That site wouldn’t have any spam, true. Though not because of the cost, but because it wouldn’t have any users to make it worth spamming. No one wants to pay per message. Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?” Once in a blue moon someone would post, get no reply, and be even more unlikely to post next.
And yes, yes, not literally everyone, but enough that it becomes a rounding error.
I think that's well below the threshold people would care.
The problem is that $0.01 is too low, it'd be well worth spending to advertise or propagandize. For context, USA presidential elections will spend billions, they could make ten billion posts for a fraction of their war chest.
People don’t even pay 0.99$ for apps they use all day every day, opting instead to suffer through ads and have their batteries drained. There’s no chance they’d pay 0.01$ per message.
For the vast majority, there are two price points: free and not free. The psychological difference between free and 0.01$ is magnitudes larger than the difference between 0.01$ and 1$.
Something that is free is an unlimited resource. Something which costs even $0.01 is a limited resource (even if the limit is very high).
People naturally deal with limited resources different than unlimited. If it’s unlimited, each usage requires no further consideration. If it’s limited, each usage requires evaluating whether to spend dollars/credits/capacity on it.
I use a paid search engine. I paid extra for the “unlimited” option even though I should have fallen well under a lower tier. It wasn’t because of payment friction. (I was already paying a monthly fee, the only difference was the amount.) I paid the extra because as soon as this transitioned from unlimited to limited, I needed to keep a mental accounting of every usage. I needed to consider if each usage was worth buying.
If you give me a sheet of stickers for free I will struggle to stick them on anything. They are, by their nature as a physical thing, a limited resource. Payment doesn’t matter because they were free. What matters is I can run out so I need to ensure I’m making the best use of a limited resource.
So the wealthiest people get to spread the most propaganda?
People were saying this about email 20+ years ago.
Not sure if it's the case here but there's a tendency for those in tech to think people problems can be solved with code.
Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve.
Sure, clever analogy. The internet barely facilitates many best practices for congregating on a communal basis, barring a user's self-sovereign strive to cultivate, recognize and then compensate for its failings with whatever sort of information, interactions and dealings one happens to seek.
20+ years ago, i just settled for lurking whatever boards popped out of the ether and playing EverQuest, RuneScape and Habbo Hotel, to soak in its novelty. Such persistent asymmetricity should never be lost.
You have zero issues with spam and abuse because you have a small user base, not because of the fee.
Twitter has TONS of paid accounts for spam.
Second: scale. Twitter has millions of users, it is not profitable and is suing advertisers in a desperate attempt to justify its lack of revenue. Let's just say that a miracle happens and I get my dream number of paid accounts (10k at $29/year). The operation would be profitable enough to pay myself more than I ever made in any job and still contribute back to the downstream projects. I could literally close registrations on my service, or start a different vetting process.
On top of that, they are effectively paying per word to post through paying for tokens. This does not stop them.
Assuming the Fediverse was as popular as Twitter/FB, they could simply run their own instances, no need to pay for access through any specific server.
Anyway, my point is that charging for access to a network where access is already open is a good enough of a filter to avoid spam originating from your node. Spammers are not going to be interested in paying $29/year to be able to send posts via Mastodon when they can just create a bunch of accounts on servers with open registrations or simply running their own botnet.
Hell, I don't even have to be a complete cynic to make the argument that basically any news piece today only gets to be written if it serves the economic interests of its publisher. That is valid from the NYT and Washington Post to an indie game developer talking about their project on Mastodon.
If everything is "spam", then there is no ham. If there is no ham, there is no way to build an classifier. If there is no way to build a classifier, then what is the problem we are trying to solve in the first place?
Bots spreading misinformation are bad and a problem on Twitter/Facebook/TikTok, sure. But the reason that an entrance fee does not solve this problem is because these networks are built on the idea of controlling what content people get to see. On the "open social web", people are in charge, there is no "algorithm" and manipulation becomes a lot harder.
No? That doesn't mean they aren't spam, though.
And then what? No one is going to navigate an instance that is just spam, and other instances will promptly block them.
There was a spam wave some months ago. The spammers were using Mastodon and Sharkey instances that had open registrations. They were not signing up to paid-only instances to become "legit".
The worst I see on Twitter when I peek in come from checkmarks. Cryptocurrency shills are some of the worst offenders and they seem to have taken over.
That looks to be retrofitted, not the origin of the term.
From a purely theoretical level, there's a very broad range of incomes worldwide, so any price point you use to keep spammers out makes it unaffordable to the average person in many nations, and varying pricing by nation just means the spammers pretend to be from the cheapest nation(s).
We also have a demonstration of payment-based messaging systems in that price range with SMS and voice calls, which still get junk. (Nation-specific: my German SIM gets none while my UK SIM gets a lot… but only when I actually visit the UK).
For subscription-based payment filtering, similar — while it's hard for me to determine which of Musks's statements I should take seriously or literally, twitter premium pricing it's still a test of this idea even if it wasn't the true intent behind Musk's assertion.
Was this the initial idea of the Brave browser? Did that succeed to some extent?
Also it tends to be made illegal for obvious reasons (even if in practice, everyone but the most careful user eventually gets identified by their IP, the logs of which Web servers are legally obligated to keep in most states).
Otherwise, if you actually meant pseudonymous payments, well, Flattr actually tried to do it. Flattr 1.0 basically died in the 2012-2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, while Flattr 2.0 never managed to get enough reach, unlike the Silicon Valley backed, new competitor, Patreon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwELepvBAVY
> He said "if I was in charge of Facebook, mate, I'd be saying like 'fucking QUID A GO!'"
> It gave me a small sense of hometown pride when I realized the guy was serious... small sense of hometown pride that there must be very few places in the world where Mark Zuckerberg would be offered financial advice from a guy who was 15 pence short for [his bus fare]
Someone built this (a 4chan clone) on ethereum, I can't remember what it's called. It was pretty dead, but the project exists.
The psychology is already there, "all" that's required a snowball to start adoption in the online media space.
[1] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works
It should cost at least 10 cents. And I think your idea is the future.
Check out this paper:
https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%...
It seems like there are things reddit could do to squelch spam that it doesn't seem to be doing, like disallowing duplicate text in posts as one example. Beyond a certain karma it seems like posting rate becomes unrestricted and I think more than one post every 10 seconds is spamming regardless.
So I think reddit right now doesn't have much incentive to squelch spam since it's not doing that much, it would take effort, and effort == money.
I think the for profit model is reddit's biggest problem right now. Others have pointed to USENET's problems, but in an open protocol those were things that could have been surmounted with effort. The for-profit problem with reddit looks to be insurmountable and the rate of enshitification will only accelerate.
Probably a clone of the old reddit is in order. Like cleddit (.com is squatted on but not .org or .net) or something like that. Or a new version of the USENET protocol. For all it's problems USENET did reveal what made scientology 'tick' behind the scenes on alt.religion.scientology. Some new version of USENET might also address DMCA abuses also.