Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

#41

Post by jmcgough » Fri, Dec 21, 2012, 6:57 PM UTC

This has some potential if it got enough traction... but it's another chicken-or-egg business which is going to have trouble drawing users without having anyone people actually want to talk to.

Slideshare is here http://www.slideshare.net/gramicon if anyone is curious. The monetization rate is really low for their case study (less than 1% of clickthroughs and even >1% of registered users), but I'd imagine more of their monetization would come from advertisers - if they can convince people to stick around and keep using Gramicon.

Re: Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

#42

Post by larrys » Fri, Dec 21, 2012, 6:59 PM UTC

jgrahamc wrote: post #2

I can't imagine using this. I'm interested in hearing from people with the most interesting things to say, not the ones with the most money.

One of the reasons that the yellow pages worked for so many years was that if someone was listed and paid to be in a particular category you knew they were serious about the product or service that they were offering. So while this does not mean that someone has something interesting to say if you are purchasing products or services for your company (or looking for ideas to fund) having someone have some skin in the game and not mass spraying everyone, to me anyway, has benefit.

Added: I was told the other day by a business owner that they received a rc helicopter by UPS the other day, minus the transmitter which the salesman would bring if they would hear his pitch. That's skin in the game obviously they had expense to send out the heli and it shows an additional level of commitment to targeting vs. traditional cold calling or direct mail.

Re: Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

#43

Post by Alex3917 » Fri, Dec 21, 2012, 7:12 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #32

rayiner wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I was about to say, this is old as dirt.

It is slightly younger than spam, but not by much. Despite the casual attitude, every single clause in it has been invoked at some point, and the counter-arguments are generally still valid.

Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if VCs used this when evaluating ideas for new email-related products. I don't think you could do any better no matter how many hours you put into due diligence.

Re: Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

#44

Post by swang » Fri, Dec 21, 2012, 7:34 PM UTC

Why is this linkbaity title still allowed by the HN mods? The mods usually forbid (and then change) misleading titles and this to me seems like an obvious one.

It's essentially just free advertisement for this website masking itself as an article about a recent Facebook change.

Re: Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

#45

Post by jacalata » Fri, Dec 21, 2012, 7:53 PM UTC

aleyan wrote: post #39

jerf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Takes about 30 seconds to do in sublime text but I think the horizontal scrolling makes it worse. 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 th…

Why does the horizontal scrolling exist?

Re: Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

#46

Post by jacalata » Fri, Dec 21, 2012, 7:54 PM UTC

larrys wrote: post #40

I like this idea. It has potential definitely. This is a sales tool and a way to get your message in front of people that want to know someone took the effort and has targeted them instead of many people and is willing to pay for the opportunity. I get solicited plenty by email (and by phone). I would definitely pay more attention if I knew there was some cost to targeting me instead of spraying everyone. I can see u…

The problem is that gramicon doesn't implement the 'if no reply, you owe $5' - it's free if they don't reply. So the cost for sending a shitty email that nobody wanted to receive is free.

edit: clarity.

Re: Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

#47

Post by Zak » Fri, Dec 21, 2012, 8:08 PM UTC

jacalata wrote: post #45

aleyan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes about 30 seconds to do in sublime text but I think the horizontal scrolling makes it worse. 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 th…

Why does the horizontal scrolling exist?

Because

    pre { overflow: auto; padding: 2px; max-width:600px; }

If you want to override it, you can use a user stylesheet, userscript or the like.

Re: Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

#48

Post by jerf » Fri, Dec 21, 2012, 8:38 PM UTC

aleyan wrote: post #39

jerf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Takes about 30 seconds to do in sublime text but I think the horizontal scrolling makes it worse. 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 th…

I generally just reformat to add newlines.

Re: Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

#49

Post by patmcguire » Fri, Dec 21, 2012, 10:48 PM UTC

igul222 wrote: post #16

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…

To be fair, though, gmail's filters are so good at this point that I basically never see spam on addresses that have been live for over five years. So I guess the technical approach does work if you have great engineers working on it way past the point where it pays off financially and you have about half of all email for training data?

Re: Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

#50

Post by dbecker » Fri, Dec 21, 2012, 11:22 PM UTC

corresation wrote: post #28

dbecker wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to reply to get paid, you could hire someone on oDesk to reply to your gramicon mails for $3/hr.

That would be a cynical view of it, sure. I do consulting work, 90%+ of it out of sight. I could technically hire some offshore help to do it for me, but it turns out that the reason people pay me what they do is the insight and knowledge that I bring to the work. The exact same principal applies here. I can see something like this (not necessarily this implementation with their ridiculous psuedo-currency) having app…

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think they've changed their front page over the course of the day (perhaps in response to these comments).

When I first read it, it looked like a way for advertisers to reach potential buyers. If that's the case, then someone on oDesk could easily respond pretending to be interested in a product just as well as I could.

Envisioned more broadly as a way to pay for the time someone spends responding to email, it would be hard to outsource my role in email correspondance.