Teenagers will be able to sell data and content to the network. It’s not a network which can exist for free because calories are not free. This means text messaging costs both in terms of requiring fuel for content producers as well as “farm land” for SAFE Network.
How are teenagers supposed to get enough calories to stay alive? They need to pay for those calories or someone else pays for their calories. What about teenagers who have no parents? Also what about when these teenagers are adults and their main skill is texting?
Teenagers can monetize texting by selling access to their feeds, by charging advertisers a fee for their limited attention, by playing games for prizes, by vlogging, lifelogging, or producing valuable content.
Micropayments are the only way that billions of workers will be able to participate in the economy as content producers. This isn’t just about teenagers but about allowing everyone to participate in the free market. The only way to have full participation is to monetize every aspect of digital life if you believe in capitalism. If you believe in something else then you have a right to that too just as long as people who are capitalists can monetize their digital lives.
In practice:
I don’t think teenagers as an example should be taken literally. I go along with that example for sake of argument but in my opinion I know if I had teenagers I would not want them on SAFE Network because it’s not the safest place to be. The reason teenagers are important to the discussion is because although teenagers are among the most skilled content productive producers on the Internet they also not being able to monetize. Micropayments allow for anyone to monetize content production so that data has non 0 value
Information/knowledge diffusion is a primary function of the Internet as a network. Individuals who partake in this process currently do not get paid very much at all. The advertisement model exploits the vast majority of people involved in this process. In my opinion the only way to put a value on this process is to monetize it otherwise no one will know how valuable a specific twitter account is, or how valuable certain perspectives are.
In a world where digital life is monetizable then people will be able to choose whether or not they want to profit from their digital activities or not. If for example the automation were transform most jobs into digital type jobs then monetizing will become critical if people are expected to produce content going into the future.
Today we assume content production is free because the content producers have a day job. Maybe in the near future their day job wont exist anymore and content producers will have to charge micropayments to continue producing content. I’d be happy with that future because we’d get the maximum amount of quality content while if we don’t let content producers monetize the quality of content will diminish as content producers lose their “real job” income.
It’s not a conflict it’s just that we have two different visions. In the vision I have the “participant/user is king” is the model. To cement this would require that the user take back ownership of their eyeballs “users own their attention”, take back ownership of their data “users own their data”, and give users the maximum ability to monetize whatever assets they own.
Since you own your attention if you’d like to give it away for free to some people you can. I would not do it through whitelisting though because it’s not granular enough. I would suggest that your attention be tokenized and you simply distribute your tokens to all who should have free access to your attention by proving you sent the token to them.
So if you give each member of your close social network an attention “interrupt token” then they’d have the ability to interrupt you at any time and the attention “interrupt token” acts as access control. Every time they interrupt you the token would get spent and if they remain on your whitelist then a new token would get sent out to them every time they redeem.
Everyone who doesn’t have an attention token would not be able to access your attention at all. There is granularity because the amount of attention tokens someone has would determine the amount of priority they’d have in the attention line. So if it’s an email inbox the people who are closest to you have the most attention tokens so their emails always hit you immediately even if you’re not at your computer but they would have to spend a lot of tokens for that.
If someone abuses your attention or wastes it then they’ll constantly run out of tokens. Over time you can just give them less tokens. This way you can manage your attention like you would your checkbook and anyone who is extremely attention expensive would immediately be noticeable on a chart.
The chart could track how many tokens you’ve given to each person. It would track how much attention they use because your tokens should be finite as your attention is and so if a person is constantly requesting you to give then more and more tokens it will become clear to you that this person is attention expensive.
What if I made a puzzle, or had a password in order for someone to message me. This very much reminds me of sharing public keys. First you must have my public key and then you can message me, more than once let’s put it this way. Without my password, you can get just one chance to catch my attention or prove to me that I know you from life or from the digital realm, then I can send you back a password in order to message my one alias.
This could get heavy, having to remember so many passwords, though considering:
Dunbar’s Number:
using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results
of primates, he proposed that humans can only comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.
Actually that is not a bad idea. What if in order to message you the person must solve a few ravens progressive matrix questions? Some sort of logic or IQ puzzle which requires attention to solve but which is easy enough that anyone can solve it. Then you can filter by IQ if you wanted to by simply using progressively more difficult questions to get your attention faster.
If it costs mental processing to get your attention then only people willing to give their attention could get yours. This would be a way to do it so it’s still free and would possibly keep bots out or allow you to keep people away who aren’t capable of solving the logic puzzle.
Could this be exploited or would it work? I’m not sure it would keep bots away but maybe for now it can since they can?
I have a question. When we talk about whitelisting, what are we talking about?
My understanding is that Maidsafe does not have a DNS, and your public IDs change on a regular basis. So what someone calls themself is more of a suggestion that people should call them that in their contacts, rather than being a one to one association with a particular number. So if I’m interacting with someone, whether its to do a safecoin transaction or whatever, we have a conversation using the IDs that we have at the time.
But then once my public ID changes, they can’t necessarily find me again just because we had a conversation in the past. So is the “whitelist” a way to give people the ability to “locate” the people they had dealt with in the past, in a more permanent fashion?
If its not, then what is it?
Alternatively, would that sort of structure, where the underlying framework is pretty much anonymous, and it requires affirmative action to give people a permanent locator ID, be desirable?
These are good questions and I’m not entirely sure what they mean when they say whitelisting. I should probably look at what developers have been working on to find out but I haven’t been posting on the forums in some time so I’m not the most aware right now.
I would do it with tokens though. If they have the tokens then they’re part of the list of token holders.
In the messaging system you will be able to whitelist store public names of people you will accept messages / contact requests from (all others banned)
Also blacklist Any contact added to your blacklist will have their messages silently dropped (filling up their outbox)
Yes if you choose to use the whitelist, it really means you cannot be contacted out of the blue. You need to allow the person to connect with you by exchanging details (names) via talking etc. bit like the business card phone number. I see this being used for very popular busy people who cannot take all the contact requests. Can also be twitter like (you follow me and I can message you if so).
Just an idea to throw out. You could only allow one message from an unknown source, until it is acknowledged as someone that you wish to correspond with. These could be categorized as stranger emails or some such until they have been acknowledged.
If you expected someone to contact you, you could search your stranger list, etc, then select to add to white list.
Under the hood, this could mean that every new source is allowed one email prior to auto-blacklisting. If the stranger is confirmed as someone who I is known, they could be whitelisted.
Edit: obviously, additional messages would just queue in the sender’s account costing them money to store too.
Some valid points here in relation to the attention economy. Synereo have an interesting model but not sure if they are building on maidsafe.
I agree that we should give users the ability to monetize their attention with micropayments. Attention is monetized already albeit users are not the beneficiaries is most instances, as was mentioned before, the users eyeballs of apps becomes the product, data is monetized and advertising bombards us all through our current digital life.
In a platform I was working on we gave individuals the ability to set a default flag rate which was the amount required to send a message to someone who you had the address of, addresses were not private per se but this feature was designed to put a cost on the sender to pay for your finite attention. Users could also set flag rates for individual contacts and also “forgive” payment if chosen. These rates could be changed at anytime by the individual users. The whitelisting feature was a list of contacts you had chosen to automatically “forgive” payment so they would not get charged to message you.
This platform was a modified version of a group of micropayment websites my father in law had built a decade ago. He never really got it of the ground for many reasons and has given all of it to me to modify, not sure what I would salvage. There were numerous flaws with the way he had designed it and many aspects I didn’t agree with, which I wont go into here, but there are some great concepts to work with. If any of you are interested here is the link Welcome to CashRamSpam.com
Spam is such a massive attention cost in both individual and organizational terms and I’m looking forward to seeing how messaging will evolve on maidsafe.
Safecoin has the ability to facilitate micropayments for messaging and any cost of PUT would be minimal if plaintext as has been mentioned. When multimedia comes in to messaging cost rise I guess which may be a deterrent for initial user traction. Having kick-ass UX and UI is going to be the challenge so all the technical details and transactions are not even thought about by the general user.