Sending newsletters should cost something • Hacker News Board

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#41

Post by b112 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:23 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.

To be fair, if you bulk send via mail, you pay a very small fraction of normal postage.

A very small fraction.

4th class mail, sent to the occupant of every house, is very very cheap.

Really, the cost of adwork, logos, placement, 4 colour print is more expensive than post.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#42

Post by edvinbesic » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #33

phkahler wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 mai…

Don't take this the wrong way but... Oh great. Just as the environmental tire fire that is bitcoin and the other crypto-currency bros is winding down, let's replace it with email.

The primary reason why a proof of work implementation for something like bitcoin has a huge environmental impact is because it is a winner take all system. You have thousands of machines trying to do the same thing but only one will get there first and claim all the reward, making all that other work that was done a waste of resources.

At some point 1:N becomes prohibitively expensive for the sender, but that doesn't mean that there is wasted work.

edit: To clarify, not really promoting the idea per say, just commenting on the proof of work statement.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#43

Post by brohee » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #27

ghaff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mai…

The carbon footprint of those proposals is always forgotten. Global warming is a more important issue than junk email.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#44

Post by mrlemke » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #20

The weirdest thing about this proposal to me is that it picks the use case where the proposal is backwards. If someone is receiving a valuable newsletter they actually want to receive, the recipient ought to be paying for it. Senders would need to be paying for emails that people don't want. If newsletter senders are paying to send out they're going to have to then have some sort of separate charging mechanism from t…

I was thinking about this too. If I had valuable information, why would I pay you to give it to you? This deincentivizes the free sharing of knowledge through email. Most people will opt for cheaper and more efficient communications methods for noncommercial communication. When that happens, the spammers will follow anyways.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#45

Post by pc86 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

It does. You have to pay for a provider. Best case scenario it takes a long time to organically grow a list. Or you're paying for ads to build it.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#46

Post by remram » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

Great, another cost to making free software. As if building installers for difficult platforms and moving targets (macOS) and dealing with antivirus software (code signing certs cost $$) wasn't enough, now charge me for sending a newsletter. Everyone is a company, right?

Edit, having read the article: If you're going to put that much cryptography into it, why not give a unique key when you subscribe? That way you can unsubscribe or reduce volume at any point, by dropping messages with that key (and all messages without keys). As usual, what is the extra blockchain for?

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#47

Post by pc86 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #13

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?

But mail is always priced at a fixed rate. What if your inbox worked on a bonding curve, such that as it filled up it became more expensive to send to (except for whitelisted addresses you approve)? What if your inbox required that the sender owned a particular NFT (proof of membership in a community)? I mean there are infinite rules to play with in that sense. That's what excites me about crypto.

What if you just click "spam" for the 1:10000 mails that make it through the filter and moved on with your day?

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#48

Post by D13Fd » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 3:06 PM UTC

This seems like just another attempt to shoehorn blockchain into a system where it has no place and offers few advantages. Plus, I very highly doubt that a system that charges users to send e-mail would see much adoption.

All of this is offered to solve a problem that a user can solve by right click->mark as junk in most e-mail clients.

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#49

Post by jedberg » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

Almost every proposal for micro transactions for email involve the sender bearing the cost only if they don't want the email. This proposal would make everyone have to pay.

I like the idea of using the blockchain to handle the micro transactions, but I'd rather only have the money put in escrow until the reader opens it and either accepts or rejects it (or it goes back to the sender after 10 days or something).

Re: Sending newsletters should cost something

#50

Post by BenjiWiebe » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #24

luciusism wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get 10's of actual unsolicited spam emails per day that want me to click a link and run an exe, or buy Canadian drugs, or give bank account details so they can send me millions, etc.