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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?

#31

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Freak_NL wrote: post #2

Even 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…

> charging $1 per post will inevitably lead to silencing poor

On social media. (One of them.) Is that objectively worse than the current tax on the time and attention of the poor that is modern advertising?

Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?

#32

Post by jancsika »

Imagine that HN is one-dollar-one-comment.

Now imagine some story related to blockchain rises to the top spot.

Does anybody seriously think blockchain fanboyism would be at all thwarted by requiring cryptbros to pay a dollar to remind everyone here that fiat requires a lot of energy, too?

Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?

#33

Post by endisneigh »

hughrr wrote: post #30
endisneigh wrote: post #29

I guarantee this idea won’t work. Despite the downsides, there’s not really anything better and more accessible than ads. If you want to end ads, create a provably correct and robust system to know when a given person is looking at a given thing on a computer. Once you do that, then the attention directly can be monetized without ads (of course it will be used for ads mainly as that’s the main use case)

Not saying anything is better than charging for posts, dealing with adverts or most of social media content. People need to get used to their content being worth what it’s really worth: nothing! Content was only worth stuff when it was scarce.

Content is worth stuff, just not to everyone, at the same time, at the same amount.

Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?

#34

Post by echelon »

willcipriano wrote: post #21
polyomino wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also why would the first users join? The site would be dead.

SomethingAwful made it work.

Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?

#35

Post by consumer451 »

smolder wrote: post #23
willcipriano wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also why would the first users join? The site would be dead.

Naturally the site owner would have a few hundred sock puppets they talk to themselves with, in order to bootstrap the social network. Growth hacking 101.

Exactly what Reddit did according to Huffman in the Coinbase talk.

Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?

#36

Post by hughrr »

endisneigh wrote: post #33
hughrr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying anything is better than charging for posts, dealing with adverts or most of social media content. People need to get used to their content being worth what it’s really worth: nothing! Content was only worth stuff when it was scarce.

Content is worth stuff, just not to everyone, at the same time, at the same amount.

This is the problem. At most it’s worth the least someone will pay for it which is almost nothing. The proportion of people who will pay for it won’t cover the operating costs of delivering the content.

Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?

#37

Post by LouisSayers »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31
Freak_NL wrote: post #2

Even 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…

> charging $1 per post will inevitably lead to silencing poor On social media. (One of them.) Is that objectively worse than the current tax on the time and attention of the poor that is modern advertising?

The difference is that one is opt-out and the other is opt-in (with a charge associated).

Anyone can choose to opt-out, however by charging for opt-in you're putting up barriers for those that don't have the same disposable income.

So to answer your question, yes, it is objectively worse.

Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?

#38

Post by openknot »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #28
yanmaani wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 I might be able to be a good race car driver, but does that entitle me to a free race car? Am I being oppressed because the race track won't buy me a race car?

It's not about being entitled to post. Rather, it's about creating a network with content created by people from a diverse set of backgrounds.

Consider Hacker News, specifically this submission [0] on "My Story as a Homeless Developer." If HN had a paywall to post, the readers wouldn't be able to learn from the story. Even if the person paid to post, the comment section might also not have included as many offers to support the writer from formerly homeless developers, as these people may not have been on the platform due to a retained habit of frugality.

The comparison to race car driving also isn't equivalent. It comparatively costs a near-negligible amount to allow one more user to create content on a platform, versus providing someone with a race car. Perhaps a comparison to a relatively low-cost sport (swimming, marathon running) would be more apt, though still flawed (for content creation isn't equivalent to a competitive sport).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17936860

Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?

#39

Post by endisneigh »

hughrr wrote: post #36
endisneigh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Content is worth stuff, just not to everyone, at the same time, at the same amount.

This is the problem. At most it’s worth the least someone will pay for it which is almost nothing. The proportion of people who will pay for it won’t cover the operating costs of delivering the content.

There's no problem - ads exist which deliver revenue proportional to viewership which is a proxy to value-add.

Re: Will charging for posts lead to higher social media content quality?

#40

Post by decohen »

This is an interesting idea, but I wonder what the effects would be on smaller or newer platforms. Would it cost say $5 for a post on Facebook, but only $1 for a post on my neighborhood's Nextdoor?

FWIW, I did some thinking about this general problem a while back, and my best idea so far is to make content artificially scarce, by limiting the number of users that can see a given post in a given period.

This has the nice property of not requiring expensive moderation, complex algorithms, or (as is the proposal here) usage charges.

More details here, if interested: https://danielcohen.dev/politics/technology/2021/01/15/socia...

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