134 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 9h \ on: The Mental Transaction Costs of Zaps bitcoin
I've been meaning to write about this. I experience far more anxiety about my flat-rate streaming subscriptions than my one-off movie and tv show rentals. I'm forced to maintain a volatile mental database of them.
Flat-rates also have an incentive to exploit their capture of you during the billing period. Amazon Video suddenly started showing ads, extorting another $3/mo to remove interruptions from movies we already paid for.
Szabo is correct about payments causing friction, but overlooks the utility of friction and that practically any friction can be countered. It's day 1 for zap science.
At least as Szabo imagined them, micropayments on the web would be an even greater anxiety-inducing payment scheme.
If streaming services can increase rates and downgrade services at flat rate billing, they can probably do just as much with pay-per-whatever billing.
Imagine your favorite streaming service slowly increases their rate by 1 sat every week. The difference might be hard to discern, and there would still be lock-in (although maybe less). But you might have the same sense of anxiety (oh man, watching movies sure has gotten expensive lately!)
Szabo is spot on that people don't want to deal with any of this.
And yet dealing with it on SN is actually fun. I like thinking about how much to zap, and the feeling of zapping, and playing around with different minimums or zap behaviors and seeing how much a post or comment has been zapped.
In responding to the comments on this post, one of the things I've come to is that it's important that zaps are voluntary. They aren't a price we pay for content. Stackers get to decide everything about the zap. And somehow that makes it better. Whereas if it was a price, I'd have to worry if it was fair or if it had gone up or if it was correct calculated for what I was purchasing.
There is the case of posting fees: there we have a required micropayment for a service. Introspecting myself, I can't say that I feel any mental fatigue over thinking through posting fees. Sometimes they are high and I decide not to post (or more often post in a different territory). But mostly I don't even notice them. All the same concerns with micropayments as listed above should still be there, and yet none of them turn out to be relevant. It is possible SN is just a really stellar service and do I don't notice them, but maybe also they aren't as big a deal as I initially suspected.
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