The potential of all this is exciting for anyone interested in how money makes the world wide web go round. We can imagine endless new ways to pay creators and participants in the digital realm, spurring a wealth of possibilities.
Experimenting with money flows
With this in mind we at openDemocracy are about to begin experimenting with how such payment types can produce novel economic outcomes, specifically by using the open-source Interledger payments protocol.
Supported by Grant for the Web, we will introduce a new set of features that bring payment rewards to authors and commenters under certain conditions.
The first feature we will test seeks to encourage authors to engage with commenters in order to support both. Here’s the idea:
- A user visits an article page whilst having a payment wallet active on their browser (e.g. Coil). The wallet is set up to automatically pass a micropayment to the article’s publisher when the user visits.
- Micropayment revenue is received and shared between the author and the publisher, openDemocracy.
- If the author highlights a comment, then that comment gets showcased in the article and the commenter gets part of the revenue share. By doing so, the author also received a greater proportion of revenue. We therefore introduce new incentives for readers to comment and for authors to engage with comments. We hope that this will lead to more vivacious, constructive debates.
openDemocracy will accept payments on articles where an author has given their permission. In most cases that will also involve the author taking a revenue share.
The project will allow us to test out different payments scenarios and get feedback about the prospects for such arrangements.
Do you want to reward authors and commenters?
This project allows you to tip authors and commenters whose contributions you appreciate. We invite you to take part in this experiment and help us see how we can change the web with micropayments.
Here’s how to get involved.
As a reader who wants to support authors and commenters
1) Sign up to Coil. This costs you $5/month and shares that between the content creators you visit.
Print
Matthew Linares | Radio Free (2021-02-18T13:21:08+00:00) User comments are critical to debate. Should we pay for them?. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/02/18/user-comments-are-critical-to-debate-should-we-pay-for-them/
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