Gabe Newell once said that "Piracy is not a pricing issue. It's a service issue". I believe this has been proven by netflix/spotify as well.
Is spam just a symptom of a much deeper problem? If so what is it? Or is it naive to think of spam this way?
Nobody wants spam or the things promoted in the spam. The companies want attention from the users. I think the better version is targeted ads on Facebook, etc. Maybe that’s the closest analogy to Gabe’s quote.
Lots of people want Viagra without having to see a doctor. There definitely is a market for it, and now there are companies that do provide it, I wonder if this will cause spam to shift to other products.
The underlying problem is that a sufficiently motivated spammer can target tens or hundreds of millions of people with their spam without too much effort.
As a result, every possible scam and spam with even the slightest possibility of converting 0.00001% of recipients can now be a viable spam campaign.
The underlying problem is that it’s so easy to scale spam to a lot of targets.
Still applies to games/music and probably audio books.
As long as the expected value per message of spam sent is positive, someone in the world will send as many messages as they are able to. You either fix this by raising their costs so that spam no longer has a positive expected value, remove their ability to send an unlimited number of messages, or both.
This is not exclusive to the e-mail system, robocalls are still a major annoyance, and the global telephone system is much more regulated. Mobile phones now automatically filter calls, even! It's wild.
What are spammers trying to accomplish, that a better product would prevent them from using email (that isn't just them shitting up the other service the way they shit up email)?