243 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 19 Sep \ on: The Mental Transaction Costs of Zaps bitcoin
Great piece! You hit on a bunch of cool ideas.
One thought I had that pulls a few of yours together, is that SN works for a bunch of interconnected reasons. One of them is what experimental economists call "warm glow": it feels nice to support someone who wrote something we liked.
The more interesting connection, to me, is that there might be a disparity between how we value sats going out vs sats coming in. Many of us are spend and replacers, so sats going out may be valued at roughly the current exchange rate. As Hodlers, however, we may be valuing the sats coming in at whatever purchasing power we imagine they'll attain.
As to the other micropayment ideas, I'm sure we'll see many different business models play around with different ways to implement and pitch micropayments. Some of them will improve the consumer experience and most won't. There will probably be micropayments in surprising places, as well as a lack of them in seemingly obvious ones.
The "warm glow" is a good way to describe it. I've tried to liken zapping to tossing some money in a street musician's hat: it's a donation but also a payment. It's not exactly charity, but it's also not required.
I probably should have included something about how most payments on SN are not required (the only required payments are posting fees, and even those aren't fully required).
It's interesting to compare my feelings about payments on SN to my resistance to paying for X. I still can't bring myself to shell out the $8 a month or whatever it is. Whereas if they just charged me a few sats to post and paying that fee kept my posts on equal footing in their algorithm...
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