At the recent "Protocols for Publishers" event, a group of us were talking about news paywalls, social media promotion, and the embarrassment of having to ask for money.
What if, we said, you could tip a journalist directly on social media? Or reward your favourite creator without leaving the platform? Or just say thanks by buying someone a pint?
Here's a trivial mock-up:
Of course, this hides a ton of complexity. Does it show your local currency symbol? Does the platform take a cut or does it just pass you to the poster's preferred platform? Do users want to be able to tip as well as / instead of reposting and favouriting?
But I think the real problem is the perverse incentives it creates. We already know that relentless A|B testing of monetisation strategies leads to homogeneity and outrage farming. Every YouTuber has the same style of promotional thumbnail. Rage-baiters on Twitter know what drives the algorithm and pump out unending slurry.
Even if we ignore those who want to burn the world, content stealers like @CUTE_PUPP1E5 grab all the content they can and rip-off original creators. At the moment that's merely annoying, but monetisation means a strong incentive to steal content.
When people inevitably get scammed, would that damage the social media platform? Would promoting a payment link lead to liability? Now that money is involved, does that make hacking more attractive?
And yet… Accounts add payment links to their profiles all the time. Lots of accounts regularly ask for donor and sponsors. GitHub sponsors exist and I don't see evidence of people impersonating big projects and snaffling funds.
It is somewhat common for platforms to pay for publishers to be on their site. If you're starting up a new service then you need to give people an incentive to be there. That might be as a payer or receiver.
Personally, I'd love a frictionless way to throw a quid to a helpful blog post, or effortlessly donate to a poster who has made me laugh. Selfishly, I'd like it if people paid me for my Open Source or (micro)blogging.
I don't know whether Mastodon or BlueSky will ever have a payments button - and I have no influence on their decision-making process - but I'd sure like to see them experiement.
You can read more discussion on Mastodon.
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6 thoughts on “Social Media Payments and Perverse Incentives”
@Edent I pay about 300$ per month via Patreon to creators (so with Patreon fees it is around 400+$).
The reason why I like Patreon is that I have a central place to manage this.
| Reply to original comment on infosec.exchange
@Edent As you know I give out rewards every day over on Hive. There's a comic artist I know there who says he makes more that way than from other online sources. It's a different model that happens to work. Ŧhose who try plagiarising tend to get found out.
Yes, I know folk here have a kneejerk reaction to things like blockchain or even to being paid to blog. I don't really need the money, but I can support others by building my stake.
| Reply to original comment on mastodon.org.uk
imo micropayments only make sense when the thing you’re doing online is already transactional. if I’m listening to someone’s music that they produced as their job and they need money to live it feels natural to want to donate to them if I loved their song. but a shitpost? not so much
| Reply to original comment on bsky.app
This is where I liked the original idea of the Brave web browser: you could "load" up your wallet (by funding it or watching ads) and then this would be spent on pages with appropriate tags (based on your view time) or you could select to "tip". There were some problems with Brave "collecting tips" for creators who didn't want to participate in it though.
However, they've gone heavily into crypto and when I found out why the founder got booted from Mozilla (transphobia at a minimum) I switched. The base idea was good though IMHO.
Coyote
User-to-user tipping was supposed to be the premise of Imzy, and it didn't work out for them. They never made it clear exactly why, but I expect it may have had something to do with the same reasons it didn't work for Cohost.
@Edent I'd say a tip/support button that directs to a link the poster chooses would be best. Not an integrated payment tied to the social media platform.
Something like Peertube has already, it shows a support button under the video, next to like/dislike buttons.
Even better if you can customize it for specific posts, if you want to promote a charity or mutual aid.
| Reply to original comment on chilemasto.casa
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