Giving Back To the Internet at Hacker Noon

The internet is the greatest invention of the last hundred years. Yet, much of it is counterproductive, with companies working against each other to "own the user." Paywalls, popup ads and excessive data collection damage the end user's experience, efficiency of time, and ability to collect micropayments.

At Hacker Noon, we're committed to experimentation with Web Monetization. I personally believe that transaction fees are one of the great racquets that technology can solve. In fact, during the initial creation of the browser, visionaries anticipated many use cases for the exchanging liquid value from visitor to site. The original documentation for the browser included this: "The 402 (Payment Required) status code is reserved for future use."

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where you just set a budget for internet content - without painstaking UX of things like paywalls or popup ads - and it just distributed the earnings automatically based on time consuming?

That's a world Coil envisions, and that's why we partnered with them as a web monetization provider.

Our goal is to have contributing writers add their own Coil metatag, Hacker Noon ensures the surfacing of the tag across all their content published with us, and Coil subscribers automatically stream micropayments to Hacker Noon writers.

All other reading experience pages on our site - where the writer hasn't added their Coil metatag - the Hacker Noon official account will collect the earnings.

As the ecosystem is young, our sponsorship revenue is solid, and we are living in batshit crazy times, we've decided to donate all proceeds generated by the company's official payment pointer into The Back to The Internet Pool.

What's The Back to The Internet Pool?

It's Hacker Noon's pool of web monetized earnings that will be donated to a nonprofit or open source project that is actively making a better internet. We'll nominate potential projects, and the community will vote on which deserves the donation, and then once a month we will donate via our Payment Pointer.

We're excited for our contributing writers' votes to determine how we impact the way the internet is built. We're committed to giving all our Coil metatag earnings back to the internet, for for at least a year. At that point, we'll re-evaluate the experiment.

Also if you just want to support The Back to the Internet Pool, email us!