[pembrook]

Not sure it was a big missed opportunity to create a communication protocol that...financially penalizes communication?

Sounds like a really fast way to kill a network instead of grow it into a 4B daily active user staple like email is today. You'd basically ensure that email would ONLY be spam, because marketers would be the only ones willing spend money to reach people.

Every time I see someone suggest micropayments on HN I have to wonder if people here have any understanding of how actual humans are. Turning every action on your network into a purchase decision is a good way to ensure nobody ever does anything on your network and thus it never becomes a network.

Humans will always gravitate toward the lowest friction way to achieve their goals. So immediately some private company would introduce a free communication channel as a loss leader instead, theirs would grow faster, and then they'd monetize via ads once their network reached critical mass (see also, whatsapp). Killing the more egalitarian decentralized protocol in the process.

[addaon]

Not all communication has positive value. 99.9% of the e-mail I receive not only has no value in itself, but the overhead of managing it, ignoring it, and categorizing it is highly negative -- and decreases the value of the valuable e-mail I receive, because I can't be arsed to check it promptly or consistently because of the overhead of the dreck. But as others point out, even charging money would only reduce spam by an order of magnitude or two, not entirely -- and since I send 1 - 10 actual e-mails a week, I only need to receive a dozen a week to never pay a penny.

My primary goal is not to send e-mail for free -- my primary goal is to have reliable, low-overhead communication with humans. Having this sponsored by spammers is a fine start, but even if I paid a dollar a year or so, that would be much lower overhead than even a day's worth of looking through spam is today (at the rate I value my time -- but even if you value your time orders of magnitudes less, the payoff is there).

[kevin_thibedeau]

This is what Xanadu and OSI were going to deliver: real world pay services recast on electronic networks. That could never compete against unmetered communication delivered by the likes of FidoNet, Compuserve, and the open internet protocols.

[handoflixue]

Agreed. In particular, I'd say that most social media relies on highly prolific posters: the people who produce the most content are also naturally the most valuable for making people want to be in-network.

If you charge to read, it's hard to build an audience. If you charge to SEND, there's not going to be anything for the audience in the first place.