Your account appears to be shadowbanned (your current comment is visible because people vouched for it). I'm letting you know since looking at your recent comments I can't see any obvious reason. You might want to use the contact link to talk to hn about it.
I like complaining about it too, but it's still a massive step forward from how things were before, where I had no access. Now I at least have access even if it involves going via third parties.
One of my agents has (read only) access to my accounts. I do it via Era, which is quite good, though expensive (they try to justify this with other functionality, but they provide nothing my agent can't do itself other than the API access).
To provide me with API access to my own accounts, Era goes through another third party provider which again connects to my bank. I guess they could eventually get direct connections themselves.
So instead of me get convenient read-only access to my bank, I've ended up giving two separate third party providers credentials I'd prefer they didn't have.
All I'd need was an automated way to get a CSV or JSON dump of my transactions and I'd have been happy, but none of my banks support that without manually logging in. It's infuriating.
On some platforms, like the Commodore 64, this to some extent became automated with freezer cartridges: Press a "freeze" button, pick a menu option, then re-enter the game, lose a life, and press the freeze button again, and it'd look for likely locations in memory based on what had changed and presumably some heuristics.
I don't need to be doing all of these projects, but I enjoy doing all of these projects, much more than I enjoy going somewhere to hang out with people. Not everyone is the same.
Longer. Microtransactions online dates back to DigiCash[1], founded in 1989 and with their first issue online of "CyberCash" in 1994 - I remember testing it at university briefly. When microtransactions quickly started turning out to be cumbersome on an individual basis that quickly made some people pivot to the idea of bundling on the user side and have the system pay it out with microtransactions on the publisher side...
I agree with the caveats you outline, though. I think to work, something like this would need to be a box you'd tick when signing up for your ISP that promised some "ad free premium access to [X number] of sites" or similar, and you'd trade entirely on it being big name sites. Even then I'd expect relatively limited takeup mostly from people unaware of ad blockers.
This[1] claims the average American is worth about $1605/year in ad revenue. It's a model, so it's certainly possible it is significantly off. That said if there was a credible system like this, I'd happily pay for even the right partial offering.
This seems like setting money on fire. Nothing stops you from tracking token use on your subscriptions and tracking how much you would spend via APIs for if/when you can't use a sub any more, and taking the savings in the meantime.
It'd certainly be possible to make this work well enough for a lot of us.
Yes, you'd need to sort out pricing. I'm unusually price insensitive, but too many sellers play stupid games and win stupid prizes (me shopping around instead of blindly buying from them every time) by changing unit prices too much too often (e.g. my sons preferred shower gel litre price regularly rotates between prices that adds up to a factor of 3 difference, with any given size container at any given time potentially being a massive rip-off). You could fix that by letting users configure price bands and make it pick from a set of products based on price parameters or give an error. Or only include products where the sellers agree to not play stupid games.
But now your UI is massively complicated and you have error scenarios you didn't have before.
Even then, though, the bigger problem is that there just aren't enough product categories where we frequently order the same thing often enough separately from e.g. the weekly grocery run, to be worth it.
In my household I think it basically boils down to shower gels - because I have a teenage son - toilet rolls, dishwasher tablets and washing machine tabs.
That's not nothing, but it's not going to make me order materially more from Amazon to be able to press a button to reorder vs. pull out my phone, press "orders" in the Amazon app, and find the last order I made and reorder the product.
And I say this as someone who did order a couple of Dash buttons when they came out and promptly forgot to even use them (and I don't even remember why).
It's just such a very minor convenience that to work it'd need to have absolutely zero friction, and even then the revenue it'd bring would likely be totally marginal.
reply