I don’t pay anything for this website. The biggest tech companies don’t charge users anything, and sell the users attention without giving them an option.
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Right. But in this new model users pay. So we should find out what they will pay for and how much they will pay — and measure the success/failure based on that; not the speculative trading around the theory that it happens.
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> in this new model users pay
Disagree. In the web3 model users *get* paid & have digital property rights. ENS is v1.
The big piñata that all the social media companies are sitting on is being bust wide open. The users are finally getting a cut of the wealth they are creating.
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They can only get paid by *other* users paying for something. When we remove the speculation we should find the clearing price for these value props.
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Right now users are paying something — time. Their hourly rate is way below what they get for the time put into social networks.
Ads are very inefficient monetization of countless hours. Tasks for crypto are an alternative paradigm. Much longer conversation.
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🥺 I’m too dumb to get it I think. People have money. They pay for things. Some apps they pay to use. Other apps they click ads and buy things and those advertisers subsidize our consumer apps. If we want users to have ad-free social apps; then the users have to pay for them.
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They can pay with money
They can pay with time inefficiently, via ads ($0.01/min)
They can pay with time efficiently, via skilled tasks ($10/min) — see coinbase.com/earn or layer3.xyz
And they can *get* paid for time efficiently (made much easier by crypto)
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In my humble opinion, these are unnecessarily novel and niche innovations to effect capitalism. Most people on the planet just want to listen to a song, watch a movie, chat with a friend, book a flight, rent a house, etc. at a consistent price.
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Disagree. LinkedIn is a shadow of what crypto LinkedIn could be. Every person with an on-chain resume, receiving a feed of tasks optimized to their skills, anywhere in the world. Liquid micro work.
Made progress with Earn, spoke about it with
conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/balaj
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I think we’re losing track of the debate. You’re talking about how people can make money on the web. I agree this could be done with crypto. The question is how online services will be paid for. If they aren’t paid for by ads, they’re paid for by users. That was the debate.
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Those are the models now. But why don’t we have instant jobs? Why can’t you just come to a website, click buttons, make money?
Mturk & Scale.ai are v1s. But embedded crypto tasking will be larger still. Maybe larger than ads. Digital labor is a new way to pay.
There are many reasons we don’t have instant jobs for anyone globally, but one of them is the lack of globally uniform payment mechanism. Another is wire overhead for small transactions. A 3rd is non-portable credentials. A 4th is hiring overhead. Web3 has tools to tackle each.
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These are are unnecessarily novel for 99% of capitalism. And so back to the point: users will need to pay for the services. So I just want to be talking about the metrics of people paying for some utility (or making money from work), not confusing that with asset prices.
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Basically, if ads & VC were the economic engines of web2, tasks & tokens are economic engines of web3.
You are asking how it will work the same way. My point is that it will/can/is working, but in a different way.
Ads for web2 were controversial, btw! andrewchen.com/why-i-doubted-
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Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize for asking the fundamental question: ‘Why do firms exist?’. The argument is making in Coasian terms is that ‘transaction costs’ are dropping rapidly due to web3.
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Transaction costs include the cost of contracting, recruiting, supervision, quality control, settling disputes, legal and admin, etc. The thesis is that these costs come down dramatically in web3 so new, more efficient models of organization emerge.
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It's basically Upwork+LinkedIn on blockchain.
Wallet address is your identity. Each tx has info of the job, rating and payment amount.
Your work reputation is public with historical ratings and how much you have made pseudonymously.
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Do you think people really want to do digital labor to access a website over watching a few ads?
The Ad business model is passive for the user. Do you expect that users would rather have to actively complete tasks before/while they are scrolling their feeds, playing games, watching Hulu, etc? The passive ad model is suited for the use case. The other model is a job.
