No prisons, no limits.
It doesn't make sense to put a jpg or a blog post behind a paywall. If it's good, it will be available for free in no time. Someone will right-click save the thing, or take a screenshot, and send it around or republish it. Trying to fight that is stupid. Putting chunks of data behind prisons is stupid.
All data can be reproduced at zero marginal cost, leading to infinite supply. That's why market prices are ridiculous for blog posts, and why it's equally ridiculous to try to sell a single blog post. What you CAN sell is access to an exclusive club or community, as well as access to the author. That's what all Twitch/YouTube/OnlyFans have figured out. But make no mistake: they're not selling JPGs. They might sell early-access (in the case of OnlyFans) which is fair, but it's not selling a JPG as you would sell an apple. Early access because if the stuff is any good, it will be available for free to anyone everywhere.
Here's the thing: people love to support other people, so let them. No limits. The success of Patreon and Substack does not come from paywalls, but from the inherent willingness of people to support others. Lean into that. Let people give without limits.
Social signaling is important. Community is incredibly important too. Do that right, and we can 100x the whole space just like a switch from $50 per game to free-to-play 100x'd the gaming industry, selling cosmetics and social status only.
Computers are copying machines. Information yearns to be free. People want to support the stuff they love, and they're willing to pay for it. Not all people, but ~4% of them. And that is enough.
I wrote about all that at length in the past, e.g. here:
"Copying something at zero marginal cost leads to a virtually infinite supply of that thing. It doesn't matter if that thing is a JPG, a blog post, or an mp3 file. If it can be copied by anyone quickly, perfectly, and for basically free, the supply of said thing quickly approaches infinity. We move from the analog world of scarcity into the digital world of abundance. Markets don't work in this world. In the words of Jaron Lanier: "Markets become absurd as supply approaches infinity.""
https://dergigi.com/2022/12/18/a-vision-for-a-value-enabled-web/
I'm mostly with you. I think the gaming example is a bit dubious. Probably the best game released in ages, amongst a whole garbage heap of both paid and free to play, is a paid game - Elden Ring. Free to play is mostly trash, disposable and will have not much of a fond legacy. There are some exceptions obviously.
Just a little aside. I appreciate the argument tho, I'm just not all that onboard with that analogy.
Exactly. Free to play opens the game for many more players but it comes with a heavy cost. All free to play games compensate with ads and/or inapp purchases. Both forcing developers to make at least some design choices which are NOT in the game’s best interest, thus decreasing the quality of the game itself.
That's fine. My point is a general one: there is a better way to monetize than charging $0.02 for a blog post (or participating in the surveillance machinery), we just have to figure it out.
Curious thing about thoughtful content creation is it’s impossible to know if a given piece is worth anything at all so really the author is the buyer and he is buying your trust with content. There is no true price discovery in this space because the media itself is not the product. Trust in the author is the product.
Yes, I totally agree. I think substack is a great example. There's also this curious project by one of the Kickstarter co-founders. Metalabel.com
He seems like an interesting guy, and this is well worth a listen, a lot of what he says would be onboard with what can be built on nostr.
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Substack is actually a bad example because it's a subscription freemium model, with set pricing, not V4V.
V4V is just a new way to say "have a tip jar".
Community software. micro-apps that are unique to a network/fandom and provide specific function or experience that only the network understands.
I'm designing for this and I need help in coming up with more examples of widgets that'd be useful for specific communities.
Interesting that you're designing for this, because we're building an entire computing paradigm meant to facilitate this: https://github.com/operating-function/pallas
We should talk 😉
Ooooh 🤩
I'm gonna need some time to grasp this (not a real coder here).
At this time, our GitHub repo and all of our docs are squarely aimed at software developers. We are a little ways off from have a product and written material appropriate for a wider audience, but the ultimate goal is your grandma should be running our software one day :)
To put it simply and overly briefly: open source sovereign personal server software that connects peer to peer with other similar nodes. "new Internet, new FOSS software market" yadda yadda lol
With games it gets confusing because they are often partly selling something scarce (computation, hosting, access to a community of other live players, etc...).
Where does the 4% stat come from?
This also applies to the meatspace.
People are willing to pay a contribution just to be member of a local / niche community. That's why I (with many other) pay a contribution to club to be part of a group where we love to cycle with each other. That's why we (I was part of the crew) had one of the biggest petrolhead communities (in the Netherlands, in 2005-2010 pre Facebook era) around one specific car (Honda Civic) with hunderds of paying members (and thousand online forum members online every evening, the slowchat topic was the most popular one).
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You perfectly captured the essence of how the internet and the digital content market have evolved. The battle against the distribution of digital content without consent is a pointless fight, and the real opportunity lies in something more valuable and intangible: community and the connection between creator and audience.
The key to the future, as you pointed out, lies in abandoning the barriers to accessing the content itself and embracing people's willingness to support. Instead of limiting and protecting content, the idea is to open doors to communities where people can connect with the creators they love, feel part of something bigger, and at the same time have the chance to contribute voluntarily.
Taking this into account. Where is the best place to publish such a blog? I am looking at Ghost.org
I want to publish a chapter of science fiction and then place a sat target as a fundraiser on nostr. If the target gets hit I place the next chapter. I have only written four chapters and if I get recurring sponsors it will motivate me to continue and finish the tale in an epic. If the story is shit no one will pay. If it retains reader interest maybe they even want to participate in the creative process. Like an interactive story development.
I am still not certain if I want to use Ghost.org though.
It seems like the perfect project for a blog hosted on Npub.pro.
Write articleson Nostr, publish them automatically on your blog, get zapped to write more, get comments to drive the story! \cc @Npub.pro
💯
Access to Creators > Access to Creations
> Computers are copying machines. Information yearns to be free.
It always surprises me how persistent is the idea that you can base
a viable, long-term business on limiting access to information and data.
> People want to support the stuff they love, and they're willing to pay for it. Not all people, but ~4% of them. And that is enough.
May I ask where that 4% figure comes from?
Do you think that ecosystems like Nostr can help popularize the concept of value4value and make that number higher?
Free market will decide, but yes.
I think a lot of people on Nostr FUD on V4V because they are trying to monetize social media interactions. I use Zaps on here as a better version of a like but I’m not going to send you a large Zap for some social media post.
V4V is about removing all the barriers so people can enjoy your content as frictionless as possible.
Really interesting discussion as usual from Gigi
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Nobody will ever make enough money from voluntary donations to have a proper career except for a handful of popular creators. In the real world, whenever donations are mission critical they are accompanied by fundraising, which is time spent procuring donations. Content creators don't have the time or resources as individuals to do that kind of marketing. Fundraising is a lot of work.
Relying on donations is an abysmal prospect for anyone trying to make a career from creating content. Many, many talented people on established platforms outside of nostr aren't making enough money to have a proper career. Doing it on nostr right now is even more difficult.
I think going all in on V4V is naively optimistic. The reality is that content creators need an array of tools to monetize their content and being dogmatic about V4V is not productive. It's frankly discouraging to anyone who hopes to monetize their craft, because it's totally unrealistic. It's silly to talk about how the theoretical price of digital content is zero because people today still buy shows on digital platforms instead of pirating them. Maybe answer why people still do that and you'll start to see that there are other factors you aren't considering.
V4V works at scale. It works with more value than a podcast or an image or blog.
It is a commerce feature, not a social feature.
Is that your theory or can you point me to an example where people are actually thriving from tips alone?
no indeed my point is that tips are too low value use case to support a business model, but that nostr can support heavier business cases. Larger transactions and real commerce.
Using your logic all books should be free?
Are books not behind paywalls?
An author should not be compensated for their work?
When you can pay 1K sats to read an article and pay for it painlessly over lightning, I will probably just pay it. I have before.
digital business models will be riskier than land-anchored businesses that bootstrap the tech to analogue use cases, which can never be as efficient and therefore defends its margins better.
Bitcoin businesses tend to be ran by or influenced by, autistic devs, who are poorly skilled to be a fiduciary or man manager. AI will help remove them as gatekeepers, and the business models will have to be excellent to survive.
Demo's and wireframes are worthless.
Apps with no income are worthless.
Built and beg is not a strategy.
Fascinating time to invest in these businesses
High risk
But very high reward
Key is the people.
Dev can't keep trying to build businesses, imo, their moat is drying up, and the user wins.
No doubt you need top quality commercial brains in the management teams
“Key is the people” is another way of saying what’s at my core:
Leadership = Relationships
Yup. Sounds very on point
I think what you are communicating in your first paragraph is:
It’s not enough for bitcoin to be $bitcoin (or perhaps stated more accurately, for BTC to be of value just because it exists)
Rather, there must be use cases. And currently we must bridge #btc to real world businesses.
Do I understand what you are trying to communicate?
Bester Post für heute. Kann man dich auch in einem Podcast oder so hören? Reposted 🧡💜
You know, everyone low-key hates product placement and other advertisements and people are now paying money to get the without-product-placement version. That's just arriving at a freemium model, but annoying the heck out of everyone, first, by trying to peddle face cream and vitamin tablets.
People willing to pay for things, prefer to cut the crap and just pay outright.
Having been in business for a couple decades now, “product placement” is less about sales and more about brand awareness.
(And admittedly I’m not 100% understanding all of your first paragraph, so please forgive me :) )
re: People willing to pay directly…
Because humans sell their attention so cheaply, most people discover (become aware) of new products via others.
This is the why the rise of the influencer has come on so strong.
However, and I think more to your point, sophisticated buyers don’t learn from influencers (those that amass hundreds of thousands of followers) Rather sophisticated buyers discover via relationship!
This is why you will see most luxury brands advertise in boutique publications or at boutiques trade shows…their sales require relationships, not transactions.
You say DRM strategies are stupid, ridiculous, and don't make sense. You demand no prisons, and no limits on the consumption of digital media.
However I haven't seen any explicit statement about whether DRM would still be bad if the strategies COULD work. You don't seem to say anything about whether the pervasiveness of piracy or the ease of creating unauthorized reproductions are good things.
You talk so much about the status quo for what is possible, but I don't see any explicit statement about rights. Why is that? Won't you say whether the original producers of a piece of digital media have any right to dictate who consumes it? Won't you say whether the consumers of a piece of digital media have every possible right to reproduce it and redistribute the reproductions? Are you even capable of giving a normative justification for a value-for-value paradigm?
So is building relationships and community on #nostr good enough to reach that 4% tipping point for proximity and access?
Or if someone was just starting out…is Patreon, Substack, Paragraph.xyz et cetera really needed?
Essentially what’s I’m trying to get at (albeit it may sound selfish, but that isn’t my heart):
Can someone (like me??) “make a living” (for lack of better phrase) simply by building relationships (#zaps ??) on Nostr instead of using a 3rd party platform such as those mentioned?
P.S.
I don’t mean to correlate or incenuate that receive zaps = relationships or that the goal of a relationship is to earn a #zap
I’m simply trying to communicate, albeit perhaps not clearly, the idea and potential paradigm shift we are in which is this #v4v movement.
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