The Advantages of Voluntary Payment over Traditional Payment and Subscription
Traditionally, people have to pay first and receive the purchase later, but we rarely know whether an intellectual work is worth its price before we receive and study it. Subscriptions usually offer users many more intellectual resources at a lower cost, but they still leave those most in need behind the paywall, because young and poor people cannot afford to pay for many subscriptions.
A new idea of voluntary payment should benefit everyone. First, we have free access to all intellectual works on the Internet, then we voluntarily pay for valuable works. People decide for themselves what an intellectual work is worth, and how much to pay for it. For example, you may pay a high price for a book because it has helped you a lot, while I may refuse to pay for the same book because it hasn’t helped me. Everyone also decides when to pay, so young and poor people can enjoy great works first and pay for them later.
Voluntary payments work like a democratic system. People vote for quality content with their wallets. We can remove the influence of the rich on our vote for valuable content by setting a price cap for intellectual works. Those who try to promote worthless content will not succeed, because others can always refuse to pay for the content they promote.
Voluntary payments use human intelligence to value all intellectual works. Since we spend our own money carefully, the total amount we pay for a work can be used to determine its value and enable creators to obtain value-based remuneration.
Most importantly, this could spark a human intelligence revolution, as people get smarter from a sea of quality content, while good creators get richer from our voluntary payments.
