Not only does Szabo have a dubious eye for micro payments, he seems to think value for value is a non-starter?
The extent to which iTunes and the like can compete with free content is another issue which Shirky describes well. This competition interacts with price granularity insofar as the mental transaction costs put a floor on content prices and competition from free content (artists seeking fame rather than money) puts a ceiling on content prices. Shirky plausibly argues that there is little or (ultimately) no room in between this floor and ceiling leaving little and perhaps ultimately no significant market for online content funded directly by the consumer.
I'm trying to think my way through this paragraph. So:
mental transaction costs put a floor on content prices
Szabo says you can't charge less than a certain amount or it becomes annoying to people to have to think about it.
Charge me a dollar and it might be worth my time. Charge me 1/100th of a penny and the actual effort of making the payment is more costly than the payment itself.
competition from free content (artists seeking fame rather than money) puts a ceiling on content prices
Szabo says there are enough artists out there who want the distribution badly enough, they are willing to give their work away for free.
I know I can maybe sell 1000 songs for $10 each, but that really doesn't add up as much as being world-famous. So I'll give away my music in the hopes that I top the charts.
Then Szabo says (or references this Shirky person saying) that this floor and this ceiling are so close together that it probably just makes sense for artists to give their art away...or sell it in larger chunks (whole album, whole novel)? Leaving
ultimately no significant market for online content funded directly by the consumer.
I wonder how much this applies to the current V4V world. It doesn't seem to be taking off even in Bitcoin circles. Maybe Odell is able to support Citadel Dispatch with V4V payments...but I kinda doubt it. And if he can't to it with that audience, who can?
But it is possible that even though V4V isn't a working model, micro payments still work...if they are fun:
Arguably some online games have also achieved low price granularities, although here payments are part of the entertainment value of the game (as in traditional games like Monopoly(tm)) rather than just a necessary transaction cost.
iTunes succeeded not because of price granularity, but because it lowered the effort of finding content to nearly zero. Convenience usually beats cheaper.
precisely.
Now apply that insight to Nostr or SN. Convenient? hell no
I think the zap button (and the pay to post buttons) on SN are more convenient than most of the zap buttons in nostr clients I've used. That lightning strike us instant and very fun.
SOOO SOOO FUNZIES
Actually, this might apply to SN vs nostr.
bc SN is easier/more convenient to maintain than Nostr keys?
I wasn’t thinking about that specifically, but sure.
Generally, I think it’s easier to get your stuff seen on SN, so people will pay a little bit to use it.
if you by "seen" mean the ~12 active people here, then yes.
I guess for most non-influencers that's still more than the ~0 we get on Nostr or Twitter...
That’s exactly what I mean.
This seems just wrong. Patreon and Kickstarter are a thing. But I notice this was written in 2007.... were those platforms around back then?
The interesting thing about Stacker News is that people are paying to get their content in front of others, but they earn more than that back in tips.
I do think v4v micropayments will probably work best as tips, rather than a gated cost to access content. But SN seems to demonstrate that a tip-driven economy can be supported. Whether it can actually support anyone in terms of making a full-time living is another question.
From these observations, your conclusion falls apart. People backward-induct that there's more (or at least cost-covering) rewards coming back to a user, making posting and zapping in advance worth it.
Take that away (as the ever-shrinking rewards pool shows), and the dreamy, flying, V4V platform that is SN will have a date with gravity
Have you been watching the rewards pool lately? Downzapping fever will save us.
To be honest, maybe there's slightly more demand for throwing away sats in hatred than there is for donations/voluntary support.
I haven’t given this much thought yet, but that might be so. How much does legacy media get paid to squash stories?
I'm not aware neither of legacy media squashing stories (Hunter Biden laptop?!) nor nefarious payments to do so
I’m not sure how many payments are explicit.
It’s mostly through access and withholding ad spending.
Epstein story was squashed by the royal family, according to the reporter who was about to break it for instance.
Wild
Perhaps Szabo would argue that things like Kickstarter and Patreon have effectively lost to things like Spotify and Netflix because micropayments are annoying.
I'm not sure that SN needs to end up providing creators with a positive flow if sats. It may instead be the case that it needs to provide users with a fun way to use sats (both spending and receiving).
Even building that audience is a different way of "giving art away for free" to become famous — and then try to monetize that size via donations (but really vanity, right, see it's other having their messages read or seen).
SN managed to bootstrap a high-zap equilibrium (as opposed to e.g., Nostr, which is shocking zap quiet these days) via rewards pool financed by ever-decreasing subsidies.
Prediction: zap decline here is a vindication of Szabo's point.
Although it may be what attracts many of us in the first place, stacking sats doesn't seem to me to be what people come to SN for.
I think it's a kind of game, really. Stacking sats in the game of SN makes a lot more sense than SN as a value for value platform.
Szabo seems to conclude that gamification is a different case, and that "fun" micropayments might be different.
Also: you and Szabo were the only ones to like the post about this on X. Maybe we will get him on here yet...
HAHAH lol... him for vanity, me for algos (=Scoresby posts!) shoving content in my face
do you mean "stay" here? Because they certainly come for the sats
Yes, that is a good point. I should have said stay.
I remember when RockstarDev messed with Parker Lewis by setting him up a fake nostr account with his actual LNURL. Lewis was annoyed at all the tiny zaps and asked people to stop.
For me with NWC and the ease of zapping in one click took the annoyance out of those tiny zaps. Agree that it's fun!
Yes. One-click, instant zaps are fun.
More than one-click zaps that take a second or two to process are not fun.
Stacker.news itself is kind of a living counterexample to Szabo's argument though. The mental transaction cost of zapping sats here is near zero — you don't deliberate whether 100 sats is "worth it" the way you would with $1. Lightning made the floor low enough that it no longer bumps into the ceiling.
Maybe V4V doesn't work as a business model for creators, but it works surprisingly well as a tipping/reputation system where the payment is more social signal than economic transaction.