I think a interesting thing @peakd could maybe try is having tips be added to the total post reward, with the tooltip giving a breakdown of whats inflation and what is tips. Right now they are their own separate little indicator.
Also having an onchain core tipping function would be nice, right now there is just peakDs version, it should honestly be part of the core chain functionality so it's standardized.
Subscriptions can already be made because we have recurrent payments as part of the core chain functionality. It just if you want to gate content behind it you have to build that yourself. It's not something that could be made as a core chain feature since there are to many variables at play and a basic universal implementation would be largely useless for most peoples needs.
Like you said if people want to make an income they should do it properly like a actually business.
I like the idea of combining tips into the post rewards on the UI. It would make it much clearer that there's real economic activity taking place.
On the paywall thing; I'm curious why you think a basic universal implementation wouldn't work? Couldn't we just encrypt content with memo keys and gate access to the decryption based on payment/subscription status? Seems like that would cover the core use case of "pay to unlock this content" without needing a ton of customization.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying or misunderstanding it, but even a basic "this post is locked, pay X HIVE to decrypt" feature would be huge.
Although I guess frontends could implement something like that using already existing features. But having it at the chain level might be better, since it would work universally across all frontends.
The problem with encrypting with memo keys is it requires both the authors and recipients memo keys to encrypt the content, I think it's either both public keys or the authors private key and the recipients public key, not 100% sure.
But anyway it would be encrypting the content uniquely for each and every subscriber or something which doesn't seem practical for locking a post behind a pay wall.
I do wonder how feasible it'd be to make functionality that allows for posts to be encrypted and access be given, either via users personal subscription systems or something built into hive, maybe a recurrent payment with a special memo.
I think my thought process with basic universal implementations is that it probably wouldn't be best being built into the core chain, it would likely serve better as a HAF app, it depends really, Encryption of posts to allow for gated content could be a vary useful feature. But likely the ability to encrypt and give access will be the only part that is added to the core chain software, everything else would probably be custom stuff handled by front ends or HAF apps perhaps.
I guess I'm more or less saying a complete subscription/content gating system wouldn't likely be part of the core chain software but rather certain parts make sense to be core chain stuff cause it's required but certain aspects of these systems can be delegated to other things like front ends or HAF apps.
I donno I sometimes wonder if I even know what I'm talking about these days.
That makes sense! I've been thinking about it for the last couple of days and you've given me some good angles to explore. I'll see if I can get something cooking.
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on this.