Building off of @Scoresby's great post yesterday, I have some ideas for how to unobtrusively include some of these proposed payments and how to think about what they should cost.

Keep FreeKeep Free

First the ones that should remain free.

Bookmarks: SN bookmarks are a convenience and hence have some value, but every browser offers a free outside option for making bookmarks. Perhaps SN could make it so you can only bookmark things that you've zapped and order your bookmarks by zap amount. That would be like paying for bookmarks.

Usernames: It's conceivable to make some sort of auction system for usernames (like waiver claims), but then new users would have to wait for some period of time for the auction to play out, which would be super annoying. Also, new nyms are unclaimed while being freely available, implying that their reservation price is 0. Perhaps SN could add a feature where we each set a reservation price for our nym that would allow new users to purchase existing nyms with almost zero transaction cost. This is probably a bad idea, though.

Subscriptions and MutesSubscriptions and Mutes

These are the two that got me excited because it's not obvious how much they should cost or even why they should be costly.

Why?
They should be costly because they are services SN is providing to improve your experience.

They are also potentially valuable signals to the community and costly signals are more reliable than cheap talk. k00b explained this pretty well in the discussion. Basically, these are individual actions that only affect the individual's experience but are based on things that affect everyone. There's valuable signal that isn't being utilized for the public good.

How?
In his post, @Scoresby rightly points out that adding a bunch more microtransactions would probably annoy people, so I thought of a way to fold these payments seamlessly into an existing system: the rewards pool.

This is very much a half-baked idea, but I'm thinking subscriptions/mutes can essentially be zaps/downzaps that automatically are deducted from your rewards payout. They would be applied to posts and comments in such a way as to enhance or reduce visibility and give you a personalized LIT feed that shows you as much of what you want as you can afford.

This would leave larger rewards payouts for those who rely less on these services.

Reinstituting trust to the LIT rankings would make this system much cheaper for users, since the stuff you're more likely to zap anyway (and are most likely subscribed to) would already be there and the stuff you never zap (and have most likely muted) will not be there. Also, letting trust go negative (i.e. when so-and-so zaps, I tend to downzap) would help with this.

Other Why's?
SN rewards have been described as a payment for doing stuff that benefits the functioning of SN. It makes sense then that if you are asking SN to do stuff for you that doesn't benefit the site, it would be deducted from those rewards.

Rewards occur as one uses SN, as does the value of subscriptions and mutes, so linking them together has a certain temporal harmony.

MentionsMentions

Considering how long @k00b has wanted mentions to be costly, I'm surprised that they're still free. This is the simplest and most obvious one by far: Each of us should be able to set the price for grabbing our attention and it should be added on to the cost of the post or comment.

Btw, the SNIP number is a fun Easter egg