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Comment by Taikonerd | Hacker News Reader

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Taikonerd

> So...what next? How do creators get paid?

I think Flattr has (or had) a model like...

1. you give Flattr a constant $X per month (you choose the X)

2. Flattr tracks the content you consume, using a browser plugin

3. Flattr divides up your $X among the creators you viewed, and sends it to them

I never used it, but it seems like an interesting model. I like the idea of spending a flat $30/month on "internet content", without agonizing about whether X webcomic deserves my Patreon support.

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Flattr sounded good on paper, but had a lot of practical problems. This comment sums it up pretty well why basically only Flattr was making money with Flattr:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15558406

If there was one thing I was expecting to come out of the cryptocurrency craze, it was a better Flattr. Yet even that failed to materialize.

No blockchain currently has the scale for this. FWIW, Visa couldn't handle this either. Youtube alone serves over 10,000 videos per second to just mobile clients. Add in podcasts, text content, music, games, etc. and it's a monumental task.

You don't have to be as big as youtube. The only infrastructure you need is ingestion points for all the feeds, and then reporting mechanisms. The ingestion can just go into an autoscaling group. At that point your cloud costs track almost directly with your revenue, so a big AWS bill is a good sign.

I like this model too. I don't want to see ads, but payment options always seem to require too many decisions. I don't want to manage subscriptions or choose whether to pay for every single piece of content, but I'll happily make a regular monthly payment if I feel it gets distributed fairly.

I'm not sure what incentive there would be to increase the amount contributed though: seems like if users can pay any $X > 0 then it's not enough. Maybe there would need to be a bare minimum.

I pay about $50 a month for internet, and none of that goes to the creators. The ISP transmits the bits but profits from others creating something that makes me want to be connected.

My idea: ISPs become regulated like utilities (fixed rate subject to public utilities commission), there is some flat fee for service and then a content fee that gets divided up based on what you consume and paid to the originating IP address. Figure out some categories of content (audio, video, image, text), enforce something that prevents inflating of bits, and then everyone gets paid based on their content. My blog earns a few pennies a day and my account with my hosting provider gets credited monthly or something—which offsets my hosting bill. A YouTube channel gets paid to YouTube who take a cut for providing the severs and the rest passed on. Software and hardware for self-hosting becomes a thing again.

> Figure out some categories of content (audio, video, image, text), enforce something that prevents inflating of bits, and then everyone gets paid based on their content.

So. much. handwaving. And there are so many ways this will be gamed by so many parties.

Won't that pave the way to the very thing everyone got up in arms about net neutrality for? Having to pay more for certain types of traffic or to certain websites. If your ISP is supposed to forward on some funds to certain types of content then you'll bet they'll add packages and throttle bandwidth for certain content unless you pay extra.

Regulation clearly won't help in the US any many parts of the world if ISPs have that kind of leeway, even if "regulated".

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