No one's yet made a workable solution for web micropayments, but one aspirational design metaphor I like is an electricity meter.
I don't think about running my dishwasher as a transaction with a price and a receipt: I just do things, and I get a bill at the end of the month.
Conversation
Prices are (fortunately!) calibrated so that the monthly bill is not usually a big deal. If it seems high, I might dig in: hey, this appliance is wasteful! Or maybe I need to turn off the mining bots or whatever. But default-batched transactions really lowers friction.
1
1
43
It's interesting to think about monetizing web content along these lines: you just read things; small charges accumulate; you pay the bill at the end of the month and maybe change future behavior if it seems too high. You could set a cap if you wanted. Aim for effortlessness.
Replying to
I was excited to discover today that there's a proposed web standard very much along these lines! webmonetization.org
I don't know if this is the right solution, but *something* like this might help us escape the awful ads model.
10
5
85
A great point about the trouble here: how can price negotiation happen sensibly? The spec punts to browsers, but it’s quite a hard problem for the long tails.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @xeegeex and @andy_matuschak
It's an information theory question: the price signal comes from both positive and negative economic choice. Either negotiation in the bazar for the fringes, or supply demand in the bigger market. The utility model doesn't have that.
5
1
23
Also, I discovered the Web Monetization API via this wonderful essay on the magic of the web being left behind in the mad rush for newsletters: robinrendle.com/essays/newslet, which in turn I found via 's 💯 relaunched Society of the ‡:
5
6
33
Replying to
An alternative is the arcade model.
“Here’s my analysis of whatever. Two tokens please.”
Idk how useful it is, but it defines a new price scale and constrains things to a small set of integers.
One, two, three rather than $0.56, $1.45, $2.34.
1
1
Regarding effortlessness, there are classes of decisions you can automate.
- automatically buy things cheaper than X, ask me otherwise
- cap my spending to $2 for the next ten minutes, or $10 on any normal day
1
1
Show replies
Replying to
Interesting idea. To add to it, if you don't like the bill you can install a meter on your dishwasher to see if that's what drawing too much electricity. Once you're satisfied it is or isn't you can remove it and/or fix it to the next device you suspect.
1