It’s always seemed to me that this would be fairly easy by just setting up a “wallet” model. I.e fill up wallet with $20, browser extension has a “tip” button where your wallet gets deducted however many cents and the site owner’s gets added the same amount (challenge is identifying the site owner). You re-up every so often, perhaps automatically, and everyone goes on their merry way.
Then people pay for things and don't like what they received. The cardholder wants their money back, and you have two choices.
Choice one, you have a dispute resolution system which costs money which requires high transaction costs, and can't have $0.03 transactions. Choice two, you don't, the user gets mad, disputes the charge with the credit card company and then the browser extension goes out of business due to chargebacks.
What you need is something that works like cash. Money is exchanged for goods and services, the end. If somebody steals from you or rips you off, your recourse is by recovering it from the person who ripped you off, not the bank. If that makes people stop doing business with shady people using this payment method, fine. Still works for the local newspaper.
Or just make the tips refundable for a short time period with no formal process (submit a short sentence about why for later review in case of abuse suspicion maybe). If people abuse the system, ban them (eta: identity banning should be pretty easy given you need to provide a credit card) If sites frequently get refunds requested, disable the app for them.
> Or just make the tips refundable for a short time period with no formal process
Then you get the fraud the other way. People get content and then ask for a refund.
> If people abuse the system, ban them
So now you're back to needing an expensive dispute resolution process.
> If sites frequently get refunds requested, disable the app for them.
Which punishes the sites who are the most common victims of buyer fraud.
There are three options. Option one, dispute resolution process, high transaction costs. Option two, caveat emptor, no refunds. Option three, caveat venditor, totally unconditional refunds.
And option three doesn't really work either, because if readers are anonymous they could all ask for a refund with no consequences, but if they're not it's a privacy problem. So what you really need for small transactions is option two. Which isn't really a problem for small transactions, because they're small -- if somebody rips you off to the tune of $0.03, whatever, lesson learned, don't do business with them again.
> if somebody rips you off to the tune of $0.03, whatever, lesson learned, don't do business with them again.
They won't need you to do business with them again. 10k viewers being ripped off is $300, and let the site fail, onto the next domain to do it over again.
Now it's the email spam problem - every site gets to rip you off $0.03, you add them to your blocklist, but there are so many you never hear of that site again anyway.
I don’t think people would pay 3 cents to every site? Or pay the money before even seeing content?
I envision this as more of a European style tipping than American: I read an article, watch a video, cline a GitHub repo, etc. I find that the content is well made and I’d like to support the creator. I press the “tip” button in my browser and top them some small amount (<$1 in most cases).
This way there’s no need to deal with refunds, bad actors, etc.
> Now it's the email spam problem - every site gets to rip you off $0.03, you add them to your blocklist, but there are so many you never hear of that site again anyway.
We already have this problem with clickbait. They get the $0.03 from filling their site with spamvertisements and then waste your time getting you to click on it. Whether the $0.03 is from you or advertisers is irrelevant.
Though you could add a "screw those guys" button where you don't get your money back but they don't get it either. That might even allow there to be no transaction costs, by using that money to fund the system.
