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Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this the opposite of what I want? I don't want people willing to pay getting into my inbox. Those are the people who think they can get more from me somehow. Those are exactly the people I want to not be in my inbox.

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I imagine the point is that if you make the price high enough, the ones who don't want it enough will go away, and the ones that do will want it enough that it's worth your while. You can set the price to whatever threshold is high enough that you'd find the money worthwhile.

pretty much this. The idea is that putting work / resources behind the sent message translates into more relevant messages getting into the owner's inbox.

That ignores the entire set of people who are not contacting you to get something out of you but rather to help you or for any number of social purposes. Those will be priced out much faster than dedicated spammers - most of them by any amount above $0.

I don't necessarily disagree, but that seems like literally the opposite of the objection that I was actually responding to. My point wasn't that this idea is infallible, but that I thought there was a flaw in the logic of the one specific objection that I chose to reply to.

Bill Gates wrote about paying to send you mail in his 1995 book "The Road Ahead" (yeah this is an old old idea). His expansion was that you could refund the sender's "stamp" if you consider their email worth your while.

>the ones who don't want it enough will go away, and the ones that do will want it enough that it's worth your while..

Counterpoint: if you think you need to pay for my attention, that's a negative signal for what you're asking me. If I'm giving 10 vendors a shot at my business, I'm not going to pay money for the right to give you that opportunity?

On the other side, the only person paying $5 to ask me something is probably someone getting a lot of no's elsewhere. That, or what I offer is so valuable that people are willing to pay for it. But that's not most people.

Sure, that's fair. I'm just saying that I probably would read a dumb solicitation email from someone who gave me, like, $10,000, but in practice that will be almost nobody, so either way I'd win!

You will get fewer of them because they all must pay a cost for each message sent. Spam works now because it's free.

that is what I was thinking

Plenty of companies pay the post office to deliver paper spam to my mailbox each day. I don't want any of that, either. "Free" makes spam easier, but a cost doesn't prevent it.

No... but paper spam actually pays less than a regular letter. Make it pay more, and the amount will go down. Not to zero, but down significantly.

The post office _wants_ some spam ads in the mail. They get paid less but everyone gets it. At this time without mail ads there would not be enough mail most days to send a postal carrier out. Think of it as the fiber in your diet. You don't get anything nutritional out of it but it helps move things along.

Physical mail costs money, but 80% of the mail I receive is junk mail that somebody has paid to send me.

Of the 20% of mail that is useful to me, it's still pretty much all just from corporations who have decided to send me a physical letter even though they have my e-mail - e.g. the water company sends me some brochure to somehow justify how much money they're charging by breaking down what they spend all their money on etc...

I get almost zero "real" mail from actual people nowadays. Now it costs £1.80 to post something first class and 91p second class, real mail is basically limited to birthday and Christmas cards. I myself send so few letters, than I still have a couple of stamps in my wallet that I technically bought 6 years ago when they cost 35% the current price (although they were replaced with barcode versions by sending them in to Royal Mail).

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