[latexr]

> 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.

[wildrhythms]

>but every comment you want to post costs one cent

So the wealthiest people get to spread the most propaganda?

[kelseyfrog]

You could take a page out of quadratic voting and scale costs nonlinearly. Then spamming would be disproportionately costly. This raises some interesting problems like, why not simply create multiple accounts, which have a different tradeoff calculus.

[carlosjobim]

I think you have to have assets worth significantly more than one cent in order to count yourself among the wealthiest. Just my two cents.

[concordDance]

> 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]

> 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]

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]

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.

[latexr]

It is not. This happens with the App Store, which is as low friction as you can get and is not a scammy site.