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I feel like this is another example of a problem that could be easily solved if we had integrated, anonymous and frictionless payments on the web. For example,

I feel like this is another example of a problem that could be easily solved if we had integrated, anonymous and frictionless payments on the web. For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly. The hurdle of course is that no one wants to put their credit card details into a bunch of random sites, or nearly any site for that matter. If we had anonymous payments integrated into our browsers, it would be very straightforward though, click a button and you give a site a dollar and you're good for a while. This would generalize and improve many other sides of the web as well, from sponsoring open source projects to creators. Removing the payment friction could help improve many things online, but I don't think I've ever seen a feasible, realistic path proposed towards that.

malshe 2y ago
One cent sounds low but it’s not zero, which has a special place in pricing. Check out this paper: https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%20a%20Special%20Price.pdf https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%...
bithead 2y ago
A fee schedule would help, but I think what may end up happening is what happened to spamcop. The realtime black hole list at one point shutdown open SMTP relays, but how spammers got around it was Spam As A Service providers like mailchimp, sendgrid, salesforce, maropost, and others. Someone will come up with a fee based reddit spam service one can buy to flood reddit with spam drowning out real people (the 'reals' or 'non-bots'). It seems like there are things reddit could do to squelch spam that it doesn't seem to be doing, like disallowing duplicate text in posts as one example. Beyond a certain karma it seems like posting rate becomes unrestricted and I think more than one post every 10 seconds is spamming regardless. So I think reddit right now doesn't have much incentive to squelch spam since it's not doing that much, it would take effort, and effort == money. I think the for profit model is reddit's biggest problem right now. Others have pointed to USENET's problems, but in an open protocol those were things that could have been surmounted with effort. The for-profit problem with reddit looks to be insurmountable and the rate of enshitification will only accelerate. Probably a clone of the old reddit is in order. Like cleddit (.com is squatted on but not .org or .net) or something like that. Or a new version of the USENET protocol. For all it's problems USENET did reveal what made scientology 'tick' behind the scenes on alt.religion.scientology. Some new version of USENET might also address DMCA abuses also.
userbinator 2y ago
That only makes it easier for those with the $$$ to control the narrative.
Grimburger 2y ago
> every comment you want to post costs one cent People were saying this about email 20+ years ago. Not sure if it's the case here but there's a tendency for those in tech to think people problems can be solved with code. Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve.
- ratlrrr 2y ago
  > Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve. Sure, clever analogy. The internet barely facilitates many best practices for congregating on a communal basis, barring a user's self-sovereign strive to cultivate, recognize and then compensate for its failings with whatever sort of information, interactions and dealings one happens to seek. 20+ years ago, i just settled for lurking whatever boards popped out of the ether and playing EverQuest, RuneScape and Habbo Hotel, to soak in its novelty. Such persistent asymmetricity should never be lost.
ben_w 2y ago
I doubt that payments of any kind will help much. From a purely theoretical level, there's a very broad range of incomes worldwide, so any price point you use to keep spammers out makes it unaffordable to the average person in many nations, and varying pricing by nation just means the spammers pretend to be from the cheapest nation(s). We also have a demonstration of payment-based messaging systems in that price range with SMS and voice calls, which still get junk. (Nation-specific: my German SIM gets none while my UK SIM gets a lot… but only when I actually visit the UK). For subscription-based payment filtering, similar — while it's hard for me to determine which of Musks's statements I should take seriously or literally, twitter premium pricing it's still a test of this idea even if it wasn't the true intent behind Musk's assertion.
latexr 2y ago
> imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly. That site wouldn’t have any spam, true. Though not because of the cost, but because it wouldn’t have any users to make it worth spamming. No one wants to pay per message. Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?” Once in a blue moon someone would post, get no reply, and be even more unlikely to post next. And yes, yes, not literally everyone, but enough that it becomes a rounding error.
- concordDance 2y ago
  > Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?" I think that's well below the threshold people would care. The problem is that $0.01 is too low, it'd be well worth spending to advertise or propagandize. For context, USA presidential elections will spend billions, they could make ten billion posts for a fraction of their war chest.
  - latexr 2y ago
    > I think that's well below the threshold people would care. People don’t even pay 0.99$ for apps they use all day every day, opting instead to suffer through ads and have their batteries drained. There’s no chance they’d pay 0.01$ per message. For the vast majority, there are two price points: free and not free. The psychological difference between free and 0.01$ is magnitudes larger than the difference between 0.01$ and 1$.
    - jen20 2y ago
      This is largely because of payment friction: is some scammy site going to manage its own subscription and call to make me cancel? Do I accidentally sign up to some dumb minimum term etc.
      - nucleardog 2y ago
        I don’t think I agree. Something that is free is an unlimited resource. Something which costs even $0.01 is a limited resource (even if the limit is very high). People naturally deal with limited resources different than unlimited. If it’s unlimited, each usage requires no further consideration. If it’s limited, each usage requires evaluating whether to spend dollars/credits/capacity on it. I use a paid search engine. I paid extra for the “unlimited” option even though I should have fallen well under a lower tier. It wasn’t because of payment friction. (I was already paying a monthly fee, the only difference was the amount.) I paid the extra because as soon as this transitioned from unlimited to limited, I needed to keep a mental accounting of every usage. I needed to consider if each usage was worth buying. If you give me a sheet of stickers for free I will struggle to stick them on anything. They are, by their nature as a physical thing, a limited resource. Payment doesn’t matter because they were free. What matters is I can run out so I need to ensure I’m making the best use of a limited resource.
andruby 2y ago
> If we had anonymous payments integrated into our browsers Was this the initial idea of the Brave browser? Did that succeed to some extent?
rglullis 2y ago
No need to charge per message. Just make every user pay an annual membership fee for entrance. This is how https://communick.com https://communick.com works. I have a small userbase, but zero issues with spam and abuse.
- sumeno 2y ago
  > I have a small userbase, but zero issues with spam and abuse. You have zero issues with spam and abuse because you have a small user base, not because of the fee. Twitter has TONS of paid accounts for spam.
  - rglullis 2y ago
    First: citation needed in spammers using paid accounts. Why would they pay to spam, go through credit card fraud detection and so on when a free account is (by definition) zero cost? Mind you, I am talking about pure spam and not crazy sophisticated phishing scams. Those certainly exist in Twitter. Second: scale. Twitter has millions of users, it is not profitable and is suing advertisers in a desperate attempt to justify its lack of revenue. Let's just say that a miracle happens and I get my dream number of paid accounts (10k at $29/year). The operation would be profitable enough to pay myself more than I ever made in any job and still contribute back to the downstream projects. I could literally close registrations on my service, or start a different vetting process.
    - themoonisachees 2y ago
      All the accounts seen on the popular "ignore previous instructions" screenshots have paid for twitter. There's no reason to believe that these bots don't operate at scale and don't all spend $8 a month. On top of that, they are effectively paying per word to post through paying for tokens. This does not stop them.
      - rglullis 2y ago
        Bots being paid by a state that is a misinformation campaign is not the same as spam. Assuming the Fediverse was as popular as Twitter/FB, they could simply run their own instances, no need to pay for access through any specific server.
zdragnar 2y ago
We used to have that for texting on mobile phones. Everyone and their dog hated it with a passion, and now "free" texting is built into the majority of phone plans in the US, even before things like fb messenger and Whatsapp. Same is true for long distance calling.
BlueTemplar 2y ago
"good for a while" is incompatible with "anonymous" : which means there's no account that could be linked back to you (think how 4chan is used). Also it tends to be made illegal for obvious reasons (even if in practice, everyone but the most careful user eventually gets identified by their IP, the logs of which Web servers are legally obligated to keep in most states). Otherwise, if you actually meant pseudonymous payments, well, Flattr actually tried to do it. Flattr 1.0 basically died in the 2012-2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, while Flattr 2.0 never managed to get enough reach, unlike the Silicon Valley backed, new competitor, Patreon.
amiga386 2y ago
> For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwELepvBAVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwELepvBAVY > He said "if I was in charge of Facebook, mate, I'd be saying like 'fucking QUID A GO!'" > It gave me a small sense of hometown pride when I realized the guy was serious... small sense of hometown pride that there must be very few places in the world where Mark Zuckerberg would be offered financial advice from a guy who was 15 pence short for [his bus fare]
boppo1 2y ago
>For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. Someone built this (a 4chan clone) on ethereum, I can't remember what it's called. It was pretty dead, but the project exists.
- celdon25 2y ago
  Was it Steemit? They had a reasonable amount of activity for awhile, some of it was good content, most of it wasn’t though.
- themoonisachees 2y ago
  Ethereum has (had?) the added problem of fees and latency. After ~2018, doing anything on Ethereum required you to spend like $20 and wait 40 minutes.
kibwen 2y ago
Everything crap about the modern web is a result of commercialization, so I'm skeptical that doubling down on commercialization is going to do anything but dig this hole even deeper.
j-bos 2y ago
The friction might be beaten as part of a network effect. Onboard a large internet celebrity, create a payment platform that syncs to open markets, soomething like the ronin bridge, people's funds can then be used to pay to post on said celebrities forums, expand to other web content, not just for posts but for viewing, 402 replaces ads. The psychology is already there, "all" that's required a snowball to start adoption in the online media space.
c_prompt 2y ago
I built it. [1] They didn't come. [1] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works
- celdon25 2y ago
  Throwing pennies around isn’t a big enough appeal or a viable business, see my other comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337617
epolanski 2y ago
Payments are already overwhelmingly frictionless online.
carlosjobim 2y ago
> but every comment you want to post costs one cent. It should cost at least 10 cents. And I think your idea is the future.

malshe 2y ago

One cent sounds low but it’s not zero, which has a special place in pricing. Check out this paper: https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%20a%20Special%20Price.pdf https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%...

bithead 2y ago

A fee schedule would help, but I think what may end up happening is what happened to spamcop. The realtime black hole list at one point shutdown open SMTP relays, but how spammers got around it was Spam As A Service providers like mailchimp, sendgrid, salesforce, maropost, and others. Someone will come up with a fee based reddit spam service one can buy to flood reddit with spam drowning out real people (the 'reals' or 'non-bots'). It seems like there are things reddit could do to squelch spam that it doesn't seem to be doing, like disallowing duplicate text in posts as one example. Beyond a certain karma it seems like posting rate becomes unrestricted and I think more than one post every 10 seconds is spamming regardless. So I think reddit right now doesn't have much incentive to squelch spam since it's not doing that much, it would take effort, and effort == money. I think the for profit model is reddit's biggest problem right now. Others have pointed to USENET's problems, but in an open protocol those were things that could have been surmounted with effort. The for-profit problem with reddit looks to be insurmountable and the rate of enshitification will only accelerate. Probably a clone of the old reddit is in order. Like cleddit (.com is squatted on but not .org or .net) or something like that. Or a new version of the USENET protocol. For all it's problems USENET did reveal what made scientology 'tick' behind the scenes on alt.religion.scientology. Some new version of USENET might also address DMCA abuses also.

userbinator 2y ago

That only makes it easier for those with the $$$ to control the narrative.

Grimburger 2y ago

> every comment you want to post costs one cent People were saying this about email 20+ years ago. Not sure if it's the case here but there's a tendency for those in tech to think people problems can be solved with code. Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve.

ratlrrr 2y ago
> Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve. Sure, clever analogy. The internet barely facilitates many best practices for congregating on a communal basis, barring a user's self-sovereign strive to cultivate, recognize and then compensate for its failings with whatever sort of information, interactions and dealings one happens to seek. 20+ years ago, i just settled for lurking whatever boards popped out of the ether and playing EverQuest, RuneScape and Habbo Hotel, to soak in its novelty. Such persistent asymmetricity should never be lost.

ben_w 2y ago

I doubt that payments of any kind will help much. From a purely theoretical level, there's a very broad range of incomes worldwide, so any price point you use to keep spammers out makes it unaffordable to the average person in many nations, and varying pricing by nation just means the spammers pretend to be from the cheapest nation(s). We also have a demonstration of payment-based messaging systems in that price range with SMS and voice calls, which still get junk. (Nation-specific: my German SIM gets none while my UK SIM gets a lot… but only when I actually visit the UK). For subscription-based payment filtering, similar — while it's hard for me to determine which of Musks's statements I should take seriously or literally, twitter premium pricing it's still a test of this idea even if it wasn't the true intent behind Musk's assertion.

latexr 2y ago

> imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly. That site wouldn’t have any spam, true. Though not because of the cost, but because it wouldn’t have any users to make it worth spamming. No one wants to pay per message. Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?” Once in a blue moon someone would post, get no reply, and be even more unlikely to post next. And yes, yes, not literally everyone, but enough that it becomes a rounding error.

concordDance 2y ago
> Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?" I think that's well below the threshold people would care. The problem is that $0.01 is too low, it'd be well worth spending to advertise or propagandize. For context, USA presidential elections will spend billions, they could make ten billion posts for a fraction of their war chest.
- latexr 2y ago
  > I think that's well below the threshold people would care. People don’t even pay 0.99$ for apps they use all day every day, opting instead to suffer through ads and have their batteries drained. There’s no chance they’d pay 0.01$ per message. For the vast majority, there are two price points: free and not free. The psychological difference between free and 0.01$ is magnitudes larger than the difference between 0.01$ and 1$.
  - jen20 2y ago
    This is largely because of payment friction: is some scammy site going to manage its own subscription and call to make me cancel? Do I accidentally sign up to some dumb minimum term etc.
    - nucleardog 2y ago
      I don’t think I agree. Something that is free is an unlimited resource. Something which costs even $0.01 is a limited resource (even if the limit is very high). People naturally deal with limited resources different than unlimited. If it’s unlimited, each usage requires no further consideration. If it’s limited, each usage requires evaluating whether to spend dollars/credits/capacity on it. I use a paid search engine. I paid extra for the “unlimited” option even though I should have fallen well under a lower tier. It wasn’t because of payment friction. (I was already paying a monthly fee, the only difference was the amount.) I paid the extra because as soon as this transitioned from unlimited to limited, I needed to keep a mental accounting of every usage. I needed to consider if each usage was worth buying. If you give me a sheet of stickers for free I will struggle to stick them on anything. They are, by their nature as a physical thing, a limited resource. Payment doesn’t matter because they were free. What matters is I can run out so I need to ensure I’m making the best use of a limited resource.

andruby 2y ago

> If we had anonymous payments integrated into our browsers Was this the initial idea of the Brave browser? Did that succeed to some extent?

rglullis 2y ago

No need to charge per message. Just make every user pay an annual membership fee for entrance. This is how https://communick.com https://communick.com works. I have a small userbase, but zero issues with spam and abuse.

sumeno 2y ago
> I have a small userbase, but zero issues with spam and abuse. You have zero issues with spam and abuse because you have a small user base, not because of the fee. Twitter has TONS of paid accounts for spam.
- rglullis 2y ago
  First: citation needed in spammers using paid accounts. Why would they pay to spam, go through credit card fraud detection and so on when a free account is (by definition) zero cost? Mind you, I am talking about pure spam and not crazy sophisticated phishing scams. Those certainly exist in Twitter. Second: scale. Twitter has millions of users, it is not profitable and is suing advertisers in a desperate attempt to justify its lack of revenue. Let's just say that a miracle happens and I get my dream number of paid accounts (10k at $29/year). The operation would be profitable enough to pay myself more than I ever made in any job and still contribute back to the downstream projects. I could literally close registrations on my service, or start a different vetting process.
  - themoonisachees 2y ago
    All the accounts seen on the popular "ignore previous instructions" screenshots have paid for twitter. There's no reason to believe that these bots don't operate at scale and don't all spend $8 a month. On top of that, they are effectively paying per word to post through paying for tokens. This does not stop them.
    - rglullis 2y ago
      Bots being paid by a state that is a misinformation campaign is not the same as spam. Assuming the Fediverse was as popular as Twitter/FB, they could simply run their own instances, no need to pay for access through any specific server.

zdragnar 2y ago

We used to have that for texting on mobile phones. Everyone and their dog hated it with a passion, and now "free" texting is built into the majority of phone plans in the US, even before things like fb messenger and Whatsapp. Same is true for long distance calling.

BlueTemplar 2y ago

"good for a while" is incompatible with "anonymous" : which means there's no account that could be linked back to you (think how 4chan is used). Also it tends to be made illegal for obvious reasons (even if in practice, everyone but the most careful user eventually gets identified by their IP, the logs of which Web servers are legally obligated to keep in most states). Otherwise, if you actually meant pseudonymous payments, well, Flattr actually tried to do it. Flattr 1.0 basically died in the 2012-2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, while Flattr 2.0 never managed to get enough reach, unlike the Silicon Valley backed, new competitor, Patreon.

amiga386 2y ago

> For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwELepvBAVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwELepvBAVY > He said "if I was in charge of Facebook, mate, I'd be saying like 'fucking QUID A GO!'" > It gave me a small sense of hometown pride when I realized the guy was serious... small sense of hometown pride that there must be very few places in the world where Mark Zuckerberg would be offered financial advice from a guy who was 15 pence short for [his bus fare]

boppo1 2y ago

>For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. Someone built this (a 4chan clone) on ethereum, I can't remember what it's called. It was pretty dead, but the project exists.

celdon25 2y ago
Was it Steemit? They had a reasonable amount of activity for awhile, some of it was good content, most of it wasn’t though.
themoonisachees 2y ago
Ethereum has (had?) the added problem of fees and latency. After ~2018, doing anything on Ethereum required you to spend like $20 and wait 40 minutes.

kibwen 2y ago

Everything crap about the modern web is a result of commercialization, so I'm skeptical that doubling down on commercialization is going to do anything but dig this hole even deeper.

j-bos 2y ago

The friction might be beaten as part of a network effect. Onboard a large internet celebrity, create a payment platform that syncs to open markets, soomething like the ronin bridge, people's funds can then be used to pay to post on said celebrities forums, expand to other web content, not just for posts but for viewing, 402 replaces ads. The psychology is already there, "all" that's required a snowball to start adoption in the online media space.

c_prompt 2y ago

I built it. [1] They didn't come. [1] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works

celdon25 2y ago
Throwing pennies around isn’t a big enough appeal or a viable business, see my other comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337617

epolanski 2y ago

Payments are already overwhelmingly frictionless online.

carlosjobim 2y ago

> but every comment you want to post costs one cent. It should cost at least 10 cents. And I think your idea is the future.