The Origins of Value 4 Value as Far as I Can Tell \ stacker news ~bitcoin

The Origins of Value 4 Value as Far as I Can Tell

10k sats \ 24 comments \ @kepford 20 Sep 2023 bitcoin

The first time I heard the term value for value was on the No Agenda podcast many years ago. For those that aren't familiar with this show its hosts Adam Curry (one of the creators of podcasting) and John C. Dvorak deconstruct the news twice a week. It was probably around 2008 though I'm not certain about when I started listening to the show. Adam Curry was talking about Atlas Shrugged quite a bit at that time and I recall him referring to Rand's use of the term value for value. I wasn't very familiar with Rand or the much maligned book. A few years later I read the book. It made me think in different ways about several topics. This is always the sign of a good book. I've included a couple excerpts from the book where she refers to value for value.

I had always thought that one did not beg in business. I thought that one stood on the merit of what one had to offer, and gave value for value.

You did not care to compete in terms of intelligence— you are now competing in terms of brutality. You did not care to allow rewards to be won by successful production— you are now running a race in which rewards are won by successful plunder. You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value— you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public's unspecified good.

In essence, value for value is the voluntary exchange of value between individuals. Adam explained in the early days of the No Agenda how the value for value model works. During the podcast he would say something like this. What is the show worth to you? We (Adam and John) can't put a price tag on it for you. Contribute what you value you get from the show. People did just that. Some would contribute small amounts like $5 a show. Others would contribute well over $1000.

One of the key reasons for their use of this model vs. the ad model is independence from advertisers. Co-host John C Dvorak explained many times that advertisers wield influence over content. Over and over again John and Adam would discuss something in ways you would never hear in popular media. Advertisers would never allow it. John has a long career in media including writing for publications, hosting TV and radio shows, and podcasting. He explained how it works like this. A story comes across the desk of an editor. The story includes some information that could be related to a sponsor. It might not even be a direct connection but the editor kills the story or modifies it to make it less likely to offend the sponsor. This seems highly plausible to me. Self censorship in essence. When you remove advertisers you don't get integrity but you do remove an influence. When you replace advertisers with value for value you shift the incentives.

Another key aspect of No Agenda's value for value model are producers. No Agenda has producers. What makes you a producer? You contribute value to the show. Again, value for value. That value might be in the form of money or it might be in clips of content that are used in the show. Others create jingles. Some share news articles. One of my favorite contributions are the many producers that write about their experiences in their fields of expertise.

In recent years Adam has talked about sharing value for value with a Christian pastor. He said the pastor replied. I hate to break it to you but the church has been doing value for value for centuries. That's true. Its not really a new idea. It isn't something Rand came up with. She put a name on something that probably dates back to the first humans. In bitcoin terms value for value is decentralized. When we express our gratitude directly we make our communities stronger. Value for value embodies freedom. Freedom for people to create and have no ceiling on the value they receive in return for their work.

A few years after I started listening to No Agenda I noticed a few other podcasts using the value for value model. They asked for listeners to support their work. What was missing was a way to easily send value, especially small amounts. These shows tend to use things like Paypal or Patreon are central choke points and due to their fees make it impractical to exchange small amounts. Over the past few years Adam and developer Dave Jones have been busy with a project called Podcasting 2.0. In short it is an effort to expand the podcasting spec to include new features and most importantly improve censorship resistance. Podcast Index is as an alternative to the index of podcasts that Apple created and manages. Anyone can copy or contribute to Podcast Index and its growth has been encouraging to watch. During this process support for direct payments to podcasters was added to the podcasting 2.0 spec. Many new podcast apps support this new feature and others. Fountain is one of these apps and it allows you to send bitcoin over the lightning network to podcasters while you listening.

Podcasting is not the only medium that is seeing a rise in the use of the value for value model. Nostr has it and I would say that Stacker.news also follows this model. Bitcoin and specifically the lightning network allow us to remove the friction of sending value over any distance in any amount no matter how small. The cumulative affects of this are massive. We are in the early stages but the value for value model isn't going anywhere. Its been around for as long as there has been money. With the power of bitcoin and lighting it will grow and become a powerful tool for freedom of expression and human flourishing.

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435 sats \ 11 replies \ @elvismercury 21 Sep 2023

I'm glad that people are seemingly open to the spirit of giving to reflect appreciation for stuff that the normal pricing mechanism doesn't do a great job of valuing, but I really don't get the magic. Our public television station (and I assume every other one in existence) would periodically go on giant campaigns, making the same V4V argument: you get a lot of value from our programming, donate what you think it's worth.

I don't understand why bitcoiners and adjacent are viewing this as some giant conceptual breakthrough. I guess it's now financially feasible to throw a few sats into a musician's open guitar case? Which is nice. But it's just another aspect of money, the same logic we've been talking about since 2008.

Interesting to see it laid out this way, though.

379 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b 21 Sep 2023

I feel a similar ambivalence toward the donation aspect of value for value. It’s part of why I have a hard time bounding SN to that context.

In part, SN has this donation dimension, but it feels like there are other dimensions that I’m yet to articulate.

435 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 21 Sep 2023

It's a really interesting problem and runs pretty deep, imo. People have these different kinds of machinery in their heads about this stuff. The example I like is that if a friend asks you to help her move, and you do, and then she tries to pay you cash afterward, you will probably feel insulted: you did the labor as part of your "friendship contract" and you were probably even kind of glad to do it; and the "obligation" your friend assumes is to buy you beer and pizza, and to return the favor -- or some comparable favor -- some other day. This is very deep, neurologically, in how social primates work.

But for a whole other class of interaction, and transaction, we have this glorious thing called money, which is just amazing that it can even work as a concept, and it encodes how much we value things, so you give me a pizza and I give you money, and it's amazing. But it taps into a very different vibe.

And so how do those things interact in a community? And esp one like SN? My sense is that even though there's money at the heart of it, it's this real human sociality that is the key, and how can "real" money help that to flourish, and how can they interact?

There's like 5 PhD theses in this project you're building. Maybe more. Makes me think that that's an area of opportunity, to tap into that expertise / labor. Hmmm.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 21 Sep 2023

if a friend asks you to help her move, and you do, and then she tries to pay you cash afterward

She is me lol. I'm aware of the problems with this enough that I'll usually disguise it as a dinner or drinks or something, ie I know people actually do these things to accumulate social capital (even if they aren't conscious of it) ... my reciprocation drive is so high though I need to literally spend it down.

There's like 5 PhD theses in this project you're building. Maybe more. Makes me think that that's an area of opportunity, to tap into that expertise / labor. Hmmm.

If you have any ideas about how I'd begin to do that, I'd be very interested.

179 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 21 Sep 2023

my reciprocation drive is so high though I need to literally spend it down.

Ha! Well, to give you a tiny bit of psychotherapy, as long as the favor is freely given, doing a favor for someone you care about really is a gift to both parties. The relationship is enhanced by it. Both of you become closer as a result. That's a hard thing to internalize, I know (I'm kind of like you in my aversion to being socially indebted) but it really is true. That truth, plus the traditional potlatch of pizza + beer, is enough.

If you have any ideas about how I'd begin to do that, I'd be very interested.

I am about to hire an economist who's a very creative thinker. I'll discuss with him, I'm sure he'll have a bunch of ways to make this concrete. Will get back to you!

406 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 21 Sep 2023

One difference I came up with after stewing a bit is that SN feels more like information trading than information broadcasting ... it's more personal and the payment aspect has the potential to enhance rapport.

462 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 21 Sep 2023

I like that metaphor: it's the difference between being at a lecture (on the good end) or a wedding and there's some dude sitting across from you droning on and on (on the bad end); and being in an actual conversation. There's value in getting broadcast at, but it's a very different kind of value.

Thought experiment of two alternate-reality SN variants:

a SN that is a really kick-ass place to go to download info about events, like a really good information depot.
a SN as a place where really good / rich / interesting conversations happen about those events.

It seems like if you were hell-bent on one of these cases, you'd do different things. I don't know what the differences would be, but the two realities seem distinct enough to warrant different approaches, though I couldn't back up that intuition right now.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 21 Sep 2023

There's also the bystander effect acting in the case of a broadcast. "I don't need to pay because someone else will." ... This effect may grow as SN does and it just isn't that significant yet.

It seems like if you were hell-bent on one of these cases, you'd do different things.

Off the top of my recently caffeinated head ...

download info about events

I think this looks more like a video game.

interesting conversations happen about those events

And this looks more like an online community.

210 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford OP 21 Sep 2023

My guess as to why bitcoiners see v4v as a breakthrough (your words not mine) is that it is a different model from the ad model. Many products for bitcoin audiences are not going to get ad funding. More importantly many bitcoiners have views that aren't "brand safe". Value 4 value is also a feedback mechanism to know if you have hit on something that resonates. You can't really get that with the ad model.

There's also this deep seated anti-capitalism thing in people. I've noticed in myself and others around me. There is a deep anti-capitalist message in our books, movies, TV, and general culture in the west. The villain is almost always a capitalist. Now, as bitcoiners we know the difference between free markets and the corporatism system called capitalism in the west but the cultural dogma is that money is evil and businessmen are greedy. When is the last time you saw a popular movie where the capitalist was the hero. There are some examples but not many.

I say that for this reason. We have a deep unease about asking for money. It varies between people but many folks I know have a very unhealthy view of money. They don't see it as a tool for exchanging value. They don't see it as tool for expressing gratitude. They don't see capitalism as a system of voluntary free trade. So v4v is a breakthrough for many and my guess is that our culture is one reason for that.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 21 Sep 2023

Value 4 value is also a feedback mechanism to know if you have hit on something that resonates. You can't really get that with the ad model.

Well, you can, just on a quite different timescale, and with different capex requirements, usually. But fair point.

There's also this deep seated anti-capitalism thing in people. I've noticed in myself and others around me. There is a deep anti-capitalist message in our books, movies, TV, and general culture in the west.

I think that's a good point, there is a general cultural stink to it, and there always has been, which is interesting to consider. (E.g., so many stories from the bible. Stories from classical history.)

Working hypothesis: some of this vibe comes from the fact that, psychologically, there are at least two kinds of value, as @k00b and I are discussing elsewhere in these comments, and these two values have some relationship to each other, but are not identical. And people really hate when one is mistaken for the other, but at scale, the only one that has ever worked is the market-transaction model. So people feel opposition to that, since their lives are dominated by it in a certain way.

Tyler Cowen has written an interesting book on the virtues of the corporation, to try to redeem it from villainy. Can't recall the name off the top of my head. Mises goes on and on about this too, though of course he would.

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford OP 21 Sep 2023

There is a commonality between the public television model and v4v except that public television actually does have ad sponsors. The other aspect that I only briefly hit on is the feedback / non-financial contribution aspect of v4v. It is missed by many people. With No Agenda producers contribute art, music, content, and insight to the hosts of the show. It indeed is not a new idea but an old idea made new by the approach and technology.

76 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 21 Sep 2023

Sometimes an old idea + new tech becomes, in essence, a new idea. Not trying to diminish that. In practice, this could be one such, though I haven't seen it manifest here yet in a substantive way.

Wrt public television advertising: do they still? I remember, as a kid, there would be those in-show reads sometimes (e.g., the Lawrence Welk show would have LW actually talk about some product in the middle of it, which now seems so surreal to reflect on) but I remember that falling away. Although I guess there were sponsorships ("This show is brought to you by xxx") which are ads after a fashion.

No free lunch, either way.

333 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 20 Sep 2023

The reason I wrote this is because I haven't seen anyone else do it. Or at least include what I am including. If you can fill in gaps please do it. I get very annoyed at times when people with large platforms/audiences do shoddy research if any and proclaim things they do not know. We've all experienced this. There's a thing now where "fact checkers" will "research" a topic. And by "fact checker" I mean a kid that knows how to use Google and probably went to college. And by "research" I mean they use Google and Wikipedia to see what they can find. I've heard some of the most dumb takes on many topics that clearly come from this very limited scope of information. This post is my contribution to my experience with V4V. Future generations are going to have to learn that all knowledge is not on the Internet. Or at least doesn't come up on the first page of Google.

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 20 Sep 2023

I didn't know Rand was the origin of the Value for Value moniker! I wonder what she'd think of this use of the term. I'd guess she'd disapprove of allowing people to consume for free and optionally pay.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford OP 20 Sep 2023

Hadn't thought about it like that but she probably wouldn't be happy with the framing.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 20 Sep 2023

I can only imagine how sobering her thoughts would be.

34 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei 1 Mar

Thanks for this. I have been using V4V rather loosely, so it’s nice to read this explanatory post and understand how this term came about

0 sats \ 6 replies \ @lawndough 21 Sep 2023

This may be a dumb, but aren’t buying and selling ads a form of value for value?

Publishers give “attention value” to advertisers.

Advertisers give “money value” to publishers.

This provides steady income for publishers so they aren’t relying on the goodwill of anonymous internet users that may or may not pay them.

While it sounds good on paper, I don’t see how the “let people pay what they want” V4V model could be applied to real businesses.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @kepford OP 21 Sep 2023

Yes, but that is a different v4v model from No Agenda. Any trade/commerce is value for value as long as there isn't a third party forcing one or both of the parties. At the core v4v is just free trade.

The incentives are different with the "traditional" ad model. With this model you are incentivized to keep advertisers happy. This is why ad driven platforms are so corporate and "safe". The term used in the ad industry is "brand safe". With the v4v model the incentives are to keep the audience happy. With the ad model the audience is the product. When the v4v model the product is the product.

I think there will always be a place for the ad model but it has downsides. Very large ones.

10 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 21 Sep 2023

It's interesting to think that "audience capture" might be considered a downside of V4V. There was a great article I read about this ... here it is. You see this everywhere these days. It's like the micro version of the perverted incentives from advertising, except way more granular. And of course, the way audience capture works in practice is enabled, at a higher layer, by advertising.

Such a complicated web of forces. The main takeaway -- or at least, my takeaway -- is that here, as everywhere, there is no real 'fix' for anything perverse. You nudge the system one way, and now there's another failure mode. To pass the time I play around in my mind about what new failure modes btc unlocks.

60 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 21 Sep 2023

There are no solutions, only trade-offs

~ Thomas Sowell

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford OP 21 Sep 2023

Didn't read the article but I'm familiar with the story. It is indeed an issue but rather one of not having core values and self respect. You could be a wore for ads or audience. Or both! Many such examples.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 21 Sep 2023

I think the whole lesson is that "core values and self respect" are eroded, little by little, by the forces around us, whether that's being surrounded by assholes, advertising, or even pandering to your V4V audience. Nobody escapes that influence, though people vary in the degree to which the same pressures affect them.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @lawndough 21 Sep 2023

That’s true. I guess the challenge is finding an audience that is willing to pay for the product with real money, not just their attention. I think Mash is doing a lot to make it feasible, I just don’t know if a majority of people want to pay for content when they’re perfectly happy to see ads and get it for “free.”