Zap Small Web Website (Value-for-value)

alltheseas

user story

As a Kagi small web spelunker, I would like a way to show my appreciation by zapping small web sites, so that I can reward those focusing on signal over ad-tech optimised noise, AND I can give Kagi another indicator in which websites carry superior signal.

acceptance criteria

Kagi enjoyer has a way to (zap) send a Lightning (or e-cash) payment to a small website creator
Kagi enjoyer is informed upon successful payment sent
Kagi has a way to inform the small website owner that they have been zapped/sent a payment
The small web site owner has a way to claim their sats

implementation & discussion

-Sendings micropayments without permission to website owners is a display of value-for-value (the polar opposite of the creepy & privacy and time invasive paid ad model)
-Effectively all websites/websites owners do not have a LN, or cashu/e-cash address posted
-Therefore in sendings sats there is a chicken and egg problem
-Kagi could investigate cashu mints, or Fedimints as a method to hold small amounts on behalf of website owners
-The website owner notification mechanism should include instructions on how to claim sats sent by small website enjoyers to the website owner

Mockup "zap" button on Kagi Small web

P.s. I have no idea what the "Appreciate" button does. Does it send monetary reward to the webiste owner? Is it simply an "upvote" in Kagi's small web rankings?

Hypothesis

Unlike a "like", or "upvote", sending a micropayment is not free, and carries real world cost. A zap is tangible proof that value was sent.

Zaps can be a valuable signal marker in Kagi's search engine. Zapped small web websites should appear higher in the results.

Zapped websites will open an entirely new frontier in webpage search, similar to zapped content on nostr.

Example Basic User Flow

1) Kagi small web spelunker receives significant value for a website
2) Kagi small web site appreciator sends a "zap" of a micropayment to the website
3) Small website owner is notified of zap receipt

Open questions

If a Kagi enjoyer does not have any sats, how might Kagi help them acquire sats for sending to small web site owners?
Which wallet(s) is recommended if the Kagi user does not have a LN/e-cash wallet?

Do-not-zap list

Non-small web entities should not be zapped.
Anything anti-small web such as dot gov, GUULAGL should never be zapped.

Vlad

alltheseas I like the idea. Bitcoing lightning may be a problem though as very low adoption.

Kagi Small Web website is open source. Do you think there is anything preventing someone from just contributing this ?

sentry

alltheseas as a method to hold small amounts on behalf of website owners

This reminds me of what Brave Browser tried to implement and it left a bit of a sour taste for a lot of people that money was being taken on behalf of creators without their consent.

Here was a HN discussion as an example.

As someone who is apparently in the small web index but just speaking for myself, I don't know what a zap or cashu even is and I wouldn't really care to engage with anything web3 related.

Mostly because in my mind it represents (maybe not accurately), an attempt to reflect everything through the lens of finance. I'm sure that's probably not an accurate reflection of the technology but more of a side effect of speculation that has been done over the years using web3 technology.

I think it would be nicer to just receive a written email than a micropayment because the motivation for what I do (and I imagine for most small web creators) is the thing itself, not the prospect of being rewarded financially. Perhaps the small web project could just try to crawl for a user's email or contact details 🤷

There have been some studies over the years that rewarding someone financially for what they had been intrinsically motivated to do up to that point can actually have the opposite effect, destroying their motivations which becomes external if there's a dependence on being paid.

I remember one about how rate of blood donors were higher in countries where donation comes without a reward (only the feeling of doing something good) versus those where you got paid a small amount.

As with most studies, I had a brief poke around and it seems like the answer is "it depends" which is kind of unfortunately 😄

alltheseas

Vlad while the website may be open source, which is great, there is considerable complexity in the outlined chicken and egg problem of rewarding website owners who do not have a known payment address.

This implies some sort of notification, and/or mint system that in turn requires the activation of the website owner to receive payment.

In my experience contributing to FOSS, barriers to permissionless payment adoption have fallen significantly with zaps, nostr, and cashu. I can test appetite with a few FOSS payment devs, and revert.

In the meantime assume conservatively that this is exclusively a job for Kagi.

I think it may benefit Kagi to take long-term ownership of payments infra.

We both know that the GUULAGL will be the last to abandon the creepy ad model.

Therefore Kagi has incentives to experiment, and integrate value-for-value in the search model (this has never been done before at scale, as far as I'm aware).

GUULAGL has disincentives to pursue this implementation commercially at scale.

As you state in describing Kagi's approach, taking ownership of payments is the "hard way". If you can deal with the complexity of a browser, I think payments will be a significantly lighter lift.

alltheseas

Vlad Bitcoing lightning may be a problem though as very low adoption.

You are correct in identifying the problem of folks not having sats.

Consider that for low amounts, Kagi can be an excellent first step in providing sats to users. Imagine that as part of Kagi's "Zap" Plan - e.g. $5-$25/month goes towards zap credits, which the user can use to reward small web creators using value-for-value.

Vlad

alltheseas

I think it may benefit Kagi to take long-term ownership of payments infra.

I agree. It is one of the reasons we are building our own browser. We have been considering an idea to implement an actual standard like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Request_API

I am not against using crypto infrastructure but so far nobody could give me an easy way to integrate this in a browser or Kagi search results for that matter and more importantly easy way for say my grandma to receive this. And I just read this today https://research.auditless.com/p/al-89-confession-i-barely-use-web3 and it further makes it more difficult to invest given our limited resources.

Bottom line: yes Kagi wants to do this, but we need to be smart about it. Glad you brought this up and are willing to help!

alltheseas

sentry Thanks for the response. You make a valid point. Perception management was clearly not the strongsuit of Brave team.

Interesting suggestion you made on the written email. What if Kagi appended an open discussion board to small web websites, where happy small web enjoyers could leave feedback?

To be clear, brave's attention token is a web 3 shitcoin that is based on the creepy ad model. I don't like this as much as you, or the HN commenters.

Whereas lightning, and cashu are layer twos of the neutral Bitcoin network. LN and cashu are used for microtransactions, which are great for rewarding content creators on the web - e.g. tweets, longer articles, podcasts, videos, and hopefully in the case of Kagi - websites! Sending micropayments is always opt-in, and value-for-value. No creepy ads are involved.

If you'd like to experience zaps, join nostr, and then generate a LN address via CoinOS that you can add to your nostr profile. Post some content and get zapped! Nostr.org has a list of nostr apps.

Here is Kagi's nostr pubkey: npub1xsgymm0ne3vndqpvsvy285qfpu59049t5n5twg9vetmt92cyn95snyzazx.