[Avipat_]

the money came directly from AI Labs paying for it. not venture or anything else.

[lurk2]

That isn’t the issue. If you paid $300,000 to 300,000 users, each user made a dollar.

[Avipat_]

We paid $300,000 to 500 users, there's over 10,000 on the waitlist still. Each of them have uploaded over 200GB of data. Some at the 1TB limit.

[lurk2]

That’s a better ratio than I would have expected, but I would have led with that. The title as it is written reads as a bait and switch. I initially read it as: “We paid a plurality of users $300,000 each for all of their data.”

It’s probably obvious to most readers that this isn’t what happened ($300,000 would be an absurd price for someone’s camera roll), but it feels misleading. People respond to that kind of thing really negatively here, which is probably why your post got flagged.