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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?

#41

Post by Barrin92 »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #4
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…

(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…

>Why are poor people entitled to use a social network

probably because anyone should be entitled to participate in the digital commons and have a social and public life rather than considering that some sort of luxury. Unless we want to go back to the 19th century when we stuffed the peasants into workhouses and treat them like stunted peons with no need for a cultural life.

And that criticism does apply to deplatforming and censorship as well. The privatization of the public sphere is a disaster for any country that considers itself a Republic consisting of active, democratic citizens.

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

#42

Post by LouisSayers »

cardanome wrote: post #5

A 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…

The issue with downvotes as someone else mentioned is essentially that there are numerous meanings for why a post is downvoted.

I imagine a better solution would be to use something like emojis (e.g. poo vs spam emojis) but to also combine that with the user's emoji history on other posts to determine the meaning of the emoji they've left.

That way the system can differentiate someone that's let's say a radical or part of a group that wish to simply "bring something down" from those that are more legitimate.

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

#43

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

polyomino wrote: post #19
er4hn wrote: post #14

What'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.

No post body was provided.

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

#44

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#45

Post by cardanome »

er4hn wrote: post #16
cardanome wrote: post #5

A 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 f…

While this is a valid point, there are some ways to deal with it.

For example on reddit, if you go to the profile of an user and downvote every post, it does not count the downvotes. You would have to open up the post and then downvote. (We could probably also detect if it is a "natural" visit or not) So you can make the process very time consuming at least. Sure there are bots but these can also be detected.

So yes, it can never be fully stopped but on the other hand you can do similar manipulation without downvotes so I feel it is more of an parallel issue. You can still have a group voting each others posts up or straight up buy votes.

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

#46

Post by cardanome »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #9
cardanome wrote: post #5

A 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…

>"vastly overrepresents content that is actively harmful to society, meaning conspiracy theories, right wing propaganda and general fake news" Your list seems lopsided.

Yeah, I am strongly siding with reason and progress.

Thousands of people have senselessly died from a disease for which a vaccine exists that can effectively reduce the risk of such a death. Social media is very responsible for those deaths.

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

#47

Post by Bancakes »

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)

How will you deal with freeloaders who simply are not affected by ads?

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

#48

Post by endisneigh »

Bancakes wrote: post #47
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)

How will you deal with freeloaders who simply are not affected by ads?

If you can uniquely identified users in a way that cannot be spoofed then you can remove freeloaders by any criteria you wish.

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

#49

Post by tenebrisalietum »

openknot wrote: post #38
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I really don't mean to sound cruel here, but humor me: If funds can help homeless software engineers, they can pay for their social media posts too.

> content creation isn't equivalent to a competitive sport

Why are scores (likes) kept and displayed then? Why do various platforms let vote count drive their algorithm?

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

#50

Post by autoexec »

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)

> Despite the downsides, there’s not really anything better and more accessible than ads.

Ads may be a "better" way for a website owner to to make money, but they do nothing at all to promote quality content, or improve the quality of a platform. It's not as if "knowing what a person is looking at" does either of those things either. I think creating a platform for useful and engaging communities/communication and getting rich by exploiting your userbase are opposing interests and for major social media platforms the only reason they attempt to do the first thing is so that they can do the second.

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