[scholia]

Facebook publishes ARPU numbers every quarter. Users in the US and Canada were worth $19.81 each in 2017 Q4, with $4.83 being the worldwide average. [1] This pays for the programmers, storage, offices and other costs.

Facebook had a net income of $3.6bn from 1.86bn monthly active users, or $1.93 per user.

I don't think many users are going to work for what Facebook could reasonably pay out of that....

Worse, any remotely attractive payment might well lead to the rapid creation of billions of fake accounts.

[1] http://static2.uk.businessinsider.com/image/589259d8dd0895fb...

[RodericDay]

Why would you spread it out evenly? Of course that makes no sense.

It's more like, you pay out to the users that generate a lot of views, and after a threshold. If 1/100 users is a great content generator, the idea that they may make $100/mo is very attractive to switch (and take their followers with them).

As for fake accounts, you bundle in the proof-of-identity stuff and whatever else current networks use to keep bots out. It's its own engineering problem.

[scholia]

So you don't think there's enough clickbait fake news on Facebook, and you want to incentivize its creation?

[RodericDay]

I don't subscribe to the theory that "fake news" won Trump the election, so I find this criticism of the idea incredibly asinine and besides the point. As a left-winger, I see "fake news" trotted out mostly by bitter liberals who refuse to accept any personal blame for the democrat's loss.

If anything, I place more blame on "legit news" and their "80+% WIN!" predictions for Clinton, ensuring that anyone who thought about casting a protest vote stayed home.