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Right, online advertising sucks. Period. There's already a solution to this problem though: subscriptions. The issue there is that people just don't want to pa

Right, online advertising sucks. Period. There's already a solution to this problem though: subscriptions. The issue there is that people just don't want to pay for something that they're used to getting for free. Your idea sounds like a service where people can request content on a given topic for a fee, without really knowing who's creating the content. What are the quality controls there? Who gets to write the content? How do I, the user, know that I'm getting a fair representation of what's going on? If someone is willing to pay for news content, why not just buy a newspaper subscription and get the email newsletter from a company that knows how to create news content? I'm just another internet rando, but I've worked for news organizations so I have some operational background here. Frankly, I just don't quite see the value in the service you're imagining, based on my interpretation. I'd have a really hard time trusting content written by a stranger catered specifically to my preferences if they weren't a bona fide journalist with experience at a reputable news organization. And I certainly wouldn't pay for it. Such a system would be super vulnerable to malicious influential behavior like we saw in the 2016 election. If you hate online ads in your news so much, do you currently pay for any of your news right now? If not, then how painful is this problem for you? We can't convince the public to spend on their news content the same way they spend on Netflix. That kinda sums it up right there.

wishrider 7y ago
Well the site is just a test (which didn't really take off to be honest, I've posted it here and there). But regarding the controls and the trust, you only pay out the reward if you like the result (that's how it works at the moment). And both the creators and the requesters can gain a reputation. A requester gets a good reputation for offering rewards and regularly paying them out. A content creator gets a good reputation for regularly fulfilling good wishes.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  The app looks awesome for curating things that aren’t time-sensitive or dependent on trust or verification of content. But again, relying purely on the community to verify quality is a major liability when it comes to information geared towards the public interest. I highly recommend you read up on the fake political groups that the Russians created on Facebook and Twitter that generated hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of engagements. People just didn’t realize that they were fake groups while sharing their content/tweets. The mueller report covered this operation in great detail, it’s worth the read if you’re serious about building products like this. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/mueller-report-document.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/m...

wishrider 7y ago

Well the site is just a test (which didn't really take off to be honest, I've posted it here and there). But regarding the controls and the trust, you only pay out the reward if you like the result (that's how it works at the moment). And both the creators and the requesters can gain a reputation. A requester gets a good reputation for offering rewards and regularly paying them out. A content creator gets a good reputation for regularly fulfilling good wishes.

save_ferris 7y ago
The app looks awesome for curating things that aren’t time-sensitive or dependent on trust or verification of content. But again, relying purely on the community to verify quality is a major liability when it comes to information geared towards the public interest. I highly recommend you read up on the fake political groups that the Russians created on Facebook and Twitter that generated hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of engagements. People just didn’t realize that they were fake groups while sharing their content/tweets. The mueller report covered this operation in great detail, it’s worth the read if you’re serious about building products like this. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/mueller-report-document.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/m...