I wanted to test a theory: does financial friction change online behavior?
Built a message board where posting costs $10. Your message value decays over time (faster with more viewers), community votes affect it, and only 100 messages can exist — lowest value gets archived.
Observations so far:
Zero spam without any moderation
People write deliberately, not impulsively
A "Country Wars" dynamic emerged — 8 nations competing for leaderboard
Meta-humor works: "Nobody will pay for that" is worth $64
The chat debates under messages are more engaging than the messages
Stack: Next.js, Fastify, PostgreSQL, Redis, WebSockets, Stripe
I don't know if this proves anything about attention economics or if it's just self-selection bias. Curious what HN thinks.