Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

The ability for users to access the lightning network is limited by blocksize since you need transactions to open channels.

Thanks. I always like putting my ideas out there as I often get feedback on points I hadn't considered.

On this leading to reporting being pushed more towards what people consider in the public interest, I would argue that's a good thing. It's also maybe not that different to the current status quo if you look at how different TV or news networks cater to one target market or another.

With regards to your second point, sounds like you're essentially describing a Sybil attack. I agree with you that that's a serious concern. I'm just going to think aloud here so not sure where I'll end on this but let's see:

1. Having to make a micropayment for each upvote will at least put some cost to the bad actors, cf spam email vs spam SMS. That still makes it more amenable to abuse by the rich but I guess in the end it would come down to the balance of economic power and interest/participation between the masses and the elites?

2. How does it compare to the current model? You pay for a monthly subscription which in this context is an undifferentiated portfolio bundle of the news stories of a particular month. I guess that does make the cost of a Sybil attack higher because you can't just spend on the particular other stories trending at the same time as the one that you are currently trying to bury. For the good actor consumer this means that they generally have to pay for/support a news organisation that is broadly aligned with their interests or ideology. It does create this cliff effect though in that if I don't think I'll read enough stories in a particular month to justify my subscription then I won't pay for it at all.

3. I guess this mirrors the kind of debate and thought that's been going on in decentralized blockchain and web3 circles over the past decade or more about how to structure incentives that create broad distributions of power without too much concentration. I'm not up to speed on that so would love it if someone more knowledgeable would weigh in.

4. I had a thought about tying subscriptions to real world identities of natural persons but I don't like that from a privacy and censorship perspective.

5. I was reminded of Quadratic Voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting) which I believe would work well if there is a limited set of participants but I think won't protect you from a Sybil attack when it is cheap to create identities.

6. Building on points 5 and 4, what about this? You need a decentralized digital identity in the form of a DID which would have to be signed by some trusted party, either a government or some other institution. This could still be anonymous or pseudononymous in that when you go to the authority to have it signed, the signing authority checks that you currently don't have another active identity or any previous ones have been revoked (potentially problematic as I'm guessing the authority would have to maintain a link and I don't know if that's possible in a zero knowledge way). Alternatively identities are unlimited but expensive to create, say something like $1000 a piece so that creating 1M fake ones at least costs you $1bn. It's yours for life though so you can amortize the cost over time. In order to not cut out people at the bottom of the income distribution, they can use the government signed one but they lose the benefit of anonimity.

7. Once you have something like 6 then maybe QV is a good mechanism for apportioning micropayments on stories in the public interest?

Anyway, would love to know what current SOTA on this is in web3 circles rather than my speculations over my morning coffee.

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.

I used to work on for a company on a product that did exactly this, but the company stopped working on that product since it didn't go anywhere (API docs seem to still be online though :D https://docs.satoshipay.io/api/). Some small publishers liked it, big ones wanted to force their customers to subscribe (whilst recording their data at the same time).

I really like the general idea though and hope it does make a comeback. I think it would be good for review/test sites especially.

I've made a start-up that has really tried making micropayments work (blink.net) and I know there have been many other attempts.

Some of the pain points can always be addressed, as it's just implementation difficulty (having an auto-pay system when opening and article, and actually being able to get a refund within a short time window if the title was clickbait -- with some limitations of course).

The main problems that always remained were:

- the dificutly in convincing a user to actually pay, which was a psichological barrier. People also don't understand that many articles would have to be priced at 20-50 cents, even more, to be worth it, or there should be an issue pass with the actual price of the whole issue.

- the publishing industry being a mess, hard to coordinate as everyone wants to do their own thing, and early experiments failing, ruining the reputation of the idea itself. Many people say micropayments are something that needs a good time, but nobody knows when that time will come.

- the huge fees that processors take (2% + 29 cents), meaning we needed to load into a wallet a minimum of 5$. After learning all the tricks of the industry, I felt a need to throw rotten tomatoes at whoever thinks that cashback should be legal.

The combination always made it a horrible problem, and at this point I'm even considering making the existing project a non-profit, if that might get something off the ground, but now it's just in low-maintenance mode.