After making this post:
#821642
I started thinking about ways authors could more easily earn bitcoin in this territory. The current method of pure value for value seems okay, but I think longer form content is less likely to receive attention, even if it's really good, and even if it is released in serial form.
I remembered learning in school about how Charles Dickens was paid for his writing. I found this article, excerpted from a book. I'm not sure it provides an answer to my question, but I enjoyed it regardless:
Dickens was being paid by the newspaper, and the revenue was generated either by readers buying the entire publication or under an advertising model, or both.
The author writes:
Good writing, we’re told time and time again, is born from love, not avarice. But this romantic picture of the writer, toiling without regard to money, is itself a fiction—one whose roots stretch back several millennia, and whose effects we’re still dealing with today.
In response to a proposal made in this post
@k00b said this:
I don't even want paywalls. I tolerate them because there's no better way to fight free riding, but I certainly don't want to pay per page of a book, or per scroll of a webpage, or per minute of a video.
What I want:
- good content
- creators to be paid, so in the future I will get good content
In no way, do I want to be charged per page.
What creators want:
- to get paid for producing content
They do not want to be paid per page afaict.
So, who wants to pay per page? If you, the reader, do, I'd ask:
- How many substacks/patreons are you subscribed to?
- How many sats have you streamed podcasters this month?
- How many geyser funds have you contributed to?
If the answer is 0, I'd guess you'd pay for 0 pages too.
The above isn't an optimistic take on value for value. I read somewhere that something like 4% of the users contribute to v4v revenue.
Perhaps v4v is really a return to something described as the "gift economy." Again from the article:
Asked to write for love, not money, the writer is asked to exit the money economy and return to the gift economy. This obligation is a means of ensuring that goods and services stay in circulation in a given community, and it is also the means by which social status is determined. In Potlatch—a festival of elaborate giving practiced by various cultures of the Pacific Northwest—the goal is to give so much, and so lavishly, that your benefactors are perpetually in your debt. As Mauss notes, the gift economy may be “apparently free and disinterested but nevertheless constrained and self-interested.” The gift, Mauss writes, appears generously given, but this is at best a “polite fiction, formalism and social deceit,” behind which lies “obligation and economic self-interest.” In gift economies, the obligation “to reciprocate worthily is imperative. One loses face for ever if one does not reciprocate,” writes Mauss. “The individual unable to repay the loan or reciprocate the potlatch loses his rank and even his status as a free man.”
It may be that the term “gift economy” is a misnomer; it is a circulation economy, and it doesn’t work if it consists only of gifts given in one direction. Georges Bataille describes potlatch as “the solemn giving of considerable riches, offered by a chief to his rival for the purpose of humiliating, challenging, and obligating him. The recipient has to erase the humiliation and take up the challenge; he must satisfy the obligation that was contracted by accepting. He can only reply, a short time later, by means of a new potlatch, more generous than the first: He must pay back with interest.”
In my experience, Stacker News works pretty well for posters who provide good content, but there is a length limit set by our attention spans. What is that limit? I don't know, but for me I don't really want to invest more than about 15 minutes of time in any one post, no matter how much I like it. If more time is required, I'll bookmark it for later, and maybe never get back to it.
I'm sure some of the book writers here have suffered from this problem.
Maybe this will be less of an issue when SN territories achieve the autonomy planned by @k00b. Then, readers would show up with the purpose of reading long form content. Or, maybe we will have to come up with new compensation models.
Footnotes