12 ms·

A Social Network That Costs 10¢ to Post

281 points by apo 9y ago

novalis78 9y ago
We should all move over and comment on yours.org :-) - did you guys plan on nested comments?
PaulHoule 9y ago
That price is too low.
- crude_euler 9y ago
  Maybe for posting, but 10c to consume or upvote content might be too high. Think about how many pieces of content you consume on a Facebook feed or on your reddit homepage. And 1k upvotes would translate to $100...sounds rich to me. Wonder how they intend on preventing spamming posts / content farming / gaming the system in that kind of environment.
  - fish_fan 9y ago
    It might stop eg "share to pray" posts and viral fake news.
    - qbrass 9y ago
      "Reply with your prayers to help little Billy afford chemo"
  - peterburkimsher 9y ago
    TED charges $4000 to listen live and meet people. After they have their conferences where all the rich people support them, they give the content away to the masses for free. The point to take away from this is that some people are willing to pay a huge amount of money for "networking".
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Or it's too high because why should anyone pay $0.10 to post on a nerdy and tiny social network when Twitter is free and you can reach hundreds of millions? Difficult balancing act.
  - tpeo 9y ago
    Depending on the nerdy and tiny social network, I would pay way more than ten cents.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      app.net was about as nerdy and "expensive" as you could realistically get and it's dead.
- yafujifide 9y ago
  We think that might be true. We're very market-minded and intend to give our users the power to set prices wherever possible. We'll let the natural price arise.
  - novalis78 9y ago
    Here is an idea for you Ryan: perhaps you could tie the money setting to an article's reach... that way you make everyone an owner of the page and strive for highest quality together. That's a more dynamic setup that rewards high quality - in the article as well as the comment section.
- jaclaz 9y ago
  >That price is too low. An alternative was proposed, if you want to spend more ;) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14761633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14761633 Courtesy of the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20170713150307/https://medium.com/@affluentconfidante/how-i-created-a-980-per-post-social-network-in-just-2-days-for-10-17c8e84f4601 https://web.archive.org/web/20170713150307/https://medium.co... https://web.archive.org/web/20170903044028/https://affluentconfidante.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170903044028/https://affluentc...
jpindar 9y ago
>People love to pay money to vote on things. Who would have thought? Anyone who's active in virtual worlds knows people love to buy content and tip creators and performers. >Why didn’t micropayments ever take off? No one ever tried. Except virtual worlds, which have whole economies based on micropayments.
- yafujifide 9y ago
  This is a great point. But many of these services do not let you withdraw easily or at all. On Yours, you can cash out instantly. Even if the company goes away, you can export your keys and cash out even then :)
- olegkikin 9y ago
  My mind was recently blown by how much people tip on gamer streams. I was watching Shroud play PUBG, he suddenly gets tipped $550, doesn't even acknowledge it. Apparently $10-20K tips happen quite often: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/231p6e/summit_the_highest_paid_cs_player/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/231p6e/sum... So yeah, if you're entertaining enough, people will throw money at you.
  - camus2 9y ago
    > So yeah, if you're entertaining enough, people will throw money at you. Which was a well known fact since the beginning of strip clubs... Twitch and co are no different from sexcams.
    - tyrust 9y ago
      >Twitch and co are no different from sexcams Once you get past the fact that they are both livestreams the similarity ends. Twitch explicitly forbids sexual content [0]. There are some streamers that dress suggestively, but they're in the minority. Your statement is not much different from calling YouTube no different from PornHub. [0] - https://www.twitch.tv/p/legal/community-guidelines/ https://www.twitch.tv/p/legal/community-guidelines/
aaron-lebo 9y ago
We started charging 10¢ to post content on our social network. Our users didn’t leave. In fact, they are posting more than ever, and the quality of content has improved. Our experiment seems to be working. People are willing to pay to post content. Neat concept (and good domain), but your top post has $2.28. The entire site has 20 new posts ($2?) over the last 24 hours. You don't gotta exaggerate to sell, it just makes me less inclined to trust you and your service. Seems to be competing roughly with Steem. These services have a problem where the initial adopters are Bitcoin users or fanatical unpopular views (voat), which biases and ruins the community early. Interested to see if this avoids it. Also, does anyone know what kind of regulatory upkeep a project like this requires? If a site like this operates with multiple currencies, it's essentially an exchange and probably has to register as such (they've outsourced this). However, if it just keeps user balances (not really a bank, but similar), does it have to register with any particular authorities? edit: your site allows a blank password, the title is "Yours | undefined" on profile pages and the menu controls to the left of the message input are very unintuitive. How do they work? Also, the profile ids are from hell: /90b5a6c4bfb6530398c8c5aa27e2b60e3a4611ddb2184c366b7d3ad41f0e9f16/ Don't men to be too picky, it's just very rough around the edges.
- yafujifide 9y ago
  Thanks for your great comments. We launched the beta only three weeks ago so it is definitely rough around the edges :) Fixing issues as fast as we can. > Also, does anyone know what kind of regulatory upkeep a project like this requires? If a site like this operates with multiple currencies, it's essentially an exchange and probably has to register as such (they've outsourced this). However, if it just keeps user balances (not really a bank, but similar), does it have to register with any particular authorities? We have discussed with lawyers and are sure to stay inside the law. Because all payments are p2p and we are not a custodian, the regulatory burden for us is a lot lower than many other similar projects. > edit: your site allows a blank password, the title is "Yours | undefined" on profile pages and the menu controls to the left of the message input are very unintuitive. How do they work? Also, the profile ids are from hell: Will fix soon. These things are already on our issues list :)
  - 9y ago
softbuilder 9y ago
>Micropayments have been talked about since the 1990s. A little longer than that, perhaps. http://transcopyright.org/hcoinRemarks-D28.html http://transcopyright.org/hcoinRemarks-D28.html
- yafujifide 9y ago
  Awesome article. Thanks for sharing.
iaabtpbtpnn 9y ago
Might be interesting if 9 of the cents go to charity, otherwise no thanks.
tpeo 9y ago
Having some limit to posts is an interesting idea. But I don't see much of a return on investment for the users in this approach. Why should I pay to have people see my post? Shouldn't I have to pay people to see their posts instead? Anyway, all of luck to them. I'd like to know what might develop from this. Though they really should have asked for two cents instead of ten. I mean, come on: how could you miss this?
- savanaly 9y ago
  >Why should I pay to have people see my post? Shouldn't I have to pay people to see their posts instead? I think people like to write things that others will read. How else to explain why people post so much on e.g. Facebook that is not informational or helpful to others but merely something they want others to read? Introspectively, I recognize that I enjoy commenting on Hacker News and am not exactly doing it wholly out of the goodness of my heart for the benefit of all of you.
  - tpeo 9y ago
    From observing the behavior of some people online, I think that there are people out there who just like to write stuff, regardless of whether anyone might read or care. This can be good or bad. I've read good posts from clearly forgotten blogs. I've also read in certain communities posts so inane and out of context that it's hard to even understand why they were written in the first place. "Shitposting" in it's strictest sense is very much an example of the latter, because it's a repeated pattern of stupid behavior which doesn't even qualify as joking, and which is repeated regardless of whether people pay attention to it or not. It's like drawing swastikas on bathroom stalls.
- yafujifide 9y ago
  Thanks very much for your input. We're very focused on creating money-earning opportunities for our users. Every time you pay you should either get some thing out of it or have an opportunity to earn money. For creators, if you write something worth paying, you can easily generate more than the 10¢ it costs to post. If you charge 10¢, you only need one payment to earn your money back :)
aussieguy123 9y ago
10c is more expensive than local phone calls are in alot of countries. Not a bad idea though, could make alot of spamming unviable even with a small amount like 1c. What about if you "like" something, a portion of the fee goes to the original poster?
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  "What about if you "like" something, a portion of the fee goes to the original poster?" Maybe if the likes only got you store credit up to what you've put in but never for profit? If profit from likes was possible, we'd end up with tons of posts karma whores go for.
  - yafujifide 9y ago
    We will have multiple mechanisms for votes, likes, favorites, etc. May the best mechanism win :)
- yafujifide 9y ago
  Spam is exactly why we turned on the 10¢ to post. Cleaned up the spam pretty well :) We will allow subcommunities soon which will allow moderators to pick the cost to post. Low-income countries can use a very low value denominated in their local currency appropriate for those users.
shadowmore 9y ago
How does this compare to steemit.com?
- deweller 9y ago
  Steemit had a big ICO sale. Yours has a more traditional funding model. I find Yours simple and easy to use apart from the friction of getting ahold of some Bitcoin Cash.
  - yafujifide 9y ago
    Yes! We have not done and ICO and don't intend to until we can do it the real way - by putting our company equity on the blockchain, allowing it to be traded globally p2p. That will require a lot of work legally for that to be possible. No rush - we'll do it when the time is right :) Also, on the friction of Bitcoin Cash, note that we currently have a Shapeshift integration allowing you to cash in with any crypt, and will support credit card onboarding soon. We think most users won't even know they are using crypto :)
- sayurichick 9y ago
  simple. I give a shit about yours.org BECAUSE they didn't create their own token to build a service. Using bitcoin cash is another positive in my books, since it costs < $0.01 per transaction, versus $7~ per transaction on Bitcoin legacy.
  - sl4i6j3o4i98g 9y ago
    legacy lol -- a malleable tx cryptocurrency that cannot support Hash Time Lock Contracts safely (thus LN and proper microtx's) is the legacy...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - omarchowdhury 9y ago
    In a post above they admit they will issue a token.
rcarrigan87 9y ago
Interesting concept. There is definitely an opportunity out there for some kind of Patreon meets reddit model but the execution on these types of businesses is particularly hard to pull off.
- yafujifide 9y ago
  Thank you. Hopefully we can pull it off. We have a great asset - very low fees while not being a custodian of user funds. Allows rapid iteration of the product with fewer regulatory concerns.
microcolonel 9y ago
I encourage you all to check out Minds. In my opinion, Minds has a much more interesting compensation model: you can directly send money to creators (feature called Wire) either generally or on a specific post. There is also an internal points system where you are compensated by interactions with your content. If you have enough points, they have a real monetary value. Also, as an added bonus, the website and apps are open source, and actually function quite well. It overall has a Facebook sort of feel in terms of feature set; but with a model that seems less exploitative and more collaborative. https://minds.com/ https://minds.com/
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  That homepage looks like someone made a wordpress site for a megachurch. Gaudy as fuck. When service doesn't get design this early and instead just crams everything they can into a page, it's good sign they're lacking taste, and that's something that can't really be overcome. It's like they're so unsure about their own service that they feel they need to overcompensate by talking about all the features it has instead of just naturally showing them. And points for hourly check ins? Modals reminding me to install apps when reading posts (got one when trying to read the terms of service, too)? In fact, you apparently can't visit the groups link without getting the pop up. I just want to try your damn site. Ugh. 18 MBs of content on load? Don't do that to the web. Despite it's own limitations, Yours is lot, lot cleaner. Compare: http://www.scientology.org/ http://www.scientology.org/ (is that the same font in the header?) After some more searching around, it's like the same audience repeated across all of these sites ("alt right" and cryptocurrency obsessed). Stefan Molyneux one of the main users of minds and also one of the first users of Yours? You guys are setting yourselves up for failure if you don't diversify your audience quick. https://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux https://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux https://www.minds.com/StefanMolyneux https://www.minds.com/StefanMolyneux https://www.yours.org/profile/b32fd24245734d632b5f3ee35a2b85d622b7b1f84a46dbb360a4979996484413 https://www.yours.org/profile/b32fd24245734d632b5f3ee35a2b85... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux#Cult_accusations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux#Cult_accusatio... Here's the third most followed user, "truth": https://www.minds.com/truth https://www.minds.com/truth Complete with "Antifa victim, Kiara Robles, speaks out about political violence in Berkeley." "Hillary Clinton blames everyone from James Comey to Bernie Sanders for her blistering defeat to Donald Trump" "Why Did World Trade Center Building 7 Fall? New Study Claims Gov’t Story Is False" I hear r/conspiracy is nice this time of year, but there's not Bitcoin to be made if that gets big, yeah?
yafujifide 9y ago
Hey everyone, Ryan X. Charles here, Cofounder & CEO of Yours. Happy to answer any questions.
- ballenf 9y ago
  > Our users also spend money to upvote content. Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed amongst earlier voters. This is our most popular activity. People love to pay money to vote on things. Who would have thought? That quote caught my attention. Is this kind of gambling or being a day trader? I like the mechanic that unearthing good content gets rewarded -- was that the goal? Have you found this system subject to gaming or collusion (a few people posting and upvoting content to increase the odds of getting a payout)? Do you see less clickbait getting upvoted than, say, on fb? What's the incentive for later readers to upvote an already popular title? Pretty cool that you taken such a different approach. Wish you the best! I'm pretty much burned out on all social media, but will check it out regardless. edit: Big question what's your vig or house cut on all the money changing hands? 2nd edit: I see the answer to my last question: you keep $0.10 from from each post and credit yourself as the "first voter on every post". So you get the largest cut of the cost of the upvotes on each post?
  - yafujifide 9y ago
    > That quote caught my attention. Is this kind of gambling or being a day trader? I like the mechanic that unearthing good content gets rewarded -- was that the goal? Have you found this system subject to gaming or collusion (a few people posting and upvoting content to increase the odds of getting a payout)? Do you see less clickbait getting upvoted than, say, on fb? What's the incentive for later readers to upvote an already popular title? The vote model encourages hotness. If you want to earn money, you are encouraged to vote quickly. We will have alternate models to encourage different things soon. The next step in rating content will be something we call reviews. After purchasing content, you will be asked: "was this content worth paying for? yes/no". We believe the information we get from that will be a very good measure of quality. > Pretty cool that you taken such a different approach. Wish you the best! I'm pretty much burned out on all social media, but will check it out regardless. Thank you very much! > edit: Big question what's your vig or house cut on all the money changing hands? Currently our revenue comes from two places: The 10¢ it costs to post content and getting the first vote on all pieces of content. > 2nd edit: I see the answer to my last question: you keep $0.10 from from each post and credit yourself as the "first voter on every post". So you get the largest cut of the cost of the upvotes on each post? Yes. This is something we will change soon, probably by either giving the creator the first vote and then charging 20% of all votes or by giving the creator the second vote. It's important that Yours Inc. gets some of the money to prevent infinite self-upvotes. We had that problem originally.
heroprotagonist 9y ago
I was intrigued, until I read that the payment system is in bitcoin cash. I've really lost interest in cryptocurrency over the past couple of years. I don't want to jump through the requisite hoops to manage another digital wallet just for the sake of engaging on an obscure platform that launched its beta 3 weeks ago. I have nothing against the site, it's an interesting concept. But having to read about whatever recent bitcoin drama is going on to understand its hard forks and implications (BCC is a hard fork, right?), setup and manage a new wallet, take appropriate security precautions, etc, just to manage my site balance is a lot more burdensome than asking for ten cents to comment.
- yafujifide 9y ago
  Don't worry about it - you can already cash in with any cryptocurrency using our Shapeshift integration. And soon we will have credit card onboarding so you don't have to worry about acquiring crypto at all :) Note that our app has a built-in Bitcoin Cash wallet, but it works well enough that you don't necessarily realize you are using crypto :)
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    How does credit card onboarding work? If someone buys content (not sure how this works) and then cashes out in Bitcoin, are you not a bank? Do you mind saying what regulatory hoops you've had to go through for this?
    - yafujifide 9y ago
      Ideally we will partner with Coinbase. They already have a credit card widget for Bitcoin and Litecoin. Tell them they need to add support for Bitcoin Cash :) If not Coinbase there are a number of other providers we can use. For global adoption, we will ultimately partner with many third parties simultaneously for this service.
- mrb 9y ago
  Easiest solution: send BTC to https://shapeshift.io https://shapeshift.io which they will convert to BCC and deposit it directly to whatever address needs to receive BCC. Shapeshift's main feature is to convert between cryptos with the minimum amount of hassle. Edit: nevermind, I didn't know yours.org had shapeshift integrated.
ramzyo 9y ago
"Our users also spend money to upvote content. Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed amongst earlier voters. This is our most popular activity. People love to pay money to vote on things. Who would have thought?" Is the payout to early voters greater than 10 cents? And do voters know when they're an early voter? If so, maybe this is why it's such a popular activity!
- alexbeloi 9y ago
  Every post is a miniature pyramid scheme. Like those chain letters that say 'send a dollar to everyone on this list, then add your name to the list and pass it along to everyone you know'.
  - novalis78 9y ago
    Indeed. That's why it might work :-) gamification of content generation.. now if they can only keep the content quality high.. how about allowing people to downvote and punish low quality content? I tried something like that on booklove.rs
- yafujifide 9y ago
  If there were 0 fees on Bitcoin Cash, the payout to earlier voters could be arbitrarily high. It's a divergent series. Because of tx fees, there are limits. BCC has low fees, but not zero. You know you are an earlier voter by looking at the amount voted. That is the amount below the vote button.
  - novalis78 9y ago
    How about using IOTA?
quickthrower2 9y ago
Looks like the tips are in Bitcoin cash? Of course people are happy to spend the 10c they got for free when it forked.
- Taek 9y ago
  10c is 10c. As much as I think using bitcoin cash was a big mistake, I wouldn't say that the activity doesn't resemble real activity.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    I think psychologically it is different, and people are more likely to splash their lottery win money around especially if it's just 10c at a time rather than their hard earned money.
trott 9y ago
A problem with "social networks", and perhaps the Internet in general, in my opinion, is that they encourage groupthink. > Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed amongst earlier voters. This sort of pyramidal scheme actually gives people a monetary incentive to try to vote how others will vote, regardless of their actual opinion. Like other gambling, it may be a good business model, but it serves to exacerbate the groupthink problem.
- alttab 9y ago
  And the sock puppeting, fraud, money laundering, and plagerism? Oh geez. Where is their cut?
  - flatline 9y ago
    Exactly what happened on steem.it, people just (re)-posted stuff like they do on reddit and made money from it with no attribution to the original author. I know they tried to crack down on this sort of thing but moderation is really labor intensive and difficult for other reasons too.
    - sneak 9y ago
      1) it's steemit.com 2) no we didn't; steemit is entirely unmoderated.
      - flatline 9y ago
        Thank you for the correction; I have never used the platform and misremebered several details from this post: https://steemit.com/steemitabuse/@masteryoda/why-i-removed-all-my-posts https://steemit.com/steemitabuse/@masteryoda/why-i-removed-a...
- yafujifide 9y ago
  This is our first voting model. We have other models planned for favorites, liking, etc. May the best model win. We are always focused on high quality content and will make sure that's the case :)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kalmakazi 9y ago
Reminds me of https://www.feespeech.com https://www.feespeech.com, but with more competition for eyes
castratikron 9y ago
People interested in this idea might also be interested in Hashcash. Someone who wants to send and email to someone else also has to provide a "proof of work" with their message, essentially the same thing as Bitcoin mining. The point of it is to reduce email spam by attaching a small cost to each email, since, today, there is no cost difference between sending 1 email and 1 million, which enables spammers to send out so many. The main benefit is that no real currency is ever involved, which reduces a lot of administrative overhead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
- sl4i6j3o4i98g 9y ago
  So Hashcash was proposed by Adam Back, who is now the CTO of blockstream, a major bitcoin development firm. His vision, and the vision you describe is actually bitcoin. A 2017 Hashcash was actually implemented recently and published at http://hashcash.com/ http://hashcash.com/ Bad news is that it requires something to store the value, so this requires bitcoin as the token transferred via hashcash. What you have described in your post doesn't actually work that way in the real world -- You cant set a global proof of work value (bitcoin difficulty adjustment) or able to build a proof of work that would allow a phone or desktop to hash -- it will be eaten alive by spam farms with ASICs (bitcoin mining asic farms).
sl4i6j3o4i98g 9y ago
Bitcoin cash! Ewwwwwwwww, i wont touch that with a 10 foot poll. As a holder of bitcoin, I will never spend the UTXO's on this chain, thus denying this false bitcoin of spendable outputs. Wouldn't something like lightning network microtx's be better than Bcash?
- omarchowdhury 9y ago
  You do know that Bitcoin cash is more like the original Bitcoin than the "Bitcoin" of today?
  - sl4i6j3o4i98g 9y ago
    Yeah, we must run MS-DOS forever. All software upgrades and protocol changes are wrong. We don't want no GUI or protected mode runtime, we will hatefork MS-DOS and run it forever. /s
alexanderdmitri 9y ago
As an American kid born along with the digital epoch of the 90s, I'm a bit of an oddity because the only social media I've ever used (& still use) is LinkedIn, which feels like sharing a room with a vipor. I have it set up with a dedicated email address and I only interact w/it in a sandboxed browser on VPN with a dedicated email address. (I guess you could add HN, StackExchange and GitHub to the list since there are pretty social aspects to all three, but I don't know if they count.) Because I am this weirdo, I can't help being astounded at the level of comfortability people have in ecosystems like the ones Facebook and Google have cultivated. These are really creepy and dystopian models at their core. And they are not helping your damn social life! Believe me, people don't mind being in touch and coordinating through more direct means, in fact most people respond more genuinely to it. So this is awesome right? Here's something proposing a fresh new model. Except nothing in this article/pitch addresses my concerns/issues with current social media. Like, as a paying member, are they aggregating "marketing" data on me? Are they going to try to follow me around the web and ID me with tracking scripts and under the table data trades with other players? Will they organize my data and sell it on as an "anonymized" individual profile ("Emperor {username}, we bring you new clothes. This is a magical anonymization cloak, making you invisible to any unsavory entities we sell your data to"). In fact, now I have even more questions/concerns! For example: 1) can toxic or just plain wrong information simply be brute-forced to the top with money (or digital tulips or whatever)? 2) how is this not just buying popularity and influence in a contrived environment? 3) do they cap the value of a post / vote or is this susceptible to weird bubbles? 4) if you do break the rules, do you pay to get out of trouble? This whole thing sounds like someone's been spending a long time getting investors on board and now can't seem to remember what the pitch to the consumers originally was.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  >Believe me, people don't mind being in touch and coordinating through more direct means, in fact most people respond more genuinely to it. You're not alone. This is a key driver to the popularity of messaging apps, in particular group chats.
- joehewitt 9y ago
  I used to feel that social networks were a waste of time (even when I worked for Facebook) but in the last couple years that has changed. My social life has been dramatically improved by Facebook because I started using it to socialize with people who share my hobby (growing fruit). Through Facebook groups I've made a number of new friends I never would have met otherwise. We communicate and share details of our hobby on a daily basis. It's great fun. I hardly use the site to socialize with my family and old friends - it's basically a glorified message board.
abpavel 9y ago
If you click "New" at the parent site, you'll see that essentially it' micro-Patreon/Kickstarter full of beggars and spam that baits you to click "read more" to earn that 10c.
EddieSpeaks 9y ago
Seems like a less accessible alternative to Steemit.com
sonink 9y ago
Very interesting. I immediately liked the product when I read this, but giving it a few minutes of thought and it doesnt seem too exciting anymore. The fundamental problem I see is that it kind-of 'corrupts' gratification. When I make a post, or do a vote, or write a comment, I dont want to think about the monetary value of it. There is 'value' inherent in creating/sharing interesting content and thats all I want to think about. Adding money to the mix makes it a distraction from a 'pure' experience and takes away value than adding it. Ads do something similar - but imo ads are less distracting than putting a monetary value on an upvote. Still this is very interesting experiment. Would love to follow updates on hn.
- tomw1808 9y ago
  The purist. I am just adding high quality content because I think I'm better off directly charging for my content rather than going the ads-route. I hate ads. I (and probably everybody else on this platform) sees as the greates-valued addon in his browser the ad-blocker. I will run a few tests, see if people are willing to pay for high quality content. I don't see this as my facebook-replacement. Facebook is fun, to watch cute little videos while enjoying my "extra privacy" during the day. Facebook isn't for high quality content. Facebook isn't good anymore for staying in touch with friends (for me) - Facebook messenger yes, but the Facebook wall - no. I also don't think that "yours" will be the next Facebook. I see it as direct payments channel for independent high-quality content creators. Something like steem, just more straight forward for me. I like the concept and I'll see if it works for me.
Radle 9y ago
This is where I will start writing my novels.
aethertron 9y ago
ctrl f 'ted nelson' 'xanadu' no results. I guess they independently came up with similar notions. Good luck with their initiative. Because I really hope there can be viable alternatives to advertising revenue for online content.
coldtea 9y ago
>Most people told us it would never work, but we did it anyway: We started charging 10¢ to post content on our social network. Our users didn’t leave. In fact, they are posting more than ever, and the quality of content has improved. Our experiment seems to be working. People are willing to pay to post content. That is not the only thing we’ve done differently. Our users can submit content with a pay wall, at a location and price of their choosing, and charge to access the full version of their content. Most users charge 10¢. Quality content sells. Sometimes for $1.00 or more. Many people told us this would never work, but it seems they were wrong. Our users are willing to pay for good content. I think those users meant "it will never work at scale". Seeing that yours is a totally obscure social network -- it might be OK for a small niche. Heck, The Well charges for belonging to a discussion group.
- wpietri 9y ago
  That was definitely my reaction. "People said it would never work! But it's worked for three whole weeks among cryptocurrency users, a group already selected for a) early adopter status, b) credulity, and c) a currency-focused worldview!" I look forward to seeing how it goes, and I'm always glad that people are getting out and doing the experiments that they find compelling. But it's very dangerous to confuse novelty with utility. As examples, consider the 90s wave of VR. Or the many waves of 3D photos/movies/TV. Early try-it-out interest among technophiles is proof of novelty, not long-term utility. And especially these days, social networks are, like the human relationships they channel, long-term propositions.
codecamper 9y ago
Make sure your site allows fivefilters to send your blog posts to my kindle. Otherwise, they will not be read. I publish to kindle everything to read & then go for a walk reading along the way. The Lidl checkout line makes for very good reading time.
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
oh i love SomethingAwful
627467 9y ago
Yesterday I found and posted about leeroy.io https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15247336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15247336 It's a Twitter clone that stores usernames, follows and posts in EthereumVM. Transactions are optimised for costs, right now it's around 0.01USD to follow/post
folksinger 9y ago
I've been telling anyone who will listen that we need a public social media platform funded by just such a mechanism, akin to similar institutions like copyright registration and the postal service. Innovation could occur on top of what is a very simple data model and doesn't need the free market to stay relevant. Our public institutions are what we make of them. If we despise and distrust them they will wither and die. If we encourage and support them they will flourish and we will all prosper together. No man is an island!
countryqt30 9y ago
So they think they have "proven" the market and the HOTTEST POST OF ALL TIME IS THIS ONE? (worth just 5$, which he probably sent to himself?) congratulations!
sleepychu 9y ago
The authors claim that their users post high quality content but a brief browse found subjectively awful content. I didn't see a single interesting article.
lolsal 9y ago
I worry about not being able to get refunds for poor content. I clicked around a bit on the domain and there were a couple articles that had click-baity titles - an interesting premise, but I was turned off from the nature of the presentation: - How Bitcoin will see massive adoption – it might surprise you. - Still Don't Get Bitcoin? Here's an Explanation Even a Five-Year-Old Will Understand I know reading would only cost $0.10 (or even less) which is not a life affecting amount, but I don't like the idea of that 'test' being seen as some sort of endorsement that I can't revoke.
jff 9y ago
I'm curious, what are the tax implications of this? You're spending money, you're receiving money--does it tell you at the end of the year how much you've taken in vs how much you spent, so you can report it as taxable income? I acknowledge that the average person would probably end up with a negative balance at year-end, but someone who wrote popular posts could end up making hundreds of dollars due to upvotes and comments, right?
stcredzero 9y ago
I think this is awesome, but I'd like a way to just subscribe and not worry about the money.
twobyfour 9y ago
So magnifying the voices of those who have cash to spare, and diminishing the voices of those who are not so fortunate?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Fjolsvith 9y ago
I read FAQ for Yours.org. The voting looks like a pyramid scheme: >You can earn money by voting on good content. Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed evenly between all earlier voters. Yours Inc. always makes the first vote. You can vote on something as many times as you'd like. You will earn money if you vote on something popular early, because you will get money from all votes after you.[1] 1. https://www.yours.org/about/ https://www.yours.org/about/
ddmma 9y ago
So this might be a feature that facebook will be happy to integrate, social media got their dinosaurs and whales on place, moving on ello

281 points by apo 9y ago

novalis78 9y ago

We should all move over and comment on yours.org :-) - did you guys plan on nested comments?

PaulHoule 9y ago

That price is too low.

crude_euler 9y ago
Maybe for posting, but 10c to consume or upvote content might be too high. Think about how many pieces of content you consume on a Facebook feed or on your reddit homepage. And 1k upvotes would translate to $100...sounds rich to me. Wonder how they intend on preventing spamming posts / content farming / gaming the system in that kind of environment.
- fish_fan 9y ago
  It might stop eg "share to pray" posts and viral fake news.
  - qbrass 9y ago
    "Reply with your prayers to help little Billy afford chemo"
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  TED charges $4000 to listen live and meet people. After they have their conferences where all the rich people support them, they give the content away to the masses for free. The point to take away from this is that some people are willing to pay a huge amount of money for "networking".
aaron-lebo 9y ago
Or it's too high because why should anyone pay $0.10 to post on a nerdy and tiny social network when Twitter is free and you can reach hundreds of millions? Difficult balancing act.
- tpeo 9y ago
  Depending on the nerdy and tiny social network, I would pay way more than ten cents.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    app.net was about as nerdy and "expensive" as you could realistically get and it's dead.
yafujifide 9y ago
We think that might be true. We're very market-minded and intend to give our users the power to set prices wherever possible. We'll let the natural price arise.
- novalis78 9y ago
  Here is an idea for you Ryan: perhaps you could tie the money setting to an article's reach... that way you make everyone an owner of the page and strive for highest quality together. That's a more dynamic setup that rewards high quality - in the article as well as the comment section.
jaclaz 9y ago
>That price is too low. An alternative was proposed, if you want to spend more ;) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14761633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14761633 Courtesy of the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20170713150307/https://medium.com/@affluentconfidante/how-i-created-a-980-per-post-social-network-in-just-2-days-for-10-17c8e84f4601 https://web.archive.org/web/20170713150307/https://medium.co... https://web.archive.org/web/20170903044028/https://affluentconfidante.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170903044028/https://affluentc...

jpindar 9y ago

>People love to pay money to vote on things. Who would have thought? Anyone who's active in virtual worlds knows people love to buy content and tip creators and performers. >Why didn’t micropayments ever take off? No one ever tried. Except virtual worlds, which have whole economies based on micropayments.

yafujifide 9y ago
This is a great point. But many of these services do not let you withdraw easily or at all. On Yours, you can cash out instantly. Even if the company goes away, you can export your keys and cash out even then :)
olegkikin 9y ago
My mind was recently blown by how much people tip on gamer streams. I was watching Shroud play PUBG, he suddenly gets tipped $550, doesn't even acknowledge it. Apparently $10-20K tips happen quite often: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/231p6e/summit_the_highest_paid_cs_player/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/231p6e/sum... So yeah, if you're entertaining enough, people will throw money at you.
- camus2 9y ago
  > So yeah, if you're entertaining enough, people will throw money at you. Which was a well known fact since the beginning of strip clubs... Twitch and co are no different from sexcams.
  - tyrust 9y ago
    >Twitch and co are no different from sexcams Once you get past the fact that they are both livestreams the similarity ends. Twitch explicitly forbids sexual content [0]. There are some streamers that dress suggestively, but they're in the minority. Your statement is not much different from calling YouTube no different from PornHub. [0] - https://www.twitch.tv/p/legal/community-guidelines/ https://www.twitch.tv/p/legal/community-guidelines/

aaron-lebo 9y ago

We started charging 10¢ to post content on our social network. Our users didn’t leave. In fact, they are posting more than ever, and the quality of content has improved. Our experiment seems to be working. People are willing to pay to post content. Neat concept (and good domain), but your top post has $2.28. The entire site has 20 new posts ($2?) over the last 24 hours. You don't gotta exaggerate to sell, it just makes me less inclined to trust you and your service. Seems to be competing roughly with Steem. These services have a problem where the initial adopters are Bitcoin users or fanatical unpopular views (voat), which biases and ruins the community early. Interested to see if this avoids it. Also, does anyone know what kind of regulatory upkeep a project like this requires? If a site like this operates with multiple currencies, it's essentially an exchange and probably has to register as such (they've outsourced this). However, if it just keeps user balances (not really a bank, but similar), does it have to register with any particular authorities? edit: your site allows a blank password, the title is "Yours | undefined" on profile pages and the menu controls to the left of the message input are very unintuitive. How do they work? Also, the profile ids are from hell: /90b5a6c4bfb6530398c8c5aa27e2b60e3a4611ddb2184c366b7d3ad41f0e9f16/ Don't men to be too picky, it's just very rough around the edges.

yafujifide 9y ago
Thanks for your great comments. We launched the beta only three weeks ago so it is definitely rough around the edges :) Fixing issues as fast as we can. > Also, does anyone know what kind of regulatory upkeep a project like this requires? If a site like this operates with multiple currencies, it's essentially an exchange and probably has to register as such (they've outsourced this). However, if it just keeps user balances (not really a bank, but similar), does it have to register with any particular authorities? We have discussed with lawyers and are sure to stay inside the law. Because all payments are p2p and we are not a custodian, the regulatory burden for us is a lot lower than many other similar projects. > edit: your site allows a blank password, the title is "Yours | undefined" on profile pages and the menu controls to the left of the message input are very unintuitive. How do they work? Also, the profile ids are from hell: Will fix soon. These things are already on our issues list :)
- 9y ago

softbuilder 9y ago

>Micropayments have been talked about since the 1990s. A little longer than that, perhaps. http://transcopyright.org/hcoinRemarks-D28.html http://transcopyright.org/hcoinRemarks-D28.html

yafujifide 9y ago
Awesome article. Thanks for sharing.

iaabtpbtpnn 9y ago

Might be interesting if 9 of the cents go to charity, otherwise no thanks.

tpeo 9y ago

Having some limit to posts is an interesting idea. But I don't see much of a return on investment for the users in this approach. Why should I pay to have people see my post? Shouldn't I have to pay people to see their posts instead? Anyway, all of luck to them. I'd like to know what might develop from this. Though they really should have asked for two cents instead of ten. I mean, come on: how could you miss this?

savanaly 9y ago
>Why should I pay to have people see my post? Shouldn't I have to pay people to see their posts instead? I think people like to write things that others will read. How else to explain why people post so much on e.g. Facebook that is not informational or helpful to others but merely something they want others to read? Introspectively, I recognize that I enjoy commenting on Hacker News and am not exactly doing it wholly out of the goodness of my heart for the benefit of all of you.
- tpeo 9y ago
  From observing the behavior of some people online, I think that there are people out there who just like to write stuff, regardless of whether anyone might read or care. This can be good or bad. I've read good posts from clearly forgotten blogs. I've also read in certain communities posts so inane and out of context that it's hard to even understand why they were written in the first place. "Shitposting" in it's strictest sense is very much an example of the latter, because it's a repeated pattern of stupid behavior which doesn't even qualify as joking, and which is repeated regardless of whether people pay attention to it or not. It's like drawing swastikas on bathroom stalls.
yafujifide 9y ago
Thanks very much for your input. We're very focused on creating money-earning opportunities for our users. Every time you pay you should either get some thing out of it or have an opportunity to earn money. For creators, if you write something worth paying, you can easily generate more than the 10¢ it costs to post. If you charge 10¢, you only need one payment to earn your money back :)

aussieguy123 9y ago

10c is more expensive than local phone calls are in alot of countries. Not a bad idea though, could make alot of spamming unviable even with a small amount like 1c. What about if you "like" something, a portion of the fee goes to the original poster?

jasonkostempski 9y ago
"What about if you "like" something, a portion of the fee goes to the original poster?" Maybe if the likes only got you store credit up to what you've put in but never for profit? If profit from likes was possible, we'd end up with tons of posts karma whores go for.
- yafujifide 9y ago
  We will have multiple mechanisms for votes, likes, favorites, etc. May the best mechanism win :)
yafujifide 9y ago
Spam is exactly why we turned on the 10¢ to post. Cleaned up the spam pretty well :) We will allow subcommunities soon which will allow moderators to pick the cost to post. Low-income countries can use a very low value denominated in their local currency appropriate for those users.

shadowmore 9y ago

How does this compare to steemit.com?

deweller 9y ago
Steemit had a big ICO sale. Yours has a more traditional funding model. I find Yours simple and easy to use apart from the friction of getting ahold of some Bitcoin Cash.
- yafujifide 9y ago
  Yes! We have not done and ICO and don't intend to until we can do it the real way - by putting our company equity on the blockchain, allowing it to be traded globally p2p. That will require a lot of work legally for that to be possible. No rush - we'll do it when the time is right :) Also, on the friction of Bitcoin Cash, note that we currently have a Shapeshift integration allowing you to cash in with any crypt, and will support credit card onboarding soon. We think most users won't even know they are using crypto :)
sayurichick 9y ago
simple. I give a shit about yours.org BECAUSE they didn't create their own token to build a service. Using bitcoin cash is another positive in my books, since it costs < $0.01 per transaction, versus $7~ per transaction on Bitcoin legacy.
- sl4i6j3o4i98g 9y ago
  legacy lol -- a malleable tx cryptocurrency that cannot support Hash Time Lock Contracts safely (thus LN and proper microtx's) is the legacy...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- omarchowdhury 9y ago
  In a post above they admit they will issue a token.

rcarrigan87 9y ago

Interesting concept. There is definitely an opportunity out there for some kind of Patreon meets reddit model but the execution on these types of businesses is particularly hard to pull off.

yafujifide 9y ago
Thank you. Hopefully we can pull it off. We have a great asset - very low fees while not being a custodian of user funds. Allows rapid iteration of the product with fewer regulatory concerns.

microcolonel 9y ago

I encourage you all to check out Minds. In my opinion, Minds has a much more interesting compensation model: you can directly send money to creators (feature called Wire) either generally or on a specific post. There is also an internal points system where you are compensated by interactions with your content. If you have enough points, they have a real monetary value. Also, as an added bonus, the website and apps are open source, and actually function quite well. It overall has a Facebook sort of feel in terms of feature set; but with a model that seems less exploitative and more collaborative. https://minds.com/ https://minds.com/

aaron-lebo 9y ago
That homepage looks like someone made a wordpress site for a megachurch. Gaudy as fuck. When service doesn't get design this early and instead just crams everything they can into a page, it's good sign they're lacking taste, and that's something that can't really be overcome. It's like they're so unsure about their own service that they feel they need to overcompensate by talking about all the features it has instead of just naturally showing them. And points for hourly check ins? Modals reminding me to install apps when reading posts (got one when trying to read the terms of service, too)? In fact, you apparently can't visit the groups link without getting the pop up. I just want to try your damn site. Ugh. 18 MBs of content on load? Don't do that to the web. Despite it's own limitations, Yours is lot, lot cleaner. Compare: http://www.scientology.org/ http://www.scientology.org/ (is that the same font in the header?) After some more searching around, it's like the same audience repeated across all of these sites ("alt right" and cryptocurrency obsessed). Stefan Molyneux one of the main users of minds and also one of the first users of Yours? You guys are setting yourselves up for failure if you don't diversify your audience quick. https://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux https://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux https://www.minds.com/StefanMolyneux https://www.minds.com/StefanMolyneux https://www.yours.org/profile/b32fd24245734d632b5f3ee35a2b85d622b7b1f84a46dbb360a4979996484413 https://www.yours.org/profile/b32fd24245734d632b5f3ee35a2b85... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux#Cult_accusations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux#Cult_accusatio... Here's the third most followed user, "truth": https://www.minds.com/truth https://www.minds.com/truth Complete with "Antifa victim, Kiara Robles, speaks out about political violence in Berkeley." "Hillary Clinton blames everyone from James Comey to Bernie Sanders for her blistering defeat to Donald Trump" "Why Did World Trade Center Building 7 Fall? New Study Claims Gov’t Story Is False" I hear r/conspiracy is nice this time of year, but there's not Bitcoin to be made if that gets big, yeah?

yafujifide 9y ago

Hey everyone, Ryan X. Charles here, Cofounder & CEO of Yours. Happy to answer any questions.

ballenf 9y ago
> Our users also spend money to upvote content. Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed amongst earlier voters. This is our most popular activity. People love to pay money to vote on things. Who would have thought? That quote caught my attention. Is this kind of gambling or being a day trader? I like the mechanic that unearthing good content gets rewarded -- was that the goal? Have you found this system subject to gaming or collusion (a few people posting and upvoting content to increase the odds of getting a payout)? Do you see less clickbait getting upvoted than, say, on fb? What's the incentive for later readers to upvote an already popular title? Pretty cool that you taken such a different approach. Wish you the best! I'm pretty much burned out on all social media, but will check it out regardless. edit: Big question what's your vig or house cut on all the money changing hands? 2nd edit: I see the answer to my last question: you keep $0.10 from from each post and credit yourself as the "first voter on every post". So you get the largest cut of the cost of the upvotes on each post?
- yafujifide 9y ago
  > That quote caught my attention. Is this kind of gambling or being a day trader? I like the mechanic that unearthing good content gets rewarded -- was that the goal? Have you found this system subject to gaming or collusion (a few people posting and upvoting content to increase the odds of getting a payout)? Do you see less clickbait getting upvoted than, say, on fb? What's the incentive for later readers to upvote an already popular title? The vote model encourages hotness. If you want to earn money, you are encouraged to vote quickly. We will have alternate models to encourage different things soon. The next step in rating content will be something we call reviews. After purchasing content, you will be asked: "was this content worth paying for? yes/no". We believe the information we get from that will be a very good measure of quality. > Pretty cool that you taken such a different approach. Wish you the best! I'm pretty much burned out on all social media, but will check it out regardless. Thank you very much! > edit: Big question what's your vig or house cut on all the money changing hands? Currently our revenue comes from two places: The 10¢ it costs to post content and getting the first vote on all pieces of content. > 2nd edit: I see the answer to my last question: you keep $0.10 from from each post and credit yourself as the "first voter on every post". So you get the largest cut of the cost of the upvotes on each post? Yes. This is something we will change soon, probably by either giving the creator the first vote and then charging 20% of all votes or by giving the creator the second vote. It's important that Yours Inc. gets some of the money to prevent infinite self-upvotes. We had that problem originally.

heroprotagonist 9y ago

I was intrigued, until I read that the payment system is in bitcoin cash. I've really lost interest in cryptocurrency over the past couple of years. I don't want to jump through the requisite hoops to manage another digital wallet just for the sake of engaging on an obscure platform that launched its beta 3 weeks ago. I have nothing against the site, it's an interesting concept. But having to read about whatever recent bitcoin drama is going on to understand its hard forks and implications (BCC is a hard fork, right?), setup and manage a new wallet, take appropriate security precautions, etc, just to manage my site balance is a lot more burdensome than asking for ten cents to comment.

yafujifide 9y ago
Don't worry about it - you can already cash in with any cryptocurrency using our Shapeshift integration. And soon we will have credit card onboarding so you don't have to worry about acquiring crypto at all :) Note that our app has a built-in Bitcoin Cash wallet, but it works well enough that you don't necessarily realize you are using crypto :)
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  How does credit card onboarding work? If someone buys content (not sure how this works) and then cashes out in Bitcoin, are you not a bank? Do you mind saying what regulatory hoops you've had to go through for this?
  - yafujifide 9y ago
    Ideally we will partner with Coinbase. They already have a credit card widget for Bitcoin and Litecoin. Tell them they need to add support for Bitcoin Cash :) If not Coinbase there are a number of other providers we can use. For global adoption, we will ultimately partner with many third parties simultaneously for this service.
mrb 9y ago
Easiest solution: send BTC to https://shapeshift.io https://shapeshift.io which they will convert to BCC and deposit it directly to whatever address needs to receive BCC. Shapeshift's main feature is to convert between cryptos with the minimum amount of hassle. Edit: nevermind, I didn't know yours.org had shapeshift integrated.

ramzyo 9y ago

"Our users also spend money to upvote content. Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed amongst earlier voters. This is our most popular activity. People love to pay money to vote on things. Who would have thought?" Is the payout to early voters greater than 10 cents? And do voters know when they're an early voter? If so, maybe this is why it's such a popular activity!

alexbeloi 9y ago
Every post is a miniature pyramid scheme. Like those chain letters that say 'send a dollar to everyone on this list, then add your name to the list and pass it along to everyone you know'.
- novalis78 9y ago
  Indeed. That's why it might work :-) gamification of content generation.. now if they can only keep the content quality high.. how about allowing people to downvote and punish low quality content? I tried something like that on booklove.rs
yafujifide 9y ago
If there were 0 fees on Bitcoin Cash, the payout to earlier voters could be arbitrarily high. It's a divergent series. Because of tx fees, there are limits. BCC has low fees, but not zero. You know you are an earlier voter by looking at the amount voted. That is the amount below the vote button.
- novalis78 9y ago
  How about using IOTA?

quickthrower2 9y ago

Looks like the tips are in Bitcoin cash? Of course people are happy to spend the 10c they got for free when it forked.

Taek 9y ago
10c is 10c. As much as I think using bitcoin cash was a big mistake, I wouldn't say that the activity doesn't resemble real activity.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  I think psychologically it is different, and people are more likely to splash their lottery win money around especially if it's just 10c at a time rather than their hard earned money.

trott 9y ago

A problem with "social networks", and perhaps the Internet in general, in my opinion, is that they encourage groupthink. > Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed amongst earlier voters. This sort of pyramidal scheme actually gives people a monetary incentive to try to vote how others will vote, regardless of their actual opinion. Like other gambling, it may be a good business model, but it serves to exacerbate the groupthink problem.

alttab 9y ago
And the sock puppeting, fraud, money laundering, and plagerism? Oh geez. Where is their cut?
- flatline 9y ago
  Exactly what happened on steem.it, people just (re)-posted stuff like they do on reddit and made money from it with no attribution to the original author. I know they tried to crack down on this sort of thing but moderation is really labor intensive and difficult for other reasons too.
  - sneak 9y ago
    1) it's steemit.com 2) no we didn't; steemit is entirely unmoderated.
    - flatline 9y ago
      Thank you for the correction; I have never used the platform and misremebered several details from this post: https://steemit.com/steemitabuse/@masteryoda/why-i-removed-all-my-posts https://steemit.com/steemitabuse/@masteryoda/why-i-removed-a...
yafujifide 9y ago
This is our first voting model. We have other models planned for favorites, liking, etc. May the best model win. We are always focused on high quality content and will make sure that's the case :)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kalmakazi 9y ago

Reminds me of https://www.feespeech.com https://www.feespeech.com, but with more competition for eyes

castratikron 9y ago

People interested in this idea might also be interested in Hashcash. Someone who wants to send and email to someone else also has to provide a "proof of work" with their message, essentially the same thing as Bitcoin mining. The point of it is to reduce email spam by attaching a small cost to each email, since, today, there is no cost difference between sending 1 email and 1 million, which enables spammers to send out so many. The main benefit is that no real currency is ever involved, which reduces a lot of administrative overhead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

sl4i6j3o4i98g 9y ago
So Hashcash was proposed by Adam Back, who is now the CTO of blockstream, a major bitcoin development firm. His vision, and the vision you describe is actually bitcoin. A 2017 Hashcash was actually implemented recently and published at http://hashcash.com/ http://hashcash.com/ Bad news is that it requires something to store the value, so this requires bitcoin as the token transferred via hashcash. What you have described in your post doesn't actually work that way in the real world -- You cant set a global proof of work value (bitcoin difficulty adjustment) or able to build a proof of work that would allow a phone or desktop to hash -- it will be eaten alive by spam farms with ASICs (bitcoin mining asic farms).

sl4i6j3o4i98g 9y ago

Bitcoin cash! Ewwwwwwwww, i wont touch that with a 10 foot poll. As a holder of bitcoin, I will never spend the UTXO's on this chain, thus denying this false bitcoin of spendable outputs. Wouldn't something like lightning network microtx's be better than Bcash?

omarchowdhury 9y ago
You do know that Bitcoin cash is more like the original Bitcoin than the "Bitcoin" of today?
- sl4i6j3o4i98g 9y ago
  Yeah, we must run MS-DOS forever. All software upgrades and protocol changes are wrong. We don't want no GUI or protected mode runtime, we will hatefork MS-DOS and run it forever. /s

alexanderdmitri 9y ago

As an American kid born along with the digital epoch of the 90s, I'm a bit of an oddity because the only social media I've ever used (& still use) is LinkedIn, which feels like sharing a room with a vipor. I have it set up with a dedicated email address and I only interact w/it in a sandboxed browser on VPN with a dedicated email address. (I guess you could add HN, StackExchange and GitHub to the list since there are pretty social aspects to all three, but I don't know if they count.) Because I am this weirdo, I can't help being astounded at the level of comfortability people have in ecosystems like the ones Facebook and Google have cultivated. These are really creepy and dystopian models at their core. And they are not helping your damn social life! Believe me, people don't mind being in touch and coordinating through more direct means, in fact most people respond more genuinely to it. So this is awesome right? Here's something proposing a fresh new model. Except nothing in this article/pitch addresses my concerns/issues with current social media. Like, as a paying member, are they aggregating "marketing" data on me? Are they going to try to follow me around the web and ID me with tracking scripts and under the table data trades with other players? Will they organize my data and sell it on as an "anonymized" individual profile ("Emperor {username}, we bring you new clothes. This is a magical anonymization cloak, making you invisible to any unsavory entities we sell your data to"). In fact, now I have even more questions/concerns! For example: 1) can toxic or just plain wrong information simply be brute-forced to the top with money (or digital tulips or whatever)? 2) how is this not just buying popularity and influence in a contrived environment? 3) do they cap the value of a post / vote or is this susceptible to weird bubbles? 4) if you do break the rules, do you pay to get out of trouble? This whole thing sounds like someone's been spending a long time getting investors on board and now can't seem to remember what the pitch to the consumers originally was.

hkmurakami 9y ago
>Believe me, people don't mind being in touch and coordinating through more direct means, in fact most people respond more genuinely to it. You're not alone. This is a key driver to the popularity of messaging apps, in particular group chats.
joehewitt 9y ago
I used to feel that social networks were a waste of time (even when I worked for Facebook) but in the last couple years that has changed. My social life has been dramatically improved by Facebook because I started using it to socialize with people who share my hobby (growing fruit). Through Facebook groups I've made a number of new friends I never would have met otherwise. We communicate and share details of our hobby on a daily basis. It's great fun. I hardly use the site to socialize with my family and old friends - it's basically a glorified message board.

abpavel 9y ago

If you click "New" at the parent site, you'll see that essentially it' micro-Patreon/Kickstarter full of beggars and spam that baits you to click "read more" to earn that 10c.

EddieSpeaks 9y ago

Seems like a less accessible alternative to Steemit.com

sonink 9y ago

Very interesting. I immediately liked the product when I read this, but giving it a few minutes of thought and it doesnt seem too exciting anymore. The fundamental problem I see is that it kind-of 'corrupts' gratification. When I make a post, or do a vote, or write a comment, I dont want to think about the monetary value of it. There is 'value' inherent in creating/sharing interesting content and thats all I want to think about. Adding money to the mix makes it a distraction from a 'pure' experience and takes away value than adding it. Ads do something similar - but imo ads are less distracting than putting a monetary value on an upvote. Still this is very interesting experiment. Would love to follow updates on hn.

tomw1808 9y ago
The purist. I am just adding high quality content because I think I'm better off directly charging for my content rather than going the ads-route. I hate ads. I (and probably everybody else on this platform) sees as the greates-valued addon in his browser the ad-blocker. I will run a few tests, see if people are willing to pay for high quality content. I don't see this as my facebook-replacement. Facebook is fun, to watch cute little videos while enjoying my "extra privacy" during the day. Facebook isn't for high quality content. Facebook isn't good anymore for staying in touch with friends (for me) - Facebook messenger yes, but the Facebook wall - no. I also don't think that "yours" will be the next Facebook. I see it as direct payments channel for independent high-quality content creators. Something like steem, just more straight forward for me. I like the concept and I'll see if it works for me.

Radle 9y ago

This is where I will start writing my novels.

aethertron 9y ago

ctrl f 'ted nelson' 'xanadu' no results. I guess they independently came up with similar notions. Good luck with their initiative. Because I really hope there can be viable alternatives to advertising revenue for online content.

coldtea 9y ago

>Most people told us it would never work, but we did it anyway: We started charging 10¢ to post content on our social network. Our users didn’t leave. In fact, they are posting more than ever, and the quality of content has improved. Our experiment seems to be working. People are willing to pay to post content. That is not the only thing we’ve done differently. Our users can submit content with a pay wall, at a location and price of their choosing, and charge to access the full version of their content. Most users charge 10¢. Quality content sells. Sometimes for $1.00 or more. Many people told us this would never work, but it seems they were wrong. Our users are willing to pay for good content. I think those users meant "it will never work at scale". Seeing that yours is a totally obscure social network -- it might be OK for a small niche. Heck, The Well charges for belonging to a discussion group.

wpietri 9y ago
That was definitely my reaction. "People said it would never work! But it's worked for three whole weeks among cryptocurrency users, a group already selected for a) early adopter status, b) credulity, and c) a currency-focused worldview!" I look forward to seeing how it goes, and I'm always glad that people are getting out and doing the experiments that they find compelling. But it's very dangerous to confuse novelty with utility. As examples, consider the 90s wave of VR. Or the many waves of 3D photos/movies/TV. Early try-it-out interest among technophiles is proof of novelty, not long-term utility. And especially these days, social networks are, like the human relationships they channel, long-term propositions.

codecamper 9y ago

Make sure your site allows fivefilters to send your blog posts to my kindle. Otherwise, they will not be read. I publish to kindle everything to read & then go for a walk reading along the way. The Lidl checkout line makes for very good reading time.

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago

oh i love SomethingAwful

627467 9y ago

Yesterday I found and posted about leeroy.io https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15247336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15247336 It's a Twitter clone that stores usernames, follows and posts in EthereumVM. Transactions are optimised for costs, right now it's around 0.01USD to follow/post

folksinger 9y ago

I've been telling anyone who will listen that we need a public social media platform funded by just such a mechanism, akin to similar institutions like copyright registration and the postal service. Innovation could occur on top of what is a very simple data model and doesn't need the free market to stay relevant. Our public institutions are what we make of them. If we despise and distrust them they will wither and die. If we encourage and support them they will flourish and we will all prosper together. No man is an island!

countryqt30 9y ago

So they think they have "proven" the market and the HOTTEST POST OF ALL TIME IS THIS ONE? (worth just 5$, which he probably sent to himself?) congratulations!

sleepychu 9y ago

The authors claim that their users post high quality content but a brief browse found subjectively awful content. I didn't see a single interesting article.

lolsal 9y ago

I worry about not being able to get refunds for poor content. I clicked around a bit on the domain and there were a couple articles that had click-baity titles - an interesting premise, but I was turned off from the nature of the presentation: - How Bitcoin will see massive adoption – it might surprise you. - Still Don't Get Bitcoin? Here's an Explanation Even a Five-Year-Old Will Understand I know reading would only cost $0.10 (or even less) which is not a life affecting amount, but I don't like the idea of that 'test' being seen as some sort of endorsement that I can't revoke.

jff 9y ago

I'm curious, what are the tax implications of this? You're spending money, you're receiving money--does it tell you at the end of the year how much you've taken in vs how much you spent, so you can report it as taxable income? I acknowledge that the average person would probably end up with a negative balance at year-end, but someone who wrote popular posts could end up making hundreds of dollars due to upvotes and comments, right?

stcredzero 9y ago

I think this is awesome, but I'd like a way to just subscribe and not worry about the money.

twobyfour 9y ago

So magnifying the voices of those who have cash to spare, and diminishing the voices of those who are not so fortunate?

deleted 9y ago

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Fjolsvith 9y ago

I read FAQ for Yours.org. The voting looks like a pyramid scheme: >You can earn money by voting on good content. Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed evenly between all earlier voters. Yours Inc. always makes the first vote. You can vote on something as many times as you'd like. You will earn money if you vote on something popular early, because you will get money from all votes after you.[1] 1. https://www.yours.org/about/ https://www.yours.org/about/

ddmma 9y ago

So this might be a feature that facebook will be happy to integrate, social media got their dinosaurs and whales on place, moving on ello