A bold idea! Whether it succeeds or not, it'll make for a terrific experiment.
Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?
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Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
(These are harsh points of view and not necessarily ones I hold. I'd like them to be savagely attacked for the sake of discussion.) - If you are poor, maybe you should be searching for work or other betterment of your situation rather than posting on social media? Maybe it should be free to view posts tagged and verified as "Help Wanted"? - Why are poor people entitled to use a social network just due to their econom…
If you insist: There's a difference between destitute and poor. Someone working as a janitor with a unimpressive but acceptable salary, who has to pinch pennies to make ends meet, can still be a good poster. (Anecdotally, a lot of good Twitter posters seem to have lots of problems with student debt and the like.) Obviously, it's not literally illegal. But it seems like you're not going to filter just for people who c…
But if you're selling stuff to rich dumb people, you will pay to play in the same space too.
But then the community will leave and form a new island.
Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?
#13How does this promise no ads? If anything this encourages more posts with a non-zero ROI.
Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?
#14What's wrong with charging for an account and enforcing a clear ban-hammer for posts which violate a set of rules? That was SomethingAwful's model and it seemed to work well. Especially combined with their "Leper's Colony" where you could see what each person was temp/perm banned for. That seemed to scale well over time since you have a fixed cost to make an account as long as you aren't getting out of line.
Charging per post does seem regressive and stifles conversation among everyone who doesn't have money to burn / doesn't view the post as an investment.
Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?
#15Even if you beat the network effect and become the next Facebook/Twitter/Whatever, charging $1 per post will inevitably lead to silencing poor, or even comparatively poor people — which is most of the world. With a pay-to-post model like this you would effectively place a filter on who can join in, and just get another niche social media website, and many people will still want to check Facebook/Twitter/Whatever beca…
(These are harsh points of view and not necessarily ones I hold. I'd like them to be savagely attacked for the sake of discussion.) - If you are poor, maybe you should be searching for work or other betterment of your situation rather than posting on social media? Maybe it should be free to view posts tagged and verified as "Help Wanted"? - Why are poor people entitled to use a social network just due to their econom…
This seems beside the point. Whether or not poor people morally deserve friends, free time, and a social media presence, the reality right now is they have those things and they're not going away, so people are likely to stay on free-to-post sites, whether or not they can also afford paid sites, just to be able to consume the additional content.
This isn't at all a problem unique to social media. Look at HBO. I don't think anyone at all questions they had higher quality content than Netflix. Nonetheless, they got purchased by a media megaconglomerate with a mandate to produce more content, even at the cost of quality, because that is what it takes to compete with Netflix, because consumers largely prefer quantity over quality, especially when quantity comes at a lower cost.
It isn't that there is no market at all for higher-quality, heavily curated, paid, niche content. It's just a small market. Maybe this site can have a happy existence and provide a good experience for whoever ends up there. But it can't solve the problem of social media polluting the global information landscape because it can't put Facebook out of business.
Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?
#16A better start would be to simply bring back downvotes. Tweak the algorithm to seriously hamper the visibility of posts with a high downvote ratio. While this might gain us "only" mediocrity, even mediocrity would be a huge step up to the current status quo that vastly overrepresents content that is actively harmful to society, meaning conspiracy theories, right wing propaganda and general fake news. The next step wo…
> While this might gain us "only" mediocrity
The general problem with downvotes is brigarding. If you post something controversial, ex: "The calling China 'West Taiwan' Meme is offensive" or "COVID-19 Vaccines are great" you risk organized groups sharing "take this person down" posts to find your content and downvote it. They may even go and downvote every post you've ever made on your account to try and punish you for your opinion.
Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?
#17This would be an excellent idea... if you were talking about doing in on Twitter, or FB, and if it would pertain only for businesses. Would greatly reduce noise and lead to more revenue for Twitter/FB. But not for a new social network you want to bootstrap. That's an awful idea.
Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?
#18It depends on what you mean by quality. By my logic, it will inevitably lead to lower social media quality. Charging for posts means that every post is in fact an ad. People generally don't like ads.
It's an interesting idea.
I guess it depends on the audience. For example, I run a literary magazine and something that has been noted in publishing forums is that when you charge a reading fee to consider a submission, it can cut down on the number of people shotgunning completely inapposite submissions to any magazine or journal with a free open call.
But that's a targeted audience, people who like contemporary literature.
If they're thinking "Twitter but you have to pay per post" ... I could unfortunately see a race to the bottom where most paid posts are ads or thinly-veiled ads.
Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?
#19What's wrong with charging for an account and enforcing a clear ban-hammer for posts which violate a set of rules? That was SomethingAwful's model and it seemed to work well. Especially combined with their "Leper's Colony" where you could see what each person was temp/perm banned for. That seemed to scale well over time since you have a fixed cost to make an account as long as you aren't getting out of line. Charging…
The problem that comes to mind is that the site is required to grow in accounts in order to continue functioning. In the long term, you'd need to add additional sources of revenue.
Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?
#20Even if you beat the network effect and become the next Facebook/Twitter/Whatever, charging $1 per post will inevitably lead to silencing poor, or even comparatively poor people — which is most of the world. With a pay-to-post model like this you would effectively place a filter on who can join in, and just get another niche social media website, and many people will still want to check Facebook/Twitter/Whatever beca…
(These are harsh points of view and not necessarily ones I hold. I'd like them to be savagely attacked for the sake of discussion.) - If you are poor, maybe you should be searching for work or other betterment of your situation rather than posting on social media? Maybe it should be free to view posts tagged and verified as "Help Wanted"? - Why are poor people entitled to use a social network just due to their econom…
Some people are poor because the country they live in doesn’t have a Silicon Valley or oil industry to prop up artificially high wages.