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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

I definitely think the trend of financing companies by selling ads is very corrupting. Google, Facebook and others have huge conflicts of interest that can't really be resolved.

It would be nice if we went back to business models where companies sell products to their end users and not sell their end users to others.

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The vast majority of companies do sell direct. Only some make products that users are able to enjoy for free (and wouldn't pay for otherwise) and fund it through ads.

There's nothing wrong with advertising, it's fast, passive, egalitarian and effective for both sides. Perhaps people need better training and self-control but that applies to a whole lot more in life than just ads on a social network.

If advertising were merely a matter of making information available to provide options and a basis for decision, you'd have a point here. The modern history of the field [1] displays no such innocuous tendencies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) - more or less the original how-to manual, breathtaking both in its cynicism and in its candor.

That's not about advertising, it's about the use of what we now holistically refer to as propaganda. The use of messaging to engineer opinions only highlights the real foundation of at work: human nature.

this is like a terrorist/freedom fighter distinction

You don't think Facebook provides value worth paying money for? They wouldn't have to charge premium members (assuming they could convert enough free users) much to match their ad revenue... They have over 2 billion users, at least a handful which you have to imagine would be willing to pay to socialize with privacy from external corporate entities. I understand why they had to make it free to get to this point, but they've got almost 7x the population of the United States as daily active users now. If they could convert 10% of their user base to pay $9.99/month, that's $24B a year... A decent start seemingly, and I can imagine there are many ways to further monetize those users with other services.

People are bad at judging value. Facebook might be valuable for them but they dont want to pay for it. People barely pay $10/month for news or music, let alone social media. There are also plenty of alternatives, both free and paid, and not much advantage in any one single platform.

I don't think any version of Facebook that bills their users would be viable. None at all.

There's something that could be viable it bundled with other products. That something would be much more like email than Facebook (what is good). Yet, ad-based Facebook would beat it all the time.

I think you underestimate the highly tuned addictive properties of their service, interface and brand... I'm not saying it's net positive whether ad-supported or not, but I believe it would be very difficult for another player to come in and beat Facebook at their dopamine inducing game now whether they charged for it or not at this point. The extent of analytics (how people interact with their website and mobile services) across the population that they have access to is borderline scary. When you consider how much money King Digital made/makes with a stupid polished match 3 mechanic by making incremental psychology driven UI/UX game design decisions...

>It would be nice if we went back to business models where companies sell products to their end users and not sell their end users to others.

If you include services in that you are talking about what, 98% of economic activity currently?

Correct. But some of our most powerful players like Google and Facebook sell their end users and not to them. After reading about the Equifax leaks and how our information is being sold around it seems a big part of the financial sectors also depends on doing things behind the backs of end users.

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