Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter
expensive.chat
expensive.chat
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.
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.
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.
Over the years, there have been efforts in feminist and academic circles to introduce alternate spellings that are not derived this way. [0]
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.
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.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/female#etymonline_v_5841
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/male#etymonline_v_42792
[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman#etymonline_v_10826
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.
Despite some technical/security issues with it, nonne really uses it (although you can now send them for free, IIRC).
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?
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
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.
"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.
If you spend 1¢ on posting ":smiley:" every day, won't that cost him about 20¢ transaction costs? Eventual DoS by CC transaction costs??
Love the spirit of it on an intellectual level though.
I think that's only in the German speaking part, not the whole EU.
eg https://www.iweb.co.uk/2016/09/ecommerce-website-legal-requi...
I can dig out references to the EU directives if you like but they should be easy to find.
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.
-- not affiliated in any way, just a happy user.
The equivalent message in English “how are you?” Is 10c
你好吗 = 9 bytes
how are you = 11 bytes
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.
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.
73 OM TNX
That took all of three messages...
( $10.000 / ( 0.3 + ( 0.029 * 0.01$ ) ) * 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...
"Hey it looks like you want to send Amelius an email. Please visit this page, where you can pay and make sure your email actually arrives"
But you can use cryptocurrencies/blockchains to send messages, and you would use the proof of work to make sure the price is paid.
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.
I suppose the same kind of thing applies to the character limit on Twitter.
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.
Is this PCI compliant, since CC numbers are typed on his page?
"Character" has its own ambiguities (am I a character in this chat room?)
Plus some damages for my lost time
Honestly, that's quite a compliment.
"We're sorry, but something went wrong."
More info: https://www.nic.rich/
Jokes aside, this business model is not going to see any kind of wide adoption.
Add a formula that makes it exponentially more expensive if you add more people to CC.
Problem with corporate mailing hell solved.
That's purely hypothetical, of course, because no one would take a job at that company.
Make those expensive, too. Or accept people making more phone calls, which is perfectly fine, because you can only call one person at a time.
> no one would take a job at that company
Not if you are already working there, and not if the company sells it as a huge improvement to work productivity and fewer distractions.
what? In the times where 15 people have phone dailies/dailys?
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.