Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

https://www.gramicon.com/pages/howto

by joeco • 14 years ago

47 48 14 years ago

jgrahamc2• 14 years ago

I can't imagine using this. I'm interested in hearing from people with the most interesting things to say, not the ones with the most money.

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

So, you're not in politics. Or a lobbyist.

jQueryIsAwesome• 14 years ago

You can't stop corruption but you always create an App to make it more efficient.

larrys2• 14 years ago

One of the reasons that the yellow pages worked for so many years was that if someone was listed and paid to be in a particular category you knew they were serious about the product or service that they were offering. So while this does not mean that someone has something interesting to say if you are purchasing products or services for your company (or looking for ideas to fund) having someone have some skin in the game and not mass spraying everyone, to me anyway, has benefit.

Added: I was told the other day by a business owner that they received a rc helicopter by UPS the other day, minus the transmitter which the salesman would bring if they would hear his pitch. That's skin in the game obviously they had expense to send out the heli and it shows an additional level of commitment to targeting vs. traditional cold calling or direct mail.

Zak3• 14 years ago

While I can see this being of use to a certain type of person, the twitter-only login is a pretty big limitation. Please stop doing that.

jpdoctor• 14 years ago

I'd be curious what rationale was behind this design decision. (ie was it as simple as expediency?)

Irregardless• 14 years ago

Which inaccessible people are available on Gramicon? None? Oh, okay... moving along.

drd• 14 years ago

"Want to talk to someone fast? Purchase credits to get to the top of their inbox."

Honestly, this looks more like a scam. I hope I am wrong.

alexlovelltroy• 14 years ago

Or. You could get in touch with top VC folks by donating to their charity through oneleap.to.

http://oneleap.to/featured/investors

zzzeek• 14 years ago

this looked like a spectacular idea for a moment, until I saw that Gramicon credits are pretty much only good for delivering onto a charity or shopping with "retailers", I'm assuming that small number of charities/retailers who've made a deal with Gramicon, and Gramicon keeps a hefty portion of the money that's actually gone into the system.

I'd prefer cash without a middleman, so please use http://gittip.com/ instead, which allows knowledge/content creators to become more financially independent overall (giving us more time to answer your questions).

dbecker5• 14 years ago

I don't know who your target advertisor or target advertisee is

But, if I were an advertiser, I'd worry that people willing to spend time looking at ad messages for money don't have a lot of disposable income... and thus they are exactly the type of people I don't care about advertising to.

negamax• 14 years ago

But that solves the users' problem. No advertiser will ever send them spams or any promotional message.

I do see value in this for busy people. Who want to receive message by urgency. So yeah, if it's urgent then only contact me like use case certainly exists.

I actually liked the concept of pay to send message. Want to contact a star no problem. Pay the highest or set number of credits and you are in.

dbecker5• 14 years ago

You are right that "pay to send" solves the spam problem. But gmail filters spam so well that this is already a solved problem.

Additionally, the sidebar ads in google or facebook are auctioned off to the highest bidder. So users are already receiving improved targeting based on pay-to-send. The only problem I see this solving for users, is that they collect the money instead of facebook or google.

That is very little money on a per-user basis. So it's not solving a meaningful problem.

I agree that there is huge potential in "pay-to-send." But this marketing appears to be off-the-mark.

mleeds• 14 years ago

A great opportunity for an entrepreneur to take these emails and direct them to the spam folder.

corresation2• 14 years ago

It says that a read message demands a reply, and a replied to message can be rated upon by the receiver.

There was a service years back that did something similar via the phone -- you could register as an expert of something and people would call and pay them for time with you. It is a good idea, fundamentally, though voice was a horrendous medium for it.

jgrahamc2• 14 years ago

The company you are thinking of is keen.com. It degenerated into a service for getting psychic readings: http://www.keen.com

dbecker5• 14 years ago

If you have to reply to get paid, you could hire someone on oDesk to reply to your gramicon mails for $3/hr.

igul222• 14 years ago

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes (x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (x) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

jerf2• 14 years ago

If you're in the mood and fast, you can prefix each line with 4 spaces to get the more traditional monospaced layout of that.

aleyan• 14 years ago

Takes about 30 seconds to do in sublime text but I think the horizontal scrolling makes it worse.

Your post advocates a

    ( ) technical 
    ( ) legislative 
    (x) market-based 
    ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.

    ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses 
    ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected 
    (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money 
    ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks 
    ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it 
    (x) Users of email will not put up with it 
    ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it 
    ( ) The police will not put up with it 
    ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers 
    (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once 
    (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers 
    ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists 
    ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

    ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it 
    (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email 
    ( ) Open relays in foreign countries 
    ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses 
    ( ) Asshats 
    ( ) Jurisdictional problems 
    (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes 
    (x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money 
    ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP 
    ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack 
    ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email 
    ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes 
    ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches 
    ( ) Extreme profitability of spam 
    ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft 
    ( ) Technically illiterate politicians 
    ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers 
    ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves 
    ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering 
    ( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

    (x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical 
    ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable 
    ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation 
    ( ) Blacklists suck 
    ( ) Whitelists suck 
    ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored 
    ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud 
    ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks 
    ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually 
    (x) Sending email should be free 
    (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? 
    ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses 
    ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem 
    ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome 
    ( ) I don't want the government reading my email 
    ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

    (x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. 
    ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. 
    ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

dbecker5• 14 years ago

Great response.

I would think it took some time to compose that. Out of curiosity, is this procrastinating before finals, or is this free time after finals?

patmcguire2• 14 years ago

It's a template that used to be big over at Slashdot and probably goes back to usenet days.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

I first skimmed this and thought, "how remarkably annoying" ("reading" it was too hard with the collapsed lists). Then I started digging into the lists and realized it is a wonderful satire of HN.

To the author: fix up the lists. Having them concatenated makes it too hard to read, so you home in on the X's, missing the satire completely. If you make them pre-formatted using the spaces at the beginning of the line, recognize there is no auto-wrapping, so long lines need to be wrapped.

Anyway, thanks for the smile.

efdee• 14 years ago

This copypasta predates HN by many, many years.

rscale• 14 years ago

I don't think this service attempts to fight spam. It seems like a market research tool, or a lead-gen service; a middleman that connects companies with consumers who are willing to be solicited.

That said, it's unclear what problem they're actually trying to solve, so it's understandable that we're all coming to different conclusions.

patmcguire2• 14 years ago

To be fair, though, gmail's filters are so good at this point that I basically never see spam on addresses that have been live for over five years. So I guess the technical approach does work if you have great engineers working on it way past the point where it pays off financially and you have about half of all email for training data?

jere• 14 years ago

Reminds me very much of a Seth Roberts article earlier this year which actually references a PG article:

>Here’s what I want: A price per email. A service that charges people for each email they send me (e.g., $1/email). I get most of the price, the company providing the service gets a small percentage (1%?).

Even the comments seem like they're describing the exact features here:

>A great feature would be allowing people to pay more and being able to see that in the inbox. The $40,000 email gets answered first! Seth: Yes, rank them in your inbox by how much was paid. More paid, closer to the top.

http://blog.sethroberts.net/2012/03/27/the-future-of-email-m...

neilk• 14 years ago

You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If... you assume that your attention is so important that strangers will pay money to send you mail.

http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html#e-postag...

SkyAtWork• 14 years ago

Doesn't seem too kooky, there's $163 billion spent every year to do just that: http://www.the-dma.org/cgi/dispannouncements?article=1590

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

> As a recipient, you have complete control over the mesages you receive. Your inbox is sorted by the number of credits attached to each message, so the more valuable messages automatically rise to the top.

Don't they mean, I have zero control over the messages I receive?

rjzzleep• 14 years ago

this is awesome, doing the same thing i built about a year ago. couldn't pull it off successfully though. maybe they can

joeco• 14 years ago

Thanks so much for the feedback. I'm impressed and encouraged by the number of people who think that this is a good idea.

To the others, I wouldn't think of this as a replacement for e-mail. E-mail is great for a majority of communications. Framing messaging from a historical perspective helps understand where our company fits.

Prior to the internet when you wanted to communicate with someone you had to attach value to that message. Whether it was a letter, long distance phone call, telegram, or other form of communication the cost and the time that it took to send were non-zero. The cost was also apparent to the recipient, which often had an impact on the recipient's likelihood of replying. The internet has done a terrific job unburdening messages of their cost and the amount of time it takes to send them. At the same time, it has created a problem of a small signal-to-noise ratio.

Consider a journalist who I would like to cover a story. With a list of 800 journalist's emails I can send 800 emails instantly. At the same time, with each journalist I am competing with hundreds of other message senders. This includes people with bad ideas for a news story who suffer no transaction cost in sending their messages. If I could communicate my value on the that journalist's time I could rise about the noise and communicate that idea more successfully. The system wouldn't be perfect, but I am betting that the overlap between people who place real value on a recipient's time and people who are offering value to the recipient is larger than the overlap between people who place no value on a recipient's time and people who are offering value to that recipient.

There's also a lot of discussion as to what these credits are worth. Right now, they're pixels on a screen. Scarce pixels. As we grow an ecosystem of message-sending, some people and companies may decide that they would like to purchase credits at a discount and offer to do things like paypal money or send discount codes for certain number of credits. At first though, the credits won't be the point. The point will be that we will provide a service for those people which will allow them to filter out people who place zero value on their attention.

I’ll address twitter sign-in quickly. When you log on to Gramicon the users who float to the top of your “find users” page are the ones you follow on twitter. Here is a list of people who you have already identified as interesting or notable. Next to their usernames you can see the average price in order to get a reply as well as their user-generated rating. Right now we only allow twitter login because we don’t want people signing up with facebook or their email and choosing the username kanyewest or stevecase.

Thanks and stay tuned for updates!

michaelochurch• 14 years ago

The stone man looked it, but was not a statue. Once every few years, sometimes in winter and sometimes in summer, he would become flesh for long enough to speak a few words. All listened, for he was wise. Then he would sleep. A color appeared in him. His hand began to tremble. His mouth began to move. He said, "This is not the solution to that problem." Then his mouth stopped moving, and he returned to stone.

larrys2• 14 years ago

I like this idea. It has potential definitely. This is a sales tool and a way to get your message in front of people that want to know someone took the effort and has targeted them instead of many people and is willing to pay for the opportunity. I get solicited plenty by email (and by phone). I would definitely pay more attention if I knew there was some cost to targeting me instead of spraying everyone. I can see using this service to get a message I want to deliver in front of a decision maker (and know that it arrived). One of the biggest part of sales is getting someone to listen to what you are saying.

Let's test this out. I can get any HNers idea in front of a well known VC in NYC that funded Twitter. The cost for having me do this is $25 if I decide that he should give some thought to your product. If, after I review, he replies to what I forward (which means it has also passed my review) you owe the $25. If no reply, you owe $5. Any takers? Send me an email. (By reply I mean either "yes have them tell me more" or "no not interested" which also has value.)

jacalata3• 14 years ago

The problem is that gramicon doesn't implement the 'if no reply, you owe $5' - it's free if they don't reply. So the cost for sending a shitty email that nobody wanted to receive is free.

edit: clarity.

jmcgough• 14 years ago

This has some potential if it got enough traction... but it's another chicken-or-egg business which is going to have trouble drawing users without having anyone people actually want to talk to.

Slideshare is here http://www.slideshare.net/gramicon if anyone is curious. The monetization rate is really low for their case study (less than 1% of clickthroughs and even >1% of registered users), but I'd imagine more of their monetization would come from advertisers - if they can convince people to stick around and keep using Gramicon.

swang• 14 years ago

Why is this linkbaity title still allowed by the HN mods? The mods usually forbid (and then change) misleading titles and this to me seems like an obvious one.

It's essentially just free advertisement for this website masking itself as an article about a recent Facebook change.

Want to chat with inaccessible people? Pay them, not Facebook

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