by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-18 05:47:52+00:00
Maybe we need a display that just shows each user approximately what they cost.

Not a wikipedia banner. No guilt verbiage. No unrelatable total site/year numbers like "2.6M out of 5M goal" etc.

Just like some little bit of ui in a corner somewhere that passively just sits there and shows it's state like a red/yellow/green light or a battery meter or something. And what it shows is some at-a-glance representation of what you are costing the service, positive or negative.

If the org is open and low profit or even non profit, or even reasonable profit but organized as a co-op, this can be a totally honest number, which will probably be suprisingly small.

(and if any full-profit type services don't like having that kind of info made quite so public because it makes it hard to explain their own prices, well golly that sure sounds awful)

This will obviously have no effect on some people.

But I know that something like that will absolutely eat at some people until they decide they will feel better if they make that dot turn green.

And everyone else who just wants to take something for free and doesn't like being reminded of it, has no basis for complaining or claiming to be outraged at being nagged or browbeaten. It's a totally passive out of the way bit of display making no demands at all and not even hindering or speedbumping anything.

Even when you click on it for more info and the links to how to donate etc, the verbiage is careful not to make kids or drive-by laypeople or anyone else without real means feel bad or feel obligated. We don't need your soup money, don't sweat it.

Maybe even include some stories about how we all wound up in our high paying IT jobs because of the availability of stuff other people wrote and let us use for free when we were kids or former truck drivers etc, and so that's how you can understand and believe we really are ok with you now using this for free.

Can't possibly get any lighter touch than that.

And yet the fact that the little thing is just there all the time in view, that alone will make it like a voluntary itch that if you know you can afford it, you should make that light green. It's like a totally wholesome use of gamification psychology.

I guess it will also have to somehow show not just what you cost yourself, but also what all the non-paying users are costing and what your fraction of that would be to cover those. At least some payers would need to pay significantly more than what they cost.

But I'd be real curious to see just how bad that skew is after a while if a lot of individuals do end up paying at least for themselves, where today most of them pay nothing.

That may make the need for whales much reduced and really no whales, just a bunch that only pay like twice what they cost. Or even less, a heavy user that costs more might be able to totally cover the entire cost of 10 other light users with only 10% more than their own cost. It could eventually smooth out to being no real burden at all even for the biggest payers.

That's getting to be a bit much info to display all in a single colored dot or something without text or some complicated graphic, but I think this much could be shown and still be simple and elegant. Even a simple dot can have several dimensions all at once. size, hue, saturation, brightness, let alone any more detail like an outline or more complex shape.

About the only thing I can see that is a bad thing is I bet this is a recipe for unfairly taxing women more than men. You just know that far more women will make that light green even if it's not easy, and far more men will happily let it ride forever even though they could afford it effortlessly, just to spend that $3 on a half of a coffee instead.