Comments on How to make a vanity Payment Pointer for Web Monetization

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Nic

Thanks for this great explainer. I'm curious tho - the Payment Pointer for this page isn't the vanity pointer at ctrl.blog, but the original uphold.com. Was this because of a problem with this approach (e.g. some transactions missed / slower to start streaming payements?) or another reason?

Daniel Aleksandersen

Hi, I can’t really audit it, so I don’t know if I lost any transactions.

There’s no special reason for it. It was fun to play with and set up for a while, and then I lost interest in maintaining it. I used another wallet provider with much longer ILP3 addresses. The compression overhead was reduced when switching to Uphold and their shorter addresses.

Few visitors still use Web Monetization. It had very good adoption for a few months. I believe it’s because Coil fails to prove to its paying customers that it’s actually paying creators and not just pocketing everything. I wrote about it here: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/coil-transparency.html

Nic

Thanks for the reply and link.

I agree more transparency could help adoption. I use Pay Trackr and see if I've paid about $18.64 over the past year, so clearly a lot is not going to creators.

I've often wondered about a fairer (tho much more complex) system, that could stream seconds, not cash. At the end of each month it would divide each users' $5 by the number of seconds they've spent, to get a cost/second and use that to pay each site. So payouts would be relative to users, which would be based on how much they each consume. But there would likely be a privacy trade off.

Daniel Aleksandersen

Yeah, that idea was briefly known as Flatter 2.0. Abandoned after AdBlock Plus’ parent company aquired Flatter. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/flattr2.html

It was fairer and more transparent than Web Monetization. Websites didn’t know the visitor was paying them at the end of the month, however.

Nic

I'd forgotten that Flattr 2/plus did that. Has that definitely been killed off post AdBlock? They boast a lot of publishers still on their site - but maybe they just offer a kind of managed Patreon for them all? A big shame if so, Flattr doesn't seem mention so much these days. (btw - props for save-data extension)