[senttoschool]

It's hard enough to get people to post for free. Now you're going to charge $0.01/post and add the friction of a blockchain to it.

This is inherently a problem with building on blockchains and why nothing useful has been built on it. It's slow. It's expensive. It's complicated for users and developers. Most blockchains have had hacks in the past. Algorand was just labeled as a security by the SEC. And most important of all, people don't value decentralized storage of information enough.

I'm sure scaling an the database(s) that power Reddit is hard enough. It might be impossibly uneconomical to decentralize a Reddit clone's data on a blockchain.

[algorade]

Thanks for the feedback!

There are indeed trade-offs, and I'm aware that most people would prefer to post for free. However, I believe the 100% free model is not sustainable, and it's worth experimenting with different approaches. Companies providing these types of services tend to become hostile towards their users over time in order to pay their bills, resorting to selling personal data, holding user-generated content hostage, or cluttering their websites with ads.

Charging a small transaction fee to the user might also have some advantages: it discourages spam and encourages more thoughtful posting. And we're talking about an amount that is trivial for most users.

Regarding speed, Algorand provides transaction finality in under 4 seconds, which is one of the main reasons I believe it's a good fit for this project. Creating a post or comment is a bit slower than posting on Hacker News, but it still feels pretty fast.

As for scalability, I'd say let's cross that bridge when we get there. Currently, Metapost is only publishing text posts to the blockchain. Hosting things like images or videos would be better suited for IPFS, with only the links being published on the chain.

[senttoschool]

Ads are a perfectly legit business model. We've had free television channels for a century based on the ad model. Ad-driven model is only hated by the top percent who are willing to pay a subscription. Facebook has 2 billion users who don't care about ads.

You seem to have the business model backwards. People who post there are contributing their time and knowledge. They're giving you something. There's no reason for them to pay you. That's why web 2.0 can't be replicated on blockchains and no one has ever created a successful mainstream blockchain-based web 2.0 product.

In an age where platforms pay you for your content, such as Substack, I can't see how charging someone $0.01/post to write in a Reddit-like platform will have any success.

Regarding speed and scale - 4 seconds is an eternity in the modern web. IPFS won't work because it's too slow and again, too expensive.

[algorade]

> In an age where platforms pay you for your content

Posting rewards the user with platform tokens. Upvoting also acts as tipping the author of the post. The economics are not 100% figured out, but I am convinced there is a way for these micro-payments to work and create a self-sustaining platform.

> 4 seconds is an eternity in the modern web

I disagree, but I think this is mostly a UI issue. You can have optimistic updates on the frontend while the transaction is confirming and make it feel exactly like a web2 site. I’ve worked on applications with similar latency pretty recently and the solution is often just to add more caching layers to make it feel fast and snappy for the user.

[aerio]

>Ad-driven model is only hated by the top percent who are willing to pay a subscription. Facebook has 2 billion users who don't care about ads.

You have no idea how widespread ad-bloclers are, it sounds like.