Stop trying to make social networks succeed(ploum.net)
ploum.net
Stop trying to make social networks succeed
https://ploum.net/2023-07-06-stop-trying-to-make-social-networks-succeed.html
223 comments
It has really made me pessimistic about tech and products in general. There's the free and great stage, then the market is captured, then enshittification, then death.
I don't get excited about new products or new tech because I know the cycle. Hype then bust. New thing comes out and I'm just meh about it, because it'll bust soon enough so it's not worth getting invested in it. Or new version will come out next year and break what I was used to, or it'll be an implicit subscription of having to buy new thing every year. But it's not really going to fix itself because it seems like everyone else loves the dopamine rush from the hype cycle, and they don't really seem to care about how ephemeral everything is.
I don't get excited about new products or new tech because I know the cycle. Hype then bust. New thing comes out and I'm just meh about it, because it'll bust soon enough so it's not worth getting invested in it. Or new version will come out next year and break what I was used to, or it'll be an implicit subscription of having to buy new thing every year. But it's not really going to fix itself because it seems like everyone else loves the dopamine rush from the hype cycle, and they don't really seem to care about how ephemeral everything is.
> It has really made me pessimistic about tech and products in general. There's the free and great stage, then the market is captured, then enshittification, then death.
Mark Zuckerberg an hour ago: "Our approach will be the same as all our other products: make the product work well first, then see if we can get it on a clear path to 1 billion people, and only then think about monetization at that point." https://www.threads.net/t/CuW5-eWL34x
Mark Zuckerberg an hour ago: "Our approach will be the same as all our other products: make the product work well first, then see if we can get it on a clear path to 1 billion people, and only then think about monetization at that point." https://www.threads.net/t/CuW5-eWL34x
lol it's so explicit
at this point he's the world's leading expert on the enshittification cycle
at this point he's the world's leading expert on the enshittification cycle
The ironic thing is that he lists monetization last, but simply by uttering that sentiment he tells us that they are really thinking about monetization first, aka the end goal of the product.
Even if he didn't say it, it's implicit in who they are. Do you really think a massive social media corporation is going to launch another social media platform, just for funsies?
They opened it up for brands days ahead of the general public. Of course they're thinking of monetization first.
I mean, did you think he was pouring money into this out of the goodness of his heart?
No, no, just pointing out the blatant contradiction in the statement. Although I do wish an app intended for a billion people had a component of goodness to it!
I don't think he's ever suggested Facebook is anything but a for profit enterprise, but I think it is an extremely cynical take that "build a product a billion people would use before thinking about monetization" actually means "think about monetization first".
The literal only goal of a public company is to make money for its shareholders; shareholder wealth maximization.
I think your altruism is misplaced because they most certainly are thinking of $$$ first and foremost.
I think your altruism is misplaced because they most certainly are thinking of $$$ first and foremost.
> The literal only goal of a public company is to make money for its shareholders; shareholder wealth maximization.
No it’s only a theory that emerged in the 70’s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine).
No it’s only a theory that emerged in the 70’s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine).
Framing things this way suggests that the reason the metaverse is failing so hard is because facebook insists on jumping straight to enshitification without spending time on the stages users actually enjoy.
I think you've actually got it a bit backwards.
Meta did not spend enough time thinking about monetization in the long term, realized they were in a really rocky position due to Apple and Google owning the platforms Facebook ran on, and then desperately had to come up with a new platform they could monetize.
They've pushed it so hard now because they didn't think about monetization early.
Meta did not spend enough time thinking about monetization in the long term, realized they were in a really rocky position due to Apple and Google owning the platforms Facebook ran on, and then desperately had to come up with a new platform they could monetize.
They've pushed it so hard now because they didn't think about monetization early.
It will always be a fascinating piece of historical trivia that Zuckerberg was represented as an iconoclastic hacker in The Social Network, when he had already turned into a turgid adtech executive by the time the movie came out.
It is so foreign to me, to choose greed as your personal identity. These individuals will gleefully stride onto a stage with a microphone and boast about ideas and actions that 1/100th of would fill my mind with such incalculable guilt and embarrassment that I would never sleep or show my face in public again.
Love this. And it’s very disheartening how society fetishizes how much personal wealth one accrues, so much so that it’s natural for the youth to grow up idolizing that and not once step back and consider the larger effect it has on the community.
An interesting thought is how many people are inadvertently bad, simply as a byproduct of what I touched on above
An interesting thought is how many people are inadvertently bad, simply as a byproduct of what I touched on above
I remember when the worst thing you could be called was a “sellout”. Now it’s a virtue.
"We will figure out the business model later"
Meaning: Once we have hooked enough users, we'll make them the product.
Free lip piercing...
Meaning: Once we have hooked enough users, we'll make them the product.
Free lip piercing...
Corollary:
"We have a business model, its built on bullshit and blue skies."
Quote from my wise father about being careful when being recruited by a startup that sounds too good to be true.
"We have a business model, its built on bullshit and blue skies."
Quote from my wise father about being careful when being recruited by a startup that sounds too good to be true.
“We have been featured at TechCrunch. There’s basically no risk anymore.”
Your father could have saved me…
Your father could have saved me…
It's hard to overlook the role of institutional capital in shaping the landscape of nearly everything.
As a teen I grinded for a few months building a b2b SaaS. A competitor launched a better version for free. The founder had a Harvard MBA and used VC funds to build this marketing tool.
Growing a product organically puts you at a disadvantage to companies that can ignore market fundamentals for years at a time. And if you do manage to grow, acquisitions that amount to life changing generational wealth is hard to ignore - and it's not like the future of your product is guaranteed.
Wall street needs returns. Tech is just the first to adapt to the loot-box economy but it'll spread. Anything that can be turned into a subscription model will be. Air-bags to air conditioning. We will own nothing and like it.
As a teen I grinded for a few months building a b2b SaaS. A competitor launched a better version for free. The founder had a Harvard MBA and used VC funds to build this marketing tool.
Growing a product organically puts you at a disadvantage to companies that can ignore market fundamentals for years at a time. And if you do manage to grow, acquisitions that amount to life changing generational wealth is hard to ignore - and it's not like the future of your product is guaranteed.
Wall street needs returns. Tech is just the first to adapt to the loot-box economy but it'll spread. Anything that can be turned into a subscription model will be. Air-bags to air conditioning. We will own nothing and like it.
A lot of people reject political ideas (i.e., regulations) because they have an idealized love for our free markets. Meanwhile small profitable companies are going out of business to larger unprofitable companies.
It begs the question, how did the larger unprofitable company become large in the first place? It wasn't by delivering goods and services at a fair price, it was by currying favor with those already in power. The romantic view that to succeed in a free market you sell goods and services at a fair price doesn't hold.
It begs the question, how did the larger unprofitable company become large in the first place? It wasn't by delivering goods and services at a fair price, it was by currying favor with those already in power. The romantic view that to succeed in a free market you sell goods and services at a fair price doesn't hold.
“A lot of people reject political ideas (i.e., regulations) because they have an idealized love for our free markets.”
No, it’s that regulation is often used as a political tool to wield power over the players in the market.
Free markets are far from ideal. But they do make it a bit more difficult to game the system because there are fewer ways for a third party to interject itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen or even that it’s rare. Just more rare than if you turn politicians loose on the system.
I’m always amazed that people implicitly trust politicians, as though they’re unbiased referees trying to keep the game fair. Nope. The reasonable regulation you pass today will turn into some bizarre fiefdom in 10 years.
No, it’s that regulation is often used as a political tool to wield power over the players in the market.
Free markets are far from ideal. But they do make it a bit more difficult to game the system because there are fewer ways for a third party to interject itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen or even that it’s rare. Just more rare than if you turn politicians loose on the system.
I’m always amazed that people implicitly trust politicians, as though they’re unbiased referees trying to keep the game fair. Nope. The reasonable regulation you pass today will turn into some bizarre fiefdom in 10 years.
I've come to believe this is just the latest version of a very old (and illegal) tactic: predatory pricing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
I think the way to do it is by growing inside a niche that is sufficiently narrow that it isn't interesting for a big competitor.
I have a small agency and a product in a niche market and even there big consulting and IT services companies are starting spin offs to address these niches, and even bidding at a loss (especially when you take into account pre sales investments) to displace remaining niche actors like us.
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Loot-box is gambling not subscriptions.
> then death
...or a perpetual zombie state as a "brand" that has absolutely nothing to do with its original owner. Trusted names from my youth (GE, Westinghouse, Frigidaire, Maytag, Zenith, etc.) mean nothing these days. Packard Bell has been resurrected twice now.
...or a perpetual zombie state as a "brand" that has absolutely nothing to do with its original owner. Trusted names from my youth (GE, Westinghouse, Frigidaire, Maytag, Zenith, etc.) mean nothing these days. Packard Bell has been resurrected twice now.
I count that as being the same as death. The name may live on, but the company is long gone and the name is meaningless.
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The British transport YouTubers I follow, particularly Jago Hazard, every time they mention the Great Western Railway, are careful to remind us that it has no relation to the original company of that name.
I get exactly what you mean, and I've felt the same thing: this pervasive stormcloud over my head as I wonder "is EVERYthing doomed to an eternal september?!"
However, I think this depressing outlook is an artifact of how much technology is fixated on social capture in a digital space. In that medium, yes, it's all just ebbs and flows. The article put it beautifully: we kept thinking that usenet or AOL or myspace or facebook were going to win, but it has taken a few decades for us to realize that in actuality they are just fashion trends that happen to require some very technical people to knit.
However, that doesn't mean that _technology_ is this way. And in fact, this speaks to the odd word mangling we've all adopted in which "tech" has started to mean "social web oriented silicon valley startups or juggernauts". Technology is so much bigger than that, and true innovation stands on its own and persists through time. An actual _invention_ doesn't need to win hearts and minds, and it doesn't need to set trends. A wheelbarrow is a wheelbarrow, and once somebody conceives it, it will always be useful whenever you need wheelbarrow-like functionality. Its utility will be obvious and non-controversial. It is still possible to use our intellects to think of pure pareto improvement arrangements of atoms and bits that do a useful job. I think the engineering profession and the world has gotten a bit distracted from that truth. Uncharitably, you could blame it on a greedy obsession with taking over the world, which comes at the expense of doing well-defined and prosaically useful things for the world.
However, I think this depressing outlook is an artifact of how much technology is fixated on social capture in a digital space. In that medium, yes, it's all just ebbs and flows. The article put it beautifully: we kept thinking that usenet or AOL or myspace or facebook were going to win, but it has taken a few decades for us to realize that in actuality they are just fashion trends that happen to require some very technical people to knit.
However, that doesn't mean that _technology_ is this way. And in fact, this speaks to the odd word mangling we've all adopted in which "tech" has started to mean "social web oriented silicon valley startups or juggernauts". Technology is so much bigger than that, and true innovation stands on its own and persists through time. An actual _invention_ doesn't need to win hearts and minds, and it doesn't need to set trends. A wheelbarrow is a wheelbarrow, and once somebody conceives it, it will always be useful whenever you need wheelbarrow-like functionality. Its utility will be obvious and non-controversial. It is still possible to use our intellects to think of pure pareto improvement arrangements of atoms and bits that do a useful job. I think the engineering profession and the world has gotten a bit distracted from that truth. Uncharitably, you could blame it on a greedy obsession with taking over the world, which comes at the expense of doing well-defined and prosaically useful things for the world.
The way you get around this type of crap is by diving deep, and when you think you've gotten deep enough, go further. Academia, for all it's faults, is a fantastic way around the bullshit you get with industry hype, by mere virtue of open peer scrutiny. You want to understand whether the current "AI" hype will last? Research and understand the theory and academics behind it - therein lies your truth, and if it doesn't align with what you see in industry, you know it's grift. Hint: it's usually grift.
Once you've identified the grift you can rest easy knowing that eventually it will collapse and the grifters will be left with nothing but society-warping amounts of money.
And you get to grind away until death but rest easy knowing that you're virtuous based on your own internalized definition of virtuous.
> It has really made me pessimistic about tech and products in general. There's the free and great stage, then the market is captured, then enshittification, then death.
This is an accurate summary. And it’s completely normal to not be excited about this. I love tech, but this isn’t tech. The tech is just bait to achieve market dominance. The new age vultures do everything in their power to eliminate competition, the very fuel that makes markets work. So it’s not even business in the traditional sense either, it’s more similar to political power games.
This is an accurate summary. And it’s completely normal to not be excited about this. I love tech, but this isn’t tech. The tech is just bait to achieve market dominance. The new age vultures do everything in their power to eliminate competition, the very fuel that makes markets work. So it’s not even business in the traditional sense either, it’s more similar to political power games.
The big wrinkle is they're mainly free while they're burning VC money on user acquisition trying to 'win' some niche they can exploit to justify a crazy evaluation. The free money fueling that early golden age directly requires the eventual enshittification in the current model because the VC doesn't want a stable profitable enterprise they're all swinging for the unicorn fences.
You are older so this cycle is relatively brief for you. For a young person, a ten year run is like forever.
I try to avoid all products with vendor lock-in specifically because it is so predictable.
This is a huge tangent, but I've started harboring similar feelings for video games. Go read comments for the latest game and 90% of the comments will be about item drops, skins, loot drops, whatever. It's absolutely mind boggling because all those things IMO suck the fun out of the game which it to kill something, kill someone, or explore some world.
I winced hard at the $70 price tag on Tears of the Kingdom - but damned if I didn't get more than my money's worth. One of the things that makes that game so fun is that the whole thing is just there in front of you and you are largely allowed to approach the game however you want. One of the best games ever in terms of respecting the player's intelligence and creativity - just gives you a set of tools and says "fuck around and find out."
Nintendo is sometimes very good at what they do. Another example is the Pikmin series. Miyamoto's favorite. It's never been a real seller, but they do another version every ten years and it gets better every time. One day we'll look at these games and realize how much they invented.
I was first a bit torn about Tears of the Kingdom, it was hard to get back to the world of Breath of the Wild. Then I found this cave, and then it was 2am, and four hours disappeared somewhere. Now I can't let it out of my hands...
I was first a bit torn about Tears of the Kingdom, it was hard to get back to the world of Breath of the Wild. Then I found this cave, and then it was 2am, and four hours disappeared somewhere. Now I can't let it out of my hands...
Tears of the Kingdom is a perfect example of doing it right. It respects the player and treats them well. Jedi Survivor does too.
This is one of the major reasons why I stopped playing most games entirely. When the fun has been monetized out of them, what's the point?
I mostly play single player games these days because they've been spared. I played a Plague's tale a few weeks ago. Really strange premise but a lot of fun!
Game publishers must fear the day when a FOSS game engine will be interfaced with a FOSS AI capable of creating credible worlds and interacting NPCs.
More recycled garbage that I can ignore
They already use procedural generation for worlds and stupid NPCs. If adding Open Source AI makes offline single player games more credible, I'd be all for it. If not also because that would force them to make online multiplayer games a lot more palatable. The point is creating competition, not discouraging multiplayer.
I only play single-player games anymore because I won't play any game that requires a connection to a server somewhere. So it's not a stance against multiplayer games (I still play old multiplayer games with my friends. They just don't require connecting with a third-party server) but a stance against phoning home.
That means there are quite a few single player games that are off the table for me as well.
That means there are quite a few single player games that are off the table for me as well.
There's too many single player games that require an internet connection though, usually for DRM or (if mobile) ad serving purposes :/
Single player games are not competitive enough for the people who believe in "the microtransactions are only cosmetic".
That's generally true, but I'd point out the Souls games which can be very rewarding for competitive people.
Who are you competing with, speed runners? I've played all of them but I never thought i should look online and find some other player to compete with in kill time or something.
Edit: oh funny. I forgot they had pvp in them. Because I've always ignored it and in Elden ring you can't get invaded unless you ask for it, so I never was.
Edit: oh funny. I forgot they had pvp in them. Because I've always ignored it and in Elden ring you can't get invaded unless you ask for it, so I never was.
I've basically given up on AAA titles and don't bother anymore. The only games I can tolerate now are indie and story driven games like "The Quarry"[0]. I think studios such as Ubisoft are the biggest offenders in this space, if you look at all their latest release , it is all free to play, looter shooter "live service" games. On second thought, everything related to tech is becoming junk in general: from Social Media to Games to Subscription based Note apps to Mobile apps.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1577120/The_Quarry/
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1577120/The_Quarry/
Just stop playing most AAA or mobile games and that should solve most of that for you. The exceptions being the God of War series, the Mario and Zelda series. I still get excited for those. And probably the next Elder Scrolls or Witcher game.
But other than that, lately I've been far more excited about the Persona series, Nier Automata, Spike Chunsoft games (especially Danganronpa), The Witness (a bit older now), The Outer Wilds, Subnautica, Slay the Spire, Inscryption, and Vampire Survivors.
Tears of the Kingdom is probably the best pure exploration game ever made, with Outer Wilds being better in some ways, as it's simulating an entier solar system in real time and has some really clever ideas in it, but it's a smaller game overall. I think I pretty much fully explored Outer Wilds (except the expansion) in 20 hours, I've aleady put in 80 hours into TOTK and I've seen maybe 40% of the content so far.
But other than that, lately I've been far more excited about the Persona series, Nier Automata, Spike Chunsoft games (especially Danganronpa), The Witness (a bit older now), The Outer Wilds, Subnautica, Slay the Spire, Inscryption, and Vampire Survivors.
Tears of the Kingdom is probably the best pure exploration game ever made, with Outer Wilds being better in some ways, as it's simulating an entier solar system in real time and has some really clever ideas in it, but it's a smaller game overall. I think I pretty much fully explored Outer Wilds (except the expansion) in 20 hours, I've aleady put in 80 hours into TOTK and I've seen maybe 40% of the content so far.
Yes, it's a disaster. A lot of industries are out to maximize profits, even if it means destroying their own product. What economic forces would drive you to ruin their product? Are these corporations looking ahead economically and concluding it's best to destroy their product and just accept the money?
The mobile gaming era pioneered the approach where game design is fundamentally driven by the game's monetization mechanics.
It's mind boggling how many people enjoy that though. You're right. Clash of Clans et all really changed the gaming dynamic.
Just as an example, Halo Infinite came out and it had warts, but also had a good fundamentals for gameplay. Good speed and weapons. Every single comment was about armor cores and skins. I just didn't get it.
Just as an example, Halo Infinite came out and it had warts, but also had a good fundamentals for gameplay. Good speed and weapons. Every single comment was about armor cores and skins. I just didn't get it.
The thing a lot of these AAA devs don’t seem to get is that what works for Clash of Clans doesn’t work for AAA games most of the time. Also, the Clash of Clans devs are liked by the player base because they take community feedback very seriously (and, as a counter point, the Clash Royale devs are despised because they don’t).
Buying a monthly pass for one of those games ends up feeling like a pretty good deal because it enables you to increase your engagement with the game by a lot for what feels like a good deal. AAA shooters that go down this rabbit hole feel like they’re spending more development effort pushing skins I don’t want while giving a half-backed game with the promise of improvement in the future that often never happens.
For the price of a monthly pass for Clash games, I’m easily getting more hours of enjoyment than dollars invested each month.
Buying a monthly pass for one of those games ends up feeling like a pretty good deal because it enables you to increase your engagement with the game by a lot for what feels like a good deal. AAA shooters that go down this rabbit hole feel like they’re spending more development effort pushing skins I don’t want while giving a half-backed game with the promise of improvement in the future that often never happens.
For the price of a monthly pass for Clash games, I’m easily getting more hours of enjoyment than dollars invested each month.
> Buying a monthly pass for one of those games ends up feeling like a pretty good deal because it enables you to increase your engagement with the game by a lot for what feels like a good deal.
You have no idea how right you are. It increases your engagement. Not your enjoyment.
> Good speed and weapons. Every single comment was about armor cores and skins. I just didn't get it.
You have to play for something. To reach the end of the story. To grow a thing (city builders, minecraft). Or... for skins in a competitive shooter. But there are no skins unless you pay real money for the game you've already paid for. Oops?
You have no idea how right you are. It increases your engagement. Not your enjoyment.
> Good speed and weapons. Every single comment was about armor cores and skins. I just didn't get it.
You have to play for something. To reach the end of the story. To grow a thing (city builders, minecraft). Or... for skins in a competitive shooter. But there are no skins unless you pay real money for the game you've already paid for. Oops?
The surprising thing is how captive we our to the chemical responses of our brains. These companies measure out dopamine like a drug and use their games to drip-feed it methodically to maximize your cash spend.
This exact thing made me stop wanting to use reddit
I would like to add completion mechanics and badges to this list of things as well. Reddit is obsessed with 100% completion. It stops being a game and starts being work at some point.
I don't know when it happened, but at some point in the past it stopped being about playing games for fun, and turned into playing these things for something else - status maybe? I don't know how to describe what I'm thinking.
I don't know when it happened, but at some point in the past it stopped being about playing games for fun, and turned into playing these things for something else - status maybe? I don't know how to describe what I'm thinking.
Yeah, I had to remove myself from gaming subs.
> I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to achieve an unnatural growth is probably not good for both the quality of the product and the long term stability of it.
Right, but that's not the point. VCs (and most founders / anyone holding equity) just want to get our before the hockey-stick graph starts turning into an S-graph. The product itself is mostly irrelevant (to everyone except the users that is).
Right, but that's not the point. VCs (and most founders / anyone holding equity) just want to get our before the hockey-stick graph starts turning into an S-graph. The product itself is mostly irrelevant (to everyone except the users that is).
> but that's not the point. VCs (and most founders / anyone holding equity) just want to get our before the hockey-stick graph starts turning into an S-graph.
Most efficient system in the world, ladies and gentlemen
Most efficient system in the world, ladies and gentlemen
> There is a fixation with growing and doing it rapidly that I believe is harmful. I don't know when this switch flipped.
Gradually? I happened around 1995 and it’s only ever slowed down for recessions.
It’s not a trend of companies it’s a trend of funding sources and strategies. If you take fifty million in funding, those guys want it back. And they want it back 10x. So when your favorite little company takes a funding round that is five times more money than they’ve ever seen total, let alone at once, your favorite little company is about to change into something ugly.
Gradually? I happened around 1995 and it’s only ever slowed down for recessions.
It’s not a trend of companies it’s a trend of funding sources and strategies. If you take fifty million in funding, those guys want it back. And they want it back 10x. So when your favorite little company takes a funding round that is five times more money than they’ve ever seen total, let alone at once, your favorite little company is about to change into something ugly.
I think it's a problem outside of the VC-adjacent space too.
There's a sense that if you can't solve a huge societal problem (ideally several), it's not worth doing anything. It's really disempowering mindset because most of those problems are really hard to solve.
It's like all the focus is on what effect the thing you're building will have on the world, rather than just building something because you think it would be kinda neat if it existed.
The latter type of projects are the only sorts of projects I've had any success with. It's really liberating to not have to play some five dimensional chess game guessing what will make other people behave in certain ways and just using your own judgement to build what you like.
There's a sense that if you can't solve a huge societal problem (ideally several), it's not worth doing anything. It's really disempowering mindset because most of those problems are really hard to solve.
It's like all the focus is on what effect the thing you're building will have on the world, rather than just building something because you think it would be kinda neat if it existed.
The latter type of projects are the only sorts of projects I've had any success with. It's really liberating to not have to play some five dimensional chess game guessing what will make other people behave in certain ways and just using your own judgement to build what you like.
> It's really liberating to not have to play some five dimensional chess game guessing what will make other people behave in certain ways and just using your own judgement to build what you like.
I think people underrate this idea, way too much.
Humans are a pretty diverse set of people. But we're similar enough that in a population with ~10^13 people, there's probably 10^4 people who are pretty much clones of you, in terms of your preference, taste, etc.
With the internet, it's never been cheaper to find them. Preconditioned on it being you or me, 10^3 of those people are probably browsing this website, for example.
I hope the fluctuations of fashion lean more towards assigning social value to smaller, more sustainable builders. The migration in that direction deserves to be bigger. I observe it happening personally, but tech media is lagging significantly behind, mainly because these people don't spend money on advertising or PR.
I think people underrate this idea, way too much.
Humans are a pretty diverse set of people. But we're similar enough that in a population with ~10^13 people, there's probably 10^4 people who are pretty much clones of you, in terms of your preference, taste, etc.
With the internet, it's never been cheaper to find them. Preconditioned on it being you or me, 10^3 of those people are probably browsing this website, for example.
I hope the fluctuations of fashion lean more towards assigning social value to smaller, more sustainable builders. The migration in that direction deserves to be bigger. I observe it happening personally, but tech media is lagging significantly behind, mainly because these people don't spend money on advertising or PR.
Oh man well said, I had this uneasy feeling while reading your comment.
I think the world is fucked, especially in how it's planting incentives in our brains. For girls it's clothes, make-up, being fit. For guys it's cars, games, sex. And of course there's general consumerism that doesn't gender-discriminate anyone.
For tech people there's something else I hate with passion: creating images of great, world changing people. We aspire to be Zucks, Musks, Gateses, Holmes (yes, theranos). It's always bullshit to sell something or gain political power but the damage is done anyway. It's hard to live a simple life and enjoy simple things when everyone around expected you to look up to them and change the world. Many people believed their narration and became sociopaths that maximize gains on every opportunity. Even I was very drawn to "growth hacking" before. Now I see how crazy it all is.
I think the world is fucked, especially in how it's planting incentives in our brains. For girls it's clothes, make-up, being fit. For guys it's cars, games, sex. And of course there's general consumerism that doesn't gender-discriminate anyone.
For tech people there's something else I hate with passion: creating images of great, world changing people. We aspire to be Zucks, Musks, Gateses, Holmes (yes, theranos). It's always bullshit to sell something or gain political power but the damage is done anyway. It's hard to live a simple life and enjoy simple things when everyone around expected you to look up to them and change the world. Many people believed their narration and became sociopaths that maximize gains on every opportunity. Even I was very drawn to "growth hacking" before. Now I see how crazy it all is.
For me, I think the big mind-shift was the dot.com explosion/implosion.
VC driven growth at all costs ("GaaC"), monetize later. That's when I first saw it.
Prior to that what I remember was mostly building a small business.
On one you grow and grow fast, needing multiple rounds, to exit.
The other was build a business with one or two rounds, then have a product that generates profit.
The GaaC method also means spreading the company into all kinds of things - maybe away from the core - which I think causes loss in the original value prop.
VC driven growth at all costs ("GaaC"), monetize later. That's when I first saw it.
Prior to that what I remember was mostly building a small business.
On one you grow and grow fast, needing multiple rounds, to exit.
The other was build a business with one or two rounds, then have a product that generates profit.
The GaaC method also means spreading the company into all kinds of things - maybe away from the core - which I think causes loss in the original value prop.
It's funny because having lived through that, we all thought the implosion of .com companies that worked this way, during the .com crash, was a repudiation of this strategy. But it came back within 10 years, and stronger.
I also remember clearly that at the beginning of things with Facebook there was a strong sense from the press of "how the hell will this thing ever make money?" and big questions like that around the IPO. Hell, there was that going on for Google around their IPO, too.
There was a brief period from about 2001 to 2007 or 2008 or so when there was perhaps more responsibility to try to start on a more even revenue-earning foundation with sounder business plans. But that all blew up in the 2010s.
It's possible this was all tied into the massive cuts in interest rates, and QE etc after 2008 that made debt really cheap.
I also remember clearly that at the beginning of things with Facebook there was a strong sense from the press of "how the hell will this thing ever make money?" and big questions like that around the IPO. Hell, there was that going on for Google around their IPO, too.
There was a brief period from about 2001 to 2007 or 2008 or so when there was perhaps more responsibility to try to start on a more even revenue-earning foundation with sounder business plans. But that all blew up in the 2010s.
It's possible this was all tied into the massive cuts in interest rates, and QE etc after 2008 that made debt really cheap.
I believe it's really the outcome of capitalism and greed taking something that was organic (forums and chat) and monetizing it to death. Facebook monetized your family and friends, Instagram monetized your vanity / creativity, etc.
You can see this incorporation of the internet with the classic Craiglist image: - https://scalecuts.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Craigslist-... - https://mediacloud.theweek.com/image/private/s--X-WVjvBW--/f...
You can see this incorporation of the internet with the classic Craiglist image: - https://scalecuts.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Craigslist-... - https://mediacloud.theweek.com/image/private/s--X-WVjvBW--/f...
I would agree with greed but push back on capitalism. There are many ways to be a capitalist. Greed is a common choice, but there are more humanist approaches, too.
From your example, Craigslist is itself is a capitalist institution, making >$100mm/year. Patagonia, Wikipedia, King Arthur Baking Company, Darn Tough Socks, Lodge cookware, are all capitalist too.
I think it's important for entrepreneurial-minded folks to have positive role models – it's possible to develop wealth for yourself, your customers, your employees, and your environment, and to do so with respect and dignity. In fact, a well-operated business is probably the most effective vehicle for having an outsized impact in your community, so defined.
From your example, Craigslist is itself is a capitalist institution, making >$100mm/year. Patagonia, Wikipedia, King Arthur Baking Company, Darn Tough Socks, Lodge cookware, are all capitalist too.
I think it's important for entrepreneurial-minded folks to have positive role models – it's possible to develop wealth for yourself, your customers, your employees, and your environment, and to do so with respect and dignity. In fact, a well-operated business is probably the most effective vehicle for having an outsized impact in your community, so defined.
I understand growing rapidly, especially for a social network, where you need to quickly reach a certain amount of user content per day to provide value. If you can't get to that point fast enough, then you'll crash and burn.
I think the bigger issue is equating success with active user count. Social networks love to brag about their number of active users. It's all they care about. It doesn't matter if they're making the world a worse place, ruining lives, making people depressed, turning everyone into swiping zombies, taking information that was previously accessible and moving it inside a walled garden. That doesn't matter. If they have more active users, they're more successful.
However, look at HN as a counter example. It's a decent community and I think the reason for that is not setting growth as the metric of success. HN has enough content to keep people interested. What's the purpose of more users after that point? Yes, they'll create additional revenue, but if they can't provide equally engaging content or comments, they're just going to drag the quality of the community down (a trade that most businesses gladly accept).
This is the world we live in though. Everyone is focused on numbers. All people care about is followers, likes, or subscribers, and they'll happily sell their soul if they can grow those numbers. Companies don't care, they'll promote whatever garbage gets the most clicks and keeps those active users up. Advertisers don't care, they'll sponsor whoever has the highest number of views. It's a sad state of affairs.
I think the bigger issue is equating success with active user count. Social networks love to brag about their number of active users. It's all they care about. It doesn't matter if they're making the world a worse place, ruining lives, making people depressed, turning everyone into swiping zombies, taking information that was previously accessible and moving it inside a walled garden. That doesn't matter. If they have more active users, they're more successful.
However, look at HN as a counter example. It's a decent community and I think the reason for that is not setting growth as the metric of success. HN has enough content to keep people interested. What's the purpose of more users after that point? Yes, they'll create additional revenue, but if they can't provide equally engaging content or comments, they're just going to drag the quality of the community down (a trade that most businesses gladly accept).
This is the world we live in though. Everyone is focused on numbers. All people care about is followers, likes, or subscribers, and they'll happily sell their soul if they can grow those numbers. Companies don't care, they'll promote whatever garbage gets the most clicks and keeps those active users up. Advertisers don't care, they'll sponsor whoever has the highest number of views. It's a sad state of affairs.
While this is true and I think most VCs are idiots, there is a natural phenomenon of the internet which allows for exponential growth and which means that startup = growth is a very real thing. What VCs and a lot of startups try and do is fake the actual utility of a product through forced marketing and Glamour.
Yea I actually think it's similar to something that happens with my 2 year-old. He thinks putting shoes on means we go outside. So when he wants to go outside, rather than saying "outside", he goes and gets his shoes.
The internet' scale allows great products to grow exponentially. A bunch of great software, sites, and tools took off and grew at a rapid rate. But we took the wrong lesson from this and thought "rapid growth=great product". So VCs have put growth above everything else, and are hoping they can figure out a product after, like a 2 year-old thinking that putting on his shoes will mean he gets to go outside.
The internet' scale allows great products to grow exponentially. A bunch of great software, sites, and tools took off and grew at a rapid rate. But we took the wrong lesson from this and thought "rapid growth=great product". So VCs have put growth above everything else, and are hoping they can figure out a product after, like a 2 year-old thinking that putting on his shoes will mean he gets to go outside.
Many companies fail because they take on investment and then have to grow into their valuation. The fast growth creates enormous inefficiencies inside the company, because management and tech cannot keep up. This often mans that the company eventually has to shut down.
On more than one occasion I've worked in places where we were asked to be at our tidied up desks because VCs were about to be paraded through the office.
Every time there were more of us. Basically, "look at how we are burning through your money by hiring all these people. Growth!"
Now, the actual growth, daily active users and all, that is an area of rampant fraud, but VCs seem to be OK with it until the company runs out of runway. THEN it's a total scandal, even though all they need to do is pop the hood for 5 minutes to see how the numbers are arrived at.
Every time there were more of us. Basically, "look at how we are burning through your money by hiring all these people. Growth!"
Now, the actual growth, daily active users and all, that is an area of rampant fraud, but VCs seem to be OK with it until the company runs out of runway. THEN it's a total scandal, even though all they need to do is pop the hood for 5 minutes to see how the numbers are arrived at.
I feel like I’m talking about how harmful the insatiable desire for growth is on an almost daily now. I couldn’t agree with you more.
Most of HN would always assume you have to compete and capture the market, no matter what you're talking about.
If you are taking hundred of millions in funding, sure you need to capture the market of "all the people". If you build something that's just for a certain group of people, you can compete by just having a better product that specifically addresses those users needs.
Look at HN, I know, run by a VC and it's not without some issues, but it is still better than most forums and social media to me specifically because of what it doesn't try to do. It has a specific goal and doesn't feel the need to try and extend beyond it.
My ideal is that in the future we will more communities like this, where it's built to address a group of users needs and not try and expand beyond it. Where the content and information is shaped in a form to meet the specific needs of the group using it and not generalized into the lowest common denominator so ad sales can go up. It feels unlikely at this point, but I still have hope.
Look at HN, I know, run by a VC and it's not without some issues, but it is still better than most forums and social media to me specifically because of what it doesn't try to do. It has a specific goal and doesn't feel the need to try and extend beyond it.
My ideal is that in the future we will more communities like this, where it's built to address a group of users needs and not try and expand beyond it. Where the content and information is shaped in a form to meet the specific needs of the group using it and not generalized into the lowest common denominator so ad sales can go up. It feels unlikely at this point, but I still have hope.
> Things can just be what they are, grow naturally and then die naturally. I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to achieve an unnatural growth is probably not good for both the quality of the product and the long term stability of it.
Maybe this actually IS, the natural way to grow and die for a global social network
Maybe this actually IS, the natural way to grow and die for a global social network
Yeah, at some point VC became synonymous with tech. I mean here we all are, discussing this topic on a VC's forum.
The two are heavily-overlapped, for sure. But in the last 25 years, it feels like the horse (tech) has been steadily placed further and further behind the cart (VC).
The two are heavily-overlapped, for sure. But in the last 25 years, it feels like the horse (tech) has been steadily placed further and further behind the cart (VC).
> I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to achieve an unnatural growth is probably not good for both the quality of the product and the long term stability of it.
The people getting rich with these methods don't care about quality or stability.
The people getting rich with these methods don't care about quality or stability.
At this point there needs to be a very big and popular anti-capitalist push before anything good comes back.
I'm all about the human rights as my first concern so any fellow SJWs reading can rest assured they don't need to interrogate me about whether I know about this or that type of oppression. BUT, can I just for a moment talk about how literally tasteless life has become?
Here in Canada, we have for my whole life had a different Special K than USans. Closest I could describe it is it was like flat rice krispies with a different kinda flavor, sort of like the American one but not completely.
The private equity that owns the Kelloggs brand now shut down the Canadian factory, which is the only place that made that Special K. Now we have "Original" on our shelves, in an extra bit of gaslighting.
I like candy, always have. I took the notion the other day to go find some Kraft Chocolate Flavor Caramels. Lately they're called Fudgies. Most lately they're discontinued.
Nothing small or niche that doesn't produce a specific profit margin is safe.
I'm all about the human rights as my first concern so any fellow SJWs reading can rest assured they don't need to interrogate me about whether I know about this or that type of oppression. BUT, can I just for a moment talk about how literally tasteless life has become?
Here in Canada, we have for my whole life had a different Special K than USans. Closest I could describe it is it was like flat rice krispies with a different kinda flavor, sort of like the American one but not completely.
The private equity that owns the Kelloggs brand now shut down the Canadian factory, which is the only place that made that Special K. Now we have "Original" on our shelves, in an extra bit of gaslighting.
I like candy, always have. I took the notion the other day to go find some Kraft Chocolate Flavor Caramels. Lately they're called Fudgies. Most lately they're discontinued.
Nothing small or niche that doesn't produce a specific profit margin is safe.
Public social media is one to many publishing.
Mass publishing is more useful and valuable the more people you can publish to at once.
It has nothing to do with VC. "Don't pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel" long predates vulture capitalists.
Mass publishing is more useful and valuable the more people you can publish to at once.
It has nothing to do with VC. "Don't pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel" long predates vulture capitalists.
> Mass publishing is more useful and valuable the more people you can publish to at once.
Absolutely, but that was happening long before the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc., came around to monetize it and convince people that they are the only ways to do it. They're cultural parasites.
Absolutely, but that was happening long before the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc., came around to monetize it and convince people that they are the only ways to do it. They're cultural parasites.
> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate.
This is something I didn't really understand when I was younger.
In every online community that has had some amount of hype surrounding it, there are prominent figures either hyping it up further or spreading doom and gloom when the metrics don't match their expectations.
What I didn't get when I was younger was that this doesn't need to affect me at all. Unlike the people mentioned above, my financial or reputational interests don't align with the size of the online communities I participate in. For me it comes down to "do I enjoy participating".
If you aren't an advertiser, streamer, content creator or anything of the sort, you don't really benefit from hype, growth or any of those things. So don't let these things affect your enjoyment of talking to people online or playing video games with them etc.
This is something I didn't really understand when I was younger.
In every online community that has had some amount of hype surrounding it, there are prominent figures either hyping it up further or spreading doom and gloom when the metrics don't match their expectations.
What I didn't get when I was younger was that this doesn't need to affect me at all. Unlike the people mentioned above, my financial or reputational interests don't align with the size of the online communities I participate in. For me it comes down to "do I enjoy participating".
If you aren't an advertiser, streamer, content creator or anything of the sort, you don't really benefit from hype, growth or any of those things. So don't let these things affect your enjoyment of talking to people online or playing video games with them etc.
Even a lot of regular people these days are caught up in the addiction of getting the maximum amount of engagement out of everything they post online. They don't want to talk to people. They want thousands of strangers to praise them. So the bigger the network the more likely they can accomplish this.
I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers doing it.
I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers doing it.
> I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers doing it.
“Prank” channels come to my mind at this. Like the one that got shot semi-recently for messing with people, who then said it was “worth it”.
It’s a shame how hard people can hyperfocus on fake Internet points and even let it hurt their actual relationships. I had a friend who was intensely upset over a comment suggesting a new camera angle because it “made their channel look bad” to be constructively criticized.
“Prank” channels come to my mind at this. Like the one that got shot semi-recently for messing with people, who then said it was “worth it”.
It’s a shame how hard people can hyperfocus on fake Internet points and even let it hurt their actual relationships. I had a friend who was intensely upset over a comment suggesting a new camera angle because it “made their channel look bad” to be constructively criticized.
The human brain wasn't made for this.
Seeing the effects of social interactions with millions of people (albeit virtual) does something weird to the brain.
Seeing the effects of social interactions with millions of people (albeit virtual) does something weird to the brain.
I agree, but I also think it's a completely unsurprising outcome. Pre-internet, there were lots of people who wanted to be famous, and idolized movie and TV stars and the like. With these sorts of internet platforms, those types of people actually do have a shot at being well-known, if not outright famous, in a way.
> They want thousands of strangers to praise them.
And the irony is that the people who think this way tend to be less likely to have anything worthwhile to offer.
And the irony is that the people who think this way tend to be less likely to have anything worthwhile to offer.
Toddler learning strikes again. Doing good gets you a token acknowledgement. Creating a mess of some sort gets it instant and intense. Yet people are always surprised that people don't do good for attention despite essentially ignoring it themselves.... People by and large tend to have little self-awareness unfortunately.
I'm of two minds on certain kinds of complaints. A lot of content creators talk about getting throttled or having their reach restricted.
While I do think content creators should be treated fairly by platforms to make the game fair... This doesn't really affect me and it often feels like that's all certain content creators will fixate upon, rather than making quality content.
I think it's sometimes a strategy of deception, to make it seem like the speaker is so much more important or dangerous that they need to be suppressed by the powerful.
While I do think content creators should be treated fairly by platforms to make the game fair... This doesn't really affect me and it often feels like that's all certain content creators will fixate upon, rather than making quality content.
I think it's sometimes a strategy of deception, to make it seem like the speaker is so much more important or dangerous that they need to be suppressed by the powerful.
> A lot of
Isn't that the issue? How is "a lot", and is that number representative for everyone who publishes text, video, pictures,... on the Internet or, more limited, the Web, or, even more limited, a handful of online platforms?
> making quality content
I'd argue that quality is in the eye of the beholder. Online, both trash and treasure co-exist. Moreover, one man's trash is another's treasure as quality is, always, subjective value attribution.
The big challenge has always been discovery. The so-called "big" social networks got big because the introduction of a "wall" or a "feed" changed how we, denizens of the internet, interact with the Web: from "pull" to "push". The vast majority of internet users don't collect and curate links: they just consume a feed that pushes updates from their "network". Or "subreddits", or "channels".
Incidentally, how's consuming feeds of pushed content all that different from flipping television channels? Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent does echo eerily in this digital future.
Isn't that the issue? How is "a lot", and is that number representative for everyone who publishes text, video, pictures,... on the Internet or, more limited, the Web, or, even more limited, a handful of online platforms?
> making quality content
I'd argue that quality is in the eye of the beholder. Online, both trash and treasure co-exist. Moreover, one man's trash is another's treasure as quality is, always, subjective value attribution.
The big challenge has always been discovery. The so-called "big" social networks got big because the introduction of a "wall" or a "feed" changed how we, denizens of the internet, interact with the Web: from "pull" to "push". The vast majority of internet users don't collect and curate links: they just consume a feed that pushes updates from their "network". Or "subreddits", or "channels".
Incidentally, how's consuming feeds of pushed content all that different from flipping television channels? Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent does echo eerily in this digital future.
Yeah I've gone back to traditional bulletin boards just because the conversation quality is much higher and therefore enjoyable. When people are racing to go viral or get "upvotes" you get lowest common denominator junk food, which is the life blood of these social networks which are about stealing your time and showing you ads.
Unless someone generates a social network based on a paywall and exclusivity that somehow delights the business model just doesn't work for the user.
Unless someone generates a social network based on a paywall and exclusivity that somehow delights the business model just doesn't work for the user.
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...
>Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
...
>Prodigy was upset that people were, by and large, using the free communication service they tossed on there just to have more content and not their weird Random Garbage You Don’t Need Storefront. And in many ways, that complaint has only gotten louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.
>Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
...
>Prodigy was upset that people were, by and large, using the free communication service they tossed on there just to have more content and not their weird Random Garbage You Don’t Need Storefront. And in many ways, that complaint has only gotten louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.
Social networks wouldn't have any users if they didn't solve a problem and/or fulfill a need that people have. What problem is it that they solve? IMO they solve exactly two problems.
1) People with no technical skills or knowledge (can't setup their own web site) want to be able to publish text, photo, and video content to the public, to a community, and/or to their direct contacts. They do not want to have to use any technology other than their phone, and they refuse to pay for this with any amount of money.
2) Since there are texts, photos, and videos being published, people want to be able to gather all the published content that interests them in one place for convenient reading.
As long as people have these needs, someone will make software that fulfills them, regardless of how they measure success.
Because people can't be serving the content directly from their phone, we have no way to do this today without some form of cloud hosting. Non-technical people can't set that up themselves. And even if they could, it would cost them money. The only solution we have right now is for some organization to create and manage a centralized-ish platform.
Even if that organization were a benevolent non-profit, it needs to pay the bills for hosting and labor. You could maybe ride on donations, but good luck with that. Therefore, the organization needs to somehow extract some value from the non-paying users. This inevitably leads to advertising, selling user data, locking users into a walled garden, and all the other mechanisms we have seen that harm the platform in order to get the resources to keep it alive.
And this is the key to making a successful social network that will last. How can you meet those two needs, and pay the bandwidth and storage bills, without doing any of the things that make the platform suck? Nobody's figured it out yet!
1) People with no technical skills or knowledge (can't setup their own web site) want to be able to publish text, photo, and video content to the public, to a community, and/or to their direct contacts. They do not want to have to use any technology other than their phone, and they refuse to pay for this with any amount of money.
2) Since there are texts, photos, and videos being published, people want to be able to gather all the published content that interests them in one place for convenient reading.
As long as people have these needs, someone will make software that fulfills them, regardless of how they measure success.
Because people can't be serving the content directly from their phone, we have no way to do this today without some form of cloud hosting. Non-technical people can't set that up themselves. And even if they could, it would cost them money. The only solution we have right now is for some organization to create and manage a centralized-ish platform.
Even if that organization were a benevolent non-profit, it needs to pay the bills for hosting and labor. You could maybe ride on donations, but good luck with that. Therefore, the organization needs to somehow extract some value from the non-paying users. This inevitably leads to advertising, selling user data, locking users into a walled garden, and all the other mechanisms we have seen that harm the platform in order to get the resources to keep it alive.
And this is the key to making a successful social network that will last. How can you meet those two needs, and pay the bandwidth and storage bills, without doing any of the things that make the platform suck? Nobody's figured it out yet!
The cost per user to maintain these kinds of platforms is extremely low. That's why advertising supported models work. So that means if you charged for a platform, you wouldn't need to charge each user very much on a monthly or yearly basis. Such a platform could still be one that require no technical skills or knowledge from the users, who just want to publish their stuff.
Many people (especially tech people) have an almost psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services. But do we always have to cater to those people, who'd refuse to pay $10 per year for an ad-free social network? I even suspect that a paid social network would be of higher quality, since the payment is an effective barrier against bots and some low-quality users.
Many people (especially tech people) have an almost psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services. But do we always have to cater to those people, who'd refuse to pay $10 per year for an ad-free social network? I even suspect that a paid social network would be of higher quality, since the payment is an effective barrier against bots and some low-quality users.
> Many people (especially tech people) have an almost psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services.
> who'd refuse to pay $10 per year
I've not actually seen many services that charge $10 per year. Most instead charge $5 per month / $50 per year. The few services I know of that do charge in the range of what you specify are near universally regarded as really good value.
> who'd refuse to pay $10 per year
I've not actually seen many services that charge $10 per year. Most instead charge $5 per month / $50 per year. The few services I know of that do charge in the range of what you specify are near universally regarded as really good value.
Yes, $10 per year was just a number, but maybe not too far from the truth. I've seen estimates of $5 to $30 to $300 per user and year for sites like Instagram.
Something for $10 per year is usually a promotion, and maybe a good place to get started. Since the social media giants have been giving it for free for a decade...
Something for $10 per year is usually a promotion, and maybe a good place to get started. Since the social media giants have been giving it for free for a decade...
>Many people (especially tech people) have an almost psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services.
That is what confuses me...we are strongly in favor of privacy and tracker blocking, but then get upset when we have to pay money to join a social media. Are there any third options to support platforms that don't require payments, or advertisement viewing?
That is what confuses me...we are strongly in favor of privacy and tracker blocking, but then get upset when we have to pay money to join a social media. Are there any third options to support platforms that don't require payments, or advertisement viewing?
> we are strongly in favor of privacy and tracker blocking, but then get upset when we have to pay money
Speak for yourself; whenever I have the option to pay to remove ads on a service I get value from, I sign up nigh immediately. And on top of that, I'm always running with aggressive ad and tracker blockers running.
If given the option, I would have paid a small yearly fee to use Instagram back ~10 years ago when the platform was actually decent and didn't do icky things to push engagement up.
Of course, the problem is that most people would not have paid a yearly fee to use Instagram, so if payment were required, it would be a ghost town. And, all things being equal, advertisers would prefer that there isn't an ad-free paid option, since then the ads reach fewer people.
Speak for yourself; whenever I have the option to pay to remove ads on a service I get value from, I sign up nigh immediately. And on top of that, I'm always running with aggressive ad and tracker blockers running.
If given the option, I would have paid a small yearly fee to use Instagram back ~10 years ago when the platform was actually decent and didn't do icky things to push engagement up.
Of course, the problem is that most people would not have paid a yearly fee to use Instagram, so if payment were required, it would be a ghost town. And, all things being equal, advertisers would prefer that there isn't an ad-free paid option, since then the ads reach fewer people.
I try to do this but money is limited. If I tried this for every service I use, I would be pretty broke and I am not the only one. The average salary in America is around 40-50k/year. Factor in kids, rent, food, and everything else, paying for no ads gets real expensive real quick. That's why I wish there was a good in-between option that respects privacy and our attention, but still allows sites to make a profit. I want an ad-free internet, but not at the risk of classism and blocking out the lower class that can only afford to use free internet services
If somebody can't afford let's say $20 per year for a service that they enjoy, then it's because that person has decided she doesn't want to afford it. I understand the argument that "It's not worth it", that's for each individual to decide. But then those people shouldn't ask for somebody else to provide it to them for free or without ads. You can have it if you want it, and if you don't want it that much, then do something else with your time, no?
I have never heard any argument about classism or blocking out poor people applied to the devices needed to get online, the computers, the phones. Strange, isn't it?
I have never heard any argument about classism or blocking out poor people applied to the devices needed to get online, the computers, the phones. Strange, isn't it?
>then it's because that person has decided she doesn't want to afford it
That is VERY flawed logic that suggests a very privileged life. Growing up my family was downright poor to the point we sometimes lost electricity because we had to buy bologna and bread for supper instead. We used an ancient PC that was given to us to access the internet which was 10$/month for dialup, but even that sometimes got cut out, again, because we needed food. Having spent most of my childhood in a trailer park with disparaged people, it often comes down to a mix of tough situations, bad luck, and poor life choices. Should we really punish them for it by locking things behind a paywall? I don't think so. Also should we have our privacy be violated to support the poor? Also no.
This is why I am trying to brainstorm a third option...one that isn't classist but still allows for privacy. Its a tough question and I am having trouble coming up with solutions...but a third option HAS to exist somewhere.
As for your point about classism not being applied to the devices themselves, that is because you could fall out of a tree and hit five cell phones on your way down. If you know pretty much anyone, they probably have a spare old phone they haven't touched in years they can let you have if you can't afford your own. People also throw them out all the time so you can get one out of the trash and it will still be plenty useable. With public WiFi, no matter how poor you are you can still access the internet. Its a weird time where even the homeless can access Facebook without even having to pay for a device
That is VERY flawed logic that suggests a very privileged life. Growing up my family was downright poor to the point we sometimes lost electricity because we had to buy bologna and bread for supper instead. We used an ancient PC that was given to us to access the internet which was 10$/month for dialup, but even that sometimes got cut out, again, because we needed food. Having spent most of my childhood in a trailer park with disparaged people, it often comes down to a mix of tough situations, bad luck, and poor life choices. Should we really punish them for it by locking things behind a paywall? I don't think so. Also should we have our privacy be violated to support the poor? Also no.
This is why I am trying to brainstorm a third option...one that isn't classist but still allows for privacy. Its a tough question and I am having trouble coming up with solutions...but a third option HAS to exist somewhere.
As for your point about classism not being applied to the devices themselves, that is because you could fall out of a tree and hit five cell phones on your way down. If you know pretty much anyone, they probably have a spare old phone they haven't touched in years they can let you have if you can't afford your own. People also throw them out all the time so you can get one out of the trash and it will still be plenty useable. With public WiFi, no matter how poor you are you can still access the internet. Its a weird time where even the homeless can access Facebook without even having to pay for a device
I don't want to pass judgement on another posters parents, even though you told your personal story here, so I'll answer your comment as best as I can with that in mind. You shouldn't be so eager to pass judgement on me either. You don't know me or my life.
Poverty or a poor upbringing is not a badge of honour, but many people see it as such and maybe you've become accustomed to easily shutting up anybody by saying that they have no idea what it's like being poor. Okay, but how do you make progress from that?
I stand by my point that if somebody can't pay a very small yearly fee for access to the content or service they want, then they weren't that interested. If you are so poor that you can't afford $10 per year, then you have much bigger problems than accessing some online content of interest. The goal for a person in that situation or somebody who wants to help them is to get out of poverty, not to cope.
As for getting the devices for free, the same argument could be applied to online content: You can get information for free at a library, you can socialize with any friend by meeting in person. It's a less convenient experience than having it at home, but using a discarded device is also a less convenient experience.
I find your arguments about "classism" a bit strange. Is it "classism" that some stuff is more expensive in the supermarket? Is it "classism" that the plumber charges his hourly fee to the poor as well as to the rich? That an iPhone costs a thousand dollars?
Is it "classism" that an employer pays a wage that is much lower than what the worker produces? Yes! Is it "classism" that you have to indebt yourself for life to afford a home or pay rent for literally nothing? Yes! Is it classism that a large percentage of the population spend their whole life without ever having done anything productive, because they have unlimited taps for money taken as taxes from workers? Yes!
But instead of being upset at those who are to blame for poverty, it is easier to direct that rage towards some internet poster like me, who dares to suggest that not everything should be free.
Here are what I see as the options to have online services:
1. Current ad-fueled, spam-ridden content and social networks
2. Cheap paid content and social networks
3. Creators work for free, making content for your benefit without any reimbursement. After some time they burn out or can't afford the time it takes.
4. Pirating. Mainstream creators can take it, small time creators go broke.
5. You vote for communism so that content creators get paid by the government and everybody can benefit for free. The content will be what the communist government prefers for you to have.
I prefer option 2.
Poverty or a poor upbringing is not a badge of honour, but many people see it as such and maybe you've become accustomed to easily shutting up anybody by saying that they have no idea what it's like being poor. Okay, but how do you make progress from that?
I stand by my point that if somebody can't pay a very small yearly fee for access to the content or service they want, then they weren't that interested. If you are so poor that you can't afford $10 per year, then you have much bigger problems than accessing some online content of interest. The goal for a person in that situation or somebody who wants to help them is to get out of poverty, not to cope.
As for getting the devices for free, the same argument could be applied to online content: You can get information for free at a library, you can socialize with any friend by meeting in person. It's a less convenient experience than having it at home, but using a discarded device is also a less convenient experience.
I find your arguments about "classism" a bit strange. Is it "classism" that some stuff is more expensive in the supermarket? Is it "classism" that the plumber charges his hourly fee to the poor as well as to the rich? That an iPhone costs a thousand dollars?
Is it "classism" that an employer pays a wage that is much lower than what the worker produces? Yes! Is it "classism" that you have to indebt yourself for life to afford a home or pay rent for literally nothing? Yes! Is it classism that a large percentage of the population spend their whole life without ever having done anything productive, because they have unlimited taps for money taken as taxes from workers? Yes!
But instead of being upset at those who are to blame for poverty, it is easier to direct that rage towards some internet poster like me, who dares to suggest that not everything should be free.
Here are what I see as the options to have online services:
1. Current ad-fueled, spam-ridden content and social networks
2. Cheap paid content and social networks
3. Creators work for free, making content for your benefit without any reimbursement. After some time they burn out or can't afford the time it takes.
4. Pirating. Mainstream creators can take it, small time creators go broke.
5. You vote for communism so that content creators get paid by the government and everybody can benefit for free. The content will be what the communist government prefers for you to have.
I prefer option 2.
>Poverty or a poor upbringing is not a badge of honour, but many people see it as such and maybe you've become accustomed to easily shutting up anybody by saying that they have no idea what it's like being poor
I don't view it as a badge of honor, but I know that its almost always privileged people that suggest locking the lower classes out of information. That pisses me off like nothing else. People are all for the poor until it comes down to actually finding solutions.
>As for getting the devices for free, the same argument could be applied to online content
Not particularly unless piracy gets involved. If we lock everything behind a paywall, going to the library or downloading information won't do jack.
>I find your arguments about "classism" a bit strange. Is it "classism" that some stuff is more expensive in the supermarket? Is it "classism" that the plumber charges his hourly fee to the poor as well as to the rich? That an iPhone costs a thousand dollars?
I am talking about information. Not physical goods. You are applying the logic of limited physical goods to online services that are virtually unlimited. Bandwidth is cheap.
As for if #2 gets implemented, I guarantee you that this will not work. Paid content will not be cheap. Never has been and never will. In your other comments you bring up that you foresee services being a mere 10$ a year. The price hikes and predatory practices that online services have had prove that at best you are naive. If #2 happens, I fully support people doing #4.
Now there are other options. Look at Coffeezilla on YouTube...doesn't run ads, but runs entirely off of donations. Other youtubers do the same thing. They set up a patreon, give benefits and incentives to do so, and for those that can't afford to support they watch for free. PBS had a similar thing going when analogue airwaves were legal for TV and still does to some extent with their streaming service. Some shows you have to pay for but the important stuff, such as newshour, are completely free for everyone to watch.
For large scale digital projects, some features could be locked behind a paywall whereas the majority of content is free. That is how Discord makes its money. The ad/paid dichotomy does not exist...there are other options that allow people to freely access content and communicate with people in ways that normally they would not be able to afford.
I don't view it as a badge of honor, but I know that its almost always privileged people that suggest locking the lower classes out of information. That pisses me off like nothing else. People are all for the poor until it comes down to actually finding solutions.
>As for getting the devices for free, the same argument could be applied to online content
Not particularly unless piracy gets involved. If we lock everything behind a paywall, going to the library or downloading information won't do jack.
>I find your arguments about "classism" a bit strange. Is it "classism" that some stuff is more expensive in the supermarket? Is it "classism" that the plumber charges his hourly fee to the poor as well as to the rich? That an iPhone costs a thousand dollars?
I am talking about information. Not physical goods. You are applying the logic of limited physical goods to online services that are virtually unlimited. Bandwidth is cheap.
As for if #2 gets implemented, I guarantee you that this will not work. Paid content will not be cheap. Never has been and never will. In your other comments you bring up that you foresee services being a mere 10$ a year. The price hikes and predatory practices that online services have had prove that at best you are naive. If #2 happens, I fully support people doing #4.
Now there are other options. Look at Coffeezilla on YouTube...doesn't run ads, but runs entirely off of donations. Other youtubers do the same thing. They set up a patreon, give benefits and incentives to do so, and for those that can't afford to support they watch for free. PBS had a similar thing going when analogue airwaves were legal for TV and still does to some extent with their streaming service. Some shows you have to pay for but the important stuff, such as newshour, are completely free for everyone to watch.
For large scale digital projects, some features could be locked behind a paywall whereas the majority of content is free. That is how Discord makes its money. The ad/paid dichotomy does not exist...there are other options that allow people to freely access content and communicate with people in ways that normally they would not be able to afford.
All I can say is try it yourself if you think donations is a good model. Unless you are huge like Coffezilla, you'll have a very hard time getting donations (or paid subscribers). People tend to fall into the content creator casino trap, since for every person who gets rich or manages to have a sustainable income for their work, there's 1000 who wastes a ton of effort without ever getting anywhere - even when the content is brilliant. It's kind of like Hollywood, a machine that eats dreams to make a few people stars and platform owners filthy rich on free labour.
> If we lock everything behind a paywall, going to the library or downloading information won't do jack.
Go to a library. You can find a whole bunch of paywalled newspapers and magazines to read for free there. Not to mention... books.
> As for if #2 gets implemented, I guarantee you that this will not work. Paid content will not be cheap. Never has been and never will. In your other comments you bring up that you foresee services being a mere 10$ a year.
You can get some excellent content for $10 per year, but a more normal price is around $50 per year - which is still dirt cheap. I chose $10 per year as an example, because that's the price point where people start complaining about how broke they are and can't they just have it for free.
> I am talking about information. Not physical goods. You are applying the logic of limited physical goods to online services that are virtually unlimited. Bandwidth is cheap.
This is the problem right here. The false assumption. People need to spend a whole lot of time and effort and usually also money to create content and information. They need to get paid, they need to sustain themselves. Or you'll just have some hobby bloggers writing about their Raspberry Pi.
Why don't you apply this argument to a restaurant? The ingredients in your meal are cheap, so why should you pay for your meal? Since the labour of the people making and serving apparently has no value. Why aren't Ubers just the cost of gas? Etc.
If small time content creators can't get paid, they'll do something else. That content will not exist to pirate. You will only have ad- and scam-fueled mainstream content. I suspect your answer is probably "Good, fuck them!", but I think that's an unnecessary loss for the world and human knowledge.
> If we lock everything behind a paywall, going to the library or downloading information won't do jack.
Go to a library. You can find a whole bunch of paywalled newspapers and magazines to read for free there. Not to mention... books.
> As for if #2 gets implemented, I guarantee you that this will not work. Paid content will not be cheap. Never has been and never will. In your other comments you bring up that you foresee services being a mere 10$ a year.
You can get some excellent content for $10 per year, but a more normal price is around $50 per year - which is still dirt cheap. I chose $10 per year as an example, because that's the price point where people start complaining about how broke they are and can't they just have it for free.
> I am talking about information. Not physical goods. You are applying the logic of limited physical goods to online services that are virtually unlimited. Bandwidth is cheap.
This is the problem right here. The false assumption. People need to spend a whole lot of time and effort and usually also money to create content and information. They need to get paid, they need to sustain themselves. Or you'll just have some hobby bloggers writing about their Raspberry Pi.
Why don't you apply this argument to a restaurant? The ingredients in your meal are cheap, so why should you pay for your meal? Since the labour of the people making and serving apparently has no value. Why aren't Ubers just the cost of gas? Etc.
If small time content creators can't get paid, they'll do something else. That content will not exist to pirate. You will only have ad- and scam-fueled mainstream content. I suspect your answer is probably "Good, fuck them!", but I think that's an unnecessary loss for the world and human knowledge.
>People tend to fall into the content creator casino trap, since for every person who gets rich or manages to have a sustainable income for their work, there's 1000 who wastes a ton of effort without ever getting anywhere
That applies to paywalled content too, my guy. That logic doesn't work.
>You can get some excellent content for $10 per year, but a more normal price is around $50 per year - which is still dirt cheap
I have never seen any content anywhere be available for 10$ a year, and 50$ a year isn't cheap unless you provide a LOOOOOT of content. Even if it is worth it, most people living paycheck to paycheck can't afford that.
>Why don't you apply this argument to a restaurant? The ingredients in your meal are cheap, so why should you pay for your meal? Since the labour of the people making and serving apparently has no value. Why aren't Ubers just the cost of gas? Etc.
All of those things are more expensive than bandwidth and are also scarce physical goods. Yes, I know, labor costs are a thing and so is electricity, etc. Thats why I brought up a mixed-payment model such as Discord. You might not make as much money as Facebook with their ad-based services, but if you want to serve the biggest amount of people that is a logical way to go. The service is free, but non-essential extras cost. Works for both parties.
>If small time content creators can't get paid, they'll do something else. That content will not exist to pirate.
I find that this is rarely true, and is hyperbole at best. Very few small time content creators paywall their content. Rather, they sell merch and accept donations. "But, what if they don't win the lottery and get big?" Yeah, they wouldn't be making that money anyway even if it were paywalled.
As for big time content creators, such as Disney, they also make the vast majority of their money off of merch. The actual ticket sales are a small fraction of total revenue so piracy is an extremely small dent in profit.
I say all this to say this...paywalls are not the answer to this problem. Its not a dichotomy like people want to assume. These past few days I have researched alternative revenue models, even brought up a few in this discussion, and paywalling is too restrictive to make any sort of sense for most consumers that are broke or value their money.
That applies to paywalled content too, my guy. That logic doesn't work.
>You can get some excellent content for $10 per year, but a more normal price is around $50 per year - which is still dirt cheap
I have never seen any content anywhere be available for 10$ a year, and 50$ a year isn't cheap unless you provide a LOOOOOT of content. Even if it is worth it, most people living paycheck to paycheck can't afford that.
>Why don't you apply this argument to a restaurant? The ingredients in your meal are cheap, so why should you pay for your meal? Since the labour of the people making and serving apparently has no value. Why aren't Ubers just the cost of gas? Etc.
All of those things are more expensive than bandwidth and are also scarce physical goods. Yes, I know, labor costs are a thing and so is electricity, etc. Thats why I brought up a mixed-payment model such as Discord. You might not make as much money as Facebook with their ad-based services, but if you want to serve the biggest amount of people that is a logical way to go. The service is free, but non-essential extras cost. Works for both parties.
>If small time content creators can't get paid, they'll do something else. That content will not exist to pirate.
I find that this is rarely true, and is hyperbole at best. Very few small time content creators paywall their content. Rather, they sell merch and accept donations. "But, what if they don't win the lottery and get big?" Yeah, they wouldn't be making that money anyway even if it were paywalled.
As for big time content creators, such as Disney, they also make the vast majority of their money off of merch. The actual ticket sales are a small fraction of total revenue so piracy is an extremely small dent in profit.
I say all this to say this...paywalls are not the answer to this problem. Its not a dichotomy like people want to assume. These past few days I have researched alternative revenue models, even brought up a few in this discussion, and paywalling is too restrictive to make any sort of sense for most consumers that are broke or value their money.
> That applies to paywalled content too, my guy. That logic doesn't work.
Not at all. If you charge for your content or services, you're starting to get an okay reimbursement at some hundreds of subscribers. With ad-supported content on social media, you need to count your audience in tens or hundreds of thousands if you want to make more than $20 per month.
> 50$ a year isn't cheap unless you provide a LOOOOOT of content.
Curiosity Stream have promotions for $10 per year, if you needed an example.
It's all about the quality of content, which it seems you don't care much for. $50 per year is cheap for a local newspaper, for example. Yet, most people think like you and that's why local journalism is dying. The result is that people sit at home and rage about Trump or Biden and know everything about the Titanic submarine, but have no clue about what's going on in their neighborhood or region. Information that is of very high value and can have a huge impact on the person who was too cheap to pay a pittance for it.
> All of those things are more expensive than bandwidth and are also scarce physical goods.
Labour is not a scarce physical good. That's what you're paying for in the restaurant. But if the result is on a screen instead of on a plate, suddenly the creator doesn't deserve to get paid. Maybe a donation, if and only if you feel like it and are in a good mood.
> Very few small time content creators paywall their content. Rather, they sell merch and accept donations.
Just take a look at how many projects abandoned because the creators moved on because they couldn't afford the monetary cost or time. Things that where enjoyed by thousands, but that very few wanted to contribute to, neither in time, money or effort. I've seen this many times. Websites that were huge in user base and impact, getting maybe a couple of hundred dollars per month in donations, while the user base is counted in millions. Or sites giving away great stuff for free for years and then started asking for payment. Do you think anybody is grateful for the years of free content? No, they're outraged that the creators don't continue making the stuff for free anymore. "Greedy", "beggar" and such are what content creators get called when they dare to charge or ask for donations.
Those still there and asking for donations and selling merch are those who didn't move on. Individual paywalls are hard because most creators aren't that technical to be able to set it up. That's why I think paywalls work better as an umbrella service.
> and paywalling is too restrictive to make any sort of sense for most consumers that are broke or value their money.
They aren't consumers if they don't pay, that's the thing. Why should anybody care about them? I hope these kind of people fucking stay on TikTok or go offline. They contribute nothing, why the hell should anybody care about them?
Not at all. If you charge for your content or services, you're starting to get an okay reimbursement at some hundreds of subscribers. With ad-supported content on social media, you need to count your audience in tens or hundreds of thousands if you want to make more than $20 per month.
> 50$ a year isn't cheap unless you provide a LOOOOOT of content.
Curiosity Stream have promotions for $10 per year, if you needed an example.
It's all about the quality of content, which it seems you don't care much for. $50 per year is cheap for a local newspaper, for example. Yet, most people think like you and that's why local journalism is dying. The result is that people sit at home and rage about Trump or Biden and know everything about the Titanic submarine, but have no clue about what's going on in their neighborhood or region. Information that is of very high value and can have a huge impact on the person who was too cheap to pay a pittance for it.
> All of those things are more expensive than bandwidth and are also scarce physical goods.
Labour is not a scarce physical good. That's what you're paying for in the restaurant. But if the result is on a screen instead of on a plate, suddenly the creator doesn't deserve to get paid. Maybe a donation, if and only if you feel like it and are in a good mood.
> Very few small time content creators paywall their content. Rather, they sell merch and accept donations.
Just take a look at how many projects abandoned because the creators moved on because they couldn't afford the monetary cost or time. Things that where enjoyed by thousands, but that very few wanted to contribute to, neither in time, money or effort. I've seen this many times. Websites that were huge in user base and impact, getting maybe a couple of hundred dollars per month in donations, while the user base is counted in millions. Or sites giving away great stuff for free for years and then started asking for payment. Do you think anybody is grateful for the years of free content? No, they're outraged that the creators don't continue making the stuff for free anymore. "Greedy", "beggar" and such are what content creators get called when they dare to charge or ask for donations.
Those still there and asking for donations and selling merch are those who didn't move on. Individual paywalls are hard because most creators aren't that technical to be able to set it up. That's why I think paywalls work better as an umbrella service.
> and paywalling is too restrictive to make any sort of sense for most consumers that are broke or value their money.
They aren't consumers if they don't pay, that's the thing. Why should anybody care about them? I hope these kind of people fucking stay on TikTok or go offline. They contribute nothing, why the hell should anybody care about them?
> That is what confuses me...we are strongly in favor of privacy and tracker blocking, but then get upset when we have to pay money to join a social media. Are there any third options to support platforms that don't require payments, or advertisement viewing?
There is a bit of a highly honed instinct that paying for it doesn't make you not the product and is thus a rip off. Cable TV has ads and it keeps on creeping in, just like how paying to not be spammed doesn't work because it only signals to the danes that you have the geld and thus are a better target.
There is a bit of a highly honed instinct that paying for it doesn't make you not the product and is thus a rip off. Cable TV has ads and it keeps on creeping in, just like how paying to not be spammed doesn't work because it only signals to the danes that you have the geld and thus are a better target.
Cable ads are always brought up, but what about all the other services you can pya for to not have ads? Fastmail has been providing this service for a long time, for example.
And what is the risk exactly? If a paid service starts introducing ads, you can cancel. You can cancel cable TV as well.
And what is the risk exactly? If a paid service starts introducing ads, you can cancel. You can cancel cable TV as well.
> The cost per user to maintain these kinds of platforms is extremely low
> Many people (especially tech people) have an almost psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services.
I'd guess it is exactly because we know how cheap running base social network is, how little value is in all the feature and fidelity overhead and realize that ultimately we aren't invited to pay for the service, but for the whole bullshit business built on top of it.
> Many people (especially tech people) have an almost psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services.
I'd guess it is exactly because we know how cheap running base social network is, how little value is in all the feature and fidelity overhead and realize that ultimately we aren't invited to pay for the service, but for the whole bullshit business built on top of it.
Modern platforms are for most folks tools of compulsive consumption more than they are tools for meaningful communication. More users = more content = more consumption. More consumption means more chances to serve ads for a business built on that model.
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I am from a generation which grew up with phpBB forums of various kinds, and I loved the format.
I still struggle with understanding why we can't remain within decentralised forums. Was it such a hassle to check like four URLs a day to see what was happening in the threads you participated in? Are centralised feeds such a core necessity to us?
I still struggle with understanding why we can't remain within decentralised forums. Was it such a hassle to check like four URLs a day to see what was happening in the threads you participated in? Are centralised feeds such a core necessity to us?
I don't think the problem is user retention so much as upkeep. That the web is an extremely adversarial environment.
Popular forums are high value targets as they both tend to be central in the PageRank graph (so link spam has historically paid off very well as black hat SEO); while also sitting on large user databases with associated emails.
So there are non-stop intrusion attempts and ceaseless bot spam. Operating a forum is a lot of thankless maintenance. It's not made better by the fact that a lot of the older forum software had nightmarish upgrade procedures.
Popular forums are high value targets as they both tend to be central in the PageRank graph (so link spam has historically paid off very well as black hat SEO); while also sitting on large user databases with associated emails.
So there are non-stop intrusion attempts and ceaseless bot spam. Operating a forum is a lot of thankless maintenance. It's not made better by the fact that a lot of the older forum software had nightmarish upgrade procedures.
tl;dr: Anecdotally, the attention span of the person is now three seconds. If you can't grab that three seconds; next.
> Operating a forum is a lot of thankless maintenance.
If you are to run any sort of site, you just kind of got to expect it. Who here thanks HN for their service?
Their favorite IRC server SysOP, Discord server owner?
Forum's were slow on delivering content.
The world is now driven by media and that was a PITA to host. If the webmaster didn't allow image uploads and even when so, you couldn't normally link elsewhere; were forced to register an account. Wait for a verification email, wait for an administrator to approve your account and then gain 10 posts. Text is time consuming to read and too write, like this comment.
They were more a leisure activity rather than what the internet has become now. Adaptability never happened and with the failure of evolving with real-time with the next generation who were starting out with internet enabled phones and gadgets caused their downfall.
They may of suited the generation, however they were not a fit for the upcoming younger generations. And if you can't target and gain their attention; expect to go extinct.
Code bases were too lumpy and such a mess; to make any modifications, to adapt it to anything else took a fair chunk of time and skill.
Proboards, Zetaboards, Invasion tried. Services where you could spawn an instantaneous forum for you and communities. It had momentum and than fell apart as did the death of AngelFire, GeoCities.
My two-cents.
> Operating a forum is a lot of thankless maintenance.
If you are to run any sort of site, you just kind of got to expect it. Who here thanks HN for their service?
Their favorite IRC server SysOP, Discord server owner?
Forum's were slow on delivering content.
The world is now driven by media and that was a PITA to host. If the webmaster didn't allow image uploads and even when so, you couldn't normally link elsewhere; were forced to register an account. Wait for a verification email, wait for an administrator to approve your account and then gain 10 posts. Text is time consuming to read and too write, like this comment.
They were more a leisure activity rather than what the internet has become now. Adaptability never happened and with the failure of evolving with real-time with the next generation who were starting out with internet enabled phones and gadgets caused their downfall.
They may of suited the generation, however they were not a fit for the upcoming younger generations. And if you can't target and gain their attention; expect to go extinct.
Code bases were too lumpy and such a mess; to make any modifications, to adapt it to anything else took a fair chunk of time and skill.
Proboards, Zetaboards, Invasion tried. Services where you could spawn an instantaneous forum for you and communities. It had momentum and than fell apart as did the death of AngelFire, GeoCities.
My two-cents.
> Who here thanks HN for their service?
you see people thanking the mods like dang on here all the time. it's basically a meme. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
even if they didn't, why should they? this site is used as advertising for YC and their job ads. why should they get extra thanks for maintaining a forum for its ad space? do you also thank Facebook or Twitter for its moderation?
you see people thanking the mods like dang on here all the time. it's basically a meme. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
even if they didn't, why should they? this site is used as advertising for YC and their job ads. why should they get extra thanks for maintaining a forum for its ad space? do you also thank Facebook or Twitter for its moderation?
> tl;dr: The attention span of the person is now three seconds. If you can't grab that three seconds; next.
I don't know this is true in general. Only in very noisy environments, which is like the opposite of what a forum is. The harder you clamor for attention, the harder it is to actually capture it because you're creating an environment where capturing attention for more than three seconds is impossible.
If you create a low-noise environment, you can capture attention for a long time.
I don't know this is true in general. Only in very noisy environments, which is like the opposite of what a forum is. The harder you clamor for attention, the harder it is to actually capture it because you're creating an environment where capturing attention for more than three seconds is impossible.
If you create a low-noise environment, you can capture attention for a long time.
Maybe so after reading your comment. I've updated my post to reflect anecdotally.
If I'm browsing for music, and if the introduction doesn't catch me, I'll randomly skip to somewhere in the middle and if then normally pass.
It's known if a comment is wall of text, like this one it's ignored.
I don't own any social accounts apart from HN, Reddit and Discord. Never owned any yet how the internet drives out content I feel it effects all.
As far as sites go, I look at very few. And if there's slow flow of information I tend to get frustrated.
We are all hunting for that dopamine hit.
If I'm browsing for music, and if the introduction doesn't catch me, I'll randomly skip to somewhere in the middle and if then normally pass.
It's known if a comment is wall of text, like this one it's ignored.
I don't own any social accounts apart from HN, Reddit and Discord. Never owned any yet how the internet drives out content I feel it effects all.
As far as sites go, I look at very few. And if there's slow flow of information I tend to get frustrated.
We are all hunting for that dopamine hit.
All of social media suffers from a paradox: you need enough users contributing valuable content to make it worth showing up, but not so many that it degrades to memes. The key benefit to centralized social networks is solving this by having a huge user base but letting you curate the content you engage with (subscribing to users, joining subreddits, etc.). Small forums have a huge discovery problem.
I loved forums, but with the modern legal landscape, liability for uploaded content, DMCA requests, etc. I would never want to run/moderate one - and that was true even before the current swarm of LLM-generated spam.
I loved forums, but with the modern legal landscape, liability for uploaded content, DMCA requests, etc. I would never want to run/moderate one - and that was true even before the current swarm of LLM-generated spam.
> “feeds”
People keep using this word when talking about what’s been happening with the internet recently- but they don’t realise how close it is to the actual answer. RSS has been around forever and it’s exactly what is needed. A feed reader can check thousands of blogs, comment sections, youtube channels, newsletters (imagine never being asked for your email randomly ever again), podcasts, whatever.
The real issue is (and should be) discovery. Make feeds more obvious (say, it was integrated into modern browsers. Some sort of first class “feed detected” icon) and then all you need is search, which has also been solved forever (hopefully it stays that way…).
People keep using this word when talking about what’s been happening with the internet recently- but they don’t realise how close it is to the actual answer. RSS has been around forever and it’s exactly what is needed. A feed reader can check thousands of blogs, comment sections, youtube channels, newsletters (imagine never being asked for your email randomly ever again), podcasts, whatever.
The real issue is (and should be) discovery. Make feeds more obvious (say, it was integrated into modern browsers. Some sort of first class “feed detected” icon) and then all you need is search, which has also been solved forever (hopefully it stays that way…).
> Make feeds more obvious (say, it was integrated into modern browsers. Some sort of first class “feed detected” icon)
Firefox and Safari used to have this during the web 2.0 years, back when RSS was at its peak: https://blog.markheadrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/fir... https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/image...
The browsers themselves were RSS readers.
Firefox and Safari used to have this during the web 2.0 years, back when RSS was at its peak: https://blog.markheadrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/fir... https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/image...
The browsers themselves were RSS readers.
> Was it such a hassle to check like four URLs a day
People decided to check more than 4. It's inevitable, you find a forum and start checking it, then find another, then another, and soon you have dozens of low volume forums, all adding to a small amount of messages.
RSS would have solved this problem, if the sites that published feeds actually made the feeds work. There's no need of centralization of the creation, but you must be able to centralize them someway.
And also, sharing a login between all of them is a very nice feature. Managing accounts is always a bother.
People decided to check more than 4. It's inevitable, you find a forum and start checking it, then find another, then another, and soon you have dozens of low volume forums, all adding to a small amount of messages.
RSS would have solved this problem, if the sites that published feeds actually made the feeds work. There's no need of centralization of the creation, but you must be able to centralize them someway.
And also, sharing a login between all of them is a very nice feature. Managing accounts is always a bother.
It's cynical, but because McDonald's only has so many humans to do social media, and they can't be everywhere all the time, so it's in their better interest to hype the fast horse and back it. We wouldn't want them infiltrating our forums, but they want our attention, and it's more cost effective to get it from Twitter and Threads than a million decentralized forums.
Not to us, but there are other folks out there.
As I've implied elsewhere, I like little geek communities too, but the big easy networks can and have fulfilled an important purpose of essentially being a better world "town square" than, e.g. network news.
They're incredibly far from perfect, but they've done a LOT of good, and are likely to continue to be necessary.
As I've implied elsewhere, I like little geek communities too, but the big easy networks can and have fulfilled an important purpose of essentially being a better world "town square" than, e.g. network news.
They're incredibly far from perfect, but they've done a LOT of good, and are likely to continue to be necessary.
> they've done a LOT of good
And a LOT of bad.
Overall, do the costs of global social networks outweigh the benefits? I'm skeptical.
And a LOT of bad.
Overall, do the costs of global social networks outweigh the benefits? I'm skeptical.
I would say that up to the point when they started for forcefully manipulating their content for direct payments or indirect "retention", yes, the benefit outweighed the costs.
By 2015 they were almost all incredibly harmful and mostly valueless.
By 2015 they were almost all incredibly harmful and mostly valueless.
As a Black person in America, I'm not in the slightest. Documented and spread proof that "we're not crazy, look at this stuff that actually does happen."
I think it's more that forums weren't really made for boosting engagement. It's like email, just a tool to do something not to keep people addicted. GenZ look at forums and they go eeewww.
I agree that the fates of social networks can develop and evolve intrinsically over time, and that there's maybe too much effort placed on advocating for their use with an immediate horizon as the goal.
However, it's pretty clear that network effects matter in social networks and other forms of IT. In some sense this is precisely why some people feel burned at the moment, in part.
In that regard, I don't really blame people for selling a social network or manipulating uptake, even if I don't like the network itself. It's how these things proceed in part.
I also agree with the author that it's ok if a community is small. I've come to the opinion that sometimes having a smaller community can be a good thing.
On the other hand, some platforms — the web, email — are pretty dominant, and we've lacked an open social network platform that solves the problem of putting content distribution directly in the hands of content producers. Part of what Mastodon, Bluesky, and Lemmy are trying to do is be that platform.
I also think it's normal for developers to want to make as many users of their products happy. So to the extent they make lots of users happy, they're happier?
However, it's pretty clear that network effects matter in social networks and other forms of IT. In some sense this is precisely why some people feel burned at the moment, in part.
In that regard, I don't really blame people for selling a social network or manipulating uptake, even if I don't like the network itself. It's how these things proceed in part.
I also agree with the author that it's ok if a community is small. I've come to the opinion that sometimes having a smaller community can be a good thing.
On the other hand, some platforms — the web, email — are pretty dominant, and we've lacked an open social network platform that solves the problem of putting content distribution directly in the hands of content producers. Part of what Mastodon, Bluesky, and Lemmy are trying to do is be that platform.
I also think it's normal for developers to want to make as many users of their products happy. So to the extent they make lots of users happy, they're happier?
> we've lacked an open social network platform that solves the problem of putting content distribution directly in the hands of content producers
I don't know about "open", but YouTube does this pretty well IMO. Search results aren't based on your profile, and it all seems pretty un-"managed", in a Twitter Files sense. I know it does do demonetization if people complain, but while it's not perfect, it's not unreasonable.
I don't know about "open", but YouTube does this pretty well IMO. Search results aren't based on your profile, and it all seems pretty un-"managed", in a Twitter Files sense. I know it does do demonetization if people complain, but while it's not perfect, it's not unreasonable.
YouTube prioritizes "authoritative sources" when searching for certain topics, which means channels of legacy media outlets.
Are we sure that your profile doesn't affect search results? I'd expect the opposite, considering it's Google and one of the things they're known for is changing search results based on your profile.
Are we sure that your profile doesn't affect search results? I'd expect the opposite, considering it's Google and one of the things they're known for is changing search results based on your profile.
I think it does. I remember that some of my more common search results changed to include children's content after I went on a lazytown binge out of nostalgia
I really want someone to make BoringBook - it's free until a billion people have signed up and then after that it costs $1 a year. It gives you a page you can post to and customise like myspace, an encrypted messaging client, local group pages and business pages. There are no ads, other than whatever businesses post on their pages. There are three feeds: your immediate network (which is the default), your local network (things from other people and businesses in your town) and the global feed. All of the feeds are capped at 100 posts to prevent infinite scrolling with the feeds refreshed every hour. Nothing else. It will never make more than 8 billion dollars a year (which is what would happen if everyone on the planet signed up). BoringBook - the social media utility company.
Eh, first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton. So, to actually pay for that you're going to either ask for VC money or show ads.
But then it turns out that money you got from the above will be far and beyond more than you'll ever earn by having people pay for the service. Your VCs and ad networks will want more engagement so you'll start down the dark path of increasing that all while showering yourself in money and not giving a single shit about the average person.
But then it turns out that money you got from the above will be far and beyond more than you'll ever earn by having people pay for the service. Your VCs and ad networks will want more engagement so you'll start down the dark path of increasing that all while showering yourself in money and not giving a single shit about the average person.
> first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton
I highly doubt that the actual essential infrastructure required to run it is going to cost more than 8 billion dollars/year. Twitter costs about $5 billion a year. Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year, enough to cover the costs, offer some dividend, and put some money aside for a rainy day. We're not fucking about with R&D because we're BoringBook, we're making a boring product that doesn't need to do anything fancy. It's a utility company. Pension funds can invest in it safe in the knowledge that they will get a small but reliable dividend year after a year. The silly VC money can go towards innovative tech like AR or growing meat in petridishes or medical research or something. We don't need it fucking around and messing with the social structure of society anymore.
I highly doubt that the actual essential infrastructure required to run it is going to cost more than 8 billion dollars/year. Twitter costs about $5 billion a year. Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year, enough to cover the costs, offer some dividend, and put some money aside for a rainy day. We're not fucking about with R&D because we're BoringBook, we're making a boring product that doesn't need to do anything fancy. It's a utility company. Pension funds can invest in it safe in the knowledge that they will get a small but reliable dividend year after a year. The silly VC money can go towards innovative tech like AR or growing meat in petridishes or medical research or something. We don't need it fucking around and messing with the social structure of society anymore.
>> the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton
> Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year
With 1 billion users, $2/year gives you $2B/year, not $16B/year.
> offer some dividend
Honestly, I think we explicitly don't want this. We should go for a non-profit model, where the company is required to put most/all of its revenue toward running the business, and cannot distribute dividends. If we have shareholders and dividends and whatnot, that's just an incentive for the owners to push for greater profits so their dividends go up.
You mention utilities, and that just makes me think of my local electric/gas utility, PG&E, which is a public, for-profit corporation, listed on a stock exchange. Years ago they even used to pay a dividend. They completely suck, and have been responsible for people's deaths. This is not at all the model we should strive for when it comes to a social-network-as-utility.
> Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year
With 1 billion users, $2/year gives you $2B/year, not $16B/year.
> offer some dividend
Honestly, I think we explicitly don't want this. We should go for a non-profit model, where the company is required to put most/all of its revenue toward running the business, and cannot distribute dividends. If we have shareholders and dividends and whatnot, that's just an incentive for the owners to push for greater profits so their dividends go up.
You mention utilities, and that just makes me think of my local electric/gas utility, PG&E, which is a public, for-profit corporation, listed on a stock exchange. Years ago they even used to pay a dividend. They completely suck, and have been responsible for people's deaths. This is not at all the model we should strive for when it comes to a social-network-as-utility.
> With 1 billion users, $2/year gives you $2B/year, not $16B/year.
I was doing the max theoretical if we had all 8 billion humans signed up. The better approach would be to do something pegged to the minimum wage in the country but it's pointless trying to create completely theoretical finances for an imaginary company in a forum thread. The general idea I'm trying to get across is we could charge a vastly lower price for these things if there weren't such greedy and power hungry motivations underlying their financial and corporate structures.
> This is not at all the model we should strive for when it comes to a social-network-as-utility.
I agree it does seem like something that it would probably be better served via a non-profit but it's probably a tough sell. Maybe something like a cooperative might be a nice compromise.
I was doing the max theoretical if we had all 8 billion humans signed up. The better approach would be to do something pegged to the minimum wage in the country but it's pointless trying to create completely theoretical finances for an imaginary company in a forum thread. The general idea I'm trying to get across is we could charge a vastly lower price for these things if there weren't such greedy and power hungry motivations underlying their financial and corporate structures.
> This is not at all the model we should strive for when it comes to a social-network-as-utility.
I agree it does seem like something that it would probably be better served via a non-profit but it's probably a tough sell. Maybe something like a cooperative might be a nice compromise.
Your numbers just don't make sense. First, if you had a bare bones social media site, it could be ran for $1b a year. Lets use that number.
Ok, so who are you getting that money from? I mean from me that $1 is some inconsiderable fraction of my income, it's nothing. But there lies the problem with income inequality in the world. For a huge portion of people you're asking for a pretty damned considerable payment for something they can get for 'free' from somewhere else. That other ad ran company is paying off influencers and 'cool kids' to be solely on their product with their ad and VC money while charging nothing. It will grow quickly while your site founders.
The problem here is you want to develop a 'rational' and 'reasonable' product. This would be useful if humans in mass were either of those things. The world would be a much better place if people were not dumb, including myself. But here we are.
Ok, so who are you getting that money from? I mean from me that $1 is some inconsiderable fraction of my income, it's nothing. But there lies the problem with income inequality in the world. For a huge portion of people you're asking for a pretty damned considerable payment for something they can get for 'free' from somewhere else. That other ad ran company is paying off influencers and 'cool kids' to be solely on their product with their ad and VC money while charging nothing. It will grow quickly while your site founders.
The problem here is you want to develop a 'rational' and 'reasonable' product. This would be useful if humans in mass were either of those things. The world would be a much better place if people were not dumb, including myself. But here we are.
Well if we was doing it properly, then it would be pegged to an hour of minimum wage or half an hour in whatever country you was operating in.
> That other ad ran company is paying off influencers and 'cool kids' to be solely on their product with their ad and VC money while charging nothing. It will grow quickly while your site founders.
Maybe. But what if it was a cool kid celebrity who made the site in the first place? There's a bunch of them out there, and quite a few who want to make the world a better place. Maybe if the vision was explained to them they'd get on board for free.
And the counterpoint is that there's been plenty of social networks that have had cool kids jump on board that have turned out to be duds. Everyone was raving about that audio chat room one during the pandemic and I can't even remember the name of it now.
> That other ad ran company is paying off influencers and 'cool kids' to be solely on their product with their ad and VC money while charging nothing. It will grow quickly while your site founders.
Maybe. But what if it was a cool kid celebrity who made the site in the first place? There's a bunch of them out there, and quite a few who want to make the world a better place. Maybe if the vision was explained to them they'd get on board for free.
And the counterpoint is that there's been plenty of social networks that have had cool kids jump on board that have turned out to be duds. Everyone was raving about that audio chat room one during the pandemic and I can't even remember the name of it now.
How do you pay for infrastructure and employees before getting to that 1-billion-user mark? If you take on VC funding, they're going to expect you to shoot for the moon; $1/user/year is not going to cut it for them.
So where else will you get the money? Do you really think you can get a loan for that? Sell bonds? I doubt it.
So where else will you get the money? Do you really think you can get a loan for that? Sell bonds? I doubt it.
You find people who see the long term benefit. Maybe they don't exist. Maybe they do.
Wikipedia is a giant global website that runs entirely on donations. I'd wager there are alternatives out there to the MBA/VC orthodoxy.
Wikipedia is a giant global website that runs entirely on donations. I'd wager there are alternatives out there to the MBA/VC orthodoxy.
This sentence made me chuckle:
> But, to this day, there are more people in the world without an account on Facebook than people with one.
So that's an upper bound of what, four billion people? I think basically anyone watching would consider that a success!
When people are wondering which social network will "succeed", they're not watching the different apps duke it out like a sports tournament. They just want to find a space in which they can communicate with most of the people they care about.
> But, to this day, there are more people in the world without an account on Facebook than people with one.
So that's an upper bound of what, four billion people? I think basically anyone watching would consider that a success!
When people are wondering which social network will "succeed", they're not watching the different apps duke it out like a sports tournament. They just want to find a space in which they can communicate with most of the people they care about.
Not everyone is looking for a small self-hosted space for their friends and family and local community. Heck why do I even need an online social network for that when I can just go out and talk to them? The vast majority of users on networks like Twitter are looking to connect with a wider world. And "success" in those terms simply means having a critical mass to make such a network sustainable and interesting (and maybe profitable). Zuck himself has stated multiple times since yesterday that his idea of success for Threads is 1 billion users. That is a lot fewer than 8 billion, but it is success nonetheless.
Mental illness. A big chunk of people on Twitter are not well up top. Normal people go to the bar to watch baseball or play boardgames or something.
It's not normal to be a Krassenstein or a BrooklynDadDefiant or whatever - those people are nuts.
It's not normal to be a Krassenstein or a BrooklynDadDefiant or whatever - those people are nuts.
It is important to point out that people like the krassenstein brothers or brooklynDadDefiant are not real people in the same sense as any Joe off the street is with an opinion. They are front-men for SuperPACs and they get paid by orgs like ActBlue. None of their ideas are ever their own, and they closely follow the daily order of battle from the DNC. Their engagement is also less-than-organic. Krassenstein were originally banned for paying for engagement from east asia and using custom software and fake accounts to artificially inflate their reach. The point is never to influence anyone. Their game is manufactured consent.
> Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier.
I appreciate the realist point of view in this paragraph and the two that precede it.
I’d like to go a step further and propose that we should deemphasize the explicit desire to develop communities online for what feels like the sake of having an online community. Online communities should be derivatives of offline identities, roles, interests etc, more often than not. But as more people seem to find “themselves” in a digital landscape that isn’t inherently social as much as it is social under certain contexts, the lines are being blurred, or disregarded entirely.
I used to be indifferent to federated networks, but I now understand the appeal of them when it comes down to being able to engage with predefined communities.
There is a lot to be said about the number one issue that newcomers confront being “which instance do I join?”.
I appreciate the realist point of view in this paragraph and the two that precede it.
I’d like to go a step further and propose that we should deemphasize the explicit desire to develop communities online for what feels like the sake of having an online community. Online communities should be derivatives of offline identities, roles, interests etc, more often than not. But as more people seem to find “themselves” in a digital landscape that isn’t inherently social as much as it is social under certain contexts, the lines are being blurred, or disregarded entirely.
I used to be indifferent to federated networks, but I now understand the appeal of them when it comes down to being able to engage with predefined communities.
There is a lot to be said about the number one issue that newcomers confront being “which instance do I join?”.
Stop trying.
Stop trying to make anything better.
Stop trying to create any kind of social space.
Just read my blog. Subscribe to my newsletter.
That's all you need.
Stop trying to make anything better.
Stop trying to create any kind of social space.
Just read my blog. Subscribe to my newsletter.
That's all you need.
Better than what?
#5 Hey stop talking and start buying things. Internet not supposed to make only some money. Internet supposed to make all money. It’s the rules.
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...
Better than #4 of the garbagetown list of social media trajectory.
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...
Better than #4 of the garbagetown list of social media trajectory.
> Like every human endeavour, every social network is there for a limited duration and will be useful to a limited niche of people
On a grand enough scale, sure. If we expand the scope of "social network" very slightly to consider things like the web and email, this fact becomes less clear. I am fairly young, and I suspect at least email will be used for the rest of my life. The difference between the modern landscape for new protocols and the landscape when the early internet protocols were made is that there was little struggle for power. People made things they wanted, and they took off if other people wanted the same thing.
Now we have a bunch of competition for what is essentially the same experience. Does that mean there will never be one dominant protocol (or shudders, one application) for social media? I wouldn't bet on that claim. I think it will just take longer to reach somewhere that we land on as a common denominator.
It seems to be that a protocol must be flexible enough to support the division of communities and migration of users, like the article says is human nature. Protocols can support that though - email is one such protocol that does. ActivityPub is another, seems to be the route that we are headed towards right now.
On a grand enough scale, sure. If we expand the scope of "social network" very slightly to consider things like the web and email, this fact becomes less clear. I am fairly young, and I suspect at least email will be used for the rest of my life. The difference between the modern landscape for new protocols and the landscape when the early internet protocols were made is that there was little struggle for power. People made things they wanted, and they took off if other people wanted the same thing.
Now we have a bunch of competition for what is essentially the same experience. Does that mean there will never be one dominant protocol (or shudders, one application) for social media? I wouldn't bet on that claim. I think it will just take longer to reach somewhere that we land on as a common denominator.
It seems to be that a protocol must be flexible enough to support the division of communities and migration of users, like the article says is human nature. Protocols can support that though - email is one such protocol that does. ActivityPub is another, seems to be the route that we are headed towards right now.
Incredibly reductionist argument. Success is impossible to define therefore all social networks are failures?
There are clearly properties of a social network that users would like to see: ease of use, reach, quality of content and moderation while also allowing for openness and free speech. Working toward a future where something like this exists at scale is worthwhile and a workable-enough definition of success.
There are clearly properties of a social network that users would like to see: ease of use, reach, quality of content and moderation while also allowing for openness and free speech. Working toward a future where something like this exists at scale is worthwhile and a workable-enough definition of success.
> Incredibly reductionist argument. Success is impossible to define therefore all social networks are failures?
Incredibly reductionist interpretation of the article.
Incredibly reductionist interpretation of the article.
That's not what the article is saying at all. The author is saying that any social network can be a success as long as it meets whatever metrics they care about.
A tiny private forum that only serves two people is successful if those two people only care about talking with each other.
Zuck will consider Threads a success if it gets to 1 billion users; that's still "only" an eighth of the world population, but that doesn't matter because the people running it get to define what success means to them.
A tiny private forum that only serves two people is successful if those two people only care about talking with each other.
Zuck will consider Threads a success if it gets to 1 billion users; that's still "only" an eighth of the world population, but that doesn't matter because the people running it get to define what success means to them.
[deleted]
The author mixes services such as Whatsapp and telegram which are mostly messaging apps with "social network" features, and full blown social networks that revolve more around posts, followers and content.
Meta launched a new platform today and got 10M people to sign up in the first 7 hours.
I am lost for words. Not sure how anyone still wants anything to do with Meta. How can you possibly want more social platforms by Meta. Meta couldn't die fast enough in my opinion.
And yet, millions of people signed up. I guess social networks can still succeed.
Meta launched a new platform today and got 10M people to sign up in the first 7 hours.
I am lost for words. Not sure how anyone still wants anything to do with Meta. How can you possibly want more social platforms by Meta. Meta couldn't die fast enough in my opinion.
And yet, millions of people signed up. I guess social networks can still succeed.
First, understand that not everyone is like you. Many people are vastly different, and have attitudes and things they care about that do not match your preferences.
Some people seem to be totally fine with the idea of a platform that sells data about them to third parties, and tries to track them all over the internet. Because they believe they get value out of the platform, but are unable or unwilling to pay for it with their own money.
I'm not like these people, but I understand that they exist, and more or less understand why they want what they want.
Some people seem to be totally fine with the idea of a platform that sells data about them to third parties, and tries to track them all over the internet. Because they believe they get value out of the platform, but are unable or unwilling to pay for it with their own money.
I'm not like these people, but I understand that they exist, and more or less understand why they want what they want.
I guess people want something similar to Twitter that is not Twitter, since Twitter has become a roaring dumpster fire.
I've never much understood the appeal of Twitter, because the discussions devolve and it seems like the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. Also the UI makes it hard to follow threads; I much prefer a nested layout a la HN to whatever Twitter is.
I've never much understood the appeal of Twitter, because the discussions devolve and it seems like the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. Also the UI makes it hard to follow threads; I much prefer a nested layout a la HN to whatever Twitter is.
I am also not a regular Twitter user, but even if I were, under no circumstances will I join another platform by Meta. Haven't we learned the lesson by now?
> Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier.
This resonates with me. The beauty of the Web was to allow you to find your niche anywhere in the world from your own place of living. But that concept has been contaminated and taken over by your typical big corporation. It is now diluted by hostile ads, psychological warfare, and manipulation, all while, on the surface, pitching you the idea that you can "cater" your experience to whatever you like.
The Web, or any community that is online or offline, should incite togetherness through a common good, whether it's artistic in nature or for the betterment of a community. Before the Web or BBS, this was done in forms of artist communities and forums in person. Seeking to return to this format, but with the aide of the Web is probably something I would prefer, but highly unlikely because younger generations seem to only live in their phones and in a Web reality.
This resonates with me. The beauty of the Web was to allow you to find your niche anywhere in the world from your own place of living. But that concept has been contaminated and taken over by your typical big corporation. It is now diluted by hostile ads, psychological warfare, and manipulation, all while, on the surface, pitching you the idea that you can "cater" your experience to whatever you like.
The Web, or any community that is online or offline, should incite togetherness through a common good, whether it's artistic in nature or for the betterment of a community. Before the Web or BBS, this was done in forms of artist communities and forums in person. Seeking to return to this format, but with the aide of the Web is probably something I would prefer, but highly unlikely because younger generations seem to only live in their phones and in a Web reality.
If more emphasis was placed on social groups than networks I think it would be better all around. Hands-down the best online group of which I'm a member is a Mastodon group who are fans of the same podcast. There are similar groups of fans of this podcast on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere but their Mastodon server is orders of magnitude more active because we're there for the same reason.
This is well written. It reminds me of a 10+ years old article on ploum.net, only in French but here's a translation: https://ploum-net.translate.goog/ploum-en-j2ee/?_x_tr_sl=fr&...
I agree with most of what was said except one tiny piece, I don't think we should give up on a universal social network. We have some of the pieces, but the puzzle still isn't solved and I like seeing people challenge that.
The rest is definitely true though, all social networks are doomed for the same result: disappear into the void or become riddled with ads and so many additional services that the core network moves on. We'll keep repeating this cycle until the universal social network is actually achieved. I'm ok with that, having made several transitions already it's nothing new.
The rest is definitely true though, all social networks are doomed for the same result: disappear into the void or become riddled with ads and so many additional services that the core network moves on. We'll keep repeating this cycle until the universal social network is actually achieved. I'm ok with that, having made several transitions already it's nothing new.
> I agree with most of what was said except one tiny piece, I don't think we should give up on a universal social network.
That wasn't one tiny piece. The central thesis of the article was against the idea of a universal social network. Literally: "stop dreaming of a universal network."
That wasn't one tiny piece. The central thesis of the article was against the idea of a universal social network. Literally: "stop dreaming of a universal network."
A tiny piece can be integral. But I would disagree with the idea that it's the central thesis. The rest can operate without it just fine. I would even go as far as to quote you on your interpretation about the article being stop dreaming of a universal network: "Incredibly reductionist interpretation of the article."
We blame ads and bad decisions by the ownership, but also the users are responsible for turning each social network into its own eternal September and I don't know if human nature can be solved.
Can't we enjoy the Twitter replacements being smaller communities and leave it at that, enjoy it while we can? Since it's a long understood pattern that a community will degrade as it gets larger, even without Musk type shittery.
Can't we enjoy the Twitter replacements being smaller communities and leave it at that, enjoy it while we can? Since it's a long understood pattern that a community will degrade as it gets larger, even without Musk type shittery.
internet is kind of The universal social network.
> The lesson here is simple: you are living in a small niche. We all do. Your experience is not representative of anything but your own.
hmm, really disagree here. if you look at history the consolidation of "networks" is insane. we used to be way more fragmented, now if you pick the top 10 social networks worldwide you probably cover 90%+ of the internet connected population. hell, Facebook alone has 40% MAUs of all living humans!
a few hundred years ago what eg newspapers had that kind of reach? nothing even remotely in the same league.
hmm, really disagree here. if you look at history the consolidation of "networks" is insane. we used to be way more fragmented, now if you pick the top 10 social networks worldwide you probably cover 90%+ of the internet connected population. hell, Facebook alone has 40% MAUs of all living humans!
a few hundred years ago what eg newspapers had that kind of reach? nothing even remotely in the same league.
> Some communities will find a new home on Mastodon or on Lemmy. Some will go elsewhere
I wish protocols like mastodon or nostr would allow to federate all of these.
I am not part of any "social network community" that I know of (apart from maybe HN) but I still occasionally use twitter, mainly as a substitute for blogs of the people I'd like to hear from, and get some comedy. They are from diverse communities and I certainly won't join everything and check everything.
I wish protocols like mastodon or nostr would allow to federate all of these.
I am not part of any "social network community" that I know of (apart from maybe HN) but I still occasionally use twitter, mainly as a substitute for blogs of the people I'd like to hear from, and get some comedy. They are from diverse communities and I certainly won't join everything and check everything.
It’s true that there are a couple different models of a social networking application - Facebook, Twitter, Wechat, and Telegram all of meaningfully distinctions. But basically, there’s a lot more similarity than difference, and probably no good reason for more than a handful of these things to exist. The idea of a custom network for your community is silly - your community probably doesn’t have any unique needs.
My strongly held belief is still that Messenger apps and SMS are still the dominant social media apps and are the only ones worth investing in the success of. At the end of the day, no one can or wants to manage a gigantic social media presence outside of commercial applications. Most people are really only invested in social media so they can make better connections off of social media.
Social media is over if you think trading Musk for Zuckerberg is progress.
On a side note though, Meta just changed their whole narrative in one day after being dragged for the last year over the Metaverse. If I were an investor I'd be very bullish on Meta. What was considered a colossal failure in over hiring helped result in a chance to add a new growing platform.
On a side note though, Meta just changed their whole narrative in one day after being dragged for the last year over the Metaverse. If I were an investor I'd be very bullish on Meta. What was considered a colossal failure in over hiring helped result in a chance to add a new growing platform.
There's definitely a growing social media fatigue, a feeling of saturation or boredom. That feeling will only accelerate as social media further fractures. The increasingly attractive option is not to switch, instead to quit.
The type of social media figures that are broadcasters will face a particularly challenging situation. I recently heard a Chrome Devrel person complain about it. They used to just post announcements on Twitter and take some feedback there as well. Now they have to go and try to reach this audience across Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Discord, Bluesky, Threads...a growing list. And there's no network effect where you get a mass following for free, you have to painstakingly build it up on each network independently.
The type of social media figures that are broadcasters will face a particularly challenging situation. I recently heard a Chrome Devrel person complain about it. They used to just post announcements on Twitter and take some feedback there as well. Now they have to go and try to reach this audience across Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Discord, Bluesky, Threads...a growing list. And there's no network effect where you get a mass following for free, you have to painstakingly build it up on each network independently.
Couldn't disagree more.
Big "winners" in this space can be dangerous, but they can also be an important tool/unfortunate necessity when it comes to national or global "news."
Which is to say, yes, I want a good replacement for Twitter because social media more-or-less succeeded where "the Rodney King story" failed.
Big "winners" in this space can be dangerous, but they can also be an important tool/unfortunate necessity when it comes to national or global "news."
Which is to say, yes, I want a good replacement for Twitter because social media more-or-less succeeded where "the Rodney King story" failed.
> I want a good replacement for Twitter because social media more-or-less succeeded where "the Rodney King story" failed.
Could you please explain this? I know what the Rodney King story is, but I don't understand the relevance here.
Could you please explain this? I know what the Rodney King story is, but I don't understand the relevance here.
I read that as “the Rodney King story” being the story in the traditional news or later documentary format. Without the social media explosion, the situation might not have got the attention it needed meaning the story fizzled out (or, more cynically, the police would have been able to control the narrative long enough for the general public not to pay attention because something else was happened elsewhere to take over the news coverage).
Rodney King was before my time, but the main Rodney King riots happened after the cops involved were acquitted, right? The main difference does have a little to do with social media, in that the George Floyd death video could be reshared in real time. The main reasons BLM took off in 2020 is that it had already taken off in 2014 and, importantly, most people were in COVID lockdown for 2 months by that point and had become a little stir-crazy.
I don't understand this comment either, because the Rodney King beating was in 1991, long before "the social media explosion".
To be honest, I was completely mixing up the timeline of police attrocities against minorities and other communities/individuals. I'm not sure if that says more about the number of those matters making the is a lot to remember, or about my own privilege of being so far removed from most of it that I don't need to keep track in any detail.
Right -- I'm a little older than many, but to explain:
When the Rodney King thing happened, black folks like myself were like "Finally, the world will see how horrible the cops can be. We will have a trial and get justice."
That didn't remotely happen. It's not until social media that we got e.g. BLM and even the concept of a "Karen." IMHO, it's been absolutely instrumental.
When the Rodney King thing happened, black folks like myself were like "Finally, the world will see how horrible the cops can be. We will have a trial and get justice."
That didn't remotely happen. It's not until social media that we got e.g. BLM and even the concept of a "Karen." IMHO, it's been absolutely instrumental.
> I'm a little older than many
This has nothing to do with age. I wouldn't recommend assuming that you're older than me.
> "Finally, the world will see how horrible the cops can be. We will have a trial and get justice."
> That didn't remotely happen.
How has that changed? The George Floyd verdict for example is an extreme rarity. Cops are almost always acquitted.
> It's not until social media that we got e.g. BLM and even the concept of a "Karen." IMHO, it's been absolutely instrumental.
How does social media affect the verdict of trials? And what does "Karen" have to do with this?
As you'll recall, the Rodney King verdict resulted in massive multi-day riots in Los Angeles, without any help from social media, which didn't exist yet. The world was paying attention.
This has nothing to do with age. I wouldn't recommend assuming that you're older than me.
> "Finally, the world will see how horrible the cops can be. We will have a trial and get justice."
> That didn't remotely happen.
How has that changed? The George Floyd verdict for example is an extreme rarity. Cops are almost always acquitted.
> It's not until social media that we got e.g. BLM and even the concept of a "Karen." IMHO, it's been absolutely instrumental.
How does social media affect the verdict of trials? And what does "Karen" have to do with this?
As you'll recall, the Rodney King verdict resulted in massive multi-day riots in Los Angeles, without any help from social media, which didn't exist yet. The world was paying attention.
Oh, I'm not arguing things are perfect; just that widespread social media makes them better by making them more visible.
It's A LOT better now than then; I'd say a much larger chunk, perhaps a majority of white people more-or-less didn't really believe in "police brutality," not in a way such they would act on it.
It's A LOT better now than then; I'd say a much larger chunk, perhaps a majority of white people more-or-less didn't really believe in "police brutality," not in a way such they would act on it.
I think the George Floyd/BLM movement has already largely failed, despite all the attention it got in 2020 and the amount of donations given to BLM and related causes - at least $10 billion.[0] Besides Juneteenth, what are the actual long-term effects of the movement in terms of material benefits for BIPOC people? DEI and ESG got a lot more popular, but that was always for the benefit of the consciousnesses of (largely white) PMC progressives, along with the relatively small number of minority employees hired as a result. Even those are getting rolled back in the face of economic headwinds, conservative counterattacks, and the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action, with an opinion whose logic can easily extend to affirmative action by private employers.
[0] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/white-journalists-are-t...
[0] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/white-journalists-are-t...
At least stop putting social networks into products where they don't belong... Looking at you Github.
I stopped reading after he declared reddit and twitter dead. That's ludicrous. They may have taken some body blows lately, but dead? Okay I guess.
I think social media is a large feed stock for training AI and for selling advertisements. People will throw money endlessly at it for this reason.
I would like a more strict version of this article, "Stop trying to make social networks".
Unsure what the point of this article is. I've never seen any person or even VC company make the claim that they're on to the one and only 100% coverage network. I'm quite sure everybody is aware that social networks come and go and that at any point in time there will be multiple of them.
This piece reads like an elaborate retelling of the Tower of Babel
Demise of twitter is.. not matching with my experience.
Stop trying.
Many people are trying ...
The problem with trying is that no one agrees.
Many people are trying ...
The problem with trying is that no one agrees.
This is like saying stop trying to make humans communicate with each other.
No, it's not.
"Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one."
"Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one."
Which is silly. The reason we have giant social networks is because quantity is a quality in its own right. It increases the likelihood that your friends/family are there as well the various interest one might have.
> It increases the likelihood that your friends/family are there
This is silly. You don't need social media to keep in touch with your friends and family. Pick up the phone, or at least write an email.
This is silly. You don't need social media to keep in touch with your friends and family. Pick up the phone, or at least write an email.
That is less convenient, which means you will do it less, and reserve your energy for only the closest friends. I don't send personal emails to anyone and I don't receive any either. Email is all transactional. Calling is even more limiting because you have to take into consideration the other person's hours. On the other hand performing these costly signals builds ties so you have a point too. I have been trying to schedule a physical meeting with a friend for a while and something always comes up.
Why is a universal success "imaginary"? Very few people are on Twitter for neighborhood gossip. They want to hear and discuss celebrity news and political developments and tech releases and sports scores. The more people join the network from different countries/industries/walks of life, the higher these signals get.
We know in this world that isn't possible anymore unless you're, you know, actually their friends.
Again, today's social networks want to grow in users, so it is not up to the author to say that we should stop making social networks succeed.
Again, today's social networks want to grow in users, so it is not up to the author to say that we should stop making social networks succeed.
"We know in this world that isn't possible anymore unless you're, you know, actually their friends."
"We" don't know any such thing.
"We" don't know any such thing.
For me, he's saying you don't need to TRY to make them succeed - they will succeed or not on their own merits, and for their own niches.
a bigger, widely accessible success can directly translate into people having small and local successes with it/on it. people have their smaller groups, local stuff, their own success, which may be smaller in scale, within bigger communication platforms.
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It’s my belief that the continued attempt to dominate the social networking space is related to predicted upcoming societal changes.
They are the hot glue underneath a AML/KYC-based identity verification systems at scale and the sticky requirement for anyone looking to build such a system at scale. There is no better verification than social context for identity, and at core these are giant graph databases that have personal histories which can be leveraged for social credit and reputation applications.
Watching these oligarchs jockey to try to concentrate people into social platforms is clearly more than a casual priority, so that’s why I suspect multiple motives that exceed the intrinsic social value of the platforms. It’s been my learning that the really massive companies in Silicon Valley a often have a back door leverage-style data platform to try to build a monopolistic position at some future inflection point in addition to their “front and center” business.
I further suspect is a land grab to try to build the “WeChat of the West,” which explains quite clearly the relatively sky-high Twitter purchase (at least vs revenues) price as simply attaching a financial valuation to a portion of the initial userbase more than makes up for the purchase price.
People are very focused on the front side applications (the social network hook) but the true value of these businesses is in building the next generations of FICO.
When I read comments like, “Our communities are worth a lot more than the underlying tool used at some point in time.”, and “We are selling them, we are transforming them into a simple commercial asset for the makers of the tool we are using, the tool which exploits us.” I do wonder if people think as I do that it’s far more extensive than simple social networking companies. The approach to global finance is incredibly clear: social credit is the new core and communities are the oil of social credit.
In the end it’s all about financial inclusion, as is laid out in this WEF article that explains just why social credit applications are so important to financial inclusion and global growth:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/this-new-approach-to-...
So, consider that niche social networks do not serve this purpose very well, and so there is little incentive to “build small” at this stage. I’d love to see more social network applications that are focused on quality connections myself, and for a while that was Reddit. But Reddit’a value was really just the aggregation of all the independent communities that used to exist in forums and similar into one website.
They are the hot glue underneath a AML/KYC-based identity verification systems at scale and the sticky requirement for anyone looking to build such a system at scale. There is no better verification than social context for identity, and at core these are giant graph databases that have personal histories which can be leveraged for social credit and reputation applications.
Watching these oligarchs jockey to try to concentrate people into social platforms is clearly more than a casual priority, so that’s why I suspect multiple motives that exceed the intrinsic social value of the platforms. It’s been my learning that the really massive companies in Silicon Valley a often have a back door leverage-style data platform to try to build a monopolistic position at some future inflection point in addition to their “front and center” business.
I further suspect is a land grab to try to build the “WeChat of the West,” which explains quite clearly the relatively sky-high Twitter purchase (at least vs revenues) price as simply attaching a financial valuation to a portion of the initial userbase more than makes up for the purchase price.
People are very focused on the front side applications (the social network hook) but the true value of these businesses is in building the next generations of FICO.
When I read comments like, “Our communities are worth a lot more than the underlying tool used at some point in time.”, and “We are selling them, we are transforming them into a simple commercial asset for the makers of the tool we are using, the tool which exploits us.” I do wonder if people think as I do that it’s far more extensive than simple social networking companies. The approach to global finance is incredibly clear: social credit is the new core and communities are the oil of social credit.
In the end it’s all about financial inclusion, as is laid out in this WEF article that explains just why social credit applications are so important to financial inclusion and global growth:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/this-new-approach-to-...
So, consider that niche social networks do not serve this purpose very well, and so there is little incentive to “build small” at this stage. I’d love to see more social network applications that are focused on quality connections myself, and for a while that was Reddit. But Reddit’a value was really just the aggregation of all the independent communities that used to exist in forums and similar into one website.
While there are definitely those in positions of power attempting to exert control over populaces, you could also consider that not everything is necessarily the result of a perfectly coordinated conspiracy, and that Musk paid a particular price because he thought it would be hilarious if the number was a weed reference.
I don’t see how conspiracy theory enters any of this whatsoever.
These are the declared plans from the man himself:
https://me.mashable.com/tech/27088/twitter-20-undergoes-a-ma...
That isn’t exactly hidden.
Perhaps the true intentions of Meta/Zuck/Facebook are underdisclosed, but after their KYC fiasco with crypto it’s clear they want to go there and just haven’t been able to cement the regulatory relationships yet or simply got on the wrong side of the regulatory compliance community and aren’t yet reingratiated into their good graces. But you will see another attempt at direct financial instrumentation on their properties as it’s the most valuable application of their data.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/28/faceboo...
And as to coordination, to deny attempts to concentrate power through coordinating the military industrial complex would be a foolhardy argument at this point, though there are clearly competing groups and philosophies.
I’m suggesting it’s more like a classic SV land grab… because that’s what it really is. And people’s connection and resultant financial enablement data is the prize underneath social networks, because it clearly is. And the person doing it is talking openly about what they are doing, so calling it a “conspiracy theory” is patently incorrect as a conspiracy would require some kind of secretive collusion to exist and all of this is discussed and public information shared by the architects themselves.
We should be concerned about how concentrated data collection and management is as the power is profound when combined with mature AI, not accusing one another of “conspiracies” at this point. I’ve long advocated for something like a “Privacy Bill of Rights,” but I fear the genie is too far out of the bottle now that the ruling classes have become aware of the profound technological potential of the data expressed through social finance.
After all, as they say, to control a city, control the water. A country? Food. The world? Finance.
I also don’t think it particularly matters what price was paid or whether it’s in the SEXY theme or 420 reference, as it’s common to see these kinds of number games among purchases by the super rich in my personal experience. It’s the general degree of size category of valuation that matters, not the numeric humor Elon injects into his numbers.
How many houses have I seen go for 1,234,567 or 2,345,678 in the offer paperwork? Same for cars and watch prices. I’ll say: more than a few. It’s all a game of points, leverage and reputation at the highest personal wealth levels. The self declared bon vivants consider themselves reincarnated Pharos destined to inherit the earth and love to play financial games with numbers on purchases and sales. That doesn’t make them any less of a business decision.
These are the declared plans from the man himself:
https://me.mashable.com/tech/27088/twitter-20-undergoes-a-ma...
That isn’t exactly hidden.
Perhaps the true intentions of Meta/Zuck/Facebook are underdisclosed, but after their KYC fiasco with crypto it’s clear they want to go there and just haven’t been able to cement the regulatory relationships yet or simply got on the wrong side of the regulatory compliance community and aren’t yet reingratiated into their good graces. But you will see another attempt at direct financial instrumentation on their properties as it’s the most valuable application of their data.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/28/faceboo...
And as to coordination, to deny attempts to concentrate power through coordinating the military industrial complex would be a foolhardy argument at this point, though there are clearly competing groups and philosophies.
I’m suggesting it’s more like a classic SV land grab… because that’s what it really is. And people’s connection and resultant financial enablement data is the prize underneath social networks, because it clearly is. And the person doing it is talking openly about what they are doing, so calling it a “conspiracy theory” is patently incorrect as a conspiracy would require some kind of secretive collusion to exist and all of this is discussed and public information shared by the architects themselves.
We should be concerned about how concentrated data collection and management is as the power is profound when combined with mature AI, not accusing one another of “conspiracies” at this point. I’ve long advocated for something like a “Privacy Bill of Rights,” but I fear the genie is too far out of the bottle now that the ruling classes have become aware of the profound technological potential of the data expressed through social finance.
After all, as they say, to control a city, control the water. A country? Food. The world? Finance.
I also don’t think it particularly matters what price was paid or whether it’s in the SEXY theme or 420 reference, as it’s common to see these kinds of number games among purchases by the super rich in my personal experience. It’s the general degree of size category of valuation that matters, not the numeric humor Elon injects into his numbers.
How many houses have I seen go for 1,234,567 or 2,345,678 in the offer paperwork? Same for cars and watch prices. I’ll say: more than a few. It’s all a game of points, leverage and reputation at the highest personal wealth levels. The self declared bon vivants consider themselves reincarnated Pharos destined to inherit the earth and love to play financial games with numbers on purchases and sales. That doesn’t make them any less of a business decision.
> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate.
Trying to get social media users out of "big number go up" mindset is really, really hard. Twitter has something like 450 million active users, and a lot of them are miserable with it, especially the heavier users. But if you try to suggest maybe just not using it, it seems like it is a "foregone conclusion" that it is the only way to go, as if there's no possible way to just do something else. Why go somewhere where you can get 100 meaningless "like" button clicks when you can go on twitter and get tens of thousands of meaningless "like" button clicks?
The worse part is that this mindset is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because users that think this way don't think it's worth bothering with anything that has less than a hundred million users. Naturally, this helps ensure that most of the growth will continue to go to just a handful of highly popular networks, since they're the only ones worth bothering with. While counts of users are meaningless, there are some knock-on effects to having most people believe alternatives are worthless. For people who produce art or videos or other forms of content, it means that you pretty much have to use the mainstream platforms, because a large amount of people are unwilling to use anything else even to follow people they're interested in, which also depresses your ability to grow and succeed. While monetary success and internet fame should absolutely never be the goal of social media or the internet, the fact remains that if you are an artist on the Internet, you are not going to get as many commissions or as much business opportunity if you're not on huge platforms like Twitter, and that means that the financial sustainability of a lot of internet creative works depends on a few tech companies.
But that's kind of the thing. That's basically WHY federated networks are good and we should want them to succeed. Indeed, it is true that there is no meaningful success metric for a social network. However, the "success" of the Fediverse is a bit different: I think it "succeeds" when it becomes viable to publish on ActivityPub as a complete alternative to needing to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But of course, that's not a constant value. It's not some constant amount of users. It depends on many factors. However, it will be pretty obvious when you see it, because it will come in the form of seeing people do healthy business over just ActivityPub.
I empathize if this sounds arbitrary or pointless, but I think a lot of people don't grasp the impact of this. For all of its flaws, this would effectively mean that you could go back to running your own damn sites, because they can participate in ActivityPub just the same as anyone else.
ActivityPub could fill the void left by the downturn in popularity of RSS, and then some.
Trying to get social media users out of "big number go up" mindset is really, really hard. Twitter has something like 450 million active users, and a lot of them are miserable with it, especially the heavier users. But if you try to suggest maybe just not using it, it seems like it is a "foregone conclusion" that it is the only way to go, as if there's no possible way to just do something else. Why go somewhere where you can get 100 meaningless "like" button clicks when you can go on twitter and get tens of thousands of meaningless "like" button clicks?
The worse part is that this mindset is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because users that think this way don't think it's worth bothering with anything that has less than a hundred million users. Naturally, this helps ensure that most of the growth will continue to go to just a handful of highly popular networks, since they're the only ones worth bothering with. While counts of users are meaningless, there are some knock-on effects to having most people believe alternatives are worthless. For people who produce art or videos or other forms of content, it means that you pretty much have to use the mainstream platforms, because a large amount of people are unwilling to use anything else even to follow people they're interested in, which also depresses your ability to grow and succeed. While monetary success and internet fame should absolutely never be the goal of social media or the internet, the fact remains that if you are an artist on the Internet, you are not going to get as many commissions or as much business opportunity if you're not on huge platforms like Twitter, and that means that the financial sustainability of a lot of internet creative works depends on a few tech companies.
But that's kind of the thing. That's basically WHY federated networks are good and we should want them to succeed. Indeed, it is true that there is no meaningful success metric for a social network. However, the "success" of the Fediverse is a bit different: I think it "succeeds" when it becomes viable to publish on ActivityPub as a complete alternative to needing to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But of course, that's not a constant value. It's not some constant amount of users. It depends on many factors. However, it will be pretty obvious when you see it, because it will come in the form of seeing people do healthy business over just ActivityPub.
I empathize if this sounds arbitrary or pointless, but I think a lot of people don't grasp the impact of this. For all of its flaws, this would effectively mean that you could go back to running your own damn sites, because they can participate in ActivityPub just the same as anyone else.
ActivityPub could fill the void left by the downturn in popularity of RSS, and then some.
Things can just be what they are, grow naturally and then die naturally. I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to achieve an unnatural growth is probably not good for both the quality of the product and the long term stability of it.
I would love to see more niche things grow organically and fill a role for some people, at some time and not try to be everything for everyone. Because when that's the case, does anyone really enjoy it?