alt Hacker NewsI still think the missing opportunity with e-mail was for the USPS (back in the US-dominant internet days) to take a leading role and implement "e-stamps." Provide a subscription service that managed a per-user account, cost a 1¢ stamp to send a message, and guaranteed delivery of messages received with a 1¢ stamp on them -- with the received stamp value being put in the user's account, so a user who received more mail than they sent would never spend a penny. (Messages received from other services could be rejected, delivered, or binned for later inspection at the user's discretion.) This would have the obvious downside of centralizing a major early-Internet feature (although federation is certainly possible as well), but it would have the upside of penalizing companies sending millions of e-mails, but not users using it for person-to-person communication, or companies using it for per-(valuable)-customer communication. We could have had a world without spam… and if USPS took 10% off the top (0.9¢ of each incoming message given to the user account), or similar, I could imagine it having a big impact on their budgetary issues.
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Yes. I don't know if this is exactly the recipe, but something akin to this could have .. no should have .. existed. Probably 1¢ is too much. Also, full public key encryption and digital signatures should be easily integrated by now as well. I know the whole trust problem ... yadda yadda ... I don't even read my email hardly at all anymore -- I want everyone that needs to get a hold of me don't rely on email.
I found the artificial cost ideas interesting at the time but I think the Ad landscape shows that it doesn't really work. All but the least sinister scammers would happily pay pretty well and have to be prevented from buying ads unless financial regulations could prevent any kind of laundering proceeds back into more ads.
> We could have had a world without spam
I doubt it. USPS charges everyone to send snail mail, and I get plenty of spam in my mailbox. I end up with way more spam in my snail mailbox than in my email inbox, since the latter has filtering.
Not sure it was a big missed opportunity to create a communication protocol that...financially penalizes communication?
Sounds like a really fast way to kill a network instead of grow it into a 4B daily active user staple like email is today. You'd basically ensure that email would ONLY be spam, because marketers would be the only ones willing spend money to reach people.
Every time I see someone suggest micropayments on HN I have to wonder if people here have any understanding of how actual humans are. Turning every action on your network into a purchase decision is a good way to ensure nobody ever does anything on your network and thus it never becomes a network.
Humans will always gravitate toward the lowest friction way to achieve their goals. So immediately some private company would introduce a free communication channel as a loss leader instead, theirs would grow faster, and then they'd monetize via ads once their network reached critical mass (see also, whatsapp). Killing the more egalitarian decentralized protocol in the process.
My physical mailbox full of junk mail says that spam would still exist.
And yet, when the USPS did deliver email (via paper, no less, with their E-COM system), over half of the message volume was sent by one mass-mailer: https://buttondown.com/blog/the-e-com-story
Afraid the spammers will always be with us.
Have you heard about hashcash? They propose a novel similar mechanism for postage for email with some interesting theoretical consequences.
The physical usps works because, the usps controls every inbox and every outbox; everyone has to have an inbox/outbox with the single carrier, and no one can actually reject or refuse mail. All the downsides of iMessage but the government reading your email bc it's not an encrypted protocol. Spam exists in the real world, this wouldn't have worked either