Hi, Pablo here

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A simple solution to spam

Spam is a problem that has plagued the Internet for decades already. Given a negligible cost to reach out, and easy access to some contact method, many annoying people will choose to mass bother all of us in hopes of striking a profit.

Different communication channels have tackled this problem in different ways. Centralized platforms such as Twitter or Facebook can easily observe a user running an unreasonably high amount of comms and punish them for it. Open protocols like email have adopted DMARC, SPF and DKIM, and emails servers themselves might use techniques like machine learning to detect and throw away spam. Chat applications like telegram will show you a big, flashy red button that says "BLOCK AND REPORT" the moment someone writes to you out of the blue, implicitly acknowledging that they perfectly know most first-contacts happening in their kingdom are spam.

These techniques have had some degree of success, but they are far from full eficacy. And some of them have resulted in thrashing protocols (it happened to email, which has become notoriously unmanageable for individuals), or creating pain-in-the-ass UX in other places.

The idea

So here's an idea (not mine at all) which solves spam big time: everytime someone wants to do the spammy action (send email, send message, connect, open chat, etc), ask them to pay. The amount is not really important. A cent will do. A cent of a cent will probably do as well.

That's it, that's the idea.

A simple hypothetical example: I could open up my email inbox for anyone, but only accept their message if they pay me. With this, I would be able to keep myself open to contacts but also avoid the wild west of internet to drown my inbox. I would also protect myself from people who would try to send me a lovingly crafted, good old manual email, but only intending to catch my attention for their own purposes and not being up to putting any effort from their side.

Why would that work? I don't think I need to explain it to you, it's simple and intuitive enough you're just realising: if a spammer needs to pay a cent everytime he shoots, he is going to run out of cents quite soon. Worst case scenario, he keeps spamming, but will become much more select with where he invests his time and resources (which probably isn't that far away from how normal people decide whether they should bother someone else with unsollicited contact) and whoever gets spammed at least gets a some compensation for it. Best case scenario, the spammer switches jobs, finds a better place in the world and we're all happier.

Thus, introducing payments would bring down the noise. And then we could remove many of those weird UX quirks, design and engineering decisions we've been piling on for decades that have made some of our existing communication channels so much worse that they could have been.

Besides the technological side of it, it could also make real people think twice before reaching out. If I'm a lazy bum going to send an email to some random guy who maintains an open source package but hasn't touched in 5 years, asking him if he's going to fix some issue, and I have zero intent to help, support, or contribute to the endeavor (I'm really just trying my luck), I'm probably not even willing to pay a buck for that. And he will probably be grateful about me not bothering him in such a selfish way. On the other hand, if I want to reach out to the lead singer of some indie band in my town because I want to hire his band for my friend's birthday, I really wouldn't mind paying that buck, or even five. And he will be very happy to get messages from people who are truly interested in their band (and prove it by paying).

Finally, this pattern also gives the individual a choice: they can decide how much is it worth being bothered. Some freelancer who is out of work and desperately needs a gig, no matter what, will probably lower the price to get in touch with him heavily, potentially not charging at all. On the other hand, a busy business woman who has plenty of things going on in life might decide she isn't opening her inbox for less than a 1.000$. Don't like that? Too bad.

Some people are already doing this. Jameson Lopp, a very intelligent and prolific business man and engineer, publicly allows you to send him a mesage: but if you want it to be in his high priority queue, you have to pay a 100$. And I think it's great. Having this man waste a single minute of his day on stupid spam would be a terrible loss to humanity.

If it's so great, why is this not implemented everywhere?

I think there's a few reasons this hasn't been done before.

Electronic payment systems have been archaic for decades. Technology has moved at an incredible pace for many decades, but the banking and finance industries, being corrupt oligopolies, have happily sat on their ass collecting bonuses and living the life. Until Bitcoin came along, which changed things. On this front, we're on the right path: there will be more and more solutions to easily apply this anti-spam pattern everywhere.

I also think the mainstream morality ideas in much of the west have tried to suppress selfishness in extreme ways. I know a lot of people would feel plain bad and guilty pretending to charge just to be reached out, out of low self-steem and thinking someone might be pissed off about it ("What do you mean I need to pay a dollar to contact you? Are you not going to help me? Don't you have a heart?").

I really don't know what's the solution for this, if it has one. Maybe we could mail a copy of Atlas Shrugged to the whole world? I will certainly keep lending my hardcover to anyone who wants to read it.

Another reason this is not being done today, even though the idea is beautifully spreading outside of cypherpunk niche corners, is that the tooling is still not that good. Most people are not familiar with using Bitcoin in any of its forms, which is not helping. And we're missing good apps to handle the wrapping of contact details behind paywalls. I haven't set it up myself in this page because it would take time and effort I'm currently not willing to spend, and I know a thing or two on the topic! If you don't have ideas for setting up a startup, this would be a great service to develop. I would happily pay 10% of the incoming money from these anti-spam paywalls if it meant I didn't have to wait a single minute maintaning it.

If you want to look more into it, here are some interesting resources:

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