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

100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

foundation.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 277 posts

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#41

Post by rahidz »

toast0 wrote: post #12
greycrasan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the service that is free will always be more popular and ultimately win over more users. People have decided that paying with their privacy is better for them. I really wish paying 10 cents to use the service was the norm, but alas I doubt it will ever happen.

I suspect you're right that people will strongly prefer free over paid, but it's hard to know how many people would pay ten cents for something, because it's not feasible to charge that little. Paypal has a micropayment rate of 5% + five cents (USD), which means if you charge ten cents, you get maybe $0.0045. Plus, you have to do all the billing infrastructure etc. The economics would be better with a stored balance…

What about your ISP? You already pay them for Internet access, how about adding a "content charge" to that, then have some neutral organization disburse that cash (based on traffic? usage? evenly?) to individual websites who promise no third-party advertising, no tracking, etc.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#42

Post by tlb »

dangrossman wrote: post #32

None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The on…

> the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income] is likely a small fraction of the pool of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets].

"Discretionary income" is a short-term idea, defined as [income - cost to maintain current lifestyle]. Over longer periods, lifestyles expand to fit current income and the idea is meaningless.

For instance, when cars were new, people could only buy them if they had a large chunk of discretionary income to spend on them. But now, most middle-class people own a car that costs more than their discretionary income. So discretionary income isn't a cap on what people can spend in the long term.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#43

Post by bobajeff »

greycrasan wrote: post #5
FreeHugs wrote: post #3

It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet. A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article. That would make the world so much better for indie developers. Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have.…

Unfortunately the service that is free will always be more popular and ultimately win over more users. People have decided that paying with their privacy is better for them. I really wish paying 10 cents to use the service was the norm, but alas I doubt it will ever happen.

People decided that paying nothing is better for them. I don't believe most people are even aware of the privacy implications or how that ties into the scheme of not paying anything. It's kind of like how most people don't really know the economics of Casinos.

Doesn't mean people don't value privacy. Just means that people don't value online services and content.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#44

Post by droffel »

radicalriddler wrote: post #38
droffel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero (getmonero.org) has many of the properties of cash on the internet. Definitely more so than Bitcoin. It's surprising how few cryptocurrencies take privacy by default seriously.

I strongly doubt Monero is the solution to the issue OP is talking about. Can we not shill on HN? Go back to /r/cryptocurrency.

It's perfectly on topic here. I would hardly call this shilling.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#45

Post by en-us »

radicalriddler wrote: post #38
droffel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero (getmonero.org) has many of the properties of cash on the internet. Definitely more so than Bitcoin. It's surprising how few cryptocurrencies take privacy by default seriously.

I strongly doubt Monero is the solution to the issue OP is talking about. Can we not shill on HN? Go back to /r/cryptocurrency.

> A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so.

Pretty sure it solves that.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#46

Post by crispinb »

jsnell wrote: post #2

Halfway through reading this, the site suddenly covered half the screen with a "donate to Mozilla" banner. The case for "reshaping the economics of the web" would have been a bit more compelling without that... (My problem isn't about asking for donations. It's about asking for them in a particularly user-hostile way. If the call to action at the bottom isn't enough, work it into the text.)

I instantly put a permanent block on any site that does this, and never visit it again. So that's Mozilla done for me.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#47

Post by stormtv »

BubRoss wrote: post #4
FreeHugs wrote: post #3

It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet. A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article. That would make the world so much better for indie developers. Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have.…

Cryptocurrency can do this, but Bitcoin artificially keeps the blocksize to 1.6KB/s so people think that small transactions are not practical in a general sense, since they aren't practical there.

It wouldn't be the best user experience if you had to wait 10 minutes for confirmation. Also by increasing the size of the blocks you increase the orphan rate due to propagation delay which results in needing more confirmations before a transaction is considered truly immutable. Bitcoin has to have a fee market to incentivize miners so that as block rewards decrease the cost of securing the network doesn't shrink as well.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#48

Post by potta_coffee »

devoply wrote: post #39
dangrossman wrote: post #32

None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The on…

The web was fine without these commercial companies. Not like their content added a ton of value to the web. The news is mostly propaganda anyhow, belonging to various wealthy parties that want people to pay for their propaganda... If they funded it completely out of pocket, that would be a more honest approach to these "businesses". The other companies like FB, they took bunch of content that belonged to users that…

The web was hands-down better when most content was made by hobbyists without a profit motive. I used to be able to spend countless hours online. Now it's rare for me to stumble across anything worth looking at. Granted, it's easier to search for and find specific information.

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#49

Post by xchaotic »

devoply wrote: post #39
dangrossman wrote: post #32

None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The on…

The web was fine without these commercial companies. Not like their content added a ton of value to the web. The news is mostly propaganda anyhow, belonging to various wealthy parties that want people to pay for their propaganda... If they funded it completely out of pocket, that would be a more honest approach to these "businesses". The other companies like FB, they took bunch of content that belonged to users that…

You mean like censorship? Who gets to decide? Or do we continue to upvote like we do now?

Re: 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web

#50

Post by devoply »

xchaotic wrote: post #49
devoply wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web was fine without these commercial companies. Not like their content added a ton of value to the web. The news is mostly propaganda anyhow, belonging to various wealthy parties that want people to pay for their propaganda... If they funded it completely out of pocket, that would be a more honest approach to these "businesses". The other companies like FB, they took bunch of content that belonged to users that…

You mean like censorship? Who gets to decide? Or do we continue to upvote like we do now?

Not sure what you are talking about, can you quote what you mean? No one gets to decide, I mean personal information being shared between companies on the backend. That should be heavily monitored with oversight. Like the sites you visited, etc.
Post reply on HN