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Comment by aninhumer | Hacker News Reader

I think micro-payments just don't sit well with people psychologically.

Even if you know the totals are going to be tiny, being on a meter just adds mental overhead to every click. And moreover most of the time people don't know if something is worth paying for until they've seen it, and they probably resent paying for some things.

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This is true. What I find puzzling is that advertisements have most of the same issues but many people accept them. You could argue that people's acceptance of ads suggests they should accept micropayments, or people's rejection of micro payments suggests they should reject ads. But I put up with ads and haven't signed up for any micro payment schemes yet.

Maybe mini-payments would be better than micro-payments, so long as there's a good it-just-works technology for doing them that minimizes user interaction.

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The history of the web is littered with the corpses of tipping companies because almost no one wants to tip on the web.

Same for micropayments. No one wants to think about if they should pay for an article even if it is only 1c.

maybey you could have a default .01$ for all sites that are using the micropayment platform (somthing like a discus plugin), and then the option to give more if you really like. so you don't actaully need to think about it most of the time

I still have to decide if I want to pay $0.01 just to visit a page. For every page I want to open I have to go through the mental process of "Is this page worth $0.01?". And it is that cost which is why micropayments like that always fail.

I think it is littered with the corpses of tipping companies because no one wants to jump through hoops to use a proprietary tipping service. But if you go with pay pal, you can get tips:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-...

That actually can work:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-...

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