I agree that email is an attention-sucking mess, but I see the problem differently from jacobjacob. I would happily get all the emails from the rationality community; my problem is that email is dominated by marketing, mailing lists, etc.
I think that using earn.com is likely to exacerbate the problem of unrequested marketing emails. It is free to send messages, and the sender only pays upon receipt of a response. This is like selling advertising on a per-click-though basis rather than on a per-view basis, and if it took off I would expect spam to quickly dominate the platform. Even if the message model were modified to incur costs for sending a message, I still think that many companies would gladly pay to send messages over a trusted high-status channel (similar to how fundraisers include stickers or cash in their mailings to raise the likelihood of you reading the materials). I’m not sure that friends and contacts would value my responses enough to match corporate calculations.
Spam dominating the platform is fine, because you are expected to sort by money attached, and read only until you stop being happy to take people’s money.
If your contacts do not value your responses more than corporations do, that actually sounds like a fine Schelling point for choosing between direct research participation and earning to donate.
If you feel that a contact’s question was intellectually stimulating, you can just send them back some or all of the fee to incentivize them sending you such.
I agree that email is an attention-sucking mess, but I see the problem differently from jacobjacob. I would happily get all the emails from the rationality community; my problem is that email is dominated by marketing, mailing lists, etc.
I think that using earn.com is likely to exacerbate the problem of unrequested marketing emails. It is free to send messages, and the sender only pays upon receipt of a response. This is like selling advertising on a per-click-though basis rather than on a per-view basis, and if it took off I would expect spam to quickly dominate the platform. Even if the message model were modified to incur costs for sending a message, I still think that many companies would gladly pay to send messages over a trusted high-status channel (similar to how fundraisers include stickers or cash in their mailings to raise the likelihood of you reading the materials). I’m not sure that friends and contacts would value my responses enough to match corporate calculations.
Spam dominating the platform is fine, because you are expected to sort by money attached, and read only until you stop being happy to take people’s money.
If your contacts do not value your responses more than corporations do, that actually sounds like a fine Schelling point for choosing between direct research participation and earning to donate.
If you feel that a contact’s question was intellectually stimulating, you can just send them back some or all of the fee to incentivize them sending you such.
In the proposed platform all messages have the same money attached. There’s no way to sort by money attached.