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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I use FB to keep in touch with friends who mostly live far from me. That's all I really want, but that makes FB no money. What I wish I could do was build exactly that because in the end that's what most people really care about; however there is exactly zero money to do this sort of thing since FB has basically cornered the market in connecting people.

The basic question is: would you pay $1 a month to keep in touch with friends without ads? I doubt anyone would. This is what FB makes per person from ads. Free is a powerful monopoly.

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"The basic question is: would you pay $1 a month to keep in touch with friends without ads?"

No, I would pay hundreds of dollars to keep in touch with friends without external entities stalking-spying my interactions with them.

Not just friends but employees and partners. I want a communication channel that is mine, not American, NSA owned.

I mean I already pay thousands of dollars a year inviting friends to my house, to the restaurant, organizing trips to cities like Paris or Venice or St. Petersburg with them.

In each of those interactions, there is no microphone recording anything I say, a video camera controlling all of my movements.

But FB is increasingly taking all the information, for example storing trip pictures becoming a private archive of people's lives bigger and more dangerous than Stasi as they are developing in fact private life dossiers that could be used against anyone when for example you run for competing against the people in power.

I think that the reason why people wouldn't pay $1 per month is mostly because of inconvenience. If people had to pay for Facebook as part of their income tax (which amounted to about $12 per year), then I think a lot of people would be OK with that and everyone would be better off overall.

The problem is that the force of marketing is invisible. Even people who are resistant to targeted advertising are at least susceptible to indirect advertising through peer pressure from their friends... If all your friends do something, you will probably start doing it too - Or else, over time, they might stop being friends with you.

I don't use Facebook much and so I rarely see their ads but I can clearly feel the effects of Facebook's advertising in my life through my personal and professional relationships.

> If people had to pay for Facebook as part of their income tax (which amounted to about $12 per year), then I think a lot of people would be OK with that and everyone would be better off overall.

But which Facebook would that be? Would it be the personal-page Facebook or the News Feed Facebook or the Facebook of Tomorrow? It's obvious that a State could build a Facebook clone, but is there any evidence that it could innovate well?

Granted, Facebook itself is imperfect, but it at least has to provide someone some value: Statebook would only need to give some grandees a sense of self-importance.

> Granted, Facebook itself is imperfect, but it at least has to provide someone some value: Statebook would only need to give some grandees a sense of self-importance.

Imagine the future where Statebook would provide this invaluable service to vote online and do your taxes when Zuck becomes a successful politician.

I think I would. After a decade of free email with ads, I now pay FastMail five bucks a month. For status updates, an up-to-date contact card, and event coordination I'd pay a buck or two. But I might be in the minority.

The problem that some people realize sooner or later, is that "Free" isn't free.

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." -Andrew Lewis

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