I recently gave you the rules of this game in a post called Schadenfreude as Tax Policy.

Do you think we have too much or too little amateur commentary?

For about 99.99999% of the time since we gave up the delights of hunting and gathering in favor of domesticity, the world happily left commentary to a small number of people – commentators — who were able to convince a slightly larger number of people – editors and publishers – that they had something useful to say.

Then came social media, especially Twitter, and off went the editors and publishers. We are left with hundreds of millions of attention seekers who were formally known as the attention undeserving.

They get to tweet for free. The world is not a better place.

Is there anyone who would object to letting the telephone company charge telemarketers for every call? Few industries need to end more quickly than that one.

Perhaps slightly more people would object to charges for Tweeting but not enough to constitute a majority. A fine social science experiment could be run on the proper size of a tweet tax: $.01; $.10; $1; $10; more?

There could be a sliding scale based on uselessness but too much adjudication would be required. On the other hand, it might bring back the editors and publishers.