If their vision is "applications" it feels like any price is too high. Would you sign up for hn if it cost 5 cents? Even though that is nothing in terms of money (for most of us), the friction of money actually being involved in and of itself probably makes it not worth it. Especially when its just a silly internet thing.
I think it's helpful to realize that most everything on the internet is already financialized by default. Whenever you post a comment, upvote, or "write", it costs some company somewhere an amount of money to maintain the marginal amount of server capacity required to process your request. And if you aren't paying for the product, then you are the product of course (ads).
So blockchains don't necessarily financialize things that aren't already financialized, they just tend to make money flow in a more direct way from a group of people using a service to a group of people hosting/providing it. Instead of paying using a micropayment of attention that gets monetized through a complex and often bespoke advertising arrangement, you can pay using a micropayment of a recognizable asset that has actual market value.
Personally, if I could click a single Apple-pay-like button in my browser to attach say 0.5 cents of postage to this Hacker News comment to get it to post, I doubt I would think twice about it. In fact, I would probably participate more confidently knowing it's a deterrent for bots (less of a problem for Hacker News, but a huge problem on Reddit and Xitter).
> they just tend to make money flow in a more direct way from a group of people using a service to a group of people hosting/providing
I suppose there is a certain sense that transaction fees go to people providing services to the blockchain... but i would mostly describe it as paying rent and not actually paying the person responsible for the service.
Farcaster is doing it (allowing posting, upvoting etc) with a pragmatic architecture with different degrees of decentralization (identity onchain, posts on a p2p storage à la bittorrent), and it's going pretty fine... https://warpcast.com/
I'd happily pay a subscription to a closed community if I thought the value of the community was higher than the entry cost. However, I'm glad Hacker News is open and democratic.
If that was the cost of decentralization I am sure a lot of users and especially content creators would consider it. I would rather pay 5c per year on Twitter and own my social graph, rather than pay 0c and leave the platform in the hands of the highest bidder.
