Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

kapwing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 190 posts

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#31

Post by tehwebguy »

bearbearbear wrote: post #18
cpncrunch wrote: post #5

Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme. IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove the branded gifs...that's how you will gr…

> Anyone can afford a dollar At the moment I'm unemployed and I'm literally living day to day just waiting for some kind of break. It's easy to say "anyone can afford a dollar" while you sit in your $4,000 apartment sipping a late` that was just brought to you in less than five minutes by any of fifty different food delivery services available to you. But consider that there are plenty of people who have a basic comp…

The point wasn’t that no one is broke, it’s that even if the price was $0.01 or even $0.0000001 perhaps it would still be priced too high for the actual value.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#32

Post by Lammy »

KyeRussell wrote: post #27
kilolima wrote: post #3

Who cares... site does not load with javascript disabled.

Yeah, cool, so like most of the modern Internet then? Accepting JavaScript's prevalence—even given its many many many many many flaws—is something us pragmatists that actually decide to use the Internet to do things decided to do long long ago.

The page is text and static images and it's kind of absurd for it not to render without JS enabled even in 2017.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#34

Post by mysterypie »

ambrosite wrote: post #13
nlawalker wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> don't think it's worth paying $1 Key word there is paying . A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the function…

This is exactly the problem, and it's a difficult one to solve. I've seen research suggesting that the cognitive cost of filling out payment forms and giving out credit card information makes it easier to pay $10 than $1, since it doesn't feel "worth" all that effort to pay only one dollar. Unfortunately this is part of what reinforces the market dominance of mega-retailers like Amazon, because if you already have an…

> cognitive cost of filling out payment forms, etc.

That's exactly the case for me. I spend physical cash with much less hesitation than for online purchases. I'd probably spend way more freely online if I didn't have to keep track of the purchase just in case something goes wrong, like getting mis-charged, double-billed, a continuing subscription I wasn't expecting, or just to remember why that $1 debit appears on my statement.

As an aside:

It's curious to see that this made it to the HN front page and already has more than 25 comments, yet nobody has commented on the original article's own page which does allow commenting. Well, there is one comment that says, "Great analysis", but that was me just to check if commenting actually works. I suppose that ties in with the same idea -- it's not worth the "cognitive cost" to make a comment no one will read.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#35

Post by Gaelan »

nlawalker wrote: post #6
cpncrunch wrote: post #5

Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme. IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove the branded gifs...that's how you will gr…

>> don't think it's worth paying $1 Key word there is paying . A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the function…

Don't know about refunds, but for the rest Apple Pay (available via web) is literally click button, scan finger (on your nearby iPhone if you're on desktop and not using a tbMBP), done. I guess you can use credit card chargebacks, but beyond that refunds are hard to solve without making abuse possible.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#36

Post by AnthonyMouse »

nlawalker wrote: post #6
cpncrunch wrote: post #5

Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme. IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove the branded gifs...that's how you will gr…

>> don't think it's worth paying $1 Key word there is paying . A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the function…

> Has anyone made any real progress in solving this problem?

The reason they haven't is that the law puts the burden of fraud on the payment processors. The dispute resolution overhead is the same for a $.10 transaction as a $100 transaction, but if that average cost is $.30 then you can't have $.10 transactions and the fee on $1 transactions is onerous.

Using some cheaper less effective dispute resolution for micro-transactions doesn't work because if it's possible to consistently scam it but only for a dime then people will just scam it for a dime in a for loop.

This is why the off-chain Bitcoin processors have lower transaction fees -- they don't have this problem. But then the problem is that the customer has to get some Bitcoin and if they have to buy it with a credit card we're back to square one.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#37

Post by shash7 »

Don't think of it as asking for 1 dollar. Think like this:

Say if you walk up to me irl and ask for a dollar, I'll be like, sure here's your change and open up my wallet.

Online, asking for one dollar is too much mental overhead. Its not like people don't want to pay, but you need to make it easy for them to pay you.

Personally, I would stick with ad revenue instead of 1 dollar payments.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#38

Post by anotherelise »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #14
devdoomari wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

um... bitcoin? heard like 3 years ago that bitcoin will handle all sorts of micro-transactions... anyone know what happened?

Bitcoin transactions have something like a $5 average transaction fee. You can offer less but your transaction won't get processed as quickly. Bitcoin is already slow at processing transactions. Disclaimer: I don't use bitcoin. The $5 number is outdated, but from the graphs I could find in a quick search it seemed to be rising consistently.

I never spend more than $0.10 on transaction fees for bitcoin. I mean, you could give $5 if you wanted to, but why would you? If I was sending a dollar I wouldn't pay more than $0.01 or less for the transaction fee. And for something so cheap the merchant shouldn't bother waiting on confirmations. Exploiting 0 confirmations isn't easy, and it's not worth the work to anyone for a dollar. Even with sub cent transaction fees they'll still settle faster than 3-5 business days.

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#39

Post by chx »

KyeRussell wrote: post #26
kobeya wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has anyone made any real progress in solving this problem? Bitcoin micro-transactions via lightning: http://lightning.network

> real progress Let's not pretend that consumer-facing cryptocurrency-backed anything is little more than something for speculators, libertarians, and nerds.

Don't bother, the HN crowd will downvote this hard, bitter truth. I had this conversation N times, my argument is roughly this: "There's no legit use of bitcoin. Main usages are a) pyramid-like hold-and-hype b) illegal money transfers out of China. No, ordinary people don't want to use it for international transfer because you need to go through hops to get Bitcoin on the sender end, even worse the receiver needs to do something to get money and at the end of the day you have no idea how much money the receiver actually gets. And let's not even discuss outsourcing the security from banks to customers."

Re: Letting users skip our paywall if they wrote an apology

#40

Post by anotherelise »

nlawalker wrote: post #6
cpncrunch wrote: post #5

Anyone can afford a dollar. I'm guessing the real reason these people don't pay is because they don't think it's worth paying $1 to generate a meme. IMO I think it makes more sense to put advertising on the main site and fund it that way. If I was a user of this service I'd prefer to have some ads on the site rather than paying $1 for it. I don't feel it makes sense to remove the branded gifs...that's how you will gr…

>> don't think it's worth paying $1 Key word there is paying . A buck is fine with me, but I don't have a good way to offer it. I'm not giving you my credit card number, email or phone number; I'm not going to spend even 10 seconds filling out a form just for your site; I don't use PayPal; I don't currently authorize you to ever take any more than the buck I want to give you right now; I want a refund if the function…

Bitcoin
Post reply on HN