pull down to refresh

1533 sats \ 59 comments \ @stack_harder 17h bitcoin

recently Joe Nakomoto was asking a similar question on nostr and most of the comments were ' add more value' and things like that. which is crazy, because the guy is literally traveling the world making bitcoin content (and doing an amazing job IMO).

but it seems like without the ads and sponsors we hate, most of the podcasts and youtube channels don't make enough to function. the idea of 'value harder' seems silly.

SN is the best example of V4V working IMO, but obviously to a small scale and as something fun on the side.

as for nostr, people say 'add more value', but as many have pointed out, the people that make all the zaps are simply known people saying GM, and even then, the zaps are relative peanuts compared to even SN

what do you guys think?

view all related items

487 sats \ 2 replies \ @kepford 16h

No. Its just early for bitcoin and content creators online and there are many cultural and economic shifts that need to happen to make it work at scale. It does work for some people today.

@k00b pointed this out that its a rebrand of other models. Its as old as time really.

One could say bitcoin has failed because it isn't being used as a widely accepted medium of exchange. Or it is a failure because its not being used as a store of value by the masses. The reality is that change doesn't happen over night.

Bitcoiners need to lower their time preference and get out of fiat thinking which is all about speed at all costs.

I wrote a bit about the origins of "value for value" on SN.

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

128 sats \ 1 reply \ @stack_harder OP 16h

even outside of bitcoin, v4v is kind of an aside though, like YouTubers for example will combine it with ad revenue. a few make it work well, like coffeezila, i feel like they are the exception.

even in the old days, a patron was just the old rich guy who paid for an artist to create, basically

148 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 16h

For sure. That's the cultural shift I am referring to. The fiat influence is strong. People don't want to pay for content they'd rather spend their attention than share value for value. It model hasn't failed but online (which is still new and evolving) we need a cultural shift.

That said, as I said it does work for some people. No Agenda is great example. Most content creators do NOT do what they do. Most prioritize the ad model.

58 sats \ 1 reply \ @ZezzebbulTheMysterious 10h

99% of video content would be of greater value as a short blog post, tweet or comment. The move towards longer and longer videos to optimize ad revenue is destructive of peoples valuable time. I watch a lot of content at 1.5x+ just to try to get through what traditionally I could do reading fast.

Contrast with Joes content, which is brief, to the point, insightful and fun. I've grown to be a fan of Kratters content recently too, because he also is succinct and does not waste our time with filler.

More content producers could add more value by considering the temporal density of information.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @tomlaies 1h

99% of video content would be of greater value as a short blog post, tweet or comment.

Funnily enough I often think the opposite. There are many great substacks and blogs that are kind of dry. They would be much better as videoessays. Costs more in production value but is much more immersive.

15 sats \ 1 reply \ @cryotosensei 9h

v4v necessitates a paradigm shift, which I think will take some time to take root in most people’s consciousness.

I mean, even in SN, it took me some time to adjust to the pay to post mentality even though the daily rewards were a lucrative incentive haha.

I think broadly speaking, v4v will only gain momentum if more people adopt an abundance mindset. That they sincerely believe that when they zap people sats, the Universe will remunerate them in ways that they have yet to fathom. It won’t take root if people are not generous at their core

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cyphercosmo 9h

if more people adopt an abundance mindset

That could be hard for a lot of people, if you see other companies that adopted v4v (e.g. Leanpub) they allow people to choose down to a minimum, and they can't go higher than a given amount as well.

Do you think if Leanpub removed the minimum price in their v4v it would net positive of negative in a long period of time?

I honestly don't know and I like the way you think, I'm just stressing scenarios to stress our understanding

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @000w2 10h

Most podcasts and youtube channels don't make enough to fund themselves. It's only the top of the top that are sustainable as anything more than hobbies. But I think that's fine, your hobbies don't need to become profitable. If they do, it's a bonus.

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @IamSINGLE 8h

V4V is hard to apply without supplements. It can be successful when it gets some real audience.

381 sats \ 6 replies \ @k00b 17h

v4v is a rebrand of tipping/busking. I'm just riffing but ...

Tipping works in American restaurants because it's culturally/socially enforced.
Busking works because there's a captive audience, you make explicit asks, there's scarce entertainment on a sidewalk, and it's understood that this how the person makes a living

Posting online alongside millions of other people that do it for status and other externalities doesn't appear to have what I think makes busking work.

Generally, bitcoin culture is anti-spending and therefore anti-tipping. I think bitcoiners have taken this to an extreme place to prove a point (ie earning money without extremely hard work is fiat), but I don't see that changing soon.

If SN does this better, it's because you can make money here by spending money here. It's more like a prediction market than it is tipping.

10 sats \ 4 replies \ @DarthCoin 16h

It's more like a prediction market than it is tipping.

wrong.

how many times I have to be right until you will pay attention to my words?

because you can make money here by spending money here

keep "selling SN" as a milking cow and you will end up dry... you will remember my words someday.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @stack_harder OP 16h

couldnt anything with zaps be seen as a milking cow though? like reddit doesn't have zaps, but even there we have karma milkers

22 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 16h

when you will earn sats for your regular work you will understand what I mean by "pay to post"... Until then veeeery few people will get it. 99,9% of people are still trapped into fiat mindset. Will take at least another decade until they will get it. Meanwhile ... I am far ahead of them.

@remindme in 5 years

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder OP 16h

i find that it's so hard to actually get sats for anything that even 500 sats is thrilling lol, despite it being like 5 fiat cents

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Milkman9000 16h

Never!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder OP 16h

i dunno, i could go zapping everything on nostr and i don't think it would make a single bit of difference, even if i was posting stuff every day

42 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 16h

Call me an eternal optimist, but I still think V4V will be part of the future internet, ad revenue models don't work for everyone and they're declining in returns for many smaller creators, blogging for ad revenue is basically dead

Paying creators directly is growing with memberships, subscriptions and donations becoming the norm, but fiat transactions you are inefficient and platforms eat into your margins

I think there's an obvious use case here

But I think this is one of those cases where being early and being wrong looks the same, lol!

52 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 14h

I think v4v is working fine. If you are hoping for v4v to support your life style stop you from getting a real job then yeah you might feel like it’s failing. But if you do it as a hobby then the pressure to earn isn’t so high.

But I often think people should be thankful they even have the time and the health to create anything for it to have a chance to be monetized.

68 sats \ 7 replies \ @SimpleStacker 17h

No, I don't think it's failed.

Plenty of V4V platforms like Substack and Pateron exist and are doing just fine.
Plenty of charitable orgs exist and are doing just fine as well, and they're similar to v4v.
Just because many podcasts and youtube channels can't function without ads doesn't mean v4v failed. Plenty of podcasts and channels can't function even with ads.
I agree that "value harder" isn't really a good answer, because probably the solution to "valuing harder" is actually just moving to a more popular platform / moving on to more popular topics. Thus, people who want to promote Nostr/Bitcoin/etc should be more introspective about their platforms than simply telling creators to "value harder."

579 sats \ 3 replies \ @cyphercosmo 17h

Sometimes I see posts on SN that are just links and the same user posting lots of them and often making more than the post costed.

I also see a lot of posts that IMO don't bring anything new or different and they are doing amazing if you measure it in terms of zaps received. Like people assmilking Bitcoin related content because they know it's the most popular topic.

If your content is great I believe it increases the chances of receiving a fair amount of sats, if you are known and respected it multiplies that, and there are probably other factors affecting it too.

I believe SN is not MAINLY about earning sats, it's about the community, but if you are always paying and watching easy content being better rewarded than hard to write content, it sends the wrong message.

144 sats \ 1 reply \ @stack_harder OP 16h

i mean, nostr is the prime example of shallow content getting all the zaps, i feel like with SN it's not nearly so bad. i don't pay any attention to the assmilking links tho.

i think the bitcoin territory is a milker magnet because it's where most activity is, i mean, who is going to post on the spirituality tettiory, it's a deadzone

i should clarify, I'm not a nostr hater, known people getting all the zaps is just a function of there not being an algo, and getting seen without said algo is fucking hard work

by comparison, a new pleb here can make a post and be seen and generate engagement off the bat

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @cyphercosmo 11h

known people getting all the zaps is just a function of there not being an algo

some clients have a working algo, take primal as an example you have the ability to choose your feed

other clients like nostrudel also has a similar concept but not fully implemented, i'm not sure if this is a NIP or just clients trying to solve the problem you described, at least some clients are a bit ahead

26 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 16h

If your content is great I believe it increases the chances of receiving a fair amount of sats, if you are known and respected it multiplies that, and there are probably other factors affecting it too.

#248227 👀

30 sats \ 2 replies \ @stack_harder OP 17h

fair points, although it seems making a pure income of substack and patreon alone is pretty tough though, no?

i also don't know if we can compare it with charity because a creator cannot just work forever without an income, whereas charity is a whole other beast, and take most of the money themselves.

maybe v4v concept works best as an addition

14 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 17h

I suppose what I meant by charity was that if you're doing some kind of public service like bitcoin education, then you can see your v4v model as more akin to charity. That would mean explicitly trying to raise funds for your work from people who support your cause.

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder OP 16h

that's true, like being a bitcoin missionary of sorts

105 sats \ 0 replies \ @jimmysong 13h

Patronage systems are a lot more realistic.

258 sats \ 1 reply \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 15h

I think there may also be a set of excessive expectations where things were overvalued. Podcasts are great, but the expectation that two guys spending an hour talking about a subject -- whatever that subject is -- is worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars only worked in an overhyped environment with lots of investors throwing money around (and similarly the expectation that people should be spending thousands on equipment for minuscule differences in quality is silly).

More succinctly, not sure if podcasting or YT really make sense as careers unless they're explicitly tied to a business (see also Substacks).

As for things like Nostr or even SN, the idea that most comments are ever worth more than peanuts just isn't realistic.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder OP 15h

then again, most of it is eyeballs that can be monitised, like you look at some top YouTubers like sniperwolf (not what i watch , but my daughter lol) and it;s just a thot doing reaction videos, lowest value there is, and yet 20+ million subs, insane

110 sats \ 2 replies \ @grayruby 17h

No there a number of fiat based v4v sub based platforms that seem to work. We just don't have a large enough user base for sats based v4v yet.

I will say, ultimately I think we land on some hybrid of monetize attention/v4v. I think you can do it so it doesn't erode user experience. Take the SN leaderboard as an example. SN could sell sponsorship of the leaderboard to companies thus funding the daily rewards pool and helping keep the v4v ecosystem going.

40 sats \ 1 reply \ @stack_harder OP 16h

do you think with enough adoption that the legacy v4vs could just integrate lightning? at the moment, like you say, the btc content is more niche

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 16h

Hope so or they all get replaced by Bitcoin integrated v4v but we are still some years away from that.

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @Dash_1971 7h

If Joe doesn't like it the office cubicle awaits. I wouldn't expect people to pay me to swan around the world living a Bitcoin inflooencer life. You get paid by controlling access to some resource people want or need. Or you sacrifice your time doing something someone else with money would rather not do themselves. Then, yes, there's begging, but that's never really been the royal road to riches.

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 13h

I'm not sure what "failed" means in this context. Some people get by on v4v and we don't have any way of assessing who else "should" be earning more than they are from v4v.

That said, the v4v model was always going to under-fund creators. Most people will freeride if that's an option and we don't have anything preventing that from being an option.

Stacker News "works" because supporting creators is incentivized through the rewards system. I could easily imagine nostr clients trying to implement a similar incentive structure as SN has.

I could also imagine nostr clients using the stick, rather than the carrot, and trying to maintain zapping with social enforcement. Something that comes to mind is giving people scores that indicate how generous they are with their zaps and publicizing who the most and least generous users are.

We're still very early and there are many more experiments to be attempted.

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @saunter 13h

It didn't failed, we just have not enough people in the world that want to spend bitcoin.

32 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 17h

I think "failed" is a strong word, but there's a reason the advertising model dominates everything. The conditions under which "pure" V4V can "succeed" are complicated, and require you to be very explicit about how you define purity and success.

22 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 17h

Yes, it has failed and it will fail for anything where it all depends on your own wish. I mean unless something/someone forces or reinforces you, you won't be losing your money or time easily.

Take youtube for example, it forces audience to watch the ads and distribute a portion of that money to creators.

For SN, it's a little different, but it has those incentives which drive people to engage with each other.

Nostr doesn't have any reinforcement or drive for audience to zap content. Remember zap is real money so they can't be in the same number as you see likes on platforms like X or youtube.

I'm not negative about future of V4V. I think we'll see some very good advancements in near future.

14 sats \ 3 replies \ @NovaRift 17h

I joined Nostr a week ago, but I left soon after because there were so many posts coming out in seconds. I think I should know some accounts to follow so that I can better understand how things work there.

14 sats \ 1 reply \ @028559d218 16h

Imo Nostr needs to be 'pay to post' like Stacker News to be a quality, sustainable social network or network in general.

Are there tradeoffs to being 'pay to post'? Hell ya.

But the long-term benefits are tremendous and the 'costs' can be minimal relative to the long-term value provided to everyone on the network. Bitcoin is a great example of this (the 'fee' market) and so is Stacker News (at least outside of Cowboy Credits).

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder OP 16h

i'd be up for that, it would cut a ton of the shit out and make people appreciate it more

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder OP 17h

i just look at teh trending 24 hour thing in primal and follow the usual btc faces like lyn alden, American hodl etc

14 sats \ 7 replies \ @Milkman9000 17h

Does OF count as v4v?

171 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 17h

vulva for value

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 17h

how long have you sat on that one?

45 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 16h

I usually don’t sit on them

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 16h

👀

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Satosora 17h

hahaha this is hilarious.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder OP 17h

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder OP 17h

i suppose it kind of does, they should integrate lightning to really test it

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinIsTheFuture 8h

We are still on the early innings here. More use cases are being build daily. I see states using it with strategic reserves as DOGE ramps up as one!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @krispy_donkey 9h

What is v4v?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @standard_sats 10h

A different name for communism. Good catch phrase invented by relatively successful Podcasters.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 12h

V4V can't work if the majority of your audience consists of freeloaders.

There, I said it.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @weimar_artifacts 13h

It does not work for me. It is rebranded donation model and it works probably even worse than with fiat.

Simple example, I've sold a pin and mistyped shipping as free for US while I ship from Europe. I asked for a tip in the letter but I haven't got anything.

https://satstash.io/listings/6085870c-8d7f-45ac-97d7-902a6547fdbf

And many other examples I just don't want to expand. Just selling stuff which is relatively rare and gets into narrative directly is better. And some bitcoiners think that it is really worth doing, just spending sats periodically.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @jamalderrick 15h

I think you have to combine both Nostr value 4 value and traditional corporate strategies until more people are comfortable with Nostr, the lightning network, and NWC. For content providers, the lightning network and instant payments may be the hook for them to start understanding bitcoin.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BITC0IN 16h

it's a total larp

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 17h

I don't think so. There will always be an undertow of V4V

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Satosora 17h

It hasnt failed. It is just a newer concept, that will take time to pick up traction. Everything right now is based on ads and sponsors. Eventually that will be on the wayside when value is being produced and noticed.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @03c0869122 11h freebie

it's all just an in-group of people swapping the same sats for doing nothing.