Thanks for the feedback!

I am going to make payment optional. When someone answers a question, they will be able to choose if it is free or payment required.

Only from questions.

The questions are rendered server side (Server-side rendering), so they get indexed by search engine crawlers. The answers are rendered on the client side, so even if unlocked, they would not get indexed as well.

Thanks! I think I will do that. When someone creates an answer, they will have the option to make it free, or put a price on it.

Free answers will be visible without paying.

What if all of the answers had a flat price of 100 sats? Would you be willing to do a single click for each individual answer if you didn't have to think about the variations of the price?

Check the user rating of the seller before you buy.

Then, after you buy, if the answer is nonsense, downvote the answer to punish the reputation of the seller.

The payments for user signup and post questions and answers is to prevent spam and keep a quality filter.

The answers should be visible after you pay for them.

I consider the app to be custodial as it is, because all of the user earnings are stored in the app wallet, and have to be withdrawn by the user.

But I decided to not use deposit-ahead-of-time, because that seems like an extra step for the user, and I want to make it easy for people to get started with low barrier to entry.

I also considered doing a bounty. The person who asks the question will pay the bounty as a deposit when they post the question.

Then they have 24 hours or 1 week to choose one of the answers to receive the bounty. If they don't choose any answer, the app will keep the bounty.

I am probably going to add this to the existing app, but I wanted to make the pay-for-answers the central feature.

Interesting. I wonder how did you plan to involve lightning payments? I experimented with a few different monetization ideas before settling on the current idea.

What do you mean by "custodial service"? Does that mean the user deposits funds ahead of time?

I personally believe that the answerer should be able to decide their price, not ask for tips. Make it a true fair market.

The escrow doesn't really help. You are putting your trust in the market administrator to arbitrate the dispute, and they have no idea or incentive on how to decide which side is right.

The best protection against fraud is a good rating/reputation system.

TANSTAAFL :)

This is the same dynamic that exists on darknet markets. New sellers have to establish a reputation before they can gain traction and sell in large quantities.

Usually new sellers start with low prices, and then they raise prices after they have built up reputation.

The use case for this app is mostly people who are searching for answers to specific questions. So I think they will be motivated to pay if they are desperate enough for the answer.

But I agree, there is too much friction with the payment right now. I'm working on integrating WebLN/Alby, so it will be a one-click payment.

Try looking at the user "Total earned" and "Weighted rating" fields under the answer.

That should give you a good indication of whether the answerer has a history of giving good answers.

That's why there is a user rating system. Even when a question has zero upvotes, you can still see the seller rating, which is calculated from the total history of their sales.

So if you see an answer with zero upvotes, but the user has 500k sats in total sales, and a 90% positive rating, you have a good chance that his answer will be good.

It's the same principle used for darknet markets, the seller can rug-pull you, but they will ruin their reputation.

What if:

Would you buy the answer in that situation?

Thanks for the feedback! It's not quite that bad, it uses username login, so you don't need to register any email address. Just sign up the new username, and pay the lightning activation fee.

I thought about doing it like that, but I realized that it's difficult to prevent someone from cheating:

Thanks for the feedback! I agree, I have a person who promised me to make a logo, but it's taking longer than expected.