<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>spookthesunset</author><text>It has always costed money to to spend money and there are pros and cons to each method.  All that stuff isn&amp;#x27;t free even if it isn&amp;#x27;t directly measurable most of the time.&lt;p&gt;Cash costs money too--you have to count it, handle it, deposit it, protect it from theft, verify it&amp;#x27;s authenticity, make sure you have enough change, spend time counting change, etc.  As a consumer, if a merchant fucks you over you have little recourse besides suing.  Cash takes no time to clear so you can spend it right after getting it, it is anonymous, it is hard to trace so you can skip on taxes, etc.&lt;p&gt;Checks can bounce, you have to deposit them, they take time to clear, they take forever to write, they can be fake, etc.  However, it is hard for your cashiers to skim off the top, it uses exact amounts so no change to keep, it is a single slip of paper to carry around instead of a pocket of paper currency, as a consumer you can stop payment on a check if the merchant fucks you over, etc...&lt;p&gt;Credit cards are super quick to use at the register.  They don&amp;#x27;t require any change (unless handing cash back).  As a consumer, if a merchant fucks you over you can issue a chargeback.  It is easy to track your spending as a consumer because all transactions are recorded electronically.  As a merchant you don&amp;#x27;t have to handle change or cash, your cashiers can&amp;#x27;t easily skim off the top, etc...&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s all trade offs and I&amp;#x27;ll bet if you did an NPV on all the different methods taking into consideration all their pros and cons, they&amp;#x27;d all wind up &amp;quot;costing&amp;quot; similar amounts.</text><parent_chain><item><author>ajkjk</author><text>Maybe it&amp;#x27;s just me, but, I think it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;so fucking stupid&lt;/i&gt; that it costs money (which goes to private businesses) to spend money in the modern world.&lt;p&gt;(and no, bitcoin doesn&amp;#x27;t fix that at all)&lt;p&gt;I think if we were in an alternate universe where the government managed a free utility for digital payments no one would find it strange for a second.</text></item><item><author>sgdread</author><text>I understand why they do it: they trying to bring down transaction costs with payment processors. These fees on small amounts is death by thousand cuts.&lt;p&gt;But, I believe, there is a way: they can introduce wallets for $1-2 patrons: put $10 in a single transaction, then charge the wallet once it is a time to pay to creator. This should aggregate small transactions into larger ones and significantly cut the costs.</text></item><item><author>JoshTriplett</author><text>This is a remarkably direct and appropriate apology, along with an appropriate response, a rare thing indeed.&lt;p&gt;If not for their &lt;i&gt;initial&lt;/i&gt; response to the first round of feedback, namely to put a &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;re still doing it&amp;quot; at the bottom of their original blog post (with completely unreasonable and unjustified explanations for &lt;i&gt;why&lt;/i&gt;), I&amp;#x27;d give them full credit for responding appropriately.  As it is, though, at least they fixed this.  They&amp;#x27;re still going to need to deal with the giant pile of patrons they drove off; many people lost a significant fraction of their support because of this change, and that won&amp;#x27;t necessarily come back.&lt;p&gt;Between 1 and 2 years ago, I talked to some folks at Patreon about an unrelated topic (namely, trying to use Patreon for registered charities). They mentioned at that time that they had a change in the works to shift processing fees from creators to patrons, which they said at the time would be &amp;quot;better for creators&amp;quot; for various reasons, but that didn&amp;#x27;t want to talk about the details yet. (Since the issue is now public, I don&amp;#x27;t see any issue with saying that now.) That discussion naturally didn&amp;#x27;t include any information about fee structure or un-aggregation of charges with associated additional fees, e.g. the &amp;quot;$1 costs $1.37&amp;quot; problem, since that wasn&amp;#x27;t the topic; the impression they gave at the time was that the only change was to pass on the (presumably still aggregated) fees to the patrons, which wouldn&amp;#x27;t have been as serious a problem, and wouldn&amp;#x27;t have killed Patreon&amp;#x27;s suitability as a wildly successful microtransaction platform the way this change did. So, they&amp;#x27;ve been thinking about this for a &lt;i&gt;long&lt;/i&gt; time, and yet they sprung it on people without warning and without running the &lt;i&gt;full&lt;/i&gt; details by anyone.&lt;p&gt;Update: there&amp;#x27;s now a survey from Patreon asking for feedback: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;Patreon&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;941010263385374720&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;Patreon&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;941010263385374720&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change</title><url>https://blog.patreon.com/not-rolling-out-fees-change/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>syshum</author><text>I would,  I in no way want to give that kind of power to government.&lt;p&gt;I would 100% opposes to a government run digital payment system,  the government is too closing integrated to todays electronic systems as it is,  I in no way want them to own and directly control it</text><parent_chain><item><author>ajkjk</author><text>Maybe it&amp;#x27;s just me, but, I think it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;so fucking stupid&lt;/i&gt; that it costs money (which goes to private businesses) to spend money in the modern world.&lt;p&gt;(and no, bitcoin doesn&amp;#x27;t fix that at all)&lt;p&gt;I think if we were in an alternate universe where the government managed a free utility for digital payments no one would find it strange for a second.</text></item><item><author>sgdread</author><text>I understand why they do it: they trying to bring down transaction costs with payment processors. These fees on small amounts is death by thousand cuts.&lt;p&gt;But, I believe, there is a way: they can introduce wallets for $1-2 patrons: put $10 in a single transaction, then charge the wallet once it is a time to pay to creator. This should aggregate small transactions into larger ones and significantly cut the costs.</text></item><item><author>JoshTriplett</author><text>This is a remarkably direct and appropriate apology, along with an appropriate response, a rare thing indeed.&lt;p&gt;If not for their &lt;i&gt;initial&lt;/i&gt; response to the first round of feedback, namely to put a &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;re still doing it&amp;quot; at the bottom of their original blog post (with completely unreasonable and unjustified explanations for &lt;i&gt;why&lt;/i&gt;), I&amp;#x27;d give them full credit for responding appropriately.  As it is, though, at least they fixed this.  They&amp;#x27;re still going to need to deal with the giant pile of patrons they drove off; many people lost a significant fraction of their support because of this change, and that won&amp;#x27;t necessarily come back.&lt;p&gt;Between 1 and 2 years ago, I talked to some folks at Patreon about an unrelated topic (namely, trying to use Patreon for registered charities). They mentioned at that time that they had a change in the works to shift processing fees from creators to patrons, which they said at the time would be &amp;quot;better for creators&amp;quot; for various reasons, but that didn&amp;#x27;t want to talk about the details yet. (Since the issue is now public, I don&amp;#x27;t see any issue with saying that now.) That discussion naturally didn&amp;#x27;t include any information about fee structure or un-aggregation of charges with associated additional fees, e.g. the &amp;quot;$1 costs $1.37&amp;quot; problem, since that wasn&amp;#x27;t the topic; the impression they gave at the time was that the only change was to pass on the (presumably still aggregated) fees to the patrons, which wouldn&amp;#x27;t have been as serious a problem, and wouldn&amp;#x27;t have killed Patreon&amp;#x27;s suitability as a wildly successful microtransaction platform the way this change did. So, they&amp;#x27;ve been thinking about this for a &lt;i&gt;long&lt;/i&gt; time, and yet they sprung it on people without warning and without running the &lt;i&gt;full&lt;/i&gt; details by anyone.&lt;p&gt;Update: there&amp;#x27;s now a survey from Patreon asking for feedback: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;Patreon&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;941010263385374720&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;Patreon&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;941010263385374720&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change</title><url>https://blog.patreon.com/not-rolling-out-fees-change/</url></story>