480 sats \ 12 replies \ @jimmysong 26 Nov 2022 \ parent \ on: The Problem of Using Attention as a Currency bitcoin
I came to this conclusion back in 2014-15. The internet runs on ads because no micropayment solutions existed when it got started. The payment amounts are so small that you can't do real payments, you have to do ads.
I actually spent some time with another Bitcoiner looking to do a startup on coming up with an alternative. At the time Lightning was nascent, but we realized then that this could be the solution.
Here's the problem. The amount of attention you need to give to figure out whether you want to pay 1/30th of a penny is not worth 1/30th of a penny. This is why subscriptions are so popular. It reduces the decision fatigue you're likely to get from having to decide every time whether a song, a book, or a podcast is worth paying for. And this is where you start running into problems.
You need some automated way of making these sub-penny decisions. And that requires a lot of code. I'll pay for articles that my friends recommend, which has a keyword that I'm interested in, or has a certain ranking on stacker news, etc. These are not easy to write and every person is going to have a different one. Heck, some people, especially people with a lot of time on their hands, will totally be willing to watch ads instead of paying 1/30th of a penny.
That's the hard part about microtransactions. The decision has to be with the user but too many decisions fatigue the user. Thus, you need a second brain that's very like you to make those decisions on your behalf. Writing that is very, very hard.
Hence my thought that it's going to take a long time to replace ads.
That said, there's at least one way which can work and that's offering to pay websites the ad revenue they would get and not showing you the ads. The problem is there's no way for you to know how much they would have made so it's easy for them to lie.
Some random thoughts, but this is not an easy thing to solve once you dig into it. Decision fatigue is real.
I agree, this is a big problem, and one of the reasons why paywalls don't work.
I am aware of the mental transaction cost problem and I wrote about it at length here: https://dergigi.com/2021/12/30/the-freedom-of-value/ (CTRL+F "MTX problem")
Podcasting 2.0 shows that payments can be invisible. I think the challenge is both on the user-experience front, and on the business model front: no paywalls, voluntary support. I think the success of Substack (and Patreon, and Twitch) shows that this is a viable model.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
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Here's the other thing, though. Ads are also unsustainable! I wrote a thread about how AI is going to destroy the ad model a few months back: https://twitter.com/jimmysong/status/1577934190540165121?s=20
What this tells me is that there's a real opportunity for entrepreneurs to figure this out and I suspect Lightning will be a big part of it.
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I agree, as does Adam Curry. He talked about it at length in the V4V panel discussion that NVK hosted on Bitcoin Review a few nights ago.
The attention economy is broken, it leads to clickbait, polarization, and maximizes outrage and addiction.
The advertising model is broken for most; it doesn't fatten the long tail, and if successful it often leads to self-censorship. Incentives are messed up too, most of the time.
What this tells me is that there's a real opportunity for entrepreneurs to figure this out and I suspect Lightning will be a big part of it.
100%
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isn't advertising only as good as the quality of data linked to a real identity..? As people become more privacy conscious and careful with whom they share their data, won't this impact ad revenue models..? Seems the longterm solution to this is self hosting of the content you want to give away on a personal server and then use the V4V model where people can access it for free or stream sats as they stream the conent from your personal server. Guess if it was really popluar though, it might not handle the bandwidth. I don't know enough about this... What are your thoughts Jimmy..?
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I hate to say it, but Brendan Eich's (Javascript, Mozilla Firefox) Brave & Basic Attention Token (BAT) model was interesting. Of course it didnt work because they made a shitcoin. But they came up with an interesting idea. Imagine instead of a sats/min, (like Fountain) a total sats/month, (like Brave/BAT) and the app figures who gets how much of it.
You earned the BAT tokens... by watching ads of course, but in this model, only Brave learns stuff about you, and tries to block trackers and cookies, giving you tokens to give out to support creators.
Websites and content creators registered. You set an amount of BAT tokens per month to give to all creators you visited during the month, and at the end of the month, it would distribute to "Brave Creators" in proportion to the amount of time spent there.
Of course in the end, both your browser and the websites were still spying on you and Brave found a way to print money. But the setting a monthly amount and it being dispersed by time spent was an interesting idea for a few years ago. It fights the "mental cost" by being something you only set once and forgot about. It even funded itself. (Thru "tokenomics" (a ponzi) and a few advertisers.)
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does it all come down to the platforms hosting the files having overheads and costs of servers, electricity, employees, brick and mortar etc. Would this change if there was a way to self host your own content on a personal server and a platform for people to serch it somehow and listen/ read/ view from your personal server to their device. That way, the content could truly be FREE (as in beer), because you're baring the costs involved with hosting..?
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I found the browser extension AddSlice a good way to earn SATS for mi attention. It's like Brave but with Bitcoin instead a shitcoin.
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Yes, it was the right idea (or at least going in the right direction), but creating your own currency for it is unethical, of course.
The Gab/Dissenter guys created a fork a while back to replace BAT with sats, but I think it was discontinued. Used to be called Dissenter browser, I believe. Imho it was too early. I'd love to see another effort now, or soon.
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Yeah I heard about Dissenter. I like the idea of a (uncensored) comment section for anywhere on the internet. With an interoperable comment section being a thing for podcasts through the Podcasting 2.0, I wonder if we will see the same thing for everywhere online.
I think the "pick an amount for the month to give and let it be distributed in proportion to the time you spent on each site" method might have been a good idea. Maybe Alby will try it, although they kinda seem more like a Bitcoin Metamask than a Bitcoin Brave Browser. But maybe they will try it.
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Yeah i think deciding about micropayments lead to fatigue. Maybe a solution would be to meassure the content consumed (e.g. scroll percentage on a page, seconds in a video) and then give an estimate/recomendation based on that which can be overruled by the user
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Did you ever use any of the new podcast apps that are value-enabled, and do exactly that?
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