I will happily accept payment for reading and responding to e-mail. I will not pay to send one, and I don’t know of any cases where I feel the need to pay for someone’s initial reading of an e-mail (I may want to pay for their attention, but that will be a negotiation or fee for a thing, not for a mail).
What _might_ be valuable is a referral service—a way to have someone who (lightly) knows you and who (somewhat) knows the person you want to correspond with, who can vouch for the fact that there’s some actual reason not to ignore your mail. No payment in money, some payment (and reinforcement) in reputation.
Basically, e-mail isn’t the problem, the variance in quality of things for me to look at is the problem. Curation is the answer, not payment.
The referral service is basically already what we have – you’re much more likely to get responses to an email to a busy person if you have someone send an intro on your behalf. (You can’t automate this much, because part of the whole point is that it’s a costly signal. Automating it just gets you linkedIn, where people mindlessly click a button saying “sure I know this person well enough to click a button for them” but people learn to tune out that signal).
If the referer doesn’t know how valuable the recipient will think this is, they might just avoid it as opposed to risking burning reputation (same problem as outlined above)
It’s still costly for the recipient. E.g. it doesn’t have any way of compensating the recipient for giving them the “reduce option value” vs “slightly harm relationship” trade-off
There are probably large differences between how important each of these problems are, though I’m moderately confident that at least the first presents are real and important user case. If the options are “Pay $50 to message X” or “Try to network with people who can then introduce you to X”, the first might be better and save us some social games.
It doesn’t require you to know the right people, it requires you to expend effort to determine the right people, and then to convince THOSE less-busy people that the referral is valuable.
For many, they have assistants or employees who perform this as an actual task—filter the volume of contacts and handle most things, escalating those that warrant it. That’s great. For others, this is more informal—they have other communication channels like LessWrong, or twitter, or social network meshes, and you can get their attention by getting the attention of any of their friends or posting interesting stuff on those channels.
Either way (or ways in between and outside this), it uses the community to signal value of communication between individuals, rather than only discrete per-message signals that ignore any context.
Basically, there are two cases:
1) the recipient will want to talk with you, but doesn’t know it. In this case, you need to show that you’re interesting, not that you’re interested. Spending money isn’t interesting. Being interesting to people around me is interesting.
2) the recipient won’t care, even after reading. In this case, money may compensate for their time, but probably not and it doesn’t get you the attention you want anyway. A useless reply isn’t worth their time nor your money.
Note that I’m assuming you’re talking about trivial amounts of money (less than full-time equivalent pay for their time), and for more than a trivial form-letter response to collect the bounty. I’d be very interested in a SINGLE concrete example where any amount of money is a good value for both parties who wouldn’t otherwise connect. Ideally, you’d give two examples: one of someone you wouldn’t respond to without your $5, and one of someone who’s not responding to you, who you’d pay $X to do so (including what X you’d pay and what kind of response would qualify).
After some more thought, I think my main objection is that adding small amounts of money to a communication is a pretty strong NEGATIVE signal that I want to read the communication. I want to read interesting things that lead to more interesting things. The fact that someone will pay to have me read it is an indication that I don’t want to read it otherwise.
I will happily accept payment for reading and responding to e-mail. I will not pay to send one, and I don’t know of any cases where I feel the need to pay for someone’s initial reading of an e-mail (I may want to pay for their attention, but that will be a negotiation or fee for a thing, not for a mail).
What _might_ be valuable is a referral service—a way to have someone who (lightly) knows you and who (somewhat) knows the person you want to correspond with, who can vouch for the fact that there’s some actual reason not to ignore your mail. No payment in money, some payment (and reinforcement) in reputation.
Basically, e-mail isn’t the problem, the variance in quality of things for me to look at is the problem. Curation is the answer, not payment.
The referral service is basically already what we have – you’re much more likely to get responses to an email to a busy person if you have someone send an intro on your behalf. (You can’t automate this much, because part of the whole point is that it’s a costly signal. Automating it just gets you linkedIn, where people mindlessly click a button saying “sure I know this person well enough to click a button for them” but people learn to tune out that signal).
Yeah, referrals are important.
They also have some problems:
Requires you to already know the right people
If the referer doesn’t know how valuable the recipient will think this is, they might just avoid it as opposed to risking burning reputation (same problem as outlined above)
It’s still costly for the recipient. E.g. it doesn’t have any way of compensating the recipient for giving them the “reduce option value” vs “slightly harm relationship” trade-off
There are probably large differences between how important each of these problems are, though I’m moderately confident that at least the first presents are real and important user case. If the options are “Pay $50 to message X” or “Try to network with people who can then introduce you to X”, the first might be better and save us some social games.
It doesn’t require you to know the right people, it requires you to expend effort to determine the right people, and then to convince THOSE less-busy people that the referral is valuable.
For many, they have assistants or employees who perform this as an actual task—filter the volume of contacts and handle most things, escalating those that warrant it. That’s great. For others, this is more informal—they have other communication channels like LessWrong, or twitter, or social network meshes, and you can get their attention by getting the attention of any of their friends or posting interesting stuff on those channels.
Either way (or ways in between and outside this), it uses the community to signal value of communication between individuals, rather than only discrete per-message signals that ignore any context.
Basically, there are two cases:
1) the recipient will want to talk with you, but doesn’t know it. In this case, you need to show that you’re interesting, not that you’re interested. Spending money isn’t interesting. Being interesting to people around me is interesting.
2) the recipient won’t care, even after reading. In this case, money may compensate for their time, but probably not and it doesn’t get you the attention you want anyway. A useless reply isn’t worth their time nor your money.
Note that I’m assuming you’re talking about trivial amounts of money (less than full-time equivalent pay for their time), and for more than a trivial form-letter response to collect the bounty. I’d be very interested in a SINGLE concrete example where any amount of money is a good value for both parties who wouldn’t otherwise connect. Ideally, you’d give two examples: one of someone you wouldn’t respond to without your $5, and one of someone who’s not responding to you, who you’d pay $X to do so (including what X you’d pay and what kind of response would qualify).
After some more thought, I think my main objection is that adding small amounts of money to a communication is a pretty strong NEGATIVE signal that I want to read the communication. I want to read interesting things that lead to more interesting things. The fact that someone will pay to have me read it is an indication that I don’t want to read it otherwise.