Spam protection & income for read.cash (a suggestion)

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4 years ago

I hope read.cash can become a self-sustaining platform with high quality content.
What I'd prefer to avoid is that low quality spam gets posted here just to flood the place. So here goes my suggestion:

Make the first post by an author within a 24-hour period free of charge.

For subsequent posts, start charging the authors $0.10 more for each one, so $0.10 for the 2nd post, $0.20 for the 3rd one etc.
The figures are only a suggestion, and might be adjusted up or down a bit.

This would provide a first line of defense against spam on the platform.
Authors who frequently post good content that gets tipped should have no problems keeping to their frequent posting, and it would generate a small bit of income for the platform itself.

AFAIK another platform (can't remember whether it was Yours.org or honest.cash) introduced a mandatory charge per post. I think it was relatively well accepted, at least I didn't see a big outcry. I still think having free posting as long as it's somewhat rate-limited, is preferably because some people might want to post good content without having any Bitcoin Cash, and it's better for adoption to give that benefit of the doubt to new users.

Spammers might circumvent and abuse this by registering more accounts in order to post at no cost.

That is a more difficult problem to tackle, but ultimately it should be manageable through UI features that let users prioritize content according to various criteria such as "has been tipped a lot", "has been tipped or commented by people in my list of accounts I've subscribed to", etc.

Anyway, interested to hear what this community thinks about the subject.

2
$ 0.30
$ 0.20 from @Read.Cash
$ 0.10 from @Cain

Comments

Oh and THANK YOU for the suggestion. All suggestions are always very welcome!

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Curation is definitely going to be an issue they will have to tackle at some point. When they have thousands of users, it's going to be interesting what algo they use to determine which posts show up on the front page.

$ 0.05
4 years ago

One more thought occured to us while discussing it. If someone wants to spam - then it would be pretty easy for them to create 2/3/4th account and just use the "free" article per day. IP tracking also won't help - VPNs are cheap and easy these days and give you tens of thousands of IPs.

Still, thanks for the suggestion!

$ 0.00
4 years ago

Also, you have a typo in text: "earn.cash" :) I wish...

$ 0.10
4 years ago

Thanks, fixed

$ 0.00
User's avatar btcfork
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4 years ago

Yeah, curation is definitely going to be a problem, but it would be a great problem to have :) Much better of a problem than "nothing's here".

As for the suggestion - we'll definitely consider it! What worries me is that this kind of introduces "Well, I've PAID for it" mentality, where suddenly we're kind of obliged to provide a platform for this article. I think it's better to have some kind of YouTube-like algorithm which suggests interesting stuff, but it costs nothing to post. Sometimes you might publish 10 articles with zero effect until you find something that works.

I think we're going to return to this problem when it becomes a real problem. Currently there's just to few articles to do something meaningful about that.

$ 0.05
4 years ago

Is the possibility of spam is really a large issue on this platform? I dont think its a big deal with articles, as they cant show up in the feed if they are not being upvoted (which costs money) or if you dont personally follow the author.

Spam could be more like an issue with the comments.

$ 0.05
4 years ago

Well, if somebody posts 100 articles - then it's really hard to find the 101st that is worth upvoting. So it's a problem but it's definitely not the most important problem now.

$ 0.00
4 years ago