Comment by feelin_googley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by feelin_googley | Hacker News Reader

"Facebook, in fact, claims lofty goals, saying it seeks to "bring us closer together" and "build a global community."

Those are indeed noble purposes that social media can serve. But if they were Facebook's true goals, we would not be here.

The ideal competitor and successor to Facebook would be a platform that actually puts such goals first.

To do so, however, it cannot be just another data-hoarder, like Google Plus.

If we have learned anything over the last decade, it is that advertising and data-collection models are incompatible with a trustworthy social media network.

...

When a company fails, as Facebook has, it is natural for the government to demand that it fix itself or face regulation. ...

If today's privacy scandals lead us merely to install Facebook as a regulated monopolist, insulated from competition, we will have failed completely.

The world does not need an established church of social media."

Source:

Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia University

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/facebook-fix-repl...

I love Tim Wu and God knows I relied on his work for my own PhD (on precisely that topic: Facebook monopolistic dominance) but his essay betrays exactly the contradiction:

- He starts by attacking Facebook to pursue growth

> Facebook prioritized growth over any other possible goal

- but, when offering a solution, he wants exactly the same thing for its proposed alternative:

> the real challenge is gaining a critical mass of users.

I’m not sure changing the name but not the presumed initial values will help.

Bu then he writes:

> for which users would pay a small fee

Anyone old enough to remember the early days of Facebook will remember how Mark Z. had to defend against that idea: being locked-in a paid service was the worst that could happen. Tim Wu knows that. Actually, everyone who is not on Facebook should know that too because that rumour became such a problem for the company that it ended up occupying the most previous location on the service: the login page.

> It's free and always will be.

It's easy to sit on the sidelines and criticise Facebook's business model.

The hard part is coming up with a business model that doesn't rely on advertising and is actually going to get any traction. Especially since people by and large like the model. If Facebook can simply lock down their APIs and handle state/nefarious actors better I think you will find the public moving past the current situation.

Does it have to be a business model? Couldn't we search for ways to support the costs of federated.distributed platforms, as used to be the case with NNTP?

You're absolutely right! We could search for funding models, plural, to support a network of federated and distributed platforms! We could even couple it with ways we know that enable distributed and federated platforms to interoperate and keep at bay the problem that come from that.

Of course, it's possible that this may be a sufficiently non-trivial problem where the best answer anyone's found to date is a centralized business. But hey, we won't know until we try! Also, email as a federated system and its history doesn't count, because that runs directly against the basic thesis that nobody has seriously tried.

The problem is that any company that starts with non-advertising goals can and probably will be acquired if they start to take off. The acquirer will most likely be ad based.

The other problem is that social media isn’t novel or interesting in 2018 so I don’t see people rushing to a new platform that replicates the same old functionality.

Messenger was expected to come up with non-advertising based business models. The most credible rumour was to sell to large companies the ability to communicate with their customers and prospects over Messenger, a trusted and spam-free platform (email appears ineffective because of poorly targeted marketing). Having payments was a key step in that direction: you could not just change your flight over Messenger, but pay the extra to do so.

Workplace (née Facebook at Work) is now considering payment options, too. That could actually bring quite a bit, especially if inter-company communications are worked out.

The reason that ads remain on Facebook is that the senior team believes that they can make the ads genuinely improve the quality of the experience. I personally block a lot of ads on Facebook (about 80-90% of what I see) and actively look at my Ad preferences, and I get genuinely useful ads -- often new offers from competing business, which allow me to monitor them. I can imagine why many people don’t see it that way but I would love to know where are the limits of that model. I would more generally encourage people to treat targeting (on Facebook and elsewhere) as something that they need to be pro-active about, and trust at least some platforms to use that information to improve their experience. That way, we could learn more about how to connect brands and customers better.

I personally would never pay Facebook for anything or pay for any sort of social media. It's just barely worth the time I spend ingesting it and nothing more to me, certainly not any money.

I'm also not super bothered by ads and fully aware that the data I give consumer internet companies will be used as they (or their future acquirers) see fit.

I don't agree with the sentiment that if we could only switch business models from advertising to subscription then all of our data will remain private. Apple's business model is not based on ads and I trust them as little as I trust Google. I know that's not a popular opinion here but I think it's prudent. Once I push information from myself to a company, I have no confidence that that information will be used as advertised.

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