Have you been watching the rewards pool lately? Downzapping fever will save us.

> 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.**

>  SN seems to demonstrate that a tip-driven economy can be supported 

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

denlillaapan

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).

Scoresby

ultimately no significant market for online content funded directly by the consumer.

This seems just wrong.  Patreon and Kickstarter are a thing.  But I notice this was written in 2007.... were those platforms around back then?

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.

The interesting thing about Stacker News is that people 

 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.

econ

Micropayments redux - Nick Szabo (2007)

> ultimately no significant market for online content funded directly by the consumer.

This seems just wrong.  Patreon and Kickstarter are a thing.  But I notice this was written in 2007.... were those platforms around back then?

> 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.

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.