Continuing the strong tradition of tech people coming up with bizarre ideas, developer and entrepreneur Marc Köhlbrugge announced the launch of a new chatroom yesterday, with one catch: every character you send costs one cent.
It’s called Expensive Chat, and Köhlbrugge described it as a “social experiment” that aims to see “what happens to a chatroom when it’s not a free-for-all, but every message cost you cold, hard cash”.
Excited to launch my latest product today! ???
?? Expensive Chat – Chatroom where you pay $0.01 per letter.
It's a social experiment to see what happens to a chatroom when it's not a free-for-all, but every message cost you cold, hard cash.https://t.co/Ss6fMzBhoF
— Marc Köhlbrugge (@marckohlbrugge) February 28, 2019
Good intentions aside, according to Motherboard, Köhlbrugge told them that, “To be the honest the reason I started it, was because I thought it would be a fun way to make some extra money.”
TBH, coming up with a way to make money and assigning it some deeper meaning after-the-fact is an incredibly Silicon Valley move, so kudos, Marc.
That’s right: while you might have assumed the money goes to a noble cause, it all just goes to Marc, but he’d only earned $103USD by the time Motherboard spoke to him via Twitter DM.
Not only does every character you type cost one cent, but every message is accompanied by a little green bubble announcing how much that message cost. I assume this is to make it easier for people who want to flex on everyone by spamming the chat with lengthy messages, thereby showing how rich they are.
Luckily, it costs nothing to change your display name, so one developer had a brilliant idea: put your message in your name, and just pay one cent to send one emoji. Genius! Someone hire this person immediately.
So https://t.co/DbDFOadBtN may cost a cent per letter, but names are free…
This may be the best cent I have ever spent, thanks @marckohlbrugge! ? pic.twitter.com/rKjesFeDJ6— mpm: melody, panko mushroom ? (@pixelyunicorn) February 28, 2019
Marc hopes to expand the app into a viable business, telling Motherboard:
“I’m considering building this out into a more serious product where perhaps celebrities and professionals can host paid chats, where the proceeds go to charity/etc.”
That would actually be a decent implementation of the idea, although I’m sure teens wouldn’t bat an eyelid at paying money to shout I LOVE YOU MOM at Ariana Grande a thousand times.
Unfortunately, all of this attention has overloaded the site’s servers, but it should be back up soon. Until then, you can just message your friends for free on any of the million apps that provide that service.