Would love to get feedback on this version. I've been thinking about this for awhile and recently revived something I first posted on HN back in 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586798
Eventually I realized that asking for payments, even as micropayments, doesn't work as the mental transaction cost is just too much. Instead I got inspiration from Ted Nelson's concept of "transcopyright" where the creator of the content is interlinked with the content itself. This too had its complexities so I simplified the linkage to be indirect by picking up existing ids that were near the content and using those as the basis for a retroactive value system I called kudos.
Today's implementation is a browser extension that looks for existing ids: things like GitHub/HN/Reddit/Youtube/Twitch/Bluesky/X/email, etc... and uses that to define your "corner of the web". Essentially these are the people that make the web pages you depend on, a kind of personal attribution graph.
You can put in a url on the home page and get a rough idea how this might work.
After a month you'll have a distribution which we use to send points to, and those points can optionally get converted back. It's kind of like shareholders buying shares in a corporation, and then later getting a dividend based on their ownership.
To encourage people to pay I built a "universal tier" system where you can cause some of your work to be paywalled behind having a tier access. Unlike something like Patreon you would be supporting the whole web rather than just one person. Tiers can gate access via a web component we have on the apps section, or via a Discord bot.
The best way to see it in action is actually with the browser extension, however you can also CC: a special email address to create kudos. That's probably too much so I'll leave it there, but happy to answer questions.
Show HN: I built an automatic micropayment-ish system to support the Web · HackerTrans
Eventually I realized that asking for payments, even as micropayments, doesn't work as the mental transaction cost is just too much. Instead I got inspiration from Ted Nelson's concept of "transcopyright" where the creator of the content is interlinked with the content itself. This too had its complexities so I simplified the linkage to be indirect by picking up existing ids that were near the content and using those as the basis for a retroactive value system I called kudos.
Today's implementation is a browser extension that looks for existing ids: things like GitHub/HN/Reddit/Youtube/Twitch/Bluesky/X/email, etc... and uses that to define your "corner of the web". Essentially these are the people that make the web pages you depend on, a kind of personal attribution graph.
You can put in a url on the home page and get a rough idea how this might work.
After a month you'll have a distribution which we use to send points to, and those points can optionally get converted back. It's kind of like shareholders buying shares in a corporation, and then later getting a dividend based on their ownership.
To encourage people to pay I built a "universal tier" system where you can cause some of your work to be paywalled behind having a tier access. Unlike something like Patreon you would be supporting the whole web rather than just one person. Tiers can gate access via a web component we have on the apps section, or via a Discord bot.
The best way to see it in action is actually with the browser extension, however you can also CC: a special email address to create kudos. That's probably too much so I'll leave it there, but happy to answer questions.