TL;DR detect donation options on a website, track website visits locally, show a monthly view of websites visited monthly with donation options, donate to your favorites (manually at first, automatically later - never worked in banking)
Intro
I’m sure a fair number read “monetisation” and though “that’s ads”. No. You’ve been conditioned to think that ads are the only way. They aren’t. They are one of the worst.
Unfortunately, that’s what many media creators, artists, writers, software developers, etc. assume. Peertube isn’t a viable platform for creators because viewers have a lot of friction to give the creator money. Meanwhile, on platforms like youtube, all they have to do is view the video and everything else happens in the background.
What if we, the viewers, had an easier way to donate.
The optimal (my dream)
- I install software and give it access to my bank account (my bank supports creating many sub accounts)
- the software tracks the usage of the things I use, the pages I visit, the videos (and their creators) that I watch, the artists I listen to, the newspapers I read, the blogs I read, the forums I interact with, etc.
- at the end of each month, I transfer
%moneyto my sub account (automatic transfer) - the software is notified and
%moneyis distributed, with an algorithm of my choosing, using the donation gateways of the stuff I consumed
This can all be done locally, without a server, and if need be stored per device, then aggregated via a local sync (WiFi, bluetooth, VPN, …). Everything stays local, the bank just sees your outgoing transactions. Optimally, it would be with a private method of transferring money e.g Monero or GNU Taler.
Distribution examples
- top X - equal split
- weighted split (#1 - 50%, #2 - 30%, #3 20%)
- exponential decay (halve until minimum is reached, 50%, 25%, 12.5%, …)
- linear decay (remove fixed amount until nothing is left, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10)
- winner takes all (#1 get all the money)
- weighted split + base ( base = 10, #1 +20, #2 +15, …)
Reality
- Tracking everything is difficult but website visits are easy with an extension
- I’ve never worked with banking and have no idea how to connect to bank account (open banking?)
Tracking
These have their advantages and disadvantages, but together, they could cover most scenarios.
- Peertube for example could add tags and provide a file on the server for information about donating to the server operator.
- Lemmy could add tags to
<head>for people who have created the thread. - People who use managed services but control the content can put donation links in the <body>. These are the most at risk though as it’s possible that managed service operators inject whatever they like into the traffic.
Reading the DOM
- find OpenGraph declarations
<meta property="og:donation" content="https://wero.eu/example" /> - find payment provider links
document.querySelector("a").filter(isPaymentProvider)
Querying the server
.well-known/donation servers should put that file there with a documented JSON format
Reading queries
Look for custom headers e.g X-Donation: https://wero.eu/example
Payments
If I’m not mistaken, GNU Taler should have an API that allows connecting to an account, but it only has a testnet. Paying with crypto probably needs a server or something where you host your wallet, but it should be possible. Open Banking, after having a quick look requires some kind of registration to be able to access the API. IMO, nobody’s going to hand over details like that unless it’s considered normal and we’re far away from that.
Therefore, the most likely is that the user will simply be presented with the algorithms to distribute money, the amounts to distribute, and the distribution methods. My best guess is that people get a quarterly, semesterly, or annual notification with the “It’s time to donate!” window and they figure it out.
Ups and downs
Advantages
- It’s completely local - nobody but you does the tracking, can analyse it, and use it
- You decide how you want to distribute the money
- You decide how much
- You decide the frequency
- You don’t have to trust me with your money
- I don’t have to take a cut
- I don’t have to setup a company to handle your money
- You don’t have to trust that I transfer the money to those who have earned it
- Operators have options:
- Do nothing aka continue as before with existing donation options (wero, paypal, direct bank transfer, crypto, whatever)
- Add a
<meta>tag which gives power to the operator to dynamically generate it (as described before) - Make it work with static pages using
.well-known/donations
Disadvantages
- Users currently will have to make the transfers themselves
- Transfers reveal who you’re donating to to banks (no third-party intermediary)
- Changes will be required by server operators or software developers
- No security review done yet
- Other extensions messing with
<meta>tags - Other extensions messing with web traffic to insert HTTP headers
- Server operators modifying HTTP headers and web content of their customers to replace donation targets
- Malicious server operators tracking users that call
.well-known/donations - Whatever else people come up with
- Other extensions messing with
I’m curious about constructive criticism, improvement suggestions, or maybe even links to dispell some of my beliefs about Open Banking.
Previous inspiration
flattr was a micro transaction platform that supposedly did something like this, but it never gained steam. They acted as the tracker and distributor, but it required that server operators also register with flattr.
You’ve reinvented one of the two reasons that Project Xanadu failed: micropayments have very high overhead relative to the content being paid for. (The other reason is that there literally aren’t data structures which work like Xanadu’s data model.)
Further, where does money come from? You’re sketching a system where money has relatively high velocity, but it’s all paying for content, which has marginal cost to distribute; how does money get into this system in the first place? This is why Bitcoin’s currently on a trend to zero; once everybody realizes this problem, the system collapses from lack of faith.
I hope that thinking about this for a bit will radicalize you further towards the understanding that a universal income and artists’ stipend is the economically-sustainable way to compensate artists, rather than forcing folks to swap scraps of digital coinage.
I hope that thinking about this for a bit will radicalize you further towards the understanding that a universal income and artists’ stipend is the economically-sustainable way to compensate artists,
Lets keep the question aside how an universal income would function and only focus on the artists stipend:
For that we would need a) a definition what an artist exactly is and b) a tamper proof ledger with the full and always up to date personal information of every single artist that qualifies for such an stipend. And to repeat the question you asked: Where does the money for this come from?
There are efforts on a standard called Web Monetization
I remember seeing this and losing track of it a year or more ago. But the ecosystem seems to have died about 2 years. Libraries are all 2+ years old. The downside I see with it is that it requires signing up to join the system, which is surely a blocker for many people. First you have to know about it, then you have to trust it, and then you have to find the people who use it.
That said, I love the idea of being able to pay for anything with your web-browser. How far away we are from it though, I don’t know. The name “interledger” is also unfortunate as it immediately makes you think “crypto”, which will probably turn off a lot of people to the wallet.
It isn’t clear to me how the connection to the bank is actually made. Gatehub for example says SEPA and Wire transfers work, but so do XRP, and bitcoin. The wallet seems to be held by them, but does that make them a bank? Maybe I’m thinking to much about it…
Maybe it warrants another look. But I do think that connecting the current world to easy donations is important. Web monetisation could be added later once it becomes a standard.
That looks interesting. Any idea how close it is to reality? I found a plugin they have but it does require setting up a test account on their test network. Doesn’t seem ready for real world use yet.
AFAIK it was already working, though cumbersome to set up. Then a core enable stopped supporting it, and now it is less alive than before. However I’m not deep into the topic and the last info I got from this article.
Thanks. That’s quite recent. If it’s already in Chromium, maybe it has a reasonable shot at becoming a standard. But who knows how long it will take.
That looks pretty decent. Could mostly support the OP’s use-case, but also could allow sites to trade a cookie for payment, for semi-anonymous pay-for-access.
Is the main issue really tracking and consolidating microdonations, or is it transferring credit between these donation systems and traditional finance entities like banks and credit card networks?
From what I’ve seen, efforts to develop microtransaction/microdonation systems generally seem to have trouble with regulatory compliance, either through legitimate legal requirements that force them to do things that seem nonsensical to their users (My guess is that the registered servers issue OP mentioned with Flattr came down to this), or due to greedy intermediaries stalling and witholding under false pretences while they hold out for a bigger share of the money, without appreciating the already extremely thin margins involved.
Is the main issue really tracking and consolidating microdonations, or is it transferring credit between these donation systems and traditional finance entities like banks and credit card networks?
They are 2 main issues. As mentioned, you want to transfer the money to the right person, which means tracking (or collection, whatever term you want to assign to it). And you want to transfer in the first place. Since there are so many systems, and some that don’t allow one-time donations, and people are all over the world, it definitely is a problem. That’s why not doing it monthly but annually could help. But that does make me think that it should be possible for the user to filter donation methods. For example filtering out direct transfers to accounts outside of your region due to transfer costs. Thanks, I can add that.
Which regulatory compliance things would apply to this in its current form? Or do you mean that connecting to a user’s bank account would incur the wrath of the authorities?
The first step would be to get websites to accept donations in any other way than PayPal and credit cards.
Why? If the tracking picks it up, then it’ll be up to the user whether they want to transfer money via those methods. Someone did make me think that filtering donation methods would be useful. So if there are website that use a donation method you disapprove of or do not support, you don’t have to transfer money to them.
I thought I remembered a standardized metadata file format you can place on your website, but I can’t find it.
Brave webbrowser attempted something like that with Brave Rewards, but through ads, and basically collected for themselves until the websites actually signed up for Brave Rewards.
I remember Flattr.
Extra support could be added to try and retrieve the FUNDING file when browsing source forges. Good idea.
I read about Brave Rewards. It’s definitely not something I aim to replicate as a whole. Maybe they have nifty distribution methods worth copying? Would be interested in that.
I remember something that I think was a bit different to Flattr. People would put buttons on their sites, then you’d kind of thumbs up or upvote or something when you visited the site if you liked it. At the end of each month, your specified donation amount got split based on the the proportion of likes on each site. I think it would be separate buttons for e.g. each article on the site, or perhaps you could like more than once as I seem to recall being able to give another like each other time you visited.
For a while there were a bunch of sites I’d visit that had it, but I can’t remember seeing it since perhaps 5-10 years ago.
I believe that is what Flattr was in the beginning. They also had integrations that allowed you to automatically “like” your starred github projects and articles read in your RSS reader. At the end of the month a fixed amount was distributed to this month’s entries. I really liked that.
Ah yes, I guess it was Flattr! I read the top of the above linked wikipedia page and it talked about visiting pages with a browser extension, which didn’t sound right. But I see now in the history section it has:
Its first version required users to click on a “flattr” button on websites to “flattr” content.
So I guess I was in early!
I’ve only partially read over you wrote and am heading into the mountains on vacation, but I will try to read over what you’ve written here sometime this weekend.
I look forward to the feedback :) Enjoy your vacation!
