satotious
Born on June 10, 2020•29 Karma
Thanks for your feedback :)
Speaking for everybody oddly enough is almost never the goal of any enterprise. Content creators generally either produce their content and care about finances to support it full time (they would try to do so even if it cost them money) or just do so as a means to the end. It is all a trade problem in the end it seems to get people what they want.
To make the process are simple as possible for non-crypto users we are working on a browser extension/app which will act as a wallet and autopay to create a seamless experience. We are working to integrate with an exchange so that users can top up straight from their credit cards and don't need to know anything about Bitcoin.
I guess the biggest threat for the user is the wallet/extension being drained. We recommend users don't store lots of money in there, but given that we are dealing with micropayments there shouldn't be need for high amounts anyway. Giving users more control comes with more risk, but that's the tradeoff and we aim to help educate on ways to mitigate these risks.
We use Bitcoin Lightning Network as it lets us do micropayments without tracking users, we aren't interested in creating a coin or doing an ico.
Thank you for your feedback
You are on Hacker News, so presumably you click some of the links. Some clickbait of course does end up here but linked articles are mostly not clickbait.
Similarly, you should pay attention to youtube links in comments (here and elsewhere) to start building a catalog of creators of content that you enjoy.
Also, incidentally, the apparent deluge of "haters" and "conspiracy theorists" you have noticed and pointed out here relates to a topic of frequent discussion in this forum (regulation of social media networks) and it is worth thinking about how it impacts us in these seemingly unrelated ways.
I'm happy to read a programming story written by a professional full time programmer just for fun.
I'm not sure I would equally enjoy a programming story written by someone who cannot find a programming job to pay the bills.
In the beginning, the internet was only people sharing things just for fun in their free time, without any commercial intent. I would like to go back there as the base model of how content websites operate.
Disclosure: I have previously pursued a business not dissimilar to the one under discussion.
Buyer's remorse doesn't make this more ethical.
So then, the question here is: How many websites are there that are worth my time to read, but not worth purchasing a $5 monthly subscription for?
So I'm not sure that there is a use for micropayments here. Either it's good quality, then they charge $5+ anyway, or it's "ad level quality" and then I'm better off not wasting my time.
We think the time is right to try micropayments again as an increasing amount of content is going behind subscriptions and ad revenue is declining. Reasons we are different: 1. We have a free option with ad views. 2. We run on the Bitcoin Lightning Network as it makes micropayments feasible without the need to track users. 3. We tackle cognitive cost associated with micropayments with our browser extension/app which can auto-pay the paywalls.
For more details of our vision have a look at our site and blog posts, satotious.com. Right now we're in beta and are looking for content creators, no matter how big or small, please get in touch: ruby@satotious.com
You can test out the paywall on our site, all feedback welcome :)
Just curious - what split have you seen so far between readers picking ads v micropayments?
Question before I try it out -How do you serve up ads? Are you a part of a network? I noticed you collect all data from sites with the extension, curious to know if the ad alternative is collecting my data and targeting me with personalized ads.
So far we are getting 95% picking ads vs micropayments, I guess thats to be expected as most people dont have bitcoin lightning wallets yet.
Right now we have demo ads which we create. Our ads are slightly different as they incorporate a captcha.
The permissive permission on the extension is so we can inject the auto-pay functionality. We dont collect your browsing data. Open sourcing the browser extension and paywall is on the road map. The future plan is that users connect their own lightning wallet to the browser extension and publishers do the same for the paywall, therefore we wont see any of those interactions and keep everything private
Disclosure: I am, in theory, a potential competitor through work I've done off and on over the past decade.
Can't wait to see where this goes!