The payment looks most like a barrier to spam. Thus anything that made it possible to create more groups and/or larger groups would require an increasingly higher price to break the economics of using this to spam people.
That sounds too complex to me. Pay to send is simple, definitely reduces spam, means that you can have an ad/tracker-free experience, reduce the amount of “chat-by-email” threads.
That's the big problem with pay to post schemes. Even with miniscule payments the friction of including payments at all is a big barrier for the majority of people who fill out forums and communities so it's not just a handful of people clout chasing the void.
Seems their plan is for public posts to be $1/post but "Posts among friends will always be free."
I imagine if they become successful they can look into lowering the public post price depending on a person's region. Let's leave aside how they'll go about determining that, VPNs, and such; that's something for the future.
But doesn't that get rid of the social aspect of "Social Media"? People like being able to comment on things - but why should they have to pay to do so? Just because someone isn't willing to pay doesn't mean that what they've got to say isn't worthwhile, and vice versa. I think a pay-to-post/free to consume setup would result in a spammy, advert ridden service, that would quickly die.
The motivation to pay is to generate better spam on the one side, and to spot that spam on the other. Plausibly, a lot of content will go through multiple iterations of both of those before reaching any actual human. Same game that's going on now, just cheaper (even more automated) and at higher volume.
Actually, it would benefit the Post and any other participating publisher -- any money is better than no money, after all. In particular, my design is structured so that service subscribers could penetrate paywalls with the guarantee that some payment will be made.
This creates a new segment in the market: people who would pay if the marginal transaction costs are zero.
The cost to post (just an upload) is going to be a lot smaller in the long run than the cost for people to view popular content (tons and tons of bandwidth, some db access, etc.). So it's kind of a weird model to charge for posting or contributing. Really you'd want to charge for time spent viewing... and then you've basically invented AOL again.
That's not the problem. The problem is that they want us to pay to deliver messages to people who already "Liked" our page and thus have a pre-established interest/subscription.
The ability to repost content without payment required is already true of every existing digital media distribution system. We do not claim to improve this situation.
LBRY does not provide IP enforcement. The primary reasons people pay for content when they could get all content for free are: 1) their personal morality and 2) fear of legal repercussions
This is more about about promoting sharing as a cultural behavior than making money on this particular product. By incentivizing sharing, companies end up with more personal information. It forces lurkers to participate (some might argue that's a good thing).
The service forces you to pay for content with your own content, whereas before the payment was implicit, or at least invisible -- as long as you were in the store, you consented to being monitored.
It's a problem with the model. It's far too much for subscribing to a single site; especially when it's linked to from social media (HN) where it's required to have access to participate in community discussion.
HN will pay for content, but they won't pay under these terms.
People don't want to pay because it requires friction on every purchase and much of the content on the internet adds up to fractions of a penny per impression. That doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
Think of like a movie: you can pay $10 to see the whole thing or $0.001 per each frame. That's what the web is like with each frame possibly being from a different publisher. That kind of granular payments is very hard to pull off effectively outside of advertising.
This is a bit tangential, but I actually think charging money to participate in certain online discussions is a really good idea.
For instance, I think it would be awesome if everyone sending an email to my main account had to send me $1. If what they are sending me isn't worth $1 to them, why should I get a buzz on my phone? Spam would be solved instantly.
I certainly don't think that every corner of the internet should be pay-to-play, and I generally don't think that the fees should be substantial to users participating in good faith. But I've got about five emails in the past two days from an airline bugging me to upgrade my seat. It costs me time and attention to weed through my inbox.
I'm sure this principle could be applied to sites like HN or reddit to raise the bar and put even just a little bit of skin in the game.
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