31–40 of 52 posts
Don't they mean, I have zero control over the messages I receive?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a template that used to be big over at Slashdot and probably goes back to usenet days.
Yeah, I was about to say, this is old as dirt.
Despite the casual attitude, every single clause in it has been invoked at some point, and the counter-arguments are generally still valid.
Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam…
Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam…
That said, it's unclear what problem they're actually trying to solve, so it's understandable that we're all coming to different conclusions.
To the others, I wouldn't think of this as a replacement for e-mail. E-mail is great for a majority of communications. Framing messaging from a historical perspective helps understand where our company fits.
Prior to the internet when you wanted to communicate with someone you had to attach value to that message. Whether it was a letter, long distance phone call, telegram, or other form of communication the cost and the time that it took to send were non-zero. The cost was also apparent to the recipient, which often had an impact on the recipient's likelihood of replying. The internet has done a terrific job unburdening messages of their cost and the amount of time it takes to send them. At the same time, it has created a problem of a small signal-to-noise ratio.
Consider a journalist who I would like to cover a story. With a list of 800 journalist's emails I can send 800 emails instantly. At the same time, with each journalist I am competing with hundreds of other message senders. This includes people with bad ideas for a news story who suffer no transaction cost in sending their messages. If I could communicate my value on the that journalist's time I could rise about the noise and communicate that idea more successfully. The system wouldn't be perfect, but I am betting that the overlap between people who place real value on a recipient's time and people who are offering value to the recipient is larger than the overlap between people who place no value on a recipient's time and people who are offering value to that recipient.
There's also a lot of discussion as to what these credits are worth. Right now, they're pixels on a screen. Scarce pixels. As we grow an ecosystem of message-sending, some people and companies may decide that they would like to purchase credits at a discount and offer to do things like paypal money or send discount codes for certain number of credits. At first though, the credits won't be the point. The point will be that we will provide a service for those people which will allow them to filter out people who place zero value on their attention.
I’ll address twitter sign-in quickly. When you log on to Gramicon the users who float to the top of your “find users” page are the ones you follow on twitter. Here is a list of people who you have already identified as interesting or notable. Next to their usernames you can see the average price in order to get a reply as well as their user-generated rating. Right now we only allow twitter login because we don’t want people signing up with facebook or their email and choosing the username kanyewest or stevecase.
Thanks and stay tuned for updates!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I first skimmed this and thought, "how remarkably annoying" ("reading" it was too hard with the collapsed lists). Then I started digging into the lists and realized it is a wonderful satire of HN. To the author: fix up the lists. Having them concatenated makes it too hard to read, so you home in on the X's, missing the satire completely. If you make them pre-formatted using the spaces at the beginning of the line, re…
This copypasta predates HN by many, many years.
Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam…
If you're in the mood and fast, you can prefix each line with 4 spaces to get the more traditional monospaced layout of that.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical
( ) legislative
(x) market-based
( ) vigilante ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook (x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough (x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!Let's test this out. I can get any HNers idea in front of a well known VC in NYC that funded Twitter. The cost for having me do this is $25 if I decide that he should give some thought to your product. If, after I review, he replies to what I forward (which means it has also passed my review) you owe the $25. If no reply, you owe $5. Any takers? Send me an email. (By reply I mean either "yes have them tell me more" or "no not interested" which also has value.)