alec on Nostr: Someone’s probably said this before, or maybe it already exists, but I don’t know ...
Someone’s probably said this before, or maybe it already exists, but I don’t know of it so…
An idea: pay-to-inform discovery
Imagine you have some internet service whose product is to solve discovery, i.e. offer a user a really good recommendation algorithm for some data source, such as twitter or nostr relays.
The user informs the service that they like a piece of content by pressing some button on that post and paying the service some amount proportional to how much they liked it (like a zap but it pays the service).
The payment says “thanks for showing me this, I would like to see more like it.” Then the service goes out and tries to find more stuff that the user is willing to pay to see more of.
The service makes the most money by showing you the content that you are willing to pay for, and in doing so, shows you content you really like—otherwise there’s no way you would pay to see more of it.
When the metric a discovery service uses to tell if you liked something is that you spent more time on the app, or that you pressed a heart icon, it gets a pretty low-cost signal of what you actually like.
Payment seems pretty high signal. An indication that this content was an “unregretted user minute” some might say.
On first thought, I was wondering, “but who wants to pay for something that’s usually free?” It’s why I don’t pay for twitter currently. But I think this could probably work fairly well with small amounts.
Not sure how it would play out in practice, but the incentives seem pretty nice. Enough to make me want to use something like it at least.
An idea: pay-to-inform discovery
Imagine you have some internet service whose product is to solve discovery, i.e. offer a user a really good recommendation algorithm for some data source, such as twitter or nostr relays.
The user informs the service that they like a piece of content by pressing some button on that post and paying the service some amount proportional to how much they liked it (like a zap but it pays the service).
The payment says “thanks for showing me this, I would like to see more like it.” Then the service goes out and tries to find more stuff that the user is willing to pay to see more of.
The service makes the most money by showing you the content that you are willing to pay for, and in doing so, shows you content you really like—otherwise there’s no way you would pay to see more of it.
When the metric a discovery service uses to tell if you liked something is that you spent more time on the app, or that you pressed a heart icon, it gets a pretty low-cost signal of what you actually like.
Payment seems pretty high signal. An indication that this content was an “unregretted user minute” some might say.
On first thought, I was wondering, “but who wants to pay for something that’s usually free?” It’s why I don’t pay for twitter currently. But I think this could probably work fairly well with small amounts.
Not sure how it would play out in practice, but the incentives seem pretty nice. Enough to make me want to use something like it at least.