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Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter
- chb 8y ago"Spend money to chat with strangers who spend money to chat with strangers." That's a demographic that doesn't deserve my time.
- odiroot 8y agoCan I use hanzi though?
- gerardes 8y agoMrBeast just enter the chat. ;)
- keesj 8y agoHi all. About 2.5 years ago I created Highscore Money. I was looking at pay-to-play games and wondered what would happen if you'd take it to the extreme. The result was just a leaderboard you'd pay your way into. Whatever you pay, that's your score. Today, I'm launching a new social experiment. A chatroom where you pay for every message you send. Normally chatrooms can get messy quick, because there's no cost to sending a message. Expensive Chat changes this dynamic.
- jstanley 8y agoWhat makes this a social experiment rather than a simple cash grab? Are you donating all the money to a charity?
- johnisgood 8y agoI think it is possible to do both, at the same time. :D
- spdionis 8y agoIt's an experiment on how much cash you can grab :)
- vortico 8y agoWhat makes this different than any other business idea that legally convinces customers to part with their money?
- jstanley 8y agoThe same as the difference between any other business idea that legally convinces customers to part with their money, and any social experiment.
- 0-_-0 8y agoIf the money was donated this would just make this an alternative way to donate money to charity, the creator pocketing the money is necessary for this to be a social experiment.
- PavlovsCat 8y agoBut that just makes it an alternative to giving the creator money directly. "How is this a plane? Is it made of wool?" "If it was made of wool it would be a comfy hat, it not being made of wool is necessary for it to be a plane. Notice how I'm not even claiming that it's a plane."
- kgwgk 8y agoHe could give the money to me and the “social experiment” part would be unaffected, I think. He could burn the money. Keeping it is not really out of necessity.
- pluma 8y agoNeato. I'll just refer to beggars and scammers as "social experimenters" from now on then.
- kome 8y agoson, i have to explain you a couple of things about capitalism... ;)
- baby 8y agoAre you shaming HN users for trying to monetize something?
- rplnt 8y agoThey are shaming them for using the "social experiment" label.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Yetanfou 8y agoThat question is comparable to the type of question which is often used in politics to silence opponents. In that sense it should be against HN rules, as to whether it is I don't know. As far as I'm concerned he just asked a question which can be answered without the need for 'defenders' to show up and challenge the questioner - and with that stifle the discourse here.
- vinceguidry 8y agoThe same logic applies to the question you're replying to. Were it me that was asked the question, I'd simply say "no, I was just curious."
- onion2k 8y agoWho says you can't profit from an experiment?
- pluma 8y agoWhen famed game designer Peter Molyneux came back out of hiding to launch his mobile games with a company called 22cans he also used the "social experiment" label to justify a pay-to-win clicker game and a "crowdfunded" god game with in-app purchases (that were later removed). The answer is: "social experiment" apps and games are just cash grabs with a veneer of clever marketing to them. The Million Dollar Homepage was probably the first one this blatant though. The outcome of the "experiment" is known in advance: people will pay unreasonable amounts of money for objectively worthless things if you can convince enough of them that it's cool. If it were an actual experiment, there would be some analysis published after the fact and the money would either be reimbursed or donated. Social experiments aren't experiments and they're mostly anti-social if anything. In video content it's code for (staged) "prank" (or harassment). In cases like this it's code for "grifting".
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- benj111 8y ago"In cases like this it's code for "grifting"" Are you accusing the pay per letter scheme of being grifting? How? They aren't misleading anybody.
- Kinnard 8y agoWhat makes this not a social experiment?
- benj111 8y agoIf you donate the money, that changes the dynamic of the experiment. How would you differentiate between cash grab and social experiment?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aur09 8y agoEvery message so far is some form of test. And what else would you expect? Nobody will care to continue chatting if there is no purpose uniting the room, especially when the more you participate the worse off you are. What are you hoping to achieve here? Or is this just a useless gimmick to get you a couple bucks?
- jpatokal 8y agoNow there's spam as well. Progress!
- comboy 8y agoI see a following potential issue: when it becomes popular, company advertising product is much more likely to spend $1 than the average user. Interestingly enough that should hold true regardless of the price (assuming popularity, and very low risk that this is all just generated by a single person). Because users who spend more money are a more valuable target.
- Aromasin 8y agoThing is, if it becomes more popular it becomes more spammed by ads and thus decrease in popularity, resulting it becoming less desirable to advertise on. Definitely an interesting social experiment, as well as a great cash grab. I'd love to see some data on the relationship between advertisement frequency and user-ship.
- TrickyRick 8y agoDidn't this happen to the donation leaderboards on Humble Bundle? I recall that being the case a few years ago at least. Of course all the money went to a good cause so it's all good.
- codeulike 8y agoFront-page of HN and its not working. No-one has said anything for 90 mins. I tried to chat, signed up, nothing happened.
- somebadguy 8y agoPlease go fuck yourself
- fxfan 8y agoI feel like if a long message I typed doesn't even get wrapped - I'm not getting what I paid for and hence am entitled to a refund. Plus some damages for my lost time
- keesj 8y agogood luck with that
- vbo 8y agoAre you able to process payments as low as 1c and if so, aren't fees exceeding the amount charged?
- bayesian_horse 8y agoThat screams blockchain, doesn't it? ;-)
- supermatt 8y agoDoes it? I thought even bitcoin had transaction fees.
- gdhbcc 8y agoSender pays them for the most part. You can get the receiver to pay, but its unusual and dependable on the receiver actively choosing to pay, so they can simply set a threshold
- bayesian_horse 8y agoIt was a joke. But you can use cryptocurrencies/blockchains to send messages, and you would use the proof of work to make sure the price is paid.
- smt88 8y agoYou can use messaging software to send messages and CC transactions to make sure the price is paid. Crypto/blockchain adds nothing to this scenario and creates headaches.
- ndnxhs 8y agoNow you get a $30 fee on your 1c transaction
- pietrovismara 8y agoWhat if he waits to collect your payments until they reach a point where fees aren't exceeding them anymore?
- vortico 8y agoIs there a micropayment service he could have used, to avoid micropayments showing up on a bank statement? Do any such services event exist? Is this PCI compliant, since CC numbers are typed on his page?
- leowoo91 8y agoThat'd make a nice cyberpunk billboard in 10 years.
- yami 8y agoLightning network, where are you?
- aur09 8y agoIt looks like you're using stripe to process your payments. Does this mean that if I send a 1-character message it will cost you money?
- mariopt 8y agoI have the same feeling. With only 300 bucks we can make this guy lose 10K :D ( $10.000 / ( 0.3 + ( 0.029 * 0.01$ ) ) * 0.01 = $333,01 We would need a javascript script that would make 33301 payments of 1 cent. This would be a very cost efficient attack between business rivals.
- theodorton 8y agoIn our Stripe integration, you're unable to process a payment that is less than the transaction fee. The minimum is around 33 cents.
- have_faith 8y agoReminds me of that 1000x1000 ad site from the 90's where you could buy an ad based on how many pixels you purchased. Allow someone to pay to set the chat room topic, the colour scheme, etc. Maybe some Rich instagram kids will throw some cash at it for bragging rights.
- lathiat 8y agoThe page is still up :-) http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
- PUSH_AX 8y agoThe ads also still get traffic, A while back I wrote a script to list all the domains that had expired and bought one at random for shits and giggles. GA reported about 100 uniques per month.
- newman8r 8y agothat's a pretty interesting idea. I did something similar a while back to grab expired image hosting websites that still had a ton of images linked to them. expired domains are a continual source of fun.
- michaelmcmillan 8y agoHilarious! I just scraped all the domains and did nslookups on all of them to see which where expired. Then I registered the one with the largest area (milliondollarconnect.com occupied 1000 pixels) at x1, y1 = 710, 750 (the ad that looks like a glassy oval). Will report back on traffic.
- test1235 8y agowow ... I just spotted ling's cars! Besides 'The Times', I've not spotted anything which I recognise on there. And I'm kinda surprised there aren't more porn adverts, to be honest.
- alexgmcm 8y agoIt reminds me of writing SMS messages - using all the awful txt spk to use as few characters as possible and save money.
- the_duke 8y agoNot just to save space. Typing with T9 was much more time-consuming that our autocomplete touch keyboards.
- moccachino 8y agoBut it could be done without looking. Driving home, reach for phone in the other seat, unlock, go to your contact (you remember the phonebook position of your frequent contacts), choose send sms, type the message fairly quickly, send. This could all be done fast and reliable without one look, perhaps one last glance before sending to make sure it looks right.
- rtkwe 8y agoEven easier to do that now. "Ok Google/Hey Siri send $contact $message" <confirm message via voice read back and send>.
- moccachino 8y agoYes, if you don't have the radio on, if other people aren't talking, if your car isn't loud and rattling, if you don't mind sharing the data with google and of course if the voice recognition and app interfacing works at all. Not all of the above are always true. But I know, things are not all bad. I'm only a bit saddened by the disappearance of the reliable deterministic haptic-only control that older phones had.
- williamdclt 8y agoI really don't think so, or at least not when you're a "power user". I used T9 when I was a teenager glued to his phone, and was definitely way faster to type than I am now with a touchscreen and autocompletion. I was also faster than my friends that did not use T9 but wrote in "txt spk"
- r32a_ 8y agoshould have used Lightning Network
- iamasuperuser 8y agoThis could make for an interesting idea for 'Quora for mentors', whereby someone pays money (maybe more than 1c) to ask a specific question to a 'business leader'.
- ndnxhs 8y agoI'm fairly sure that has been tried before a few times. Is it really needed though? Stack exchange is fairly good for free.
- fishsander 8y agoJustin Kan & others tried this a few years ago with Whale (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whale-3 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whale-3)
- smt88 8y agoVarious companies have been doing this for a while (and it's a business model that existed long before the internet). This is the one I know best and have used: https://clarity.fm/ https://clarity.fm/ It was great a few years ago for validation for a B2B product we wanted to sell and needed unbiased feedback on.
- nijynot 8y agoIt exists, it's called https://earn.com/ https://earn.com/. You pay in cryptocurrency, but it works.
- ajuc 8y agoNice :) We were just talking about something like this several days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19253464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19253464
- ratsimihah 8y agoThe implementation is clean AF and the idea is super fun! Really neat job there! This probably won't take off as-is but I feel like there's untapped potential to be leveraged.
- fouc 8y agoThe creator is the same guy that made wip.chat & betalist. I wouldn't be surprised if he keeps building on it and it succeeds.
- ratsimihah 8y agoOf course it is! What an inspiring community.
- keesj 8y agothanks for the kind words :)
- gelo 8y agoI just broke this website sending this: " ｓｅｎｄｉｎｇ ｕｎｉｃｏｄｅ ｃｈａｒａｃｔｅｒｓ ｆｏｒ ｆｕｎ "
- elcomet 8y agowhere did you find those characters?
- eps 8y agoThis looked oddly similar to https://highscore.money https://highscore.money and... it’s the same guy, Marc. For what it’s worth, we had one of top ten spots on the highscore.money, got some traffic from it (and still get a trickle), but all of them were immediate bounces. Caveat emptor.
- momania 8y ago... still cheaper than a Slack subscription.
- thatguyagain 8y agoOne thought: you should let the user know that you are using Stripe(?), instead of a random credit card form. Cool thing!
- keesj 8y agoadded! thanks for suggestion
- codeulike 8y agoNo new messages for 45 mins, tried to chat, doesn't work.
- zyx321 8y agoSounds like something that would make sense to implement on top of Twitch chat. You already have a payment infrastructure tgat allows attaching arbitrary amounts of money to each message, as well as a baseline reading for either free or sub-only($5/month) chat. Of course you'd need to do it in cooperation with an established Twitch partner. Can't just create a new channel and start charging.
- C4stor 8y agoThe cheer fact that people actually payed to use it is boggling my mind. I suppose the conclusion is that I need to work a lot more to even start understanding how people think !
- baby 8y agoI created something similar but with a smart contract: https://davidwong.fr/FiveMedium/#/ https://davidwong.fr/FiveMedium/#/
- miki123211 8y agowhat about making something similar, but where the cost formula is an^2? a should be some constant factor like a tenth of a cent and n should be the number of chars, i.e. per message or in the last 24 hrs. If Twitter worked that way instead of an arbitrary 140/280 char limit, it would be so much cleaner.
- iagooar 8y agoBusiness idea: corporate email system that offers a limited amount of emails per month, and once the limit gets hit, discounts money from employee's salary. Add a formula that makes it exponentially more expensive if you add more people to CC. Problem with corporate mailing hell solved.
- puranjay 8y agoThat would just mean employees would make every email like 1,000 words long
- iagooar 8y agoWell, that would be a clear win, because you would reduce the amount of distraction.
- smt88 8y agoThis would result in incessant phone calls. That's purely hypothetical, of course, because no one would take a job at that company.
- iagooar 8y ago> This would result in incessant phone calls. Make those expensive, too. Or accept people making more phone calls, which is perfectly fine, because you can only call one person at a time. > no one would take a job at that company Not if you are already working there, and not if the company sells it as a huge improvement to work productivity and fewer distractions.
- thenanyu 8y agoInteresting language effects at play. There’s a message in there: “你好吗?” Which is priced at 4c The equivalent message in English “how are you?” Is 10c
- carlmr 8y agoWe can make it more fair by pricing UTF-8 bytes. 你好吗 = 9 bytes how are you = 11 bytes
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fredley 8y agoper-byte pricing opens the pathway to posting images too!
- gruez 8y agonot really. according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roadmap_to_Unicode_BMP.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roadmap_to_Unicode_BMP.sv..., any codepoint bigger 0x80 (second half of the first box) is 2 byte per character, and codepoint bigger than 0x800 (anything past the 8th box) is 3 bytes charater. so while it might be fair for CJK languages, it's even less fair for languages that don't mostly use the latin alphabet.
- carlmr 8y agoThat's true, considering the name of the website they would have the privilege of an even more expensive chat.
- twodave 8y agoReally strange, typically I'd expect you to have to pay to read, not to be heard.
- foreigner 8y agoIt's interesting that this favours pictographic languages. You can express a lot more in a few "characters" of Chinese than you can in English! Might be a little more fair if you charged per byte instead of per character, but they would still have a big advantage. I suppose the same kind of thing applies to the character limit on Twitter.
- kabwj 8y agoYes. If I remember correctly when Twitter rose the character limit to 280, it was kept to 140 for tweets in CJK languages.
- Krasnol 8y agoI just get an "application error"
- bambax 8y ago"letter" seems ambiguous? I thought it meant "message" but it means "character". I'm not a native English speaker though so maybe it's just me.
- thejohnconway 8y agoI can see why that might seem ambiguous, but I've never heard anyone refer to an electronic message as a "letter". A letter is always in physical form. "Character" has its own ambiguities (am I a character in this chat room?)
- wongarsu 8y agoThis reminds me of Twitch, where many streamers have it set up so that you can get a message displayed or even automatically read out on stream if you accompany it with a donation. Of course there it is in addition to a regular free chat and more often used to get the streamer's attention
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoHmm, don't think I'm giving a random site (that breaches EU online business laws: must have an irl address for service) my CC info. If you spend 1¢ on posting ":smiley:" every day, won't that cost him about 20¢ transaction costs? Eventual DoS by CC transaction costs?? Love the spirit of it on an intellectual level though.
- wgx 8y agoIt's using Stripe for payment, so this site never sees your CC info.
- amingilani 8y agoYes, but the costs are still the same. Even stripe has a 2.9% + 30¢ cost per transaction.
- jimcsharp 8y agoI'd feel more comfortable with a Stripe branded off-site transaction if that's the case. Get that credit card field off of the seedy untrusted site.
- runeks 8y agoBut to users it looks like you're giving your CC info to a random website. I'd prefer being redirected to a trusted payment processor.
- NullPrefix 8y ago
- Kinnard 8y agoBitChat: https://bitchat.bitdb.network https://bitchat.bitdb.network
- raphinou 8y agoI'm curious, is it needed to generate an invoice for every payment received? How is the accounting managed?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- anyzen 8y agoInteresting question! I would assume that some invoice must be generated, but it can be in electronic form (e-mail). Getting this right internationally is still a major problem as far as I'm aware, but would love to know if there is a (cheap enough) service that solves it...
- keesj 8y agoUsers are charged only once every 24 hours aggregating their usage of the previous period. This way the number of charges/fees/invoices are limited to a relatively small number.
- another-dave 8y agoLooks nice & seems like a fun experiment but can't help thinking that — at scale, this becomes Twitter, where the average person has relatively short messages like now, but Donald Trump gets an unlimited character count…
- WMCRUN 8y agoI’m curious,how are they processing the micropayments? Wouldn’t transaction fees crush them?
- Jenz 8y agoTo be frank, I don’t get it
- cm2012 8y agoI posted a few comments but they didn't show up. Oh well.
- alexandercrohde 8y agosame
- benbristow 8y agoSeems to have gotten a hug of death showing a standard Rails error. "We're sorry, but something went wrong."
- bob_theslob646 8y agoAm I supposed to be impressed? This makes no sense whatsoever. The reminds me of that card game that raised money to dig a hole.
- bovermyer 8y agoIt's entertaining. It doesn't need to make sense. If you want a sane product with a good business model, well, there's more than enough of that flying around.
- mlevental 8y agoyou're not impressed by cards against humanity? it's a wildly successful company
- balfirevic 8y ago> The reminds me of that card game that raised money to dig a hole. Honestly, that's quite a compliment.
- keesj 8y agothanks I appreciate the compliment :)
- bitt 8y agoThis sounds really fun! It is one of those ideas that when you first hear it doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm not sure how it will handle transaction costs though. It might be better to allow a minimum of $1 to be added in credits and use that to charge for letters.
- mipmap04 8y agoNeed to add font enhancement features. Can I pay 2 cents per letter to have the letters animated in fire?
- mlevental 8y agowhat ui kit is this?
- keesj 8y agoI custom designed it.
- mcnichol 8y agoI love that people are already working around the model by embedding part of the message in the username. That took all of three messages...
- marsrover 8y agoIt's dead
- amelius 8y agoI want people to pay per letter they email me ... "Hey it looks like you want to send Amelius an email. Please visit this page, where you can pay and make sure your email actually arrives"
- Tepix 8y agoYou need to make clickable URLs more expensive!
- stakhanov 8y agoIt's such an obvious idea, and it has been around for as long as spam e-mail has been a problem. I absolutely do not understand why it has not yet been adopted for all e-mail traffic worldwide. If an e-mail were to cost just one cent, it would never add up to an amount that a normal person would even notice, yet it would solve the problem of spam e-mail over night.
- lighttower 8y agoThis was one of the motivators described in the original Bitcoin white paper
- myself248 8y agoAnd Hashcash, 12 years before that.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- zild3d 8y agomaybe it only costs a cent if the receiver does not accept it
- gruez 8y agoIt would kill newsletters and mailing lists. Also, considering that SMS spam is a thing (they cost just under a cent to send), it's not a foolproof solution.
- nikeee 8y agoThere is De-Mail in Germany that is basically E-Mail. Initially, sending a De-Mail would cost a couple cents. It also offered the possibility to be legally binding, like a physical letter. Despite some technical/security issues with it, nonne really uses it (although you can now send them for free, IIRC).
- billpg 8y agoWhere would the money go?
- cbhl 8y agoI'm reminded how, last year, at work, they changed the length limits on performance reviews from characters to words. They found that character limits resulted in men having more room to express themselves than women -- "she" is longer than "he"; "girl" is longer than "guy", and "female" is longer than "male". Twitter also has interesting per-country dynamics because it uses a character limit. In Chinese or Japanese, 140 characters can express more words than in English.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago^ I also find it culturally interesting that basically every female descriptor I can think of is more characters than the male counterpart.
- jMyles 8y agoThat's because most of them are modifiers "wo"-men, "fe"-male, etc. Which really is pretty demeaning if you think about it. Over the years, there have been efforts in feminist and academic circles to introduce alternate spellings that are not derived this way. [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn
- ultraluminous 8y agoGenuine question and not some MRA trolling, but how is that demeaning? How would the etymology of English pronouns would be demeaning to anyone?
- deckar01 8y agoThe etymology of "woman" is very demeaning. It literally means "wife of man" or "servant". https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman
- dragonwriter 8y ago> The etymology of "woman" is very demeaning. It literally means "wife of man" or "servant". Your own source disagrees with you; while it does say that it came from a word formed from “wif” plus “man”, “wif” didn't mean what “wife” means now but what ”woman” means now, and “man” meant what “person” means now (which is among the current meanings of “man”, too.) The literal meaning of the compound is “woman person”. It's true that the compound “wifman” was used both for “woman” and “female servant”, but it's worth noting that the modern English word “man” includes among its meanings (and has for centuries) both “male person” and “male servant” (the latter being most commonly used preceded by a possessive indicating whose male servant is being referred to), so that the old “wifman” was a pretty exact equivalent of the modern “man” ignoring the (semantic, not grammatical) gender neutral senses of the latter.
- gspetr 8y agoThe TLD choice is a missed opportunity. With that idea they should have at least used the ".rich" More info: https://www.nic.rich/ https://www.nic.rich/ Jokes aside, this business model is not going to see any kind of wide adoption.
- ZachWick 8y agoLooks like telegraph commercial codes are poised and ready to make a comeback! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_(communications) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_(communication...)
- peter303 8y agoSuch compression tricks were also used save money on costly telegraph messages. The telegraph was arguably the first internet device, tying the world together at lightspeed. But wires were expensive and messages consequently so. A standard ten word message cost a workers average day wage. So people used abbreviation tricks seen in texting and twitter. And companies had code word dictionaries where a single word might mean a whole sentence. This saved cost and disquised messages. In the early days messages were limited by the number of wires, the speed of human operators at both ends and electrical degradation of long wires. 20 bits per second was a good speed. Physicists like Faraday and Maxwell figured out how to lessen degradation. Inventors like Thomas Edison figured out how to multiplex multiple signals on the same wire. And how transmit messages at superhuman speeds with tape players and recorders at both ends.
- myself248 8y agoThose codes are still in use. 73 OM TNX
- La_Beffa 8y agoHihihi this is fun and brilliant ! Had the chance to see it working for a few minutes. It doesn't seem to work now, just a blank page. Hello javascript :(
- sandis 8y agoSeems it has been taken down? Now it only returns three dots.
- keesj 8y agoServer went down. Up now :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- keyle 8y agoI shouldn't but I love the UI of this thing. It's fresh and bold.
- ian0 8y agodrawo.sh obviously wins. Not just because they paid the most. Because its the first ad ive clicked on in ages that gave me exactly what I expected it to. And asked for nothing.
- the_most 8y agoThis idea is really cool. It reminds me of THE MILLION DOLLAR HOMEPAGE. Especially because you can see that people use it to advertise. Here are two best ideas for an opportunistic website: - the most creative billboard (https://www.themostcreativebillboard.com/the-idea https://www.themostcreativebillboard.com/the-idea) - the mostexpensive ad (https://www.themostexpensivead.com/the-idea https://www.themostexpensivead.com/the-idea) Take a look and enjoy!