
Five Buck Fatigue - lawik
https://underjord.io/five-buck-fatigue.html
======
johnpowell
Back in the day the internet for normal people was 3 bucks a hour over a
14,400 modem. I didn't consider myself a "creator" for posting my recipes for
making mashed potatoes in a crock pot. I just wanted to make the world have
better mashed potatoes. I did it for free. There was no "like" button or
comments or monetization. Just this nerd and a crock pot and a gross amount of
butter. That is not a joke. I had a crock pot cooking site. I didn't have a
counter or anything. Maybe it was popular.. I will never know.

The internet was pretty great when it was just people sharing info without
looking for a advertising partnership with Land 'O Lakes.

~~~
scalablenotions
That's cool, but I want people to be able to independently create content for
me to enjoy, which is a bit less of a crock. That will probably takes all
their time and they need to pay for ingredients for their pot. Bring on
universal basic income I guess.

~~~
irrational
But there is already more excellent content that has already been created than
you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes. Do we really need to
support people to create more? I feel like we can enjoy what we already have
and don't need to continuously look for something new. If people really really
really want to create something, they will find a way to do so.

~~~
avian
> there is already more excellent content that has already been created than
> you could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes.

I hear this often. Where is this excellent content? 99% of things online
recommendations float up for me is garbage. Sometimes I see some gems, but
it's rare. Already years ago I was hearing people say that the only thing we
need now is good content discovery. Screw any new content. We already have too
much good stuff.

I'm starting to think that, if in all this time Internet giants haven't been
able come up with a way to get to those hundreds of lifetimes of amazing
content, maybe it doesn't actually exist?

Our tastes change over time. Some things that were great 10 years ago haven't
aged well. There's a long tail. What's excellent for you isn't interesting to
me, and so on. In a sum there might be more content than you can watch in a
lifetime, but an intersection of that whole collection with a single person's
momentary interests seems to be much much smaller.

~~~
barry-cotter
Have you really read the entire Western Canon? Listened to the collective
oeuvres of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart? Watched the AFI top 100 movies or
IMDB’s top 1000? Watched all of The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad? Read
the SF Masterworks Collection?

~~~
learnstats2
Nothing about that idea sounds fun to me.

If you've listened to some Bach (for example) and didn't like it, why would
you spend 200 hours listening to the rest?

~~~
barry-cotter
Is there any kind of cultural production, any genre that you like a lot more
than most people? Because if there is there’s someone who likes it 100 times
more than you and has made a list of the top 100 things in it. If you haven’t
gone through multiple of these lists then you you’re not even trying to get
through the enormous amount of fantastic content out there that is wildly
disproportionately likely to be great, for you.

~~~
imtringued
You underestimate how specific people's tastes can be. There are nano niches.
For example what if I like the music of a person so much that I'd rather
listen to that person for 100 hours than to anything else? Well, that's
exactly what I'm doing but when the author has only ever published 12 songs
each 3 min long then that means I've heard the songs over a hundred times
already and unfortunately at some point I just get bored of a song. I wish I
could enjoy them longer but for me it would be just as good if the same author
released a new batch of songs.

~~~
barry-cotter
You no longer enjoy that person’s music so much that you would rather listen
to it than do anything else. It seems unlikely that all of your interests are
so specific. If you have some more general tastes there will be lists of good
stuff you should check out in those genres. If you love these 12 songs more
than acting else but have listened to them so much that all joy has drained
from them have you listened to songs others with taste recommend for those who
love these songs?

Artistic taste is far from infinitely malleable but it’s flexible enough for
many to appreciate metal, opera, pop and classical music. If your tastes are
so narrow and specific you are in a tiny minority.

Finally, what is the artist and album?

------
zem
I have the opposite feeling; very often I will contribute to someone's patreon
or gofundme or whatever because I like their work and have gotten a lot out of
it, but I almost never go on to read the members only writing. some part of me
values it less because it isn't freely accessible.

~~~
throwanem
I don't tend to take advantage of members-only content either, but for me it's
purely a matter of convenience. If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link
in user profiles, I absolutely would use it, but I can rarely be bothered (or
even remember, really) to actually visit the website.

It doesn't feel like a loss, though. I mean, if I'm supporting someone's work,
it's on the strength of what I could already see before I started doing that.

~~~
techsupporter
> If Patreon had an authenticated RSS feed link in user profiles, I absolutely
> would use it

Patreon does have this feature for audio content, like podcasts, if the
creator enables it: [https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-
us/articles/213557023-Enab...](https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-
us/articles/213557023-Enable-audio-RSS-feeds-for-my-patrons)

But I think you mean for all content? I emulate this by enabling e-mail
notifications for all posts from some creators and auto-forwarding them to
Newsblur for newsletter reading. Maybe that helps.

~~~
throwanem
That actually really might! I've been in the market for a new reader, since
Feedly's product people seem hellbent on making it worse with every update,
and Newsblur might be just the thing. And while it hadn't occurred to me until
you mentioned that (for which thanks!), any email-to-RSS gateway should let me
do what I'm looking for.

One thing Feedly hasn't managed to ruin, yet at least, is the "today" view,
with items from all sources sorted by time. Does Newsblur do something
similar? Their iOS screenshots don't make it easy to tell.

~~~
techsupporter
There's an "All Site Stories" category that shows all unread articles from
each site (a newsletter counts as a "site") with the most recent entry at the
top. Most recent is across all sites, so something like this:

\- Site 2, 08:34

\- Site 1, 08:19

\- Site 3, 07:49

\- Site 2, 06:02

\- Site 3, 05:55

And so on, if that makes sense. I haven't looked for a "show me everything,
unread or not, sorted by time" feature but if it's not there the dev just
might add it for you.

------
techsupporter
Perhaps I'm not reading this in the vein in which the author intended, so I'm
open to being corrected. But my read of this is that authors and other
creators are in a no-win situation. People don't like ads (so they block them
or simply don't interact with them, either way driving down the money made
from the ads), but people also don't like subscriptions, and people
_definitely_ don't like one-off "plonk your credit card here" request, yet no
centralized micropayment system has really taken off because people also don't
take to those.

So...what next? How do creators get paid?

(FWIW, I am on the opposite end of this. I probably devote too much of my
income--not a brag, it's likely a financially unwise thing to do--on recurring
subscriptions on Patreon and Maximum Fun and other platforms because I'm very
quick to "ooh, shiny" and click-to-subscribe.)

~~~
lmm
> So...what next? How do creators get paid?

I think we're in a "creator" bubble and a crash is coming. There are simply
too many people expecting to be able to live off their hobbies and not enough
actual value being created. Many, perhaps even most, of these creators are
going to have to go get a job. It may not be a popular opinion, but I don't
even think that's such a bad thing; there is _way_ too much "content" out
there, we don't actually need anywhere near as much as we're currently
creating.

~~~
Lammy
I wonder what's the ratio of people who genuinely expect to be able to live
off their hobbies vs people who don't even get to enjoy a hobby due to The
Fear forcing them into "The Hustle" in a world where success and even survival
are not defaults?

~~~
tristor
> a world where success and survival are not defaults?

Success is never a default in any world. Even in the most utopian Star Trek
universe, not everybody gets to be a starship captain.

I actually have thought about recording videos of my hobbies and sharing them,
just to share, but I'm discouraged by the high production value expectations
that people have now and it's not worth the hassle. But I would never expect
to turn it into a career. I respect and support several content creators, but
they are handful among tens of thousands. The majority of creators simply
aren't generating $5/mo in value.

~~~
Lammy
"Contentment" would probably be a better word for what I had in mind. I wish I
could just, like, exist, you know? I don't want a damn job lol

~~~
LetThereBeNick
“contentment content,” i.e. stuff put online just because it makes the creator
happy

------
Pxtl
You have to have a heck of an offering to get a $5 monthly out of me. Every $5
monthly gets measured against "half a Netflix" and comes up short.

Edit: I'll admit I'll gladly drop $40 on an ebook from the same creators I
feel weird about funding monthly. I'm allergic to monthlies.

~~~
throwanem
What I hear you saying is, Netflix has swamped the market and driven down the
price of quality content.

Well, I say "quality". It seems like every time I look at it, their catalog's
dropped something else I wanted to see. My hit rate on searches there has to
be hovering around 2%.

~~~
amelius
No, really, no single human creator can provide $5/mo worth of content. If you
don't like Netflix just think of a quality monthly magazine.

~~~
throwanem
Judging by my actual spend, I'm _infinitely_ more likely to put $5 a month
toward some individual's excellent work, via Patreon, than I am toward a
magazine subscription. Meanwhile, the persistence of my Netflix account relies
entirely on inertia.

Besides, when was the last time you could get a magazine for $5 a month? They
were already well past that when I was still a little kid, and these days a
physical magazine is both too costly to produce, and too much of a status
symbol, for any such low price to seem very likely.

~~~
Dylan16807
I think my average magazine subscription has been 80% off cover price. $5 a
month is an extremely easy bar to clear.

Right now I can go out and get Wired for $20 a year and Time for $30 a year
with only a couple seconds of searching, and those are probably not the best
offers available.

------
habosa
I often try to support a creator and find out that monthly support is my only
option ... which I am not willing to do.

Here are some ways we have always supported creators without subscriptions: I
can buy a book, watch a movie in a theater, get a CD, attend a play, buy a
painting, etc.

I'm still willing to do those things, I do them all the time. I'm still
willing to spend a lot of money on those things. I am not willing to lay you
$5/month in the future to see what you may or may not produce. I'd rather give
you $100 one time for something really great.

~~~
jillesvangurp
What's missing here is a netflix style model where your donations are
distributed among people you want to support instead of having to micromanage
donations.

I pay about ~30 euro per month for netflix, spotify, and amazon prime. So,
it's not a stretch of the imagination that I would be willing to pay for
(some) of the free content I enjoy on e.g. Youtube.

However, I follow dozens of youtubers asking for donations and while I like
most of them, it's not going to add up to me handing out multiple dollars to
each of them on a monthly basis because it would add up to vastly more than I
spend on commercial content. And it's kind of unfair to single out just a few
of them.

But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about
allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a simple
distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work.

It would probably add up to just a few cents per personn I donate to; but if
lots of people do that, it adds up. The deal with patreon is that you rely on
a handful of people supporting you while you give away most of your content
for free. IMHO most of that is unrealized potential for monetization.

Several youtubers I follow have numbers of followers and views that would put
some tv channels to shame and they also get revenue from sponsorships. Several
others are a bit more modest but still rake in tens to hundreds of thousands
of views easily.

I'd love a platform that gives me a simple predictable cost per month combined
with a fair, no hassle way to ensure that money gets funneled to artists,
writers, coders, and other content creators I care about. Donating 10cents per
month is not a thing and donating 1-10$ per month means I have to cherry pick
people out of group of dozens to hundreds I might consider donating to but
currently don't.

~~~
Nullabillity
> But, I'd be willing to put in 10 a month if I did not have to worry about
> allocating that to each of them or micromanaging who gets what. IMHO a
> simple distribution based on views/listens/clicks, could work.

YouTube Premium?

~~~
auxym
Does YT Premium redistribute any money to content creators?

~~~
coldpie
Yes, but not to _your_ creators. Google's description is vague, but my
impression is YT Premium revenue (after google's cut) goes into a big pool and
is split up among all creators:
[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276#YouTube_Re...](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276#YouTube_Red_revenue_2)
So your creators are getting paid by watch time, but not all of your $10 is
going only to creators you watch.

~~~
auxym
Yeah, the Spotify model. Not the best thing if your main intention is
supporting the creators you enjoy.

------
teej
Frankly, I've seen little evidence that subscription fatigue exists beyond a
handful of complains in HN links and comments. The meteoric growth of Onlyfans
demonstrates the opposite - that there's huge demand for subscriptions and
we're only starting to learn what subscription content folks will pay for.

I suspect that the average person does not sweat every single $5 purchase they
make.

~~~
Lammy
The "average person" in the US also couldn't cover a $1000 emergency expense
_before_ the pandemic so maybe there's something to this and we shouldn't be
encouraging more: [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/41-percent-of-americans-
woul...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/41-percent-of-americans-would-be-
able-to-cover-1000-dollar-emergency-with-savings.html)

~~~
twblalock
Saving $5 here and there is not going to substantially improve emergency
savings for the average person. However, it will make their life a little bit
less pleasant.

People frequently post on Reddit's personal finance forum saying they have
tens of thousands of dollars in debt, they are upside down on their car loan,
what can they do? And the first responses are always things like "cancel
Netflix". That doesn't really help solve financial problems of that magnitude,
it just makes people more miserable.

~~~
umvi
Well, cigarettes are a $5 subscription of sorts. $5 per week, maybe $5 per
day. That could substantially improve a savings fund. Netflix on its own might
not, but Netflix, Crunchyroll, and hulu, if you cancel them all that's a
couple hundred bucks a year.

~~~
twblalock
> if you cancel them all that's a couple hundred bucks a year

Right, that's what I mean. You go without all those things for a year and all
you get is a measly few hundred dollars?

Consider someone on a $15 minimum wage, working 40 hours a week, 2080 hours a
year. Their pre-tax income is $31,200. Let's say they cancel subscriptions and
save $20 per month, saving $240 per year. That is how much they earn in 16
hours of work -- merely 0.77% of their annual income. I think most people
would be ok blowing 0.77% of their income on streaming if they get multiple
streaming subscriptions for that money.

~~~
yojo
One nuance here is someone making $31,200 is barely getting by. It might only
be .77% of their salary, but 50% of their annual savings. The difference
between saving $500 and $750 is substantial. E.g. if you’re trying to put
together 20k for a down payment, that could be a > 10 year difference in time
it takes to get a house.

~~~
Aeolun
If you're living that close to using all your salary every month, there are
probably better things you can do to save more than cancel Netflix. I think
that's what the OP is trying to say.

Netflix is really good value for money. If you want to cancel something,
cancel your cable.

------
nine_k
> _I want to support, I want to engage. But I also want to be mindful in how I
> spend my money. And $5 /month adds up pretty quickly._

So basically the author _cannot afford_ to buy all the content he would like
to, but feels a pang of conscience when he has to take the content for free,
even if it's made freely available by the authors.

It's an interesting internal conflict to have.

> _I think I might need to figure out what my actual budget is for supporting
> independent creators on a monthly basis._

I suppose there are multiple solutions that provide something like that.

> _I think it would be worse if they were as heavy-handed as Wikipedia_

I'm totally fine with Wikipedia, and I usually give them $5-15 yearly. (They,
in particular, are said to receive more money than they know what to
reasonably do with.) This must be a case of personal sensitivity, which varies
across the audience, and it sucks to be on the above-average sensitive end.

I personally buy stuff I find great / fascinating. I hear a great track or a
great album on Bandcamp? OK, I pay for it. I see it on Youtube? I go to
Bandcamp, or whatever other site the authors care to list, and pay there. If
there's no such link, sad.

OTOH I don't normally subscribe to support a particular creator. I pay for the
result. Great online creators usually produce good stuff anyway, they
_started_ with producing and publishing free (to view) stuff. The number of
people who paid for a particular episode / track / post / whatever is an
important piece of feedback, I think.

~~~
diag
When you say you're buying a product or result, you're still paying for the
production indirectly.

------
RhysU
Back when we bought music albums (on vinyl or tape or whatever) we didn't
subscribe to a content creator. We bought a product. If we liked it, we
watched for the next release. I loved $NINETIES_BAND but I sure as heck
wouldn't subscribe to them in the modern sense. The old model allowed
monetizing outsized genius (or fashion) as demonstrated by dribbled song
releases on the radio. This new model rewards consistently-better-than average
content. It is a big divide. Perhaps what is missing is the modern DJ.

------
bjoernw
Companies like [https://coil.com](https://coil.com) are solving this by giving
you a single $5/month subscription and then streaming micropayments to the
content creators as you consume their content. It builds on the
WebMonitization standard
[https://webmonetization.org](https://webmonetization.org)

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
There have been countless attempts to create a micropayments ecosystem during
the last 20 years, and they have all flopped. What makes this different?

~~~
bjoernw
Coil and Mozilla working on a web standard together, the fact that we now have
a couple of years of examples of digital content creators being de-monitized
on ad-supported platforms, and the fact that crypto currencies are more
approachable now.

------
makecheck
It’s kind of depressing how some business models can just siphon money (like
cable bills going up a few dollars every month forever until it’s hundreds),
while others practically have to beg.

Apps that took literally _years_ to write can ask for donations and get
nothing, while a single bank’s _overdraft fee_ probably nets more.

And now of course, we passed legislation to “help” businesses that somehow
couldn’t even get money (despite applying the first day) because of greedier
or more well-connected applicants.

This is a huge mess and it should be a massive priority for society to stop
letting the leeches get away with this theft.

------
lelandbatey
I get the fatigue, but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of
"payment for genesis", were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make
something fantastic. It's such a breath of fresh air from the world of
advertising. TOTALLY off topic, but I want to get this advertising
analogy/story/parable/fiction out of my head, so I might as well write it down
here:

In the advertising-based revenue world, you see really odd businesses. Imagine
a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading
"FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when
your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni
pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of
flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a
phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before
you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!"

As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm
throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy."

"But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't
give away the pizza?" moans the employee.

Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw
these away." And with that you walk to your car and drive home.

The frustrated employee would, by 2030 move to management, where the business
would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed
pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer sits with their eyes held
open and stares into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035,
this nameless employee would recieve a promotion to VP after coordinating a
team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing
the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually enforced
assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments".

Meanwhile in 2025, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.

~~~
Applejinx
"but I also LOOOVE that we're moving towards a world of "payment for genesis",
were we explicitly pay folks so that they "might" make something fantastic"

But that would be Universal Basic Income :)

think about it, that's exactly what UBI is. Pay enough people and someone is
gonna come up with something amazing. They might share it, they might profit
by it, but they will want it to be known as that will be the new 'need' in the
Maslow hierarchy.

This has more or less happened before by accident. For instance, Silicon
Valley, which came out of a period of significant wealth and leisure.

~~~
1123581321
The big difference is that Patreon/Memberful subscriptions are optional and
not burdensome.

------
christiansakai
I only contribute to two Patreons (each $5) monthly so far: \- a friend of
mine, because he is a friend of mine \- a guitar teacher that I followed,
because he constantly produce good quality materials that are only available
on mmembership. worth it. I also bought some of his courses and sometimes
schedule a 1 on 1 private with him.

But for open source, I never contributed to anything lol. Sorry, OSS
maintainers. Thank you for the awesome work. The world needs more people like
you. But if I can get it for free I'll get it for free.

For indie SaaS, I never pay anything as well. Sorry indie SaaS devs, but I am
not an app/software heavy user even though I work as an SWE. I don't use note
taking apps or any other productivity apps.

~~~
mywittyname
You're pretty typical in this respect. It's why open source software needs to
be sponsored by large corporations and why indie software is "free for non-
commercial use". It's easier to swipe that business CC than it is your own
one.

------
hguant
I've found that I'm much more willing to spend a larger chunk of money in a
one off payment than signing up for yet another "only 5 dollar" pledge. I
recently signed up for a few substack accounts from writers I've admired, and,
in a move that would have horrified my younger, eye patch wearing self, have
bought a year long subscription to The Economist. They offer good writing,
interning opinions that, though I may disagree with them, are well thought out
and we'll constructed. Publishing in this day and age is easy - twitter and
Facebook and friends have shown us how simple it can be to say, well,
anything. Good writing is hard, has remained hard, and should be valued. I've
done my level best to make sure that only the most dedicated institution can
reliably get ad revenue from me - it's only fair that I buy and support the
things I value.

------
reustle
> Let's call this the Five Dollar Fatigue, sounds catchy.

This is already commonly called "subscription fatigue" and has been discussed
extensively

------
octoberfranklin
> There is a lot of consideration in committing that recurring payment for ..
> indefinite duration.

It's (yet another) negative externality of the Anti-Money Laundering / Know
Your Customer mania.

If it turns out that a drug cartel used one of these crowdfunding platforms,
the government will kill/bankrupt the platform. Requiring recurring payments
is the only reliable way to screen out prepaid gift cards, because prepaid
gift card issuers are no longer allowed to process fixed-amount recurring
payments.

Any other approach is EXTREMELY labor-intensive and still doesn't work 100% --
for example look at Amazon AWS, which devotes a huge amount of effort to
playing this whack-a-mole game and yet still isn't 100% successful. AWS bills
aren't the same dollar amount every month so they can't go this route.

Basically AML/KYC is Why We Can't Have Nice Things like micropayments or even
one-time minipayments to individuals without something like Paypal where they
randomly lock up your money for 180 days while demanding "papers please".
AML/KYC simply does not scale down to micropayments or even near them. It's
not about the payment processing technology, it's about the legal/regulatory
burden.

------
AlexeyMK
My mental model lately has been, if I'm enjoying the content, I should try to
figure out how to pay ~$1/hour.

If I'm not enjoying it, I should find a better way to spend m time.

------
electriclove
I usually donate a one-time, larger amount. I know it isn't recurring which is
what people want but this is the way that I'm able to deal with it.

~~~
Applejinx
I make my living off Patreon and have many people doing exactly that. Also, I
support quite a few Patreons myself but they're all ones that I can do $1 a
month… forever.

I feel like if I started throwing around $5 pledges, I'd soon have to
backtrack, and that seems bad. But then being close to the top 50 in the Music
category equates to maybe a bit over minimum wage so I do in fact have to
budget if I intend to keep all my pledges up forever. So I do budget.

Any way people want to do this is fine with me. I prefer the little tiny
patreon pledges, because they average out to a steady amount. The danger of
pushing people to do larger pledges (even the $5) is that they will hit a
rough patch and bail. If you have encouraged them to pledge only small amounts
they think they can afford, and encouraged them NOT to pledge if they can't
handle it, people see it more as a 'stick with it' thing rather than a
'highest amount' thing. And 'stick with it' is more predictable and easier to
plan for, as the creator.

~~~
hinkley
I thought Brave was going to go a different direction, closer to what Apple
music streaming does, where they look at your traffic over the month and divvy
up your subscription between them.

Or even: these are all of the things you support: which ones did you enjoy
this month?

------
scrollinondubs
@lawik not sure if you caught this the other day
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981563)
<\- that person proposes an interesting solution specifically in the context
of supporting open source software that would seemingly address this fatigue
phenomenon you experience: a monthly pool that you can apportion so it dilutes
and supports the projects you choose. That way you set the total monthly
contribution and then you're just carving that up. Assuming there was a simple
enough one-click interface for doing so that could be one way to address this.
Of course you'd have to get a critical mass of makers to adopt the standard in
order for it to take off (or convince the Patreon's and Github's of the world
to adopt it).

~~~
lawik
Ah, yeah, I saw that. It could definitely be good for some cases. I think it
would be good for GitHub and such. I think the incentives for fairly
successful creators just isn't there. They'll get more from their dedicated
fanbase. But I hope something like this shows up for and from GitHub,
especially for businesses. I think a lot of dev-teams would like to portion
out some stipend from their company on a monthly basis to support their
dependencies. I'd do it privately too, for sure.

------
thathndude
Was just thinking of this yesterday as I listened to ATP (Accidental Tech
Podcast - ATP.FM).

They're adding a members component to their podcast. Just $8/month. And they
don't do the hard sell, but there are little perks.

I listen to at least 5-7 podcasts regularly. If they all do the same thing,
it's close to my cable + Internet bill from just 10 years ago.

Now let's do streaming: Netflix + Disney+ and you spent another $20/month.

I just don't think this model is going to work in the long term. Who knows!

~~~
jdechko
I listen to ATP as well, and I did end up joining their membership program.
The author mentioned CGP Grey specifically, and Cortex, his podcast with Myke
Hurley on relay.fm recently announced a $5 membership. Upgrade, with Jason &
Myke _also_ announced the same $5 membership. So I see where the author is
coming from. At the same time all 3 podcasts for now say that just by
listening, it supports the podcast through the old channels. I do get a little
of that FOMO, but I don’t feel any guilt for not paying.

------
Dylan16807
$5 adds up quickly but $1 adds up a lot slower. So far I haven't hit my budget
for $1/month support, and over a big group it's enough to fund a lot.

~~~
1123581321
$1 is not enough to qualify for the extra content many of these services are
offering.

------
tomcam
Doesn't seem to be a problem for purveyors of high quality content. Often they
only get a small percentage of people to contribute, but they make do. And
IMHO more of them make out like bandits than one might think, especially
Youtubers with multiple ways to make money. I think that number is closer to
the low thousands than the high dozens.

------
jjice
I've been trying to loosen up with my small subscriptions like this. Back when
I became a consistent member of the internet and multiple communities on it, I
was a middle school student with no money, and when I did have pocket change
from mowing lawns, I had no way to exchange it online. I gravitated towards
free content because of this. Even once I was working and had a bank account
at 16, I still felt weird about committing to a subscription. Now that I keep
my costs low and work full time, I have a disposable income that could be
spent on these creators, but there are so many that I don't know where to put
it. Should it go to the long time creators I've followed since those middle
school days, or should I throw it towards the real underdogs right now?

There is only so much to go around from my pockets, and just like the author
says, it adds up quickly.

------
627467
What you can call "fatigue" in the first world, presents itself as impossible
to overcome barrier to the rest of the world.

I get that if platforms and creators charged any less than 5 bucks they
probably lose even more in payment fees.

Can't help but think that we still have so much to overcome with regards to
cheap or free micropayments.

~~~
waheoo
$1 seems to be the lower limit.

Transaction fees on low volume are usually like 30c or 1% whichever is higher.

~~~
Dylan16807
Competent sites, like Patreon sometimes, will let you support multiple
creators off one transaction fee.

Also if you deliberately set up for small payments, there's things like paypal
micropayments offering a fee of 5 cents plus 5%.

------
CarbyAu
One HN comment mentioned the value of a magazine subscription, which can be
ballpark similar monthly costs.

For me a patreon (or whatever) subscription to a whole GROUP of specialists in
a field would be valuable.

As it stands: Patreon person:This thing I did/reviewed is great! Me: Is it
though?... _search more internet for validation_

~~~
hinkley
I had the thought, "why doesn't PBS or a PBS-like organization do stuff like
this?"

PBS doesn't exist without the local affiliates, though, and chasing after web
content too vigorously would betray that relationship, if you didn't handle it
very, very carefully.

------
sandoooo
For me, the only reason I'd be willing to pay $5/m for a single creator is
because of information disparity: it is difficult to find content I like,
because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low. If I have to spend a lot of time
looking this costs far more than just paying for incrementally more of the
same, even though the perfect content for me is probably out there somewhere
for free.

AI will probably solve this problem eventually, though recommender services
are in general pretty crap right now.

I think there is a lot of value in a service that can go through the Amazon
catalog and just cull the 99.9% of stuff it thinks I'm not interested in, then
give me advanced search / preview / indexing on the rest. Problem is, it would
have to do this without taking ad dollars to poison the list. Also privacy
concerns.

------
jcun4128
Kind of curious if there's a way to batch support... you put in a fixed amount
of money/month and you can subscribe to multiple people, but your contribution
gets divided... probably not viable due to transaction fees and somebody's
like "oh great I got a penny"

~~~
lbotos
I think this is what Brave is trying to do with attention tokens? I don't use
it but I think that's what it's called.

~~~
jcun4128
I see. I was thinking about Patreon/support like YouTubers but maybe they do
something like that already/reason not to.

------
bullen
There is a malaise in the world and no matter what you call it money will flow
in other directions now. You need to force the payment; optional or piratable
walls are meaningless, that means you need to provide a service the people
expect to pay for and some parts have to be closed!

I think 1$/month should be the goto value that we sponsor each other with.

The only way to get velocity in a deflation is to spend, but you need to get
spent on more than you spend which requires inflation! Let's wait and see how
the money will be distributed after the "easy dead tree" has been burned, just
make sure you are prepared, things are going to get hard and accelerate down
for the first time!

------
rossdavidh
I think it would be better if people allowed a Patreon "any amount you
choose", which gets you...nothing. Just allows me to contribute however much I
want, in exchange for the already freely available content. The advantage of
it being Patreon is that the per-charge expense is spread among several
creators who I am a patron of. I rarely take advantage of any of the "special
content" for Patreon supporters, anyway, I'm just doing it to support people I
like. Some of them, it's $1 a month, some it's $3 a month, and I don't want or
expect anything from it except what they are already providing for free
anyway.

------
praptak
I can relate. If I were to imagine a perfect system for this it would be
something that tracks whatever I subscribe and drops unused things, with some
sensible safeguards not to drop something I don't actually want to drop.

------
shadeslayer_
Human beings need to understand that it is simply not possible for a large
portion of people to live off their hobbies - there's a reason why they're
called hobbies or passion projects to begin with.

------
everdrive
I don't mean this as a critique of the article, but it seems this is just the
burden of so much choice. There is amazing, wonderful, life-changing content
out there today. And, there's so much of it. It feels so overwhelming. It's
just like the calorie problem that shot up in the 80s and 90s. There's too
much of everything, and the only filter is ourselves.

And, much like the calorie problem most people never solved it. Most people
are anywhere from a little fat to very fat. And, so it will be with content
and distraction.

------
irrational
The only subscription I have is to Disney+ for the kids and even that I'm
considering dropping. I have friends who have Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, whatever
the paid version of YouTube is called, whatever streaming service has Star
Trek, etc. It's gotten to the point where they are paying as much for those
services as they do for cable.

------
sandoooo
Are the members-only content higher or lower quality, in general? The
incentive seems to be for lower quality, because the vast majority of time and
effort is spent on the free part that convinces you to pay. It's a reverse
iceberg.

------
cercatrova
People value a product or service more when it is priced higher, so in my
opinion, good content needs to be priced a lot higher than it is now, an order
of magnitude higher, even (~$50/month), for people to value it properly.

------
AnonC
Tangent: I don’t have access to a computer right now to analyze this website
more, but it’s blazing fast! Great work, author. I’d love to know more about
the technology stack (seems like it’s hosted on AWS with CloudFront).

------
gwbas1c
I prefer crowdsourcing incomplete but defined works. I'm always happy to
crowdsource an album on Kickstarter.

IMO, I'd prefer if Youtube / Spotify / ect had some kind of integration with
Kickstarter or similar.

------
npunt
I wish we could just set a fixed monthly budget (e.g. $40/mo) and divide that
among all the creators we wish to support. Then when we come across someone
whose work we like, the question is simply "do I want to support this person's
work?", and if so, they get a fraction of our budget.

Right now, rewards effectively make every membership a _custom membership_
that requires users spend extra time considering their support and dollar
amount. This type of decision doesn't scale when we all want to support dozens
of creators.

I wrote a more detailed breakdown of this design here:
[https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships-
pla...](https://nickpunt.com/blog/designing-a-better-memberships-platform/)

------
CarVac
I'm willing to buy swag if it's particularly unique or interesting, but I
won't subscribe unless it's something really really special.

------
ggm
I offered a newspaper $60 for a years hassle free reading but they still nag
me.

I definitely feel the $5 fatigue here, because its a $5/mo payment threshold.

------
alexashka
> And $5/month adds up pretty quickly

Does it?

If you can't spare fifty bucks/month on whatever on top of your other
expenses, you're doing it wrong :)

~~~
twic
It adds up if you like fifty different things.

------
mrhektor
"You are fighting uphill against a cultural expectation for things to be free
on the web."

A great solution to this problem of "free", is to make things that are "better
than free". Kevin Kelly explains it really well in his essay
([https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-
fre/](https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/)), but TL;DR is that traits
like Immediacy, Personalization and Interpretation play a very important role
in getting people to pay for stuff. Software: Free, The manual: $10,000

------
aj7
Yeah, but just in time, the five-dollar-foot-long is back.

------
mnky9800n
why cant the guy making videos just like sell tickets or something instead
like for a normal movie?

