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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :/
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.
I'm reminded how, last year, at work, they changed the length limits on performance reviews from characters to words. They found that character limits resulted in men having more room to express themselves than women -- "she" is longer than "he"; "girl" is longer than "guy", and "female" is longer than "male".
Twitter also has interesting per-country dynamics because it uses a character limit. In Chinese or Japanese, 140 characters can express more words than in English.
I don't get the performance review thing, do people talk about themselves in the third person? I guess for peer reviews you would have less space if you were reviewing a woman, but it doesn't make sense for talking about yourself.
They've certainly come to appear that way, but in female/male (and, to a lesser extent, woman/man) the etymology is distinct.
Female comes through Old French "femelle", which ultimately traces back to Latin "femina" (where we also get "feminine", et al.).[0] Male comes through Old French "masle", derived from Latin "mas" (from which we get "masculine").[1]
It does appear that the ultimate transformation that aligned their spellings _does_ come from the many-centuries-old belief that they shared a common root (see the article on "female").
Woman was indeed a modifier on "man", originally "wifman", but at a time when "man" was almost exclusively in the sense of a human being (e.g., "mankind"). Prior to that, the sexes were "wer" (as in "werewolf") and "wif".[2] A couple centuries after "wifman" is first attested (around which time "werman" was also present), "wer" died off in favor of "man" and we ended up with the roots of our modern words.[3]
None of this to say that people should not continue evolving the language - the modern connotation and perception is far more important in informing how things continue to change. Just hoping to point out that the words actually _weren't_ derived that way.
Your point does, of course, still stand in the facts that "female" was modified to resemble "male" and "wifman" remained when "werman" died out, but this doesn't seem (to me) as demeaning as the idea that they have always been modifiers of the words referring exclusively to male humans.
> The etymology of "woman" is very demeaning. It literally means "wife of man" or "servant".
Your own source disagrees with you; while it does say that it came from a word formed from “wif” plus “man”, “wif” didn't mean what “wife” means now but what ”woman” means now, and “man” meant what “person” means now (which is among the current meanings of “man”, too.)
The literal meaning of the compound is “woman person”. It's true that the compound “wifman” was used both for “woman” and “female servant”, but it's worth noting that the modern English word “man” includes among its meanings (and has for centuries) both “male person” and “male servant” (the latter being most commonly used preceded by a possessive indicating whose male servant is being referred to), so that the old “wifman” was a pretty exact equivalent of the modern “man” ignoring the (semantic, not grammatical) gender neutral senses of the latter.
If you click the link for "man" it lists "servant" as one of the Old English meanings, so it stands to reason that a word consisting of the terms for "female" and "servant" would mean a "female servant". Remember that back in the day being a servant used to be the default for most people.
> Which really is pretty demeaning if you think about it.
Not really: Languages have millions of positive modifiers (including for higher social status) so why assume (and indirectly promote) these ones as automatically pejorative?
Connotations are unrelated to length. Super(wo)man isn't "lesser" just because it takes longer to say, the "default" isn't automatically best.
It's such an obvious idea, and it has been around for as long as spam e-mail has been a problem. I absolutely do not understand why it has not yet been adopted for all e-mail traffic worldwide. If an e-mail were to cost just one cent, it would never add up to an amount that a normal person would even notice, yet it would solve the problem of spam e-mail over night.
But I still receive spam mail in my (physical) mailbox. I imagine they're not doing that for free either.
I agree with you though, it would probably still (drastically) reduce the amount of spam we have to deal with and we might still get some very specific targeted spam
It would kill newsletters and mailing lists. Also, considering that SMS spam is a thing (they cost just under a cent to send), it's not a foolproof solution.
I wonder if this would have the unintended consequence of incentivizing companies to get even more of our personal data so that they're more judicious & targeted in who/what/when they send their emails.
There is De-Mail in Germany that is basically E-Mail. Initially, sending a De-Mail would cost a couple cents. It also offered the possibility to be legally binding, like a physical letter.
Despite some technical/security issues with it, nonne really uses it (although you can now send them for free, IIRC).
Perhaps into a cryptocurrency wallet of my choosing to cover my bandwidth and storage costs incurred by receiving the message?
In fact, I wonder if this could be shoehorned into SMTP somehow? I.e. automatically respond with a unique wallet public key, and only forward the message if said wallet receives a specified payment?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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".
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.
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?
There's a directive from some time ago, maybe 10 years, requiring businesses to put a bricks & mortar address for service on all marketing materials (I modified a few sites at the time), and ecommerce regulations add to that.
I've clarified payments are handled through Stripe. Hopefully that alleviates at least some concerns.
As for the transaction cost, I actually negotiated a lower fixed fee and higher percentage. Also, if the fees would be higher than the revenue Stripe is smart enough not to process the payment.
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.
not really. according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roadmap_to_Unicode_BMP.sv..., any codepoint bigger 0x80 (second half of the first box) is 2 byte per character, and codepoint bigger than 0x800 (anything past the 8th box) is 3 bytes charater. so while it might be fair for CJK languages, it's even less fair for languages that don't mostly use the latin alphabet.
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.
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"
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.
Such compression tricks were also used save money on costly telegraph messages. The telegraph was arguably the first internet device, tying the world together at lightspeed. But wires were expensive and messages consequently so. A standard ten word message cost a workers average day wage. So people used abbreviation tricks seen in texting and twitter. And companies had code word dictionaries where a single word might mean a whole sentence. This saved cost and disquised messages.
In the early days messages were limited by the number of wires, the speed of human operators at both ends and electrical degradation of long wires. 20 bits per second was a good speed. Physicists like Faraday and Maxwell figured out how to lessen degradation. Inventors like Thomas Edison figured out how to multiplex multiple signals on the same wire. And how transmit messages at superhuman speeds with tape players and recorders at both ends.
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 !
Interesting question! I would assume that some invoice must be generated, but it can be in electronic form (e-mail). Getting this right internationally is still a major problem as far as I'm aware, but would love to know if there is a (cheap enough) service that solves it...
Users are charged only once every 24 hours aggregating their usage of the previous period. This way the number of charges/fees/invoices are limited to a relatively small number.
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).
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.
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'.
It's interesting that this favours pictographic languages. You can express a lot more in a few "characters" of Chinese than you can in English! Might be a little more fair if you charged per byte instead of per character, but they would still have a big advantage.
I suppose the same kind of thing applies to the character limit on Twitter.
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.
This reminds me of Twitch, where many streamers have it set up so that you can get a message displayed or even automatically read out on stream if you accompany it with a donation. Of course there it is in addition to a regular free chat and more often used to get the streamer's attention
This sounds really fun! It is one of those ideas that when you first hear it doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm not sure how it will handle transaction costs though. It might be better to allow a minimum of $1 to be added in credits and use that to charge for letters.
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.
I can see why that might seem ambiguous, but I've never heard anyone refer to an electronic message as a "letter". A letter is always in physical form.
"Character" has its own ambiguities (am I a character in this chat room?)
Hihihi this is fun and brilliant !
Had the chance to see it working for a few minutes. It doesn't seem to work now, just a blank page. Hello javascript :(
It's entertaining. It doesn't need to make sense. If you want a sane product with a good business model, well, there's more than enough of that flying around.
drawo.sh obviously wins. Not just because they paid the most. Because its the first ad ive clicked on in ages that gave me exactly what I expected it to. And asked for nothing.
Business idea: corporate email system that offers a limited amount of emails per month, and once the limit gets hit, discounts money from employee's salary.
Add a formula that makes it exponentially more expensive if you add more people to CC.
If people are already working there, this scheme would be illegal in the US. It would violate the employment contract. It might be illegal in many places regardless.
Anyway, people don't like to start at a baseline and then go down from there. It makes them anxious. A better scheme would be to reward people for short meetings, few or concise emails, etc.
Looks nice & seems like a fun experiment but can't help thinking that — at scale, this becomes Twitter, where the average person has relatively short messages like now, but Donald Trump gets an unlimited character count…
