Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@serapath (You can see this reflected in how basically every single thing that cryptocurrency touches, immediately goes to shit and becomes miserable)

@serapath Exploitation, especially labour exploitation, same as with any other kind of money. "Printing money" isn't how billionaires get rich.

@serapath The problem is that that is not how it would actually work in practice, as has been demonstrated by basically every single "earn money by posting" platform in existence.

What will actually happen is that you make "earning money" the core metric in your system, and therefore people will start hyper-optimizing for that, and in a matter of months your entire platform will just be profit-optimized slop of no authentic value to try and maximize income.

Quite literally the worst thing you can do to *anything* is to make money the primary objective. It should only ever exist as an auxiliary thing, at most, and "you can tip anything trivially" is the opposite of that. The friction is necessary to not create a capitalist hellscape.

@serapath The problem is that you can't. The existing capitalist power relations have long been replicated in the Bitcoin ecosystem, just in a slightly different form.

You just fundamentally cannot fix a political problem with technology.

@serapath Flattr failed due to a combination of low interest (it wasn't worth it for people for tiny amounts), and the operation of the service itself not being sustainable with the low revenue.

And yes, supporting people's work is a good thing, but that is crucially something *very* different from "attaching monetary value to social interactions", and you don't need tiny microtransactions for that. Entirely different problem space.

While donation systems as they exist today certainly are not perfect, the funding issues people have broadly aren't technical in nature. They're a mix of political, cultural, and most of all "if a bunch of capitalists are hoarding all the money, there's simply not a lot of money to go around". Those are the real problems that need to be addressed, and you can't do that with an app.

(A big part of the cultural issue is actually that people think of donations as a special case of payments, in terms of "you need to distribute donations across everyone whose work you enjoy"; in reality that model doesn't make sense for donations at all, it just needs to work out on the whole and it doesn't actually matter who sends money to who.)

@serapath No, literally, it's just a terrible idea. Attaching monetary value to social interactions makes things worse for everybody. It shouldn't be done.

(Flattr did try something similar in the past and it was a failure)

@serapath Anywhere within SEPA, bank transfers are typically free, including internationally; and stuff like Wise is also very low-cost and, crucially, much simpler and faster to use than cryptocurrencies.

Like, that's the whole thing with cryptocurrencies and so many things like it that are hyped - sure, they do something that could be useful, but they don't actually do it *better* than the things that already exist.

(Also, I'm extremely not a fan of trying to 'monetize' social interactions. It creates toxic dynamics. I'd consider that an anti-feature.)

@serapath Oh, sure, but "Bitcoiners" is a very very very small group, and that group alone would have never caused Bitcoin to catch on.

The mass "adoption" of Bitcoin happened in roughly two stages; first, a bunch of actual shops and companies accepting it as a payment method, while it was being marketed as a fast and low-fees money transfer method, and then a ton of 'traders' (ie. capitalists, including commercial miners) trying to extract profit from it.

The traders then went on to spawn a lot of other cryptocurrencies, with a fig leaf of functionality that never actually became reality, because they fundamentally didn't offer much over Bitcoin anyway.

It's that first group that I'm thinking of here - in the US the existing payment infrastructure is generally nightmarish, both for consumers and vendors, and this functioned as a selling point for that group to adopt Bitcoin. Which then made it interesting to traders, which eventually sustained the hype themselves.

Had that first group not been there, the second group likely also would not have been, and it would likely have forever remained a weird nerd thing.

@hvangalen I mean, I don't actually have a *problem* with media being made that way, just... as long as it's not all of it, and it should really be labelled as such!