Comment by huslage
7 days ago
Why does anyone need a cash incentive to pass a message silently? There is literally zero marginal cost to them to do this. Why does everything have to cost/make money?
7 days ago
Why does anyone need a cash incentive to pass a message silently? There is literally zero marginal cost to them to do this. Why does everything have to cost/make money?
It costs energy.
It's very little energy, but it's literally non-zero, so definitely not "literally zero marginal cost".
Why would the user care if it's negligible? Because very-small-but-nonzero things scale very differently from actual zero things. If the price of injecting something is zero or almost zero, then this gets quickly abused and suddenly your battery drains like crazy because somebody decided that this is an excellent new vector to serve spam. So everybody will deinstall/deactivate this.
And that's why we can't have nice things.
I see it as an anti-spam measure. If sending a message costs nothing I could just flood you with messages as fast as you can forward them. That's probably not okay with you. But if you get paid then it probably is okay with you.