4 ms·

Spam needs censorship? But isn’t spam only profitable at scale? Can’t you just charge a nominal fee or something?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 4y ago
I'm reminded of https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt which is 20+ years old and remains true. > Spam needs censorship? Spam needs to be deleted or hidden by someone or something or your inbox/feed will be full of spam. Trying to manage this individually with keyword filters or even the more sophisticated Bayesian anti-spam is exhausting. > But isn’t spam only profitable at scale? Yes. So what? Spam scales. It's like cryptocurrency, you burn trillions of FLOPS of computing power to make a few cents. > Can’t you just charge a nominal fee or something? Fee? For Facebook? This absolutely kills customer acquisition. It has often been suggested and never worked; the only site I think that does it is Metafilter? Facebook went in the other direction with subsidised data plans that were free to access Facebook. The economics does not permit them to charge the eyeballs to look at Facebook. On the other hand, they can't afford to let people advertise for free on Facebook, since that's the service they do charge for. In practice this is why accounts get tied to phone numbers so often, because it's slightly more difficult to acquire another few thousand phone numbers after the first thousand are banned for spamming, than it is with IP4 addresses.
- stevage 4y ago
  It seems so weird that we all happily pay $5 or $10 a month for a bunch of random services, but a central platform like Facebook or Twitter can't even charge a buck?
  - dimva 4y ago
    You pay for services where there isn't a network effect (streaming) or where the market isn't super competitive (telecom). Social is an incredibly competitive market with a huge network effect - if Facebook or Twitter charged money, young users would migrate somewhere else and would continue using that network when they got older. So that would be the end of any social network that decided to charge, unless it was trying to be a small niche network for adults to have more intellectual conversations (metafilter?)
  - lbriner 4y ago
    There is the network effect where to make it worthwhile, you need to have pretty much all of your friends on it, if not, it doesn't work. Most people won't pay for anything they don't have to pay for. There is also the fact that it can be hard to see the overall gain when each interaction is very marginal. For example, updating your timeline with a photo and a status by itself doesn't seem worth paying for even if the cummulative effect over an entire year could be very beneficial for your networks.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Facebook might be valuable enough for me to pay for, but it is marginal. For every friend who decides to get off facebook the value of facebook also goes down. I wouldn't pay more than a buck/month for facebook, and to get that they need to focus on the things that provide me value (that is they need to show me more about the life of my friends and cut all the memes and political garbage that my friends share). However I never would have joined facebook if there was a price and for years after I wouldn't have been willing to pay, it is only now that I realize the ability to share pictures of my kids with my parents and other friends is a valuable service.
      - lukasyuy5 4y ago
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Customers are funny like that. My own personal gimmick ideas for twitter, that will never be tried, would be "premium" which gives you abuse reporting that actually works (and maybe some other stuff), and a system to enable people to pay for premium (or part thereof) for other users.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
paulcole 4y ago
Charging a fee is censorship. But there’s also nothing inherently wrong with censorship. It just tastes extra bad when the things we like get censored. There’s censorship right here on HN for example and that’s OK.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

I'm reminded of https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt which is 20+ years old and remains true. > Spam needs censorship? Spam needs to be deleted or hidden by someone or something or your inbox/feed will be full of spam. Trying to manage this individually with keyword filters or even the more sophisticated Bayesian anti-spam is exhausting. > But isn’t spam only profitable at scale? Yes. So what? Spam scales. It's like cryptocurrency, you burn trillions of FLOPS of computing power to make a few cents. > Can’t you just charge a nominal fee or something? Fee? For Facebook? This absolutely kills customer acquisition. It has often been suggested and never worked; the only site I think that does it is Metafilter? Facebook went in the other direction with subsidised data plans that were free to access Facebook. The economics does not permit them to charge the eyeballs to look at Facebook. On the other hand, they can't afford to let people advertise for free on Facebook, since that's the service they do charge for. In practice this is why accounts get tied to phone numbers so often, because it's slightly more difficult to acquire another few thousand phone numbers after the first thousand are banned for spamming, than it is with IP4 addresses.

stevage 4y ago
It seems so weird that we all happily pay $5 or $10 a month for a bunch of random services, but a central platform like Facebook or Twitter can't even charge a buck?
- dimva 4y ago
  You pay for services where there isn't a network effect (streaming) or where the market isn't super competitive (telecom). Social is an incredibly competitive market with a huge network effect - if Facebook or Twitter charged money, young users would migrate somewhere else and would continue using that network when they got older. So that would be the end of any social network that decided to charge, unless it was trying to be a small niche network for adults to have more intellectual conversations (metafilter?)
- lbriner 4y ago
  There is the network effect where to make it worthwhile, you need to have pretty much all of your friends on it, if not, it doesn't work. Most people won't pay for anything they don't have to pay for. There is also the fact that it can be hard to see the overall gain when each interaction is very marginal. For example, updating your timeline with a photo and a status by itself doesn't seem worth paying for even if the cummulative effect over an entire year could be very beneficial for your networks.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Facebook might be valuable enough for me to pay for, but it is marginal. For every friend who decides to get off facebook the value of facebook also goes down. I wouldn't pay more than a buck/month for facebook, and to get that they need to focus on the things that provide me value (that is they need to show me more about the life of my friends and cut all the memes and political garbage that my friends share). However I never would have joined facebook if there was a price and for years after I wouldn't have been willing to pay, it is only now that I realize the ability to share pictures of my kids with my parents and other friends is a valuable service.
    - lukasyuy5 4y ago
- pjc50 4y ago
  Customers are funny like that. My own personal gimmick ideas for twitter, that will never be tried, would be "premium" which gives you abuse reporting that actually works (and maybe some other stuff), and a system to enable people to pay for premium (or part thereof) for other users.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

paulcole 4y ago

Charging a fee is censorship. But there’s also nothing inherently wrong with censorship. It just tastes extra bad when the things we like get censored. There’s censorship right here on HN for example and that’s OK.