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Spam notwithstanding, what's wrong with the usual methods for sorting email, e.g. catchy wording in title, and filtering based on whether the sender is familiar
by westbywest 17y ago
Spam notwithstanding, what's wrong with the usual methods for sorting email, e.g. catchy wording in title, and filtering based on whether the sender is familiar to you?
Admitted I'm not a celebrity like Arrington, but I really don't find myself especially more likely to absorb email content that I'm apathetic about, even if I get paid. And precisely because I'm no celebrity, I don't see how I could be paid anything more than a pittance by this scheme, meaning someone would be buying my attention span for very cheap.
I'll let the attention span devoted to writing this comment (provided free of change) serve as an example of how I believe this scheme would drastically de-value email readers' time.
- devinj 17y agoI think it'd be okay to be paid a pittance. In fact, I would hope the auction lets people send emails for free. For people that don't get much email, then, it's just like normal, no problems. If you get a lot, people will notice you have 500 emails left unread and go "hm, maybe I should jump the queue". So they pay a dollar. The biggest concern is that if you get a huge number of emails a day, it's kind of sad that people that don't want to pay are pushed down so far. I'm not sure how the service works, but maybe the queue could be designed to balance money with time spent waiting? I feel like I should dislike this idea, but I think I like it.