When real money is involved on the internet the worst kinds of stuff results, and it takes a lot of effort to avoid it. How's that going to work?
None of this is to take away from your accomplishments here, by the way. The exact opposite in fact, you've got an interesting enough idea that it prompts interesting questions of the mechanics.
P.S. do you have any long-term plans to IPO this if it becomes successful? If not, some kind of guarantee that this platform is immune to enshittification would probably be very, very popular.
If he can get 50k paying users, he's a millionaire. If that means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars out of his hand?
The "intelligentsia" of the Internet need to get a grip on what people want; these sites are for entertainment not elucidation and discovery.
so how do you feel about HN personally?
>If that means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars out of his hand?
If so, congrats. I'll keep searching and be glad some rags to riches site came about in a time of multibillion dollar empires.
>these sites are for entertainment not elucidation and discovery.
put it this way. I've been on the internet for decades, and I know that to really find quality content you gotta either pay for it in money behind a paywall, or in a lot of time digging through the muck. I have done both.
I'm not going to pretend there won't be a lot of muck to dig through here, even with the idea of a paid subscription site. But the goal here is that there will be enough nuggets underneath to make it worth it. And currently, that line is pretty low given what I dig through reddit to find.
The people who like memes are a lot easier to make money off of than you, and as much as people pretend to hare money, it’s the way we survive in this world.