Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

> Wonderful, so Twitter is now a tool for corporate propaganda, Google is providing Censorship-as-a-Service API, Facebook is removing links classified as "Fake News(tm)", Reddit is deleting whatever mods don't agree with etc.

This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large part - by ads. When it came to choosing between serving the users vs. the advertisers the latter would always win in the long run because they were the paying customers.

What's needed is some sort of "public" space on the internet that's not controlled by corporate (and increasingly advertising) interests. Non-profits like Wikipedia and archive.org come close, but aren't meant for real time communication. Ironically, technologies like SMS are also somewhat neutral because they were conceived before advertising became the dominant business model on mobile and have no hooks for "curation" and "engagement".

View on HN

"This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large part - by ads."

Unsustainable situations always seem to go on for longer than you expect, but I wonder if we're finally getting to be just a year or three out from Adpocalypse, when the ad-supported internet companies finally end up having to face head on that you can not serve two masters.

I wonder if there's going to be a market developing for services that look like current services, but actually cost money somehow. Probably a billion-dollar-level opportunity for figuring out how to charge for a Facebook or Google or Twitter a couple of bucks a month.

(If you are seriously inclined to take this on, which I would support, bear in mind that the answer to these questions, for all sorts of reasons, is never "It's just Facebook, with a subscription." Facebook, to take one example, has been deeply structured around advertising for years now. You can't take the end result and just remove advertising from it. You need to start back at the beginning and rethink the whole thing, figuring out how to get people to spend some money on it. And I can all but promise "It's Facebook, but cares about your privacy" is a dead letter too, as that has been tried. I don't know what the answers are, just some of the problems. It'll take some serious thought to solve this.)

> Adpocalypse

That's brilliant.

It can't come fast enough for me, but I highly doubt that's only 3 years away. It will also be remembered as the .com crash 2.0.

>I wonder if there's going to be a market developing for services that look like current services, but actually cost money somehow. Probably a billion-dollar-level opportunity for figuring out how to charge for a Facebook or Google or Twitter a couple of bucks a month.

You're really overestimating people's willingness to pay for a service that's already free and convenient. There's really no good comp for tens of millions of users switching from a free service to a paid service just to avoid ads/conspiracy theories.

There are tons of alternative social networks to Facebook, I run several of them. People are more than happy to pay a few $$ a month to not be tracked, censored or advertised at.

Even completely free you can be profitable just selling 'credits' to send e-gifts etc. Facebook is functionally crippled, they still don't even have a dislike button.

> There are tons of alternative social networks to Facebook, I run several of them.

Would you care to tell us more about this/these ??

> People are more than happy to pay a few $$ a month to not be tracked, censored or advertised at

Isn't the current state of the average person's use of the Internet completely contradictory to this?

> Facebook is functionally crippled, they still don't even have a dislike button.

A lack of a dislike button is functionally crippled? Please stop with the hyperbole. They have reasons for this and have rolled out other reaction types a while ago, and all of this is a miniscule amount of the functionality they offer to billions of people.

"You're really overestimating people's willingness to pay for a service that's already free and convenient."

Did you miss my last paragraph?

I mean, if "just reconceptualize the entire idea of a social network" sounds easy to you, well... go for it. But it doesn't sound easy to me, which is why I said "It'll take some serious thought to solve this."

>Did you miss my last paragraph?

No.

>It'll take some serious thought to solve this.

I disagree. No amount of serious thought is going to come up with a solution to reroute an established aspect of modern human nature. The only way this happens is a black swan event that (by definition) nobody is going to see coming.

Facebook is like a network TV sitcom, produced around advertising. Everything is artificially distorted for that purpose.

What if Facebook Released a Premium service, where you pay for the privilege of having no ads served to you? I am sure they have at least considered it a million times, and have decided it would be a bad idea.

It makes me wonder if perhaps the internet is ready for an ad-free, paid news and communication as a service site?

I mean, I personally already do (in the form of various services, such as usenet), but I'm talking about larger portions of the internet. I think maybe the exclusivity via paywall of the right service might actually draw users in.

Been there. Done that. Compuserve, GEnie, Delphi, etc...

> What's needed is some sort of "public" space on the internet that's not controlled by corporate (and increasingly advertising) interests.

Perhaps the federal government could find a budget every year to fund a website that provides exactly this, and that those managing it are not employees of the government.

A USFED-sponsored "public" space would likely end up US-centric and also would have to pander to opinions and whims of the USGOV. Not a good Twitter/FB/Reddit replacement for international users.

The first thought I had was that maybe UN should run something like this, but still, there's an issue that affects us regardless of who is running the service - social media are heavily network-effect-dependent. Unless you're willing to literally have a law against using privately-owned social media and forcing people into government-provided services, any attempt of building such a service will likely fail simply because Twitter, FB and Reddit are already there, and regular people won't have any strong incentive to jump ship.

Don't forget the fact that all these companies built their empires on top of "viral growth", which is an effect only possible because they figured out a way to get people to spread the "idea" of the product the company was pushing at the time to others. Of course, making money off these ideas is also important, so the VCs and private equity firms were there to help "guide" the company into making decision to change the product in ways the users don't/won't/can't notice.

What is needed is some kind of distributed infrastructure like Usenet, which is not owned or controlled by any one entity.

A group of Slashdot users moved to comp.misc when Slashdot made some significant changes they disliked, and there's still some relatively lively discussion over there.

(http://www.eternal-september.org/ if you want your own free text-only feed)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com