Dialect: Solving Spam

Last week we released our first implementation of Message Requests.

This marked a significant first step toward our long-run vision for Dialect: a messenger that rescues our users’ inboxes from spam & scams.

Since Day 1 our focus has been on creating new messaging experiences that are unique to web3 by leveraging the design space created by wallet authentication.

These new experiences range from the useful — in the form of Smart Messages — to the simply delightful — in the form of NFT Chat Stickers.

However, in addition to these new experiences, there are also run-of-the-mill messaging problems that can be solved by web3 rails, most importantly: spam.

Spam and scams are ubiquitous in email and modern messengers. Fundamentally, this is an economics problem. On virtually all these channels, it is completely free for malicious (or just annoying!) actors to deliver messages to your inbox.

As a result, spammers and scammers are incentivized by profiting from even slight or infrequent successes, and as a result, all our inboxes suffer.

To combat this, we’re letting users monetize message requests by accepting bids from senders.

For senders, this means higher bids get you higher placement in the recipients’s inbox. And while you might need to pay to message a stranger, recipients will be able to accept with no payment, making it free to reach friends and trusted contacts.

With paid message requests, our goal is to rework the economics of spam on the internet, and saving your inbox in the process.

On the other side of the coin, legitimate companies pay billions annually to reach users via targeting marketing, however these end users almost never get a cut. In Dialect, users will receive the vast majority of bids for placement.

Attention is a valuable and scarce resource. At Dialect, we’re excited to use crypto rails to solve real problems in messaging while doing right by our users.