Comment by wateralien 2 days ago
Top of HN and people are loving it, but there's got to be a better way of getting some $$ rewards for fun viral ideas like this than "Buy me a coffee". I'm betting he's got tens of thousands of sessions currently and nobody is tipping. https://ko-fi.com/magnushambleton
Is there a better way? Asking for myself, also.
My CPM is not great (not Google) and that's 25-30k impressions
Doesn't an ad require the user to bust out their credit card eventually?
No? Advertising money is paid upfront. X number of impressions. You get paid a cut for hosting the ad. The ad might be a huge failure and lead to zero clickthrough or purchases. But the money has already been paid for the campaign.
Yes, nothing happens until you trade a dollar for something, but it does not have to be this site they spend money at.
Advertising isn't even about getting people to open their wallet, it's more about influencing their decision when they do go to spend money or make a purchase.
Yea, but most advertisers come only after something went viral, not when you are building something and you try to say to potential advertiser: "this will go viral trust me bro". And such small viral things are usually short lived, by the time the advertisers come it will probably starts to die down. But yea, maybe he would have got a little more financial support than donations even if he puts up ads after it went viral.
Another way he could benefit from this is when people want his skills to build them similar things, so it's basically already an advertisement for his skills.
I saw it going viral before going to bed last night and spent 15min trying to enable payments but failed so made it block you after 2 gens using cookies and try guilt you into donating instead. Made me $160 in donations compared to the $500 in AI credits burned so not a huge success but at least slightly offset the loss.
If the demand continues after this blip I’ll try add ads or make real payments work.
There have been alternatives suggested. While better is a subjective term, most alternatives have either not been successful or have not yet meaningfully achieved a level of success to matter.
Flattr took one approach without much success. They represented the problem well though. When someone does something that is of a small but not insignificant benefit for a large number of people, how should they be rewarded? When the reward due, divided by the number of people paying for it, gets low enough it seems to not reach a threshold that it makes sense for any individual to pay.
You could charge a fee above the threshold, and many people do take this path. It is essentially requiring a small number of people to massively overpay to cover those who don't pay at all.
A Universal Income takes the approach that if everyone gets what they need there is no particular requirement to be monetarily rewarded. You essentially have been rewarded for whatever it is you do.
Advertising plays the small threshold thing both ways, They offer you a chance to sell a little corruption below your threshold for thinking it is damaging, and in return they accumulate the corruption and the money and send you the money and deliver the requested corruption to their customers.
Part of the fundamental difficulty is in determining the size of the reward due. How is that determined? There are plenty of people who will offer services to do that if it means they can take a cut. I don't see that path going well unless it is a mechanism governed by strict non-profit rules, and even then I would have doubts.
A purely rule based system would be intrinsically unfair and subject to gaming, but often times this turns out to be the least worst solution. By agreeing to a set of rules people can accept that while flawed, adhering to them by agreement can make a system that cannot be taken over by a malicious individual.
In short, right now, No I don't think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.
> Is there a better way?
Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn't depend on it going viral.
How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Like it seems like people are ideologically for or against UBI, but I’ve never seen anyone discuss how the mechanism would avoid this outcome. Like I’m not saying it’s 100% the outcome that would happen on whatever time frame, just that even e.g. a 10% chance of that happening would make it too risky to attempt at scale. And like I don’t accept “some people just love farming” or “a lot of stuff that isn’t needed gets made now”, I need an actual mechanism description.
> How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Pay higher when someone does things. UBI + income. If you want to live better, try doing something that will bring you money, but if you fail, you can still live and try something other next time.
Current model: if you try something and fail, you are homeless and starving.
I could maybe support UBI if you completely shut down Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, school lunches, subsidized housing, and every other assistance program. It must replace all of that to achieve the so-called operational efficiency of just giving people cash. Give them enough to buy those things on the open market, and if they choose to spend it on something else, that's on them.
If you don't trust people enough to do that, then you don't trust them enough to do UBI.
I think most proponents of UBI want this and I think it's a good idea. UBI is meant as social security, just not dependent on what you do and doesn't disappear when you have cash. Just give minimum wage to everyone and remove minimum payment requirement from economy. If you use up your social security/UBI in wrong way, that's on you. But there should be probably some education. And if someone can't effectively use your allowance (mentally ill, non-functioning alcoholic), then maybe we should put such people in proper institutions, but they could be funded by UBI instead of specialised assistance program.
Failing -> homeless and starving is a failure mode at the level of the individual. That’s not good, but failure modes of the entire structure are higher priority and the two don’t really compare apples to apples. Capitalism (absent corruption) is actually sort of cleverly recursive there because financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods, because the act of producing vital goods is precisely what is rewarded by the system. So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure).
On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live, and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically, even across plausible variable configurations such as “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming” etc.
We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
How is UBI different from welfare?
On the surface, they sound the same
> Current mode...
Or, ya know, save money or get a job. Failure rarely leads to homeless and starvation. Most people are far more resilient than that, the current US homeless rate is ~1/500
If we need/want UBI to be a thing, educating people on the difference is going to part of the effort and debate
UBI discussion invariably is way off the mark. The only thing UBI solves is how to give out the money, which is a massive misdirection, the real problem is how to get the money. Do you gut the state and allow people who don't work to have enough money to barely survive as an underclass, or do you end billionaires and usher in a new renaissance where all needs are met and labour shall just be at our whim. These two vastly different visions are both UBI, but most discussion about UBI completely sidesteps that as it requires touching upon the more difficult issues.
Once you have control of the money to give out, literally every way of redistribution is as good as UBI. If you calculate how much money would be required for a reasonable UBI.. then imagine what could be done if that money was spent on communal, humane, services then it would be able to revolutionise the world every bit as much.
Necessities get made because there's someone to buy them. Only 5% of people are employed in agriculture and 15% in manufacturing. 80% of working people could do nothing and we'd still be fine when it comes to necessities. And we don't even have peak automation.
Most people want a lot more out of life than basic necessities.
UBI does not mean you don't work, nor you can't earn a lot of money. It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't.
I'm a psychiatry resident and developper. I have never been paid for my dev work but have produced quite a lot on my free time (site: w.olicorne.org ). I would do psychiatry pretty much no matter how much I'm paid for it.
In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway. UBI would free up time and cognitive load of the most productive people I believe. Following a 80/20 kinda rule.
Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not *have to* monetize.
> In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway.
The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking. Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
> Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not have to monetize.
Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.
> It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't.
Seems inefficient to pay for everyone to have kitchens in their house and pay them cash to get ingredients to cook. Couldn't we just employ some of these people as cooks and have them make meals in a centralised kitchen in every neighbourhood? A bit like the British Restaurant idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Restaurant
I don't see the connection with what we were talking about but:
- soup kitchen are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_kitchen
- community fridges too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_fridge
- and historically in france where I'm from, when we started having freezer technology it first appeared in shared houses for the whole village. People would go there once a day to fetch what they needed and would eat it. Can't find english sources but it seems very efficient. A least much more than every one having a fridge. https://france3-regions.franceinfo.fr/pays-de-la-loire/mayen...
That's why it works, lol. Those already driven by the bet paying off still have their incentives, and those who would love to try something ... can! Because they don't have overdue bills to pay with extra interest.
...and rather depends on the whims of the feeding hand instead.
Like, haven't got your 22nd cocksuckie virus booster? Get lost and die from hunger.
You can make cool shit without having to do the work of productizing and monetizing it
I built a browser extension for a hackathon that enabled crypto payments direct to site owners. "registration" was just sticking a formatted payment address in a DNS TXT record, and if you were at a supported website, the extension would light up, and facilitated payment.
I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version
I had a similar idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who:
Ideally the model would be run locally in the browser, so the author isn't paying whatever they're paying. But the web standards to do complicated stuff locally aren't there yet and probably will never be.
That's not a practical answer but it's my two cents.
I wish I could give him two cents without having to try. HTTP status 402 with micropayments or something needs to become a thing. The platforms do it... (subs, tips, donations, rewards etc etc.) Why can't the web.
I had an idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who:
Maybe, but WASM still has its limitations and pains. If you compile with emscripten you're still using thousands lines of generated javascript to glue the wasm and javaecript together.
Especially in the age of AI tools, I also thought about this a few times. The current idea I have is something like a parking meter. Every expensive transaction (like calling a model) would subtract from the money pool, and every visitor could see how much is still left in the pool. In addition, a list of the top 5 donors with their amounts might improve the group dynamic (like on pay-what-you-want pages like humblebundle.com).
It would be more about covering the cost than about making someone rich, but I think that is what most of the people who build stuff care about. Sadly, I don't know a service yet that offers this model.
This won't work when the meter is at zero due to human psychology. New visitors will say: "no one subsidized my experience (indeed I don't even know what $thing does) but <creator> wants me to subsidize $thing for others".
The whole "subsidize for other visitors" concept is weaker than "pay <creator>".
If there’s one thing I learnt from HN it’s how many people can’t comprehend this. Is it a byproduct of growing up in a very transactional or selfish environment?
Yes. First being a YouTube creator became a business, then twitch, tiktok, twitter. GenZ basically grew up with everything being/becoming a business "opportunity". Making money is the goal for "creators", to the point where ads have become normalized and not having a sponsor is leaving money on the table.
I'm almost sure it is. I don't understand it personally, and it feels like grifting to me.
Sometimes it would be nice if you could just break even though. Particularly for these AI projects.
I don't think donation approaches are necessarily bad, but yes it should not be as simple as putting a kofi link at the top of a page.
This person doesn't just do that though. Right after the part where you've uploaded your own examples, there's a reminder: if you had fun buy me a coffee.
Though this is slightly offset by the fact that they state you have 2 free trials and then you pay. It's a complete incentives mismatch if you ask for coffee for something you explicitly presented to them as a marketing offer. Though, I suppose leaving the donation option on doesn't hurt in this case either.
In my experience, donationware works best when the donation request is polite, personal, uncoercive, unintrusive, and comes at a moment of surprise right after you would have seen actual value from a product, and from a product that has not otherwise asked you for any money so far (including showing you ads).
KeepassXC Android is a good example: the guy asks for a beer during octoberfest :)
> Is there a better way?
If one's visitors are gamers, perhaps one might use gaming payment providers to sell an "supporter badge"? But that's perhaps be pushing their envelope.
If one's visitors are from the "rapidly-developing world", with well-adopted candybar-scale micropayment systems - China, India, Indonesia, Brasil, Kenya, SK, Sweden... hmm. Direct access from elsewhere seems still very limited, but perhaps one might use a global payment gateway like Adyen? My impression is transaction cost is more than $0.10 but less than $1.
In the "less-rapidly-developing world", X.com has been working towards a similar superapp with Visa for the US. The Visa/MC duopoly seems to have shifted from its years of preventing US micropayments, to something like "maybe 2030-ish".
Thanks for the highlight. Doesn't seem like there's much activity on his Ko-Fi for being on the front page of HN. I sent him a tip, although privately.
I had an idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who:
Yeah - fine tune it a bit more (it’s a little too worst-case-scenario-in-the-dead-of-winter) and sell it to architectural firms and developers for a fee. This is simple to monetize and not up to us to figure out how to turn processor cycles into dollar bills.
Monetization: People can now use ChatGPT for this if they have the idea, so it’s a tight goal. Would people in urban planning pay to see this? If not, then this was just the “15 minutes of fame” experience”, and people who are not career influencers have difficulty monetizing that. Of course, thank you for your concept.
This will be an unpopular answer but one way that could have worked is just good ol' advertising, because it directly converts "virality" into income.
Any solution that requires the user to bust out a credit card and put down his billing address has way too much friction for the median user to get through.