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Comment by sfilargi | Hacker News Reader

Why don't we have a subscription based, non-tracking, ad-free social network yet??

Is that a serious question? Social networks are dependent on network effects. Having a subscription immediately increases the barrier to entry too high for people to be able to get their friends on the same platform.

Yes it is.

My feeling is that we have entered an age that youth is not naive anymore and would happily pay $3/month (at least in the US) for a non-tracking all-round communication service.

Just asked my teenage siblings and both of them responded that they don't care that they are tracked and aren't sure why they'd pay. Only an anecdote, but there you go.

Maybe it is just wishful thinking on my part then :D

Yeah, as someone in that age range, none of my friends particularly care if some company has all their information and is doing whatever with it.

As long as no one else they know sees...

Mine too, believe me! My idea is to allow a group to contribute to cover a certain amount per year for their entire network, depending on the size of it. $50.00 split by 15-20 family/friend members would be pretty affordable. I would say a smaller more intimate network would be a major step in the right direction.

I'm afraid there's not much to suggest that's the case.

I'm pretty skeptical of this claim. The barrier from $0.00 to $0.01 is huge, and it's even moreso with people young enough to not have credit cards.

It's not that "oh, if it'd succeed someone would have done it by now," but the attempts I've seen at this make me think that it'd be very difficult to even try.

I am sure that $3/month wouldn't be a financial problem for the majority of Harvard students, but I agree with the first part of your argument.

We have yet to learne to pay for nice things on the internet.

It's not Harvard students you need. There aren't that many of them and they already have their own social networks. You need to market to middle- and high-schoolers. Because by the time they're in college and could afford $3/month, they've already got outlets.

Network effects are king.

When the time comes that I can't avoid them using something, as a parent I would pay $3/month for my kids.

>My feeling is that we have entered an age that youth is not naive anymore and would happily pay $3/month

Are you joking? When I was a broke student there was zero chance I would sign-up for a monthly subscription service.

It's a pipe dream.

The youth - under 18 - may or may not have a problem with it. However, they also can't readily do the actual payment portion of the deal and would have to buy a gift card or ask their parents - and their parents may object, especially if they are poor.

> My feeling is that we have entered an age that youth is not naive anymore and would happily pay $3/month (at least in the US) for a non-tracking all-round communication service.

Probably not, but there just might be enough, youth (or people just out of the edge of that category with contacts inside of it) that will pay $10/month for such a service plus the privilege of sponsoring 9 of their friends with free accounts. Who, would of course have the option of upgrading to paid, getting their own 9 giveaway accounts, and returning the giveaway account to their sponsor.

Which, sure, might be as little as $1/user/mo., rather than $3.

Do what Whatsapp did, free for the first year, then something really really low, but covers the cost of servers and headcount. Done right, this is probably around 0.50-1 a month for a really high quality service.

What speaks against making subscription an option as with Spotify?

A spotify subscription is more valuable than whatever option a social network could offer. Facebook makes a boatload off ads so there's no way they would just turn the option off even with a small subscription. Plus, not enough users care about ads. Most of the comments on this forum will be preaching to the choir.

I'm not so sure about that. A lot of people are not completely comfortable with Facebook using their data and I think a substantial number of people might be willing to pay, not primarily to get rid of ads but to have a sense of privacy. If they get rid of ads that a nice bonus. Saying it's never going to happen is like saying that people will never pay for music online. A lot of people believed that to be true just a couple of years ago and yet ...

You could make it more exclusive.

I contributed to the Kickstarter for an open social network called Disapora seven years ago[1].

It's open source now[2], there's no advertising, and you can host your own "pod" (page) or you can use another host. https://joindiaspora.com is the main site.

Hardly anyone uses it because... hardly anyone uses it. And it's a little more technical than getting on Facebook.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-per...

[2] https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

We have even better social networks: free as in freedom, ad-free, non-tracking. See https://prism-break.org/en/all/#social-networks for a quite comprehensive list.

Besides the obvious remarks about people not caring a lot about their privacy and not wanting to pay a cent for a social network the biggest problem is a coordination problem: Facebook satisfied a nearly universal desire for online social interactions and as a consequence gradually all your friends joined the network. That was something new and exciting. Replicating this huge social pull effect once more is incredibly difficult - you'd have to create an entirely new kind of social network.

The only way for other business models to work will be to ban collecting invasive info about your users. Otherwise we're stuck with the spy-vertising economy forever. Boycotts (Boycott what? Most of the Internet at this point?) won't work for the same reason we can't just rely on boycotts to enforce e.g environmental regulations or safe workplace standards.

You should take a look at Mastodon [0].

It has risen from 150k to 560k users in the last few weeks [1] with 1601 instances up.

[0]: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon

[1]: https://instances.mastodon.xyz/list

You had one, but you didn't pay for it, so it died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

Russian social network Odnoklassniki ("classmates" in English) tried subscription-based model for two years. It nearly killed them.

Because you haven't started one yet. :-)

"know thyself" :D

Even if I did, I don't have what it takes to make it popular.

Nobody wants to pay for it.

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