Slashdot Mirror
Responses to Clay Shirky on Micropayments
FrnkMit writes "Others besides Slashdotters have responded to Clay Shirky's latest article on Micropayments, including long-time micropayment booster Scott McCloud and the MIT Technology Review."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Registration, however trivial, is ultimately inconvenient to the casual browser. These individuals are likely dedicating a minimal amount of effort to your website.
Do you like German cars?
Any article mentioning Scott McCloud must of course include the views of two of my favourite philosophers.
(P.S. If you read the news article that goes with it, you'll see that the comic is actually about micropayments.)
I moderate "-1, Fool"
Nanoprofit!
... is that there's so many to choose from. The problem is all these micropayment systems don't interconnect with eachother. If I were to sign up with BitPass, I would have to pay $3 even though I need it only for a purchase of $0.25 The same goes for any other micropayment system. I think micropayments should be handled in a decentralized way, all the way from your ISP bill to the target vendor, using so-called "micropayment banks" in the process.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
If micropayments ever become ubiquitous, I think we'll start seeing the old "salami slicing" hack again. When a lot of stuff you do online costs a nickel here, a penny there, a dime elsewhere... you can rack of some pretty serious numbers of transactions just browsing around. After all, if loading that New York Times article linked to from Slashdot is only 2 cents, who cares, right?
But perhaps some clever fraudster will see an opportunity here. Wouldn't it be easy to steal 1 cent a month from 1,000,000 people who use micropayments? After all, who's going to notice a line item titled "News article ----- $0.01"? So there's $10,000/month that nobody's really going to miss.
And for a single penny, would most people take the time to make a phone call or write an email to request clarification on where that charge originated? Even if all you make is a pitiful $3.60/hour, that one penny takes a mere 6 seconds to earn, far shorter than the time it would take to investigate. And is the micropayment company going to investigate your 1 cent dispute? Likely they would ignore you or even just automatically refund your penny without much thought.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The article is spot-on, for specific kinds of content, but I think its conclusions are wrong.
Clearly no-one will pay even a dime for content that they can get elsewhere for free. It's true that the size of the payment is less important than its simple presence.
But there are other things we happily pay for, and micropayments are a basic necessity if we want to get those things digitised and available on-line.
In Belgium, where I am, people are using premium SMS messages for micropayments. It's incredibly inefficient: a Euro1.00 message returns at most 60% to the website owner. Yet this is becoming a more and more popular way of charging for access to dating sites and other web sites people are happy, eager even, to pay for.
Micropayments to reserve parking spaces, to place small ads, to search for appartments, to post a CV to a job site, to chat with remote friends, to get news on what's happening downtown, to vote for pop starts, to play games, to access porn,... the horizons are vast and limited today only by the complexity of linking the consumer's wallet and the vendor's account.
What's missing in the micropayment world are two things, AFAICS. One is government support to mandate norms and standards backed up with legislation and consumer/supplier protection. Two is support from the banking industry in the form of accessible implementations available to small vendors.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
A point in the MIT piece shows that they do not really understand what they are talking about. They say:
"A micropayment system like BitPass would allow consumers to experiment with new content but also to place their support behind specific artists whose work they find consistently rewarding and interesting. Ultimately, they are paying for only the content they consume--and not shelling out a fixed sum every month."
In other words, they see pay-as-you-go as a benefit to the consumer. Problem is, the consumer does not view it as a benefit; rather the opposite.
A number of studies have shown that people greatly prefer a fixed-cost structure over use-based payment - even when they demonstrably would save significant amounts of money by switching over. People find the need to constantly decide whether a given use is worth the money; and to feel they constantly have to monitor and aveluate their usage spending to be a burden that is disproportionate to the amount of money they would save, even when the amount is quite significant.
I know that the most liberating aspect for me of going for a fixed line, rather than using a modem, was not the speed, but rather the liberation of being online at all times, using it whenever I wanted without worrying about telephone charges (local calls are metered in most of Europe).
So, no, I do not really believe in "micropayments" in the sense they are talking about it here.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Metafilter
Les Jones
Bruce Landon - landonline
City Comforts Blog
Marginal Revolution
Long story; short pier
Tom Maszerowski on Livejournal
bbCity.co.uk
Being an "artist" myself, and even having vague plans at earning my money with this after my (unrelated) study, I'm afraid I must disagree with McCloud saying that art isn't a commodity.
;-)
Funny though that Dictionary.com has a rather interesting definition of the word "commodity" with relation to McCloud's comments, but I'm sure that McCloud tries to say that a commodity is "something that you can just take for granted".
We may not realize this, but our "modern" culture, like any other culture before it, relies on the availability of the art that underwrites it. Belonging to a culture is still something that is expressed through music, art, fashion and religion. People don't like restricted access to culture. Music, cartoons, whatever art it is that you like, it becomes part of your life, and part of your culture. (Striking example: how many `80's songs do you like to hear, while you agree at the same time that they suck -- just because you grew up in the `80's and you can share something with your friends through this music?)
Life, even in our Western world, would not be so nice if we all threw out our stereos, radios, comic strips, TV's, bioscopes, monuments and ALL other ways in which we access art, and thus culture.
Art is a gift to culture, and should thus be a gift to the people. Like anyone else, artists should make a living. They should definately find some way to calculate their hours of work into their products. But the art should be free for all of us willing to enjoy and extend it (bar stuff like trademarks that put some structure in the "development process" of our art).
Now get out there and start making business models again!
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]