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0 pointsmichaelchisari7y ago0 comments

Once we can crack the micropayment nut, it opens a whole new world of ad-free low-cost subscriptions. I'd much rather pay $0.50 a month for a social network that has no interest in my data than deal with ads or data tracking.

But that needs to be both effortless for me as a user, and require very little in the way of processing fees. Both of which are not possibilities right now.

Cheap is better than free has always been my motto. Cheap is sustainable, does not require dark patterns for monetization and is transparent to the user.

But in order to get there, we need a way to pay small amounts of money to apps, creators and each other. And do it in a way that doesn't immediately become a lightning rod for economic manipulation and money laundering.

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Mirioron7y ago

>Once we can crack the micropayment nut, it opens a whole new world of ad-free low-cost subscriptions.

Online payments are hard to do because of lots of legislation around money. This means that it's going to be annoying. There are also many people that can't pay online, because they simply don't have access to these payment methods. You could argue that we will eventually digitize our money and that would solve the problem, but I doubt that that's going to happen any time soon. People would be too afraid that Visa and MasterCard would basically control their life.

The way you might make it work is if you did what Steam does - you can put money onto the platform that you can then spend later. If you had an entire ecosystem built around that then it might be possible that people would do micro payments to content providers.

>I'd much rather pay $0.50 a month for a social network that has no interest in my data than deal with ads or data tracking.

I wonder if it could cost that little. I guess it could.

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