Sending newsletters should cost something • Hacker News Board

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#21

Post by balozi » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

chadlavi wrote: post #10

This would just mean that no one does hobby newsletters, and all the newsletters are simply spammers/marketers trying to make money off of you. Adding more capitalism is not how to solve problems caused by capitalism.

The dig at capitalism is a bit puzzling since this may be the perfect setting to demonstrate the principles of capitalism. Let them deploy their capital and see how market responds. Their theory is that "sending an e-mail should cost something". Maybe that cost is $2.30 per message, and maybe its $0.0000000023 per message. Either way its their capital at stake.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#22

Post by luciusism » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:36 PM UTC

daniel-cussen wrote: post #18

jonwest wrote: post #8

It seems like the point of this is to reduce junk mail by forcing a financial cost to sending mail thereby causing the sender to really consider the content of their message before sending it—except there is a real cost associated with sending traditional mail and there is still a huge amount of garbage traditional mail sent out every day. Maybe I’m missing the point, though?

There is really not that much junk mail in the traditional mail, in my experience. Probably it varies place to place, but it's much MUCH less than what I get in my gmail.

My experience is the opposite. I'm constantly getting junk mail at my home with no filtering, meanwhile gmail does a great job blocking unwanted emails.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#23

Post by ghaff » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

jonwest wrote: post #8

It seems like the point of this is to reduce junk mail by forcing a financial cost to sending mail thereby causing the sender to really consider the content of their message before sending it—except there is a real cost associated with sending traditional mail and there is still a huge amount of garbage traditional mail sent out every day. Maybe I’m missing the point, though?

No. And I've heard proposals like this going back at least a couple of decades. The theory goes that if you make email expensive (at scale) charging even a trivial fee will make shotgun blasts cost prohibitive. While (very much in theory), a few cents won't deter the casual emailer. Though more likely, as with SMS at one point, people would find ways to route around the expensive pipe because bits are bits at the end of the day.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#24

Post by ghaff » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

luciusism wrote: post #22

daniel-cussen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is really not that much junk mail in the traditional mail, in my experience. Probably it varies place to place, but it's much MUCH less than what I get in my gmail.

My experience is the opposite. I'm constantly getting junk mail at my home with no filtering, meanwhile gmail does a great job blocking unwanted emails.

I suppose it depends on how you count volume. I maybe get 2 or 3 pieces of "junk" mail a day, along with bill/renewal/etc. associated paper (most of which is handled electronically), and few other letters and packages. Certainly I get way, way more than that in email whether outright junk or the loosely-related result of being on countless industry lists, etc.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#25

Post by zivkovicp » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:53 PM UTC

...or you could just mark your spam as such and block the sender to reduce future junk mail without ruining a nice system of essentially free global communication for everyone who uses it as such.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#26

Post by chadlavi » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

balozi wrote: post #21

chadlavi wrote: post #10

This would just mean that no one does hobby newsletters, and all the newsletters are simply spammers/marketers trying to make money off of you. Adding more capitalism is not how to solve problems caused by capitalism.

The dig at capitalism is a bit puzzling since this may be the perfect setting to demonstrate the principles of capitalism. Let them deploy their capital and see how market responds. Their theory is that "sending an e-mail should cost something". Maybe that cost is $2.30 per message, and maybe its $0.0000000023 per message. Either way its their capital at stake.

right and that... sucks? and is bad?

A lot of the passion/hobby newsletters I receive would not exist if the person writing them had to pay to send the emails. Adding a cost to distributing information does not increase the quality of distributed information, it just increases the percentage of information distributed that is trying to make the sender money.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the article. Are they talking only about marketing newsletters or just any kind of mass-emailing? Because sure, I'd support adding a toll to sending marketing emails. If your intent is to sell something, it should cost you some money to advertise.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#27

Post by phkahler » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:59 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #23

jonwest wrote: post #8

It seems like the point of this is to reduce junk mail by forcing a financial cost to sending mail thereby causing the sender to really consider the content of their message before sending it—except there is a real cost associated with sending traditional mail and there is still a huge amount of garbage traditional mail sent out every day. Maybe I’m missing the point, though?

No. And I've heard proposals like this going back at least a couple of decades. The theory goes that if you make email expensive (at scale) charging even a trivial fee will make shotgun blasts cost prohibitive. While (very much in theory), a few cents won't deter the casual emailer. Though more likely, as with SMS at one point, people would find ways to route around the expensive pipe because bits are bits at the end…

>> While (very much in theory), a few cents won't deter the casual emailer.

Better yet. Require proof of work where the receiver sets the challenge level. Now you can whitelist people by offering trivial challenges for them. If you really want to email me it's going to take 2 minutes of CPU time - this will be done by the new mail clients in the background, so individual personal cost is essentially zero but bulk mail will require significant resources to send.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#28

Post by Fnoord » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:00 PM UTC

Bill Gates proposed sending email costs money. I remember this list from the 00's which included all kind of failed proposals to combat spam.

Newsletters are no issue in EU though. They need to provide a clear and easy way to unsubscribe or they break the law.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#29

Post by brianoconnor » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:01 PM UTC

qqii wrote: post #14

jonwest wrote: post #8

It seems like the point of this is to reduce junk mail by forcing a financial cost to sending mail thereby causing the sender to really consider the content of their message before sending it—except there is a real cost associated with sending traditional mail and there is still a huge amount of garbage traditional mail sent out every day. Maybe I’m missing the point, though?

At the moment the cost of sending mail doesn't scale with the amount of mail you send. After spinning up a mail server the difference in cost between sending 1,000 and 10,000 emails is trivial.

Sending 10,000 mails yes, but will the email be actually delivered by large mail providers?

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#30

Post by thinkmassive » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

daniel-cussen wrote: post #19

teitoklien wrote: post #7

Not sure if its a good idea, Email servers get hacked daily, If you’re auto-sending payment to receiver , now there is an incentive for hackers , to spam themselves with your inbox and you pay out of your wallet for that. Now, yes one could say, that’s no problem just have a multi-wallet approval method , so unless the second one approves, it wont. But now that makes it a bit more complex, especially for newsletters…

Well in the mail you have to pay for the stamp. It's about a dollar. You could charge 10 cents...in fact, that's not a bad idea for a cryptocurrency.

This was one of the original motivations to develop technologies that made cryptocurrency possible. Adam Back released the first proof-of-work implementation, Hashcash, in 1997 as a denial-of-service countermeasure.