Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter

Reminds me of that 1000x1000 ad site from the 90's where you could buy an ad based on how many pixels you purchased. Allow someone to pay to set the chat room topic, the colour scheme, etc. Maybe some Rich instagram kids will throw some cash at it for bragging rights.

This looked oddly similar to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;highscore.money" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;highscore.money</a> and... it’s the same guy, Marc.<p>For what it’s worth, we had one of top ten spots on the highscore.money, got some traffic from it (and still get a trickle), but all of them were immediate bounces. Caveat emptor.

I&#x27;m reminded how, last year, at work, they changed the length limits on performance reviews from characters to words. They found that character limits resulted in men having more room to express themselves than women -- &quot;she&quot; is longer than &quot;he&quot;; &quot;girl&quot; is longer than &quot;guy&quot;, and &quot;female&quot; is longer than &quot;male&quot;.<p>Twitter also has interesting per-country dynamics because it uses a character limit. In Chinese or Japanese, 140 characters can express more words than in English.

It&#x27;s such an obvious idea, and it has been around for as long as spam e-mail has been a problem. I absolutely do not understand why it has not yet been adopted for all e-mail traffic worldwide. If an e-mail were to cost just one cent, it would never add up to an amount that a normal person would even notice, yet it would solve the problem of spam e-mail over night.

Hi all. About 2.5 years ago I created Highscore Money. I was looking at pay-to-play games and wondered what would happen if you&#x27;d take it to the extreme. The result was just a leaderboard you&#x27;d pay your way into. Whatever you pay, that&#x27;s your score.<p>Today, I&#x27;m launching a new social experiment. A chatroom where you pay for every message you send. Normally chatrooms can get messy quick, because there&#x27;s no cost to sending a message. Expensive Chat changes this dynamic.

Hmm, don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m giving a random site (that breaches EU online business laws: must have an irl address for service) my CC info.<p>If you spend 1¢ on posting &quot;:smiley:&quot; every day, won&#x27;t that cost him about 20¢ transaction costs? Eventual DoS by CC transaction costs??<p>Love the spirit of it on an intellectual level though.

I just broke this website sending this: &quot; ｓｅｎｄｉｎｇ ｕｎｉｃｏｄｅ ｃｈａｒａｃｔｅｒｓ ｆｏｒ ｆｕｎ &quot;

The implementation is clean AF and the idea is super fun! Really neat job there! This probably won&#x27;t take off as-is but I feel like there&#x27;s untapped potential to be leveraged.

Interesting language effects at play. There’s a message in there: “你好吗?” Which is priced at 4c<p>The equivalent message in English “how are you?” Is 10c

It reminds me of writing SMS messages - using all the awful txt spk to use as few characters as possible and save money.

Such compression tricks were also used save money on costly telegraph messages. The telegraph was arguably the first internet device, tying the world together at lightspeed. But wires were expensive and messages consequently so. A standard ten word message cost a workers average day wage. So people used abbreviation tricks seen in texting and twitter. And companies had code word dictionaries where a single word might mean a whole sentence. This saved cost and disquised messages.<p>In the early days messages were limited by the number of wires, the speed of human operators at both ends and electrical degradation of long wires. 20 bits per second was a good speed. Physicists like Faraday and Maxwell figured out how to lessen degradation. Inventors like Thomas Edison figured out how to multiplex multiple signals on the same wire. And how transmit messages at superhuman speeds with tape players and recorders at both ends.

I love that people are already working around the model by embedding part of the message in the username.<p>That took all of three messages...

The cheer fact that people actually payed to use it is boggling my mind. I suppose the conclusion is that I need to work a lot more to even start understanding how people think !

It looks like you&#x27;re using stripe to process your payments. Does this mean that if I send a 1-character message it will cost you money?

I&#x27;m curious, is it needed to generate an invoice for every payment received? How is the accounting managed?

I want people to pay per letter they email me ...<p>&quot;Hey it looks like you want to send Amelius an email. Please visit this page, where you can pay and make sure your email actually arrives&quot;

Are you able to process payments as low as 1c and if so, aren&#x27;t fees exceeding the amount charged?

This could make for an interesting idea for &#x27;Quora for mentors&#x27;, whereby someone pays money (maybe more than 1c) to ask a specific question to a &#x27;business leader&#x27;.

It&#x27;s interesting that this favours pictographic languages. You can express a lot more in a few &quot;characters&quot; of Chinese than you can in English! Might be a little more fair if you charged per byte instead of per character, but they would still have a big advantage.<p>I suppose the same kind of thing applies to the character limit on Twitter.

One thought: you should let the user know that you are using Stripe(?), instead of a random credit card form. Cool thing!

what about making something similar, but where the cost formula is an^2? a should be some constant factor like a tenth of a cent and n should be the number of chars, i.e. per message or in the last 24 hrs. If Twitter worked that way instead of an arbitrary 140&#x2F;280 char limit, it would be so much cleaner.

Seems it has been taken down? Now it only returns three dots.

This reminds me of Twitch, where many streamers have it set up so that you can get a message displayed or even automatically read out on stream if you accompany it with a donation. Of course there it is in addition to a regular free chat and more often used to get the streamer&#x27;s attention

This sounds really fun! It is one of those ideas that when you first hear it doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense. I&#x27;m not sure how it will handle transaction costs though. It might be better to allow a minimum of $1 to be added in credits and use that to charge for letters.

Lightning network, where are you?

Sounds like something that would make sense to implement on top of Twitch chat. You already have a payment infrastructure tgat allows attaching arbitrary amounts of money to each message, as well as a baseline reading for either free or sub-only($5&#x2F;month) chat.<p>Of course you&#x27;d need to do it in cooperation with an established Twitch partner. Can&#x27;t just create a new channel and start charging.

Looks like telegraph commercial codes are poised and ready to make a comeback! (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Commercial_code_(communications)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Commercial_code_(communication...</a>)

MrBeast just enter the chat. ;)

Nice :) We were just talking about something like this several days ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19253464" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19253464</a>

I created something similar but with a smart contract: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;davidwong.fr&#x2F;FiveMedium&#x2F;#&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;davidwong.fr&#x2F;FiveMedium&#x2F;#&#x2F;</a>

Is there a micropayment service he could have used, to avoid micropayments showing up on a bank statement? Do any such services event exist?<p>Is this PCI compliant, since CC numbers are typed on his page?

&quot;letter&quot; seems ambiguous? I thought it meant &quot;message&quot; but it means &quot;character&quot;. I&#x27;m not a native English speaker though so maybe it&#x27;s just me.

I posted a few comments but they didn&#x27;t show up. Oh well.

No new messages for 45 mins, tried to chat, doesn&#x27;t work.

Hihihi this is fun and brilliant ! Had the chance to see it working for a few minutes. It doesn&#x27;t seem to work now, just a blank page. Hello javascript :(

I feel like if a long message I typed doesn&#x27;t even get wrapped - I&#x27;m not getting what I paid for and hence am entitled to a refund.<p>Plus some damages for my lost time

That&#x27;d make a nice cyberpunk billboard in 10 years.

&quot;Spend money to chat with strangers who spend money to chat with strangers.&quot; That&#x27;s a demographic that doesn&#x27;t deserve my time.

Am I supposed to be impressed? This makes no sense whatsoever. The reminds me of that card game that raised money to dig a hole.

... still cheaper than a Slack subscription.

BitChat: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitchat.bitdb.network" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitchat.bitdb.network</a>

I just get an &quot;application error&quot;

Need to add font enhancement features. Can I pay 2 cents per letter to have the letters animated in fire?

Seems to have gotten a hug of death showing a standard Rails error.<p>&quot;We&#x27;re sorry, but something went wrong.&quot;

It&#x27;s dead

I’m curious,how are they processing the micropayments? Wouldn’t transaction fees crush them?

Really strange, typically I&#x27;d expect you to have to pay to read, not to be heard.

I shouldn&#x27;t but I love the UI of this thing. It&#x27;s fresh and bold.

drawo.sh obviously wins. Not just because they paid the most. Because its the first ad ive clicked on in ages that gave me exactly what I expected it to. And asked for nothing.

The TLD choice is a missed opportunity. With that idea they should have at least used the &quot;.rich&quot;<p>More info: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nic.rich&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nic.rich&#x2F;</a><p>Jokes aside, this business model is not going to see any kind of wide adoption.

Business idea: corporate email system that offers a limited amount of emails per month, and once the limit gets hit, discounts money from employee&#x27;s salary.<p>Add a formula that makes it exponentially more expensive if you add more people to CC.<p>Problem with corporate mailing hell solved.

You need to make clickable URLs more expensive!

should have used Lightning Network

To be frank, I don’t get it

Can I use hanzi though?

Looks nice &amp; seems like a fun experiment but can&#x27;t help thinking that — at scale, this becomes Twitter, where the average person has relatively short messages like now, but Donald Trump gets an unlimited character count…

what ui kit is this?