement systems like that. Canada has one, I'm pretty sure Great Britain and most of Europe each probably maintain their own as well. You'd have to check. I understand why a country would seek to have one, and operate one. I just can't consciably be involved in it. The abuse potential of the capability is too damn high. "Good guys in office who wouldn't be stupid enough to abuse such a thing" cannot be said to be a given. I wasn't comfortable with the Orange Man sitting on the nuclear football, nor am I comfortable with him on OFAC or anything else his position now entitles him too.

If I sound like a paranoid nutter, I sympathize, sounds pretty fantastic right? I once thought the same thing about a guy who used to work for the Postal Service who tried to tell me that "Oh, hell no, USPS will absolutely open main in transit for a myriad of reasons. At the time, I took it with a grain of salt. Now... I realize he was absolutely telling the truth. If it's a network, we (the U.S.) will do everything in our power to maintain the ability to tap, manipulate, and control it. I just want help machines move bits from A to B man. Not be a cog in sovereign theft/freezing of assets of the politically/diplomatically inconvenient/disfavored. Violates the Moral Imperative.

Here's the lists btw. Enjoy.

https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/

Was really the first time in my life I started looking at and appreciating databases as the weapons they are.

[sanex]

If only there was some sort of alternate monetary system based on cryptography that enabled instant micro payments.

[salawat]

Using a public ledger, that is just surveilled and treated as prosecution futures, or targeting for kidnappers. Yes, we know. It's also got major usability issues, and tends to end up in practice defaulting to a centralized custodial model anyways for the vast majority of users. Where it can't, the onramps to convert to the currency of the land are outlawed.

[sanex]

Still would work for the use case.

[julianeon]

This is me w Google Gemini. And you're right: it does change your outlook on micropayments, which in my case, are API calls. My costs for the last few days: 3 cents, 2 cents, 46 cents. Believe it or not, every one of those calls was scrutinized and justified.

[jaredwiener]

But you're not doing micropayments, you're using metered billing. There's a big difference.

For one, you have a request. The answer isn't going to be anywhere else. Sure, you can't be guaranteed the quality in advance, but you are guaranteed to not have an answer without submitting the request. This doesn't work in a field where so many see news as commoditized, and can just get a free article or headline elsewhere.

Micropayments have been tried over and over (see https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...)

Some of this issue is the nature of news. With an LLM, the providers just run the infrastructure anyway, and your request is routed to it. They develop new models constantly, and deploy. News does not work like this.

If you have to grab someone's attention to read an article, that's an incentive structure that creates clickbait and other things people hate. You may offer a headline, but that is very often the only part of the story people care about. (Oh, Robert Duvall died? That's sad. But I don't need to pay anything to read anymore -- I already know the story!)

It also does nothing for the piracy that is so rampant -- especially on this site. How many people post archive links to articles with paywalls? Would that stop? Getting a fraction of a cent or so before someone else copies the article is absolutely not a business model.

[reactordev]

I think a token system where $10 gets you 1,000 tokens and each read is logged and costs 1-5 tokens, depending on severity of the news and its age, is a great idea.

[NicuCalcea]

Who determines severity? What about investigations that take months or years to produce, who counts how many more tokens they should cost compared with a news story about Trump's latest tweet? Do you get a popup asking if you want to pay x tokens for each link?

Journalism micropayments have been tried many times before, and never worked. Things haven't substantially changed in the meantime, so what would be different this time? I'm genuinely curious, I'm a journalist, so I'd really love to find a working funding model for quality media.

[jcynix]

Readers who payed (and only those) could vote on a scale whether the article was worth the payment? The amount payed might even be calculated into the vote, e.g. you payed one token and get one vote, I payed two or three tokens and get two votes.

[reactordev]

And for those long investigation stories, you can sell the series cheaper up front and give access to all the stories related to that case. Or nickel and dime each post.

[dboreham]

Curiously, LLMs seem to be the first successful use case for micropayments.

Possibly this happened because a) the vendors only offered a micropayment model and b) the product was so popular that nobody pushed back.

That said we can see LLM inference being sold on a subscription basis commonly now (e.g. Claude Code).

[easton]

A lot of cloud services sorta work the same way. AWS and Azure are pay per request for all sorts of things, I figured that was the model the inference providers were following.

[robinsonb5]

The in-world items you could buy in Second Life two decades ago using Linden dollars were arguably a successful use case for micropayments.

You could buy and sell virtual items with a real-world cost far smaller than the transaction fees of a regular card transaction.

Speaking of which - that, to my mind, is the definition of a micropayment - a payment too small to be practical to administer using existing card payment infrastructure. So-called "micropayments" in games have long since ceased to qualify under that definition - they're just "transactions" now.

[Ethee]

I would consider a lot of mobile apps to also be a 'micro-payment' type model. Clearly there's no issue with people paying for content, I think the real gap here is in the ability for the consumer to pay for the content. If I go to some random news site and it hits me with a paywall for a micro-payment there isn't a simple system by which I can actually give them money without directly signing up for a subscription to that specific site or some other service. If there was a type of wallet for this that I could just put money into and sites asked "would you like to pay X amount from your wallet to read this content?" I would be more amenable to it. It's the same idea with streaming sites and piracy. Companies have made content more expensive and more exclusive so why would I want to jump through the extra hurdles which was supposed to make consuming your content EASIER. It's always about ease of access to the consumer.

[boplicity]

You can't pay $.001 to $0.05 to get someone to do actual reporting.

[antonymoose]

How much is an ad impression worth on your local paper?

[boplicity]

I don't know -- but I'm a paid subscriber to 4 newspapers.

[akst]

I would love the option for pay for usage for many products I am forced into paying a subscription for.

I think one legitimate difficulty with micropayments for a news site (that has a few options to solve) is the reservation price of most readers for a single article might be lower than the cost of handling the transaction. The best option I can think of is the user needs to add credit their account or a credit card or something, which isn’t uncommon but I think some people might see it as a grift where they pay for more than they’re initially getting.

I think one benefit of it or shortcomings is it’ll probably kill off portions with smaller readership, but if that’s not you -you’re no longer paying for something you weren’t reading.