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Comment by Noaidi | Hacker News Reader

A nickel for each iMessage…

Some countries still charge for SMS. That's why WhatsApp is so popular in many places of the world.

No way really .. amazing in 2026 if true

There's basically two mobile worlds in India. The middle class has mobile plans basically like the rest of the world, while the poor (especially the rural poor but also to some extent the urban poor) have a pay-per-use account that also functions as their bank. So sending a text might cost 2 rupees, and an MMS might cost 6.

in a lot EU countries, still today telco contracts are marketed with "...and unlimited number of SMS into all networks..."

Its still widely used :-D

Honestly… if we implemented $0.01 charge on every message, post and etc. the world would become an amazing place.

I think that spammers would happily pay that rate.

Today out of curiosity, I tried looking at what is the cost of one PVA (Pre-verified account) of google. I found it to be around ~$0.03 (3 cents) or it could be an amazon account idk or maybe an youtube account

Like my point is that atleast for amazon/yt, these bots usually cost this much ~$0.03 to buy once.

Then we probably see a scammer buy many of these accounts and then (rent it?) on their own website/telegram groups to promtoe views/ratings etc./ comment with the porn ridden bots that we saw on youtube who will copy any previous comment and paste it and so on.

So technically these still cost 3 cents & scammers are happily paying the rate.

I mean...that's how SMS used to work? Or still works?

Once upon a time it was expensive to send messages and now it's cheap.

Yeah. Iirc, I used to have to pay $0.20 per SMS message, sent and received, before unlimited plans became a thing. Also had a limited amount of minutes for phone calls.

I remember Verizon wireless at the time had a plan with unlimited nights and weekends for calls and texts, so my friends and I would message each other like crazy on the weekends when it was free. Got grounded when I got my first girlfriend in high school for racking up the phone bill from text messages and promptly got my phone taken away.

You had to pay for receiving SMS?

Yeah, in the early days, at least in the US, carriers used to charge for both incoming and outgoing SMS unless you had a plan that included it, usually with a limited amount of messages and they were quite expensive for the time.

It costs to mail physical letters, somehow I still get "spam" addressed to homeowner/resident in my physical mailbox.

1. This would not deter bad actors in any way, spammers already have no issue paying for junk mail. An 0.01 cost means nothing if the action they're taking generates more than 0.01 for them (it generally does). In fact this essentially incentivizes bad actors; you get punished for not profiting off your messages, so people would be more inclined to find ways to monetize their posts.

2. The costs for this would be ridiculous. I have probably sent over a million public messages on Discord in the decade I've been using it. $10,000 is a pretty steep fee to do some chatting.

3. This is essentially a digital ID scheme with extra steps, and requires ceding privacy completely to communicate on the internet.

I understand your comment was probably an off-hand joke and not to be taken seriously but if you think about it for very long it becomes apparent that it would actually make the problem worse.

>spammers already have no issue paying for junk mail.

Junk mail isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things. And I'd be surprised if the margins for this was so high that a mere 1 cent transactions wouldn't deter so many of them.

I see it the opposite. You will never stop truly motivated propaganda from spreading its messae. They put millions into it and the goal isn't necessarily profit. But you stop a lot of low time scammers with a small cost barrier.If only because they then take a cheaper grift.

I was talking about good actors as well!

Yes. Now you have to dox yourself to the platform to be able to talk to anyone, because payment cards are linked to strong ID.

That would totally amplify the voice of people you want to hear more from, not less /s

This was Bill Gates' idea with regard to a bit-tax, and goes someway to explaining why Microsoft initially didn't believe the internet would take off (and tried to push their own MSN walled garden as an alternative).

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