221–230 of 247 posts
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Entertainers aren't pretending to be your friend, or lover, in exchange for money.
To the latter: prostitution has always been prevalent. Now it’s simply through a glass screen and not a peephole.
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Yes and no. They jump around the profit-point. They made some profit in 2019 or so, but the pandemia peaked them, not just in views and income, but also costs. The thing is, Twitch's business-model is very frail. A streamer with too many viewers can cost them more money than it brings them money. Similar, are there millions of small streamers who barely make them a dollar. And then are there also too many side-costs,…
You do know Amazon owns Twitch? I'm sure they aren't using normal AWS billing...
I don't see creators clamoring for micropayments. The reason is simple: It's not a good way to actually earn an income. Creators need stable and predictable support. Subscriptions work much better for them. It's a tried-and-true business model. What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity. That's the fundamental failure h…
Ads (along with nazis and pedophiles) are the root of almost all issues on the internet and it looks like a very bleak future if we can't build an alternative form of compensation into our protocols. I don't understand why we can't at least outbid the advertisers for our own attention.... what a waste of time and money and attention and culture all around.
Pessimism of whether the content would be worth real money, mostly.
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There is, or anyways there was, but the model didn’t work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle It still exists, sort of, you can download the app, but it’s all in Dutch now, and doesn’t work on a pay-per-article model anymore, it’s unclear to me what their model is now, since I don’t speak Dutch. In any case, what you’re asking for exactly was a thing before, and failed, so I assume that’s why you can’t do it - i…
This is one of those things where I wonder if it was too early for its success? I don't know the answer but it feels like it could have been. I have never seen it used on US based media unfortunately.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. They jump around the profit-point. They made some profit in 2019 or so, but the pandemia peaked them, not just in views and income, but also costs. The thing is, Twitch's business-model is very frail. A streamer with too many viewers can cost them more money than it brings them money. Similar, are there millions of small streamers who barely make them a dollar. And then are there also too many side-costs,…
You do know Amazon owns Twitch? I'm sure they aren't using normal AWS billing...
I don't see creators clamoring for micropayments. The reason is simple: It's not a good way to actually earn an income. Creators need stable and predictable support. Subscriptions work much better for them. It's a tried-and-true business model. What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity. That's the fundamental failure h…
Microtransactions are a natural extension of this funding mechanism into smaller-scale creative output such as blog posts and ten-minute videos that don't cost anywhere near as much to produce as films and novels.
Flattr was the first time anyone paid me money for my open source/freely-hosted passion projects. It made my heart glow for a week.
Curious, do you still have your NFC implant?
My magnet implant came out around 2019, iirc. The coating ruptured, and a five year run on the old-style parylene magnets was super solid.
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Ads (along with nazis and pedophiles) are the root of almost all issues on the internet and it looks like a very bleak future if we can't build an alternative form of compensation into our protocols. I don't understand why we can't at least outbid the advertisers for our own attention.... what a waste of time and money and attention and culture all around.
> I don't understand why we can't at least outbid the advertisers for our own attention Pessimism of whether the content would be worth real money, mostly.
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IMHO their main problems were: they delivered too early, and failed in what they offered. When they started, there was no donation-economy like we have today on Twitch, Ko-fi, and others, nor was there an established support-hivemind like we have with Patreon, Github and others. So people did not know what they should do with it. And on the other side was Flattr a bit annoying to use in the beginning, and had percent…
Also Patreon. The real failure was adopting a panhandling model of giving "each time" you consume content. Not only is this high friction, but people don't like doing it. They should have aggressively pushed a subscription model ($2 a month or less) that reoccured so creators actually could have reliable income.
Micropayments struggle because they add friction to the process of consuming content. Right now, if I see a great blog post, video, whatever, I spend a bit of time taking it in and then move on. With micropayments, I now have to think about how much it is worth to me (is this blog post, comment, sketch worth $0.50? $0.10?). You just turned a brainless moment of enjoyment into a value judgement where I now have to bec…
That was never how Flattr worked though. Flattr was just a button that could be placed on a page (next to "Facebook Like", etc.); if you click it, they'd get a portion of your monthly donation. The whole point was to (a) be as simple to use as a Facebook "like", and (b) always cost the same per month (since the monthly donation was divided up, there was no need to worry about clicking too many things; just click what you like).
> Subscriptions bundle the friction into a single event (the conversion) and remove it for all future interactions. Micropayments are just constant papercuts.
Clicking someone's Flattr button twice would "subscribe" to them (automatically put them in your donations every month). So again, Flattr was pretty much designed precisely to avoid these problems that you bring up...