Still some years back I used to read magazines. Printed on paper, page after page there were articles. Magazines were (and still are) bought at a store or subscribed. The price tag was for the whole package - whatever the editor decided to put in. And I trusted those editors.

Now we are in Publish0x. Like on so many online platforms content is free, you have the thumbs up/down and the possibility to tip. While it is fairly easy to decide on liking an article or not, at least for me tipping decisions are far more complex. Spending the fraction of a cent worth somebody else's tokens on a piece of writing should not be big issue, but there is also the question of how big a portion of the total I should get. This is complex enough for some explicit criteria.

Point one: Does the article have any merits? Does it contain news? Is it fun to read? Is it well written? If all I get is the frustration of spending time with poorly packaged news from yesterday, I skip tipping.

Point two: Did I just read original content with news, analysis or some other value add that got me interested. If yes, I will tip.

Point three: To what extent was the interesting article I just read a creation of the author and not canned dog food provided by a crypto project or other organization. There is nothing wrong with the copy-paste - it equals reading the commercial inserts in the magazine. Most likely the author is doing his job writing. The thing is, that for reading promotional material I should be tipped. That means the slider moves right and the portion of the author is reduced from the default.

So all of this is for a fraction of a cent. Why bother? Not for the money. Publish0x gives you an external cue for thinking about how you should value what you just read. I think that is great ... but I am far from sure it was the intention of the creators. What do you think?