As an American kid born along with the digital epoch of the 90s, I'm a bit of an oddity because the only social media I've ever used (& still use) is LinkedIn, which feels like sharing a room with a vipor. I have it set up with a dedicated email address and I only interact w/it in a sandboxed browser on VPN with a dedicated email address. (I guess you could add HN, StackExchange and GitHub to the list since there are pretty social aspects to all three, but I don't know if they count.)
Because I am this weirdo, I can't help being astounded at the level of comfortability people have in ecosystems like the ones Facebook and Google have cultivated. These are really creepy and dystopian models at their core. And they are not helping your damn social life! Believe me, people don't mind being in touch and coordinating through more direct means, in fact most people respond more genuinely to it.
So this is awesome right? Here's something proposing a fresh new model. Except nothing in this article/pitch addresses my concerns/issues with current social media. Like, as a paying member, are they aggregating "marketing" data on me? Are they going to try to follow me around the web and ID me with tracking scripts and under the table data trades with other players? Will they organize my data and sell it on as an "anonymized" individual profile ("Emperor {username}, we bring you new clothes. This is a magical anonymization cloak, making you invisible to any unsavory entities we sell your data to").
In fact, now I have even more questions/concerns! For example:
1) can toxic or just plain wrong information simply be brute-forced to the top with money (or digital tulips or whatever)?
2) how is this not just buying popularity and influence in a contrived environment?
3) do they cap the value of a post / vote or is this susceptible to weird bubbles?
4) if you do break the rules, do you pay to get out of trouble?
This whole thing sounds like someone's been spending a long time getting investors on board and now can't seem to remember what the pitch to the consumers originally was.
First of all, I use Facebook in a similar way (dedicated email, sandboxed browser, external tracking disabled (I know it still tracks me internally), not entirely my real name, no mobile apps, all paranoia privacy settings on, don't really share anything). And I only signed up there a year or two ago. But Facebook absolutely helped my social (and even professional) life. Even if I can reach people by other means, it doesn't change the fact that they prefer to keep in touch with Messenger, we have our private group chats there. Facebook lets me keep up with cultural (art/music) events, and also local dev meetups. I have my current relationship thanks to Facebook as well (I met her in real life first, but we only started to hang out because I looked her up and added her on Facebook and we started chatting there). I even got my dream dev job accidentally, because of a Facebook share by an acquaintance. Buy/sell groups also got me a lot of good deals, including my current apartment.
That doesn't change the fact that, as a company, ethically, strategically etc. I despise Facebook. I hate their manipulative practices. Most of the information shared there is pure shit (but I can more or less choose not to follow it). Regardless, by not being there I'd be losing more than gaining.
Now, LinkedIn I detest even more, thanks to the unsolicited invites from strangers that I get to my private email, even though I haven't even registered there, and I have no intention of doing so.
>Facebook lets me keep up with cultural (art/music) events, and also local dev meetups.
It's 2017. Between aggregators, dedicated sites, instant notifications, apps, Calendar sync et all, we probably have 1000 more ways than every decade in the 20th century to keep up with cultural events and local dev meetups.
I don't think 60s', 70s and 80s culture and art events (and event goers) suffered because they didn't have Facebook to tell them... if anything, from concerts to art exhibition the scene was even more vibrant!
> we probably have 1000 more ways than every decade in the 20th century to keep up with cultural events and local dev meetups.
Yes, that's part of the problem. That's part of why so many people prefer to have one way of keeping up, and choose Facebook for it by default because that's what "everyone else" uses.
It might be more country specific (I don't live in the United States, nor in a metropolis), and specific to the art/music scene and venues I'm interested in, but Facebook really covers most bases for me. And I often discover great events because some Facebook friend is interested in them. Some dev meetups are crossposted to meetup.com or eventbrite.com, but only some, and Facebook aggregates both for me. There's even a group for local IT events.
I understand that things happened before 21st century, obviously, there's still posters, word of mouth, newsletters (in some cases, but they're not that popular over here), but these days, at least where I live, event organizers are using Facebook as a core platform to spread awareness. I certainly didn't know about a lot of these events before I joined Facebook.
And there's events like bike rides, hiking trips etc. organized by individuals... on Facebook.
I wouldn't mind any of this about Facebook except for the fact that it is mostly a walled off portion of the internet. Content has a hard time behaving like a normal part of the internet. So to make it work you absolutely have to have an account.
That's true. However, for better or worse, FB knows a lot about me (and my friends) so it can recommend somewhat related events to me without any effort on my part. There's at least some value there.
> Now, LinkedIn I detest even more, thanks to the unsolicited invites from strangers that I get to my private email, even though I haven't even registered there, and I have no intention of doing so.
I stopped getting spam email from LinkedIn after I set up an account (which I never use).
I used to feel that social networks were a waste of time (even when I worked for Facebook) but in the last couple years that has changed. My social life has been dramatically improved by Facebook because I started using it to socialize with people who share my hobby (growing fruit). Through Facebook groups I've made a number of new friends I never would have met otherwise. We communicate and share details of our hobby on a daily basis. It's great fun. I hardly use the site to socialize with my family and old friends - it's basically a glorified message board.
responseStr = "Well, I only use it for " + singleCase + ". I rarely use it for " + otherStuff + "."
As a former employee you might have more insight than I do, but how exactly has a glorified message board which doesn't charge its users become one of the richest companies in the world?
Sure they're a bit interested in the fruit growing hobby and that network, but they're also very interested in the ways you "hardly use the site" and they're even more interested in the things your doing when you don't even know they're still watching you. Even more interesting, you're actions on and off their platform can be correlated with heavy users of the site to infer traits they'll assign to you and sell on, true or not.
At the end of the day, the way the species is evolving with the internet, giving someone permission to follow you around the web and collect that data on you is the same as giving them insights into your inner psyche, the majority of what composes your reality, and the things you value most in your life, among other things.
These are things we should have a right to offer explicitly, not implicitly surrender.
[edits to elaborate on a couple points and add helpers to the why I use FB excuse]
>...but how exactly has a glorified message board which doesn't charge its users become one of the richest companies in the world?
Because, as you just demonstrated with your programming example: For HIM it's a glorified message board. Other people may use it in completely different ways and appreciate it for them.
I'm not the greatest facebook-fan either, but I think you're really overstating the control they have over people's lives here and at the same time understating the value it can provide to people.
Unless of course all people using facebook are just damn idiots and don't know what they're getting themselves into!
EDIT: 'control over people's lives' might be better phrased as 'knowledge about their activities/preferences'
I think you're missing my point. Google and Facebook are conditioning the population to say no big deal. It's creeping normalcy. Remember when Sergei was trying to make peeps comfortable with Gmail? [para-phrasing here:] "It's not a person reading your email, it's just a robot." Well now the robot is a neural net and I'm pretty convinced (if it's not already) that neural net will start feeding data to other nets built by other powerful institutions that decide whether you get higher education, loans, whether you're likely to be guilty or innocent, &c. Didn't provide enough data, well hell, that's suspicious, throw a red flag.
And people will accept it because we're pragmatic. And those who don't just need to grow up and start pleasing the AI.
A whole new industry will pop up from the ones training nets in the first place. Hey do this and that and our calculations will read you better, you'll get the results you want. We just suggest you don't talk about these things at all, don't shop at these stores, don't have this name or be associated with that demographic ...
This is totally off topic and I apologize, but considering apparently you and I share very similar views on "social networking" and such, you would probably really love (or really hate) the show Black Mirror if you don't already. It does an excellent job of showing just how fucked up things can get when these things get out of hand.
Well yes, I must've missed your point. I was under the impression we're talking about the reasons why people use facebook and not engaging in a privacy discussion. I have nothing to add to that. Have a nice weekend!
I agree we're heading in that direction. There's actually a group of us that talk regularly about this, if you would like to join, here's our group on faceb...
I hardly use the site to socialize with my family and old friends - it's basically a glorified message board.
That's the annoying thing. We already had message boards! Except they were decentralized, you could register anonymously and the administrators often had more autonomy (e.g. not put up ads and tracking scripts). Now Facebook has eaten a bunch of that market, and so we're forced to choose between giving up those communities or submitting to the Borg. It's annoying as hell.
I still think that the information is not well organize. I prefer goes to a standard forum of the 90' to share things.
For what I see on Facebook or social network is :
- look at me
- post without arguing or even answer, discussion.
- look at me
- stalking
- quote about life
- game
- cat meme
0% construction, information is not well organize, scrolling..
Apparently for the majority of people "look at me - post without arguing or even answer, discussion. - look at me - stalking - quote about life - game - cat meme" are just the ticket!
I understand for Facebook that is better that we pay for that they don't sell our data, but I don't understand why we need to paid to post, voting. This make me feel bad. Only rich will post, vote, terrible idea. You even can't down vote. Then why don't allow down vote, or remove for 1000$? You even can have better control of the information. Welcome internet for rich only.
Facebook works ok as a message board while a group is small. But at some point as a group grows Facebook starts manipulating the feed, removes chronological ordering, stops notifying group members consistently, and does whatever other opaque actions that the engagement algorithms dream up.
How do you know if you haven't even used them? Facebook is completely instrumental to my social life and I'm very happy with it. Also, what do you mean with "more direct means"? Is Facebook Messenger not direct enough?
I'll try to address each of your questions / points individually.
The quote from me is probably too strongly worded on my part, but I really don't see the added value. You may have made it instrumental to your social life, but my personal opinion is the price is too high. Unfortunately, when the majority of people choose to pay the price, it switches from being a personal choice to being an expected exchange. This is fundamentally about the right to privacy and it's not something a rational person would trade away for something that can (and has been!) achieved without the terrible price tag.
Usually if something provides a high value, like a car, you invest in it so you can see the returns. My qualm is not with the messaging service per say (I take more issue with the mass posts people make about their kids or others without consent, I believe that's wrong and cheapens inter-personal relationships). I mean, you have to realize they take your keyups, they know when you've reworded before sending and they're tying what you might think of as a personal conversation to the valuable profile you're consciously helping them build and capitalize on.
I've been around a lot of people using messenger. I've found using the phone or email somewhat increases the likelihood of something tangible happening (general follow through) as well as thoughtfulness of the replies I receive. Obviously that's anecdotal and the jury's still out. I guess my question is, how can you assert Facebook would help someone's social life?
I'm not debating your happiness with it. I'm just a little surprised your so comfortable using it.
More direct means would include chatting in person, the proverbial snail mail (you got to admit, receiving a letter from someone you respect/love/h[oh]ld dear is great), phone call or text message. Except for the last one, each one contains a ton more social queues than a chat group.
I don't want any physical mails and I never pick up when people call me. That you seem to think this is something everyone loves is telling. We're simply different creatures and that's why I use Facebook and you don't.
We're different creatures in an analogous sense, sure.
I'm simply raising privacy concerns I have and I believe it affects us all. I was disappointed this model did not address it. Invasion of privacy, profiling and tracking are big issues in my opinion and I would be curious to know why you don't think they are worth mentioning.
I do think phone calls, and spoken word in general, are highly effective. You are not helping yourself socially by refusing to speak to people who are calling you and if none of your friends or loved ones call you, there is likely a problem (I don't know your exact circumstances). I also think it's a fair claim that people are much more likely to value a hand-written letter over a chat forum message. You are offering something tangible!
I'm just proposing alternatives to socialization on a platform like FB which really is, I think, hurting natural and more effective means of communication and self presentation. I'm not saying there isn't a good place and use for internet chatting and what-not, those are great social tools too.
Just to repeat, my main point is I don't think we should have our social lives commoditized. I do not think we should be profiled and tracked across the internet. I see this ending very badly. That's all.
I'm not the previous commenter but here my take on it.
> Invasion of privacy, profiling and tracking are big issues in my opinion and I would be curious to know why you don't think they are worth mentioning.
The thing is that they can do it. It's like saying people shouldn't listen to other people conversation in public. Sure it's "wrong" to do it, but you do know it may and will happen. The web is public, I'm not the only one that can your comment here and that's true for Facebook too.
I know what I post on the web, I know what I do on the web and I all consider them the same way I would do ANYTHING in public. I wouldn't share nude picture of me in a mall, at least if I were, I would be pretty sure that it's done in a relatively private means.
> I think, hurting natural and more effective means of communication and self presentation.
How can you declare it's more effective? I can organize events in a central place, way quicker and keep much more people involved in it that in any of the ways you talk about. You may be able to argue that it's not the most private, but that's not why I use Facebook.
> I see this ending very badly.
The good old slippery slope argument. I'm curious, what's the bad ending that you imagine?
I usually like to use this counter-argument over that one: Hitler didn't ever need social media to kill that many jews...
It's easy to manipulate people to hurt their community and go against what it's good for them. All you need is to control their fears. The funny thing your privacy fears is probably just as easy to manipulate. That's maybe what needs to be fixed, way more than anything else, though I would say that teaching people to be conscient of their actions and their impact is even better.
On the topic of snail mail, it really has become more meaningful to send and receive mail when instantaneous communication is so readily available. Even more so when nowadays the only mail I receive is either bills or spam.
Plus, there's something tangible about a letter that gives it so much more charm. Of course, if I need to make plans or need to get a response promptly, I'll most likely use Facebook.
facebook messenger is fine, but it's exactly the same as any other messenger/texting.
facebook itself is a different beast, aside from the event planning stuff it's pretty much just a bunch of "look at what people you vaguely know are doing" for me
> Believe me, people don't mind being in touch and coordinating through more direct means
I feel like you are from an older generation, not that there's anything wrong with it, but you probably no longer have the same needs as the younger generation. When I organize stuff, I don't always do it between 1 or 2 people. Once we were a dozen that went to an Escape Room, even more people were interested and even more were invited. It was barely organized days before. Sure it works coordinating through more direct means and people did that for a pretty long time, I feel like you had to when you had similar needs, but the thing is, there's a better tool for it nowadays which is Facebook. It's like saying you don't want to use the all good new framework because of the good old way that worked.
Also, it's partially true, people do mind being in direct touch, we had some people that just disappear from our events (and some of them came back using a pseudonym later on) because of that reason. It's a central way to put everything if something goes bad, this is where it's updated if anything changes. Again, it's like saying you don't need a bug tracker because you can easily do it using emails. Yeah, it works, but it tiresome to do it that way.
I personally don't care much about this tracking. It tracks mostly what I give it. I know what it does and I work with it. I'm not afraid of personalized offer, it's all good, offer me a new laptop for a great price, I would be happy to take a look and buy it if it does fit my criteria and my needs.
I don't want Facebook to know that I'm interested in software engineering? Well, maybe that was dumb to tell it in the first place (and in that case, I would use more private means to follow that passion).
>Believe me, people don't mind being in touch and coordinating through more direct means, in fact most people respond more genuinely to it.
FWIW, some do. The only reason I signed up for Facebook was to have an asynchronous medium in which people can "contact" me, instead of trying to meet up, call my phone, text me, etc. I use Google+ for sharing photos/updates with my family while I travel, and LinkedIn for recruiter fishing. I use each of the above at least a few times a week, but always out of necessity; I've set a pretty solid standard of "I may take a couple weeks to respond, but I'll always respond" which is so much nicer than being constantly interrupted by people reaching out through direct means.
Email was nice for this originally, but there's way less friction to contacting someone through FB than there is through email, and keeping social messages out of email keeps my inbox more manageable for productive uses without having to set up and maintain filters.
Of course, YMMV. But just remember not everyone likes/minds the same things. :)
A problem with "social networks", and perhaps the Internet in general, in my opinion, is that they encourage groupthink.
> Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed amongst earlier voters.
This sort of pyramidal scheme actually gives people a monetary incentive to try to vote how others will vote, regardless of their actual opinion. Like other gambling, it may be a good business model, but it serves to exacerbate the groupthink problem.
> It costs 10¢ to post a comment and the money goes to the original author. Our users enjoy paying the original creator to post a nice comment next to their work.
Which would seem to discourage discourage diversity of discussion since profits go to the OP.
What if they tweaked things so if you reply with an agreement to an opposing author, that money is,either split or goes to the opposing opinion's author outright?
This is our first voting model. We have other models planned for favorites, liking, etc. May the best model win. We are always focused on high quality content and will make sure that's the case :)
Exactly what happened on steem.it, people just (re)-posted stuff like they do on reddit and made money from it with no attribution to the original author. I know they tried to crack down on this sort of thing but moderation is really labor intensive and difficult for other reasons too.
In my opinion, Minds has a much more interesting compensation model: you can directly send money to creators (feature called Wire) either generally or on a specific post. There is also an internal points system where you are compensated by interactions with your content. If you have enough points, they have a real monetary value.
Also, as an added bonus, the website and apps are open source, and actually function quite well. It overall has a Facebook sort of feel in terms of feature set; but with a model that seems less exploitative and more collaborative.
That homepage looks like someone made a wordpress site for a megachurch. Gaudy as fuck. When service doesn't get design this early and instead just crams everything they can into a page, it's good sign they're lacking taste, and that's something that can't really be overcome. It's like they're so unsure about their own service that they feel they need to overcompensate by talking about all the features it has instead of just naturally showing them.
And points for hourly check ins? Modals reminding me to install apps when reading posts (got one when trying to read the terms of service, too)? In fact, you apparently can't visit the groups link without getting the pop up. I just want to try your damn site. Ugh. 18 MBs of content on load? Don't do that to the web.
Despite it's own limitations, Yours is lot, lot cleaner.
After some more searching around, it's like the same audience repeated across all of these sites ("alt right" and cryptocurrency obsessed). Stefan Molyneux one of the main users of minds and also one of the first users of Yours? You guys are setting yourselves up for failure if you don't diversify your audience quick.
We suspect that is not the real Stefan Molyneux. We will have flagging and moderation to deal with this soon. Also we will allow more auth options so people can prove who they are (twitter auth, e.g.)
Right now nearly all new social networks (esp the one which promise free speech) will see an influx from alt right and conservative refugees.
Dtube (distributed Youtube) is see it for yourself. People are complaining about alt-right and conservative refugees being the early adopters of any distributed/decentralized/free speech platform:
Here's a list of some non-alt-right profiles I tossed a rock and found. In fact, none of the top profiles appear to be alt-right at all.
https://www.minds.com/Timcast [Independent journalist who frequently embeds himself in mild to hot political protests and is fairly careful with his words]
They might not be "alt right", but they're really fascinated by it. Here's Timcast:
Propaganda, tribalism, and Ben Shapiro in Berkeley
The Alt-Left double standard.
What is bit coin and can you still make money by investing?
Here's the second user:
Pewdiepie did nothing wrong. Anyone acting offended is probably lying through their teeth.
The people who know/care about Shapiro are conservative, same goes for those defending a guy who makes jokes about Jews and uses the n-word.
Your third user just happens to "retweet" the first. It's a very small and focused community there. Also from the last user:
BREAKING: Now is your chance to become a founding investor of Minds. We are taking the idea of a people-powered global network to the next level. Invest now before we reach our goal!
Ben Shapiro is definitely not the "alt-right". Unless by the alt-right you mean all conservatives. He was heavily targeted by the alt-right since he supported Cruz and he still is on the fence about Trump (criticizes him fairly often). Also he is an Orthodox Jew.
He's Townhall, WND, Breitbart which all share a common background with birtherism and people like Bannon. He's just mad that his brand of reactionary conservatism isn't on top.
Yeah, it unfortunately takes time to build a community. The first wave seems to be people who have been burned by mass demonetization and poor discoverability on YouTube. The next mass after that is their audiences. The next after that will probably be the next wave of censorship refugees. This will likely continue until there are enough people for it to be a viable general social network (or not).
I was intrigued, until I read that the payment system is in bitcoin cash. I've really lost interest in cryptocurrency over the past couple of years. I don't want to jump through the requisite hoops to manage another digital wallet just for the sake of engaging on an obscure platform that launched its beta 3 weeks ago.
I have nothing against the site, it's an interesting concept. But having to read about whatever recent bitcoin drama is going on to understand its hard forks and implications (BCC is a hard fork, right?), setup and manage a new wallet, take appropriate security precautions, etc, just to manage my site balance is a lot more burdensome than asking for ten cents to comment.
Easiest solution: send BTC to https://shapeshift.io which they will convert to BCC and deposit it directly to whatever address needs to receive BCC. Shapeshift's main feature is to convert between cryptos with the minimum amount of hassle.
Edit: nevermind, I didn't know yours.org had shapeshift integrated.
Don't worry about it - you can already cash in with any cryptocurrency using our Shapeshift integration. And soon we will have credit card onboarding so you don't have to worry about acquiring crypto at all :)
Note that our app has a built-in Bitcoin Cash wallet, but it works well enough that you don't necessarily realize you are using crypto :)
How does credit card onboarding work? If someone buys content (not sure how this works) and then cashes out in Bitcoin, are you not a bank? Do you mind saying what regulatory hoops you've had to go through for this?
Ideally we will partner with Coinbase. They already have a credit card widget for Bitcoin and Litecoin. Tell them they need to add support for Bitcoin Cash :)
If not Coinbase there are a number of other providers we can use. For global adoption, we will ultimately partner with many third parties simultaneously for this service.
you could create an account, post content, get paid, and technically pay for things by "cashing out" of "yours" to the receiving address for the thing you're trying to buy.
of course, there'll be a point where you DO want to load your account to be able to view content. That's likely in the long term when there are more users and higher quality content.
Having some limit to posts is an interesting idea. But I don't see much of a return on investment for the users in this approach. Why should I pay to have people see my post? Shouldn't I have to pay people to see their posts instead?
Anyway, all of luck to them. I'd like to know what might develop from this.
Though they really should have asked for two cents instead of ten. I mean, come on: how could you miss this?
>Why should I pay to have people see my post? Shouldn't I have to pay people to see their posts instead?
I think people like to write things that others will read. How else to explain why people post so much on e.g. Facebook that is not informational or helpful to others but merely something they want others to read? Introspectively, I recognize that I enjoy commenting on Hacker News and am not exactly doing it wholly out of the goodness of my heart for the benefit of all of you.
From observing the behavior of some people online, I think that there are people out there who just like to write stuff, regardless of whether anyone might read or care. This can be good or bad. I've read good posts from clearly forgotten blogs. I've also read in certain communities posts so inane and out of context that it's hard to even understand why they were written in the first place.
"Shitposting" in it's strictest sense is very much an example of the latter, because it's a repeated pattern of stupid behavior which doesn't even qualify as joking, and which is repeated regardless of whether people pay attention to it or not. It's like drawing swastikas on bathroom stalls.
We're very focused on creating money-earning opportunities for our users. Every time you pay you should either get some thing out of it or have an opportunity to earn money.
For creators, if you write something worth paying, you can easily generate more than the 10¢ it costs to post. If you charge 10¢, you only need one payment to earn your money back :)
> Why should I pay to have people see my post? Shouldn't I have to pay people to see their posts instead?
Based on perceived value, I think that the fee for posting should be negative (it costs to post), but with a small amount recouped based on use (some combination of number of views, number of comments, etc.). Beyond a certain threshold of viewers, the posting would have a net positive cost (you get paid for popular posts).
I have not given much thought to how that could be gamed.
> Though they really should have asked for two cents instead of ten.
My mind was recently blown by how much people tip on gamer streams. I was watching Shroud play PUBG, he suddenly gets tipped $550, doesn't even acknowledge it.
Once you get past the fact that they are both livestreams the similarity ends. Twitch explicitly forbids sexual content [0]. There are some streamers that dress suggestively, but they're in the minority.
Your statement is not much different from calling YouTube no different from PornHub.
This is a great point. But many of these services do not let you withdraw easily or at all. On Yours, you can cash out instantly. Even if the company goes away, you can export your keys and cash out even then :)
We started charging 10¢ to post content on our social network. Our users didn’t leave. In fact, they are posting more than ever, and the quality of content has improved. Our experiment seems to be working. People are willing to pay to post content.
Neat concept (and good domain), but your top post has $2.28. The entire site has 20 new posts ($2?) over the last 24 hours. You don't gotta exaggerate to sell, it just makes me less inclined to trust you and your service.
Seems to be competing roughly with Steem. These services have a problem where the initial adopters are Bitcoin users or fanatical unpopular views (voat), which biases and ruins the community early. Interested to see if this avoids it.
Also, does anyone know what kind of regulatory upkeep a project like this requires? If a site like this operates with multiple currencies, it's essentially an exchange and probably has to register as such (they've outsourced this). However, if it just keeps user balances (not really a bank, but similar), does it have to register with any particular authorities?
edit: your site allows a blank password, the title is "Yours | undefined" on profile pages and the menu controls to the left of the message input are very unintuitive. How do they work? Also, the profile ids are from hell:
Thanks for your great comments. We launched the beta only three weeks ago so it is definitely rough around the edges :) Fixing issues as fast as we can.
> Also, does anyone know what kind of regulatory upkeep a project like this requires? If a site like this operates with multiple currencies, it's essentially an exchange and probably has to register as such (they've outsourced this). However, if it just keeps user balances (not really a bank, but similar), does it have to register with any particular authorities?
We have discussed with lawyers and are sure to stay inside the law. Because all payments are p2p and we are not a custodian, the regulatory burden for us is a lot lower than many other similar projects.
> edit: your site allows a blank password, the title is "Yours | undefined" on profile pages and the menu controls to the left of the message input are very unintuitive. How do they work? Also, the profile ids are from hell:
Will fix soon. These things are already on our issues list :)
So if every payment is p2p does that mean every transaction in yours is a bitcoin cash transaction? Are those cheap enough? I don't know much about bitcoin cash.
People interested in this idea might also be interested in Hashcash. Someone who wants to send and email to someone else also has to provide a "proof of work" with their message, essentially the same thing as Bitcoin mining. The point of it is to reduce email spam by attaching a small cost to each email, since, today, there is no cost difference between sending 1 email and 1 million, which enables spammers to send out so many.
The main benefit is that no real currency is ever involved, which reduces a lot of administrative overhead.
So Hashcash was proposed by Adam Back, who is now the CTO of blockstream, a major bitcoin development firm. His vision, and the vision you describe is actually bitcoin.
A 2017 Hashcash was actually implemented recently and published at http://hashcash.com/
Bad news is that it requires something to store the value, so this requires bitcoin as the token transferred via hashcash.
What you have described in your post doesn't actually work that way in the real world -- You cant set a global proof of work value (bitcoin difficulty adjustment) or able to build a proof of work that would allow a phone or desktop to hash -- it will be eaten alive by spam farms with ASICs (bitcoin mining asic farms).
> Our users also spend money to upvote content. Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed amongst earlier voters. This is our most popular activity. People love to pay money to vote on things. Who would have thought?
That quote caught my attention. Is this kind of gambling or being a day trader? I like the mechanic that unearthing good content gets rewarded -- was that the goal? Have you found this system subject to gaming or collusion (a few people posting and upvoting content to increase the odds of getting a payout)? Do you see less clickbait getting upvoted than, say, on fb? What's the incentive for later readers to upvote an already popular title?
Pretty cool that you taken such a different approach. Wish you the best! I'm pretty much burned out on all social media, but will check it out regardless.
edit: Big question what's your vig or house cut on all the money changing hands?
2nd edit: I see the answer to my last question: you keep $0.10 from from each post and credit yourself as the "first voter on every post". So you get the largest cut of the cost of the upvotes on each post?
> That quote caught my attention. Is this kind of gambling or being a day trader? I like the mechanic that unearthing good content gets rewarded -- was that the goal? Have you found this system subject to gaming or collusion (a few people posting and upvoting content to increase the odds of getting a payout)? Do you see less clickbait getting upvoted than, say, on fb? What's the incentive for later readers to upvote an already popular title?
The vote model encourages hotness. If you want to earn money, you are encouraged to vote quickly. We will have alternate models to encourage different things soon. The next step in rating content will be something we call reviews. After purchasing content, you will be asked: "was this content worth paying for? yes/no". We believe the information we get from that will be a very good measure of quality.
> Pretty cool that you taken such a different approach. Wish you the best! I'm pretty much burned out on all social media, but will check it out regardless.
Thank you very much!
> edit: Big question what's your vig or house cut on all the money changing hands?
Currently our revenue comes from two places: The 10¢ it costs to post content and getting the first vote on all pieces of content.
> 2nd edit: I see the answer to my last question: you keep $0.10 from from each post and credit yourself as the "first voter on every post". So you get the largest cut of the cost of the upvotes on each post?
Yes. This is something we will change soon, probably by either giving the creator the first vote and then charging 20% of all votes or by giving the creator the second vote. It's important that Yours Inc. gets some of the money to prevent infinite self-upvotes. We had that problem originally.
I created a site with similar idea back in 2008 (even tried to get into y-combinator, but no luck). My big stumbling block (among many things) was that I couldn't let people cash out with out a lot of paperwork. Basically either be a bank or create 1099's for everyone. Don't you have "Know your customer" issues or does using cryptocurrency make that go away. I would not think so. May you will just worry about that later, when/if you get traction.
If you consider your system as a gamified version of online posting sites. From what I have read and from my experience people will always try to game such a system. I am sure you have thought about this, just want to read your thoughts on this.
For example, and someone did mention it in the comments below, if I write a script to analyze the kind of content that gets most votes and simply bet on those to maximize the cash earned. Then this will introduce a perpetual loop of content.
Interesting concept. There is definitely an opportunity out there for some kind of Patreon meets reddit model but the execution on these types of businesses is particularly hard to pull off.
Thank you. Hopefully we can pull it off. We have a great asset - very low fees while not being a custodian of user funds. Allows rapid iteration of the product with fewer regulatory concerns.
The authors claim that their users post high quality content but a brief browse found subjectively awful content. I didn't see a single interesting article.
"Our users also spend money to upvote content. Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed amongst earlier voters. This is our most popular activity. People love to pay money to vote on things. Who would have thought?"
Is the payout to early voters greater than 10 cents? And do voters know when they're an early voter? If so, maybe this is why it's such a popular activity!
Every post is a miniature pyramid scheme. Like those chain letters that say 'send a dollar to everyone on this list, then add your name to the list and pass it along to everyone you know'.
Indeed. That's why it might work :-) gamification of content generation.. now if they can only keep the content quality high.. how about allowing people to downvote and punish low quality content? I tried something like that on booklove.rs
If there were 0 fees on Bitcoin Cash, the payout to earlier voters could be arbitrarily high. It's a divergent series. Because of tx fees, there are limits. BCC has low fees, but not zero.
You know you are an earlier voter by looking at the amount voted. That is the amount below the vote button.
It's a Twitter clone that stores usernames, follows and posts in EthereumVM. Transactions are optimised for costs, right now it's around 0.01USD to follow/post
>Most people told us it would never work, but we did it anyway: We started charging 10¢ to post content on our social network. Our users didn’t leave. In fact, they are posting more than ever, and the quality of content has improved. Our experiment seems to be working. People are willing to pay to post content. That is not the only thing we’ve done differently. Our users can submit content with a pay wall, at a location and price of their choosing, and charge to access the full version of their content. Most users charge 10¢. Quality content sells. Sometimes for $1.00 or more. Many people told us this would never work, but it seems they were wrong. Our users are willing to pay for good content.
I think those users meant "it will never work at scale".
Seeing that yours is a totally obscure social network -- it might be OK for a small niche.
Heck, The Well charges for belonging to a discussion group.
That was definitely my reaction. "People said it would never work! But it's worked for three whole weeks among cryptocurrency users, a group already selected for a) early adopter status, b) credulity, and c) a currency-focused worldview!"
I look forward to seeing how it goes, and I'm always glad that people are getting out and doing the experiments that they find compelling.
But it's very dangerous to confuse novelty with utility. As examples, consider the 90s wave of VR. Or the many waves of 3D photos/movies/TV. Early try-it-out interest among technophiles is proof of novelty, not long-term utility. And especially these days, social networks are, like the human relationships they channel, long-term propositions.
Very interesting. I immediately liked the product when I read this, but giving it a few minutes of thought and it doesnt seem too exciting anymore.
The fundamental problem I see is that it kind-of 'corrupts' gratification. When I make a post, or do a vote, or write a comment, I dont want to think about the monetary value of it. There is 'value' inherent in creating/sharing interesting content and thats all I want to think about.
Adding money to the mix makes it a distraction from a 'pure' experience and takes away value than adding it. Ads do something similar - but imo ads are less distracting than putting a monetary value on an upvote.
Still this is very interesting experiment. Would love to follow updates on hn.
I am just adding high quality content because I think I'm better off directly charging for my content rather than going the ads-route. I hate ads. I (and probably everybody else on this platform) sees as the greates-valued addon in his browser the ad-blocker.
I will run a few tests, see if people are willing to pay for high quality content.
I don't see this as my facebook-replacement. Facebook is fun, to watch cute little videos while enjoying my "extra privacy" during the day. Facebook isn't for high quality content. Facebook isn't good anymore for staying in touch with friends (for me) - Facebook messenger yes, but the Facebook wall - no.
I also don't think that "yours" will be the next Facebook. I see it as direct payments channel for independent high-quality content creators. Something like steem, just more straight forward for me. I like the concept and I'll see if it works for me.
10c is more expensive than local phone calls are in alot of countries. Not a bad idea though, could make alot of spamming unviable even with a small amount like 1c. What about if you "like" something, a portion of the fee goes to the original poster?
"What about if you "like" something, a portion of the fee goes to the original poster?"
Maybe if the likes only got you store credit up to what you've put in but never for profit? If profit from likes was possible, we'd end up with tons of posts karma whores go for.
Spam is exactly why we turned on the 10¢ to post. Cleaned up the spam pretty well :)
We will allow subcommunities soon which will allow moderators to pick the cost to post. Low-income countries can use a very low value denominated in their local currency appropriate for those users.
I read FAQ for Yours.org. The voting looks like a pyramid scheme:
>You can earn money by voting on good content. Each vote costs 10¢ and the payment is distributed evenly between all earlier voters. Yours Inc. always makes the first vote. You can vote on something as many times as you'd like. You will earn money if you vote on something popular early, because you will get money from all votes after you.[1]
I've been telling anyone who will listen that we need a public social media platform funded by just such a mechanism, akin to similar institutions like copyright registration and the postal service.
Innovation could occur on top of what is a very simple data model and doesn't need the free market to stay relevant.
Our public institutions are what we make of them. If we despise and distrust them they will wither and die. If we encourage and support them they will flourish and we will all prosper together.
I'm curious, what are the tax implications of this? You're spending money, you're receiving money--does it tell you at the end of the year how much you've taken in vs how much you spent, so you can report it as taxable income? I acknowledge that the average person would probably end up with a negative balance at year-end, but someone who wrote popular posts could end up making hundreds of dollars due to upvotes and comments, right?
Make sure your site allows fivefilters to send your blog posts to my kindle. Otherwise, they will not be read. I publish to kindle everything to read & then go for a walk reading along the way. The Lidl checkout line makes for very good reading time.
Yes! We have not done and ICO and don't intend to until we can do it the real way - by putting our company equity on the blockchain, allowing it to be traded globally p2p. That will require a lot of work legally for that to be possible. No rush - we'll do it when the time is right :)
Also, on the friction of Bitcoin Cash, note that we currently have a Shapeshift integration allowing you to cash in with any crypt, and will support credit card onboarding soon. We think most users won't even know they are using crypto :)
If you click "New" at the parent site, you'll see that essentially it' micro-Patreon/Kickstarter full of beggars and spam that baits you to click "read more" to earn that 10c.
I worry about not being able to get refunds for poor content. I clicked around a bit on the domain and there were a couple articles that had click-baity titles - an interesting premise, but I was turned off from the nature of the presentation:
- How Bitcoin will see massive adoption – it might surprise you.
- Still Don't Get Bitcoin? Here's an Explanation Even a Five-Year-Old Will Understand
I know reading would only cost $0.10 (or even less) which is not a life affecting amount, but I don't like the idea of that 'test' being seen as some sort of endorsement that I can't revoke.
I think psychologically it is different, and people are more likely to splash their lottery win money around especially if it's just 10c at a time rather than their hard earned money.
I guess they independently came up with similar notions. Good luck with their initiative. Because I really hope there can be viable alternatives to advertising revenue for online content.
Maybe for posting, but 10c to consume or upvote content might be too high. Think about how many pieces of content you consume on a Facebook feed or on your reddit homepage. And 1k upvotes would translate to $100...sounds rich to me. Wonder how they intend on preventing spamming posts / content farming / gaming the system in that kind of environment.
After they have their conferences where all the rich people support them, they give the content away to the masses for free. The point to take away from this is that some people are willing to pay a huge amount of money for "networking".
We think that might be true. We're very market-minded and intend to give our users the power to set prices wherever possible. We'll let the natural price arise.
Here is an idea for you Ryan: perhaps you could tie the money setting to an article's reach... that way you make everyone an owner of the page and strive for highest quality together. That's a more dynamic setup that rewards high quality - in the article as well as the comment section.
Or it's too high because why should anyone pay $0.10 to post on a nerdy and tiny social network when Twitter is free and you can reach hundreds of millions?
Bitcoin cash! Ewwwwwwwww, i wont touch that with a 10 foot poll. As a holder of bitcoin, I will never spend the UTXO's on this chain, thus denying this false bitcoin of spendable outputs.
Wouldn't something like lightning network microtx's be better than Bcash?
Yeah, we must run MS-DOS forever. All software upgrades and protocol changes are wrong. We don't want no GUI or protected mode runtime, we will hatefork MS-DOS and run it forever. /s
Because I am this weirdo, I can't help being astounded at the level of comfortability people have in ecosystems like the ones Facebook and Google have cultivated. These are really creepy and dystopian models at their core. And they are not helping your damn social life! Believe me, people don't mind being in touch and coordinating through more direct means, in fact most people respond more genuinely to it.
So this is awesome right? Here's something proposing a fresh new model. Except nothing in this article/pitch addresses my concerns/issues with current social media. Like, as a paying member, are they aggregating "marketing" data on me? Are they going to try to follow me around the web and ID me with tracking scripts and under the table data trades with other players? Will they organize my data and sell it on as an "anonymized" individual profile ("Emperor {username}, we bring you new clothes. This is a magical anonymization cloak, making you invisible to any unsavory entities we sell your data to").
In fact, now I have even more questions/concerns! For example:
1) can toxic or just plain wrong information simply be brute-forced to the top with money (or digital tulips or whatever)?
2) how is this not just buying popularity and influence in a contrived environment?
3) do they cap the value of a post / vote or is this susceptible to weird bubbles?
4) if you do break the rules, do you pay to get out of trouble?
This whole thing sounds like someone's been spending a long time getting investors on board and now can't seem to remember what the pitch to the consumers originally was.