Hi all. About 2.5 years ago I created Highscore Money. I was looking at pay-to-play games and wondered what would happen if you'd take it to the extreme. The result was just a leaderboard you'd pay your way into. Whatever you pay, that's your score.
Today, I'm launching a new social experiment. A chatroom where you pay for every message you send. Normally chatrooms can get messy quick, because there's no cost to sending a message. Expensive Chat changes this dynamic.
If the money was donated this would just make this an alternative way to donate money to charity, the creator pocketing the money is necessary for this to be a social experiment.
But that just makes it an alternative to giving the creator money directly.
"How is this a plane? Is it made of wool?"
"If it was made of wool it would be a comfy hat, it not being made of wool is necessary for it to be a plane. Notice how I'm not even claiming that it's a plane."
He could give the money to me and the “social experiment” part would be unaffected, I think. He could burn the money. Keeping it is not really out of necessity.
That question is comparable to the type of question which is often used in politics to silence opponents. In that sense it should be against HN rules, as to whether it is I don't know.
As far as I'm concerned he just asked a question which can be answered without the need for 'defenders' to show up and challenge the questioner - and with that stifle the discourse here.
When famed game designer Peter Molyneux came back out of hiding to launch his mobile games with a company called 22cans he also used the "social experiment" label to justify a pay-to-win clicker game and a "crowdfunded" god game with in-app purchases (that were later removed).
The answer is: "social experiment" apps and games are just cash grabs with a veneer of clever marketing to them. The Million Dollar Homepage was probably the first one this blatant though.
The outcome of the "experiment" is known in advance: people will pay unreasonable amounts of money for objectively worthless things if you can convince enough of them that it's cool. If it were an actual experiment, there would be some analysis published after the fact and the money would either be reimbursed or donated.
Social experiments aren't experiments and they're mostly anti-social if anything. In video content it's code for (staged) "prank" (or harassment). In cases like this it's code for "grifting".
Every message so far is some form of test. And what else would you expect? Nobody will care to continue chatting if there is no purpose uniting the room, especially when the more you participate the worse off you are. What are you hoping to achieve here? Or is this just a useless gimmick to get you a couple bucks?
I see a following potential issue: when it becomes popular, company advertising product is much more likely to spend $1 than the average user.
Interestingly enough that should hold true regardless of the price (assuming popularity, and very low risk that this is all just generated by a single person). Because users who spend more money are a more valuable target.
Thing is, if it becomes more popular it becomes more spammed by ads and thus decrease in popularity, resulting it becoming less desirable to advertise on. Definitely an interesting social experiment, as well as a great cash grab. I'd love to see some data on the relationship between advertisement frequency and user-ship.
Didn't this happen to the donation leaderboards on Humble Bundle? I recall that being the case a few years ago at least. Of course all the money went to a good cause so it's all good.
Sender pays them for the most part. You can get the receiver to pay, but its unusual and dependable on the receiver actively choosing to pay, so they can simply set a threshold
You can use messaging software to send messages and CC transactions to make sure the price is paid. Crypto/blockchain adds nothing to this scenario and creates headaches.
Yes. They offer something called metered billing. You report usage, and only invoice once the customer hits a certain threshold or after a certain time period. (whatever comes first).
Reminds me of that 1000x1000 ad site from the 90's where you could buy an ad based on how many pixels you purchased. Allow someone to pay to set the chat room topic, the colour scheme, etc. Maybe some Rich instagram kids will throw some cash at it for bragging rights.
The ads also still get traffic, A while back I wrote a script to list all the domains that had expired and bought one at random for shits and giggles. GA reported about 100 uniques per month.
that's a pretty interesting idea. I did something similar a while back to grab expired image hosting websites that still had a ton of images linked to them.
Hilarious! I just scraped all the domains and did nslookups on all of them to see which where expired. Then I registered the one with the largest area (milliondollarconnect.com occupied 1000 pixels) at x1, y1 = 710, 750 (the ad that looks like a glassy oval). Will report back on traffic.
wow ... I just spotted ling's cars! Besides 'The Times', I've not spotted anything which I recognise on there. And I'm kinda surprised there aren't more porn adverts, to be honest.
I am sorry about that! I wouldn't have known it would do that, I do not use my mobile to browse the Internet because it does freeze more often than not, and when it does not, it is slow. :/
Every once in a while someone stumbles onto it and drops another dollar in, but I haven't remembered to even bring it up in over a year. I feel like it's just novel enough that if I ever got around to promoting it, it might get to a vaguely reasonable amount of money.
But it could be done without looking.
Driving home, reach for phone in the other seat, unlock, go to your contact (you remember the phonebook position of your frequent contacts), choose send sms, type the message fairly quickly, send.
This could all be done fast and reliable without one look, perhaps one last glance before sending to make sure it looks right.
Yes, if you don't have the radio on, if other people aren't talking, if your car isn't loud and rattling, if you don't mind sharing the data with google and of course if the voice recognition and app interfacing works at all.
Not all of the above are always true.
But I know, things are not all bad. I'm only a bit saddened by the disappearance of the reliable deterministic haptic-only control that older phones had.
I really don't think so, or at least not when you're a "power user". I used T9 when I was a teenager glued to his phone, and was definitely way faster to type than I am now with a touchscreen and autocompletion.
I was also faster than my friends that did not use T9 but wrote in "txt spk"
Are you sure you're not thinking of multi-tap on a keypad and not T9?
Once you've learned T9 (the one where you tap a key a single time for each letter in the word and a lookup is made based on the combination). You can surely be faster than Qwerty.
This was also the reason I developed https://typenineapp.com [1] for iPhone once they allowed custom keyboards.
I am on average 20wpm faster (50wpm for english, 60wpm for my native language danish) with Type Nine on my iPhone compared to the apple qwerty keyboard.
Even though you don't have the tactile feedback of the previous T9 phones on the iPhone I can type without looking just the same way as on a phone with a physical keyboard.
This perpetuated myth has annoyed me greatly. Somehow, very few people actually know how a T9 keyboard actually works.
In fact, T9 is one of the last few reasons why I only VERY recently got myself an iPhone. T9 is superior in almost every way to a full touch-based QWERTY when writing texts.
So, great idea and product, mate. This is a buy from me.
I'd say it was on par with non-Swype Android keyboards. One button press per letter, fewer buttons to choose between and tactile physical buttons to push, so more accurate presses. Correcting a wrong word was about the same effort.
This could make for an interesting idea for 'Quora for mentors', whereby someone pays money (maybe more than 1c) to ask a specific question to a 'business leader'.
The implementation is clean AF and the idea is super fun! Really neat job there! This probably won't take off as-is but I feel like there's untapped potential to be leveraged.
For what it’s worth, we had one of top ten spots on the highscore.money, got some traffic from it (and still get a trickle), but all of them were immediate bounces. Caveat emptor.
Sounds like something that would make sense to implement on top of Twitch chat. You already have a payment infrastructure tgat allows attaching arbitrary amounts of money to each message, as well as a baseline reading for either free or sub-only($5/month) chat.
Of course you'd need to do it in cooperation with an established Twitch partner. Can't just create a new channel and start charging.
The cheer fact that people actually payed to use it is boggling my mind.
I suppose the conclusion is that I need to work a lot more to even start understanding how people think !
what about making something similar, but where the cost formula is an^2? a should be some constant factor like a tenth of a cent and n should be the number of chars, i.e. per message or in the last 24 hrs. If Twitter worked that way instead of an arbitrary 140/280 char limit, it would be so much cleaner.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadToday, I'm launching a new social experiment. A chatroom where you pay for every message you send. Normally chatrooms can get messy quick, because there's no cost to sending a message. Expensive Chat changes this dynamic.
"How is this a plane? Is it made of wool?"
"If it was made of wool it would be a comfy hat, it not being made of wool is necessary for it to be a plane. Notice how I'm not even claiming that it's a plane."
As far as I'm concerned he just asked a question which can be answered without the need for 'defenders' to show up and challenge the questioner - and with that stifle the discourse here.
The answer is: "social experiment" apps and games are just cash grabs with a veneer of clever marketing to them. The Million Dollar Homepage was probably the first one this blatant though.
The outcome of the "experiment" is known in advance: people will pay unreasonable amounts of money for objectively worthless things if you can convince enough of them that it's cool. If it were an actual experiment, there would be some analysis published after the fact and the money would either be reimbursed or donated.
Social experiments aren't experiments and they're mostly anti-social if anything. In video content it's code for (staged) "prank" (or harassment). In cases like this it's code for "grifting".
Are you accusing the pay per letter scheme of being grifting?
How? They aren't misleading anybody.
How would you differentiate between cash grab and social experiment?
Interestingly enough that should hold true regardless of the price (assuming popularity, and very low risk that this is all just generated by a single person). Because users who spend more money are a more valuable target.
Plus some damages for my lost time
But you can use cryptocurrencies/blockchains to send messages, and you would use the proof of work to make sure the price is paid.
Is this PCI compliant, since CC numbers are typed on his page?
( $10.000 / ( 0.3 + ( 0.029 * 0.01$ ) ) * 0.01 = $333,01
We would need a javascript script that would make 33301 payments of 1 cent.
This would be a very cost efficient attack between business rivals.
Perhaps if you spent less than 33 cents he won't...
History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
expired domains are a continual source of fun.
[0]https://www.lingscars.com/ [1]https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/li...
Last I saw, he was running the 'Calm' app.
I know, it is not exactly identical to what you are saying, but this is what came to mind, and the idea is very similar, if not the same.
It should work from your PC though.
Every once in a while someone stumbles onto it and drops another dollar in, but I haven't remembered to even bring it up in over a year. I feel like it's just novel enough that if I ever got around to promoting it, it might get to a vaguely reasonable amount of money.
Typing with T9 was much more time-consuming that our autocomplete touch keyboards.
But I know, things are not all bad. I'm only a bit saddened by the disappearance of the reliable deterministic haptic-only control that older phones had.
I was also faster than my friends that did not use T9 but wrote in "txt spk"
Once you've learned T9 (the one where you tap a key a single time for each letter in the word and a lookup is made based on the combination). You can surely be faster than Qwerty.
This was also the reason I developed https://typenineapp.com [1] for iPhone once they allowed custom keyboards.
I am on average 20wpm faster (50wpm for english, 60wpm for my native language danish) with Type Nine on my iPhone compared to the apple qwerty keyboard.
Even though you don't have the tactile feedback of the previous T9 phones on the iPhone I can type without looking just the same way as on a phone with a physical keyboard.
[1] More on my thoughts here - https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing-experienc...
In fact, T9 is one of the last few reasons why I only VERY recently got myself an iPhone. T9 is superior in almost every way to a full touch-based QWERTY when writing texts.
So, great idea and product, mate. This is a buy from me.
This is the one I know best and have used: https://clarity.fm/
It was great a few years ago for validation for a B2B product we wanted to sell and needed unbiased feedback on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19253464
For what it’s worth, we had one of top ten spots on the highscore.money, got some traffic from it (and still get a trickle), but all of them were immediate bounces. Caveat emptor.
Of course you'd need to do it in cooperation with an established Twitch partner. Can't just create a new channel and start charging.