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> in practice it creates a barrier to adoption and makes the social network kinda useless

The main thing is that you're trying to bootstrap new cultural norms. If there weren't so much inertia around free services, people would probably be fine paying a few bucks per month for certain classes of services.

I've always thought it would be a great idea to fund message boards, communities, etc., by keeping track of users' individual resource usage and making that info visible to them.

GitHub is free for most, for example, and others pay for some extra perks. But even then, the price structure comes off as pretty arbitrary.

Since Patreon became a thing, I've seen some people set up funding goals that take the form of explaining that it takes, say, ~$85 per month to cover the costs of running servers, but that doesn't really accomplish what I'm talking about, since it's still too easy to treat it as a shared commons.

A running sum is able to make the point unambiguously; it says something along the lines of, "because of the requests we had to handle to serve your use of the site, we are now on the hook for paying $2.74 so far this month". If you're a magnanimous admin, you can continue operating free services, but just "soft bill" people with a pay-what-you-want scheme (by which I mean guilt them). If you're actually trying to cover costs you do hard billing, but offer the first year free or something, which also removes one of the barriers of getting started—so long as we're operating on the assumption that we've already managed to establish it as a new cultural norm.

Resource-proportionate billing also has the nice side benefit of getting people to be more conscious of wasting time on the site—breaking the cycle of idly refreshing the home page to procrastinate.

Right, it's not really a social "network" if it is just a collection of individuals, and charging individuals creates a barrier to network effects, especially with upfront subscription decisions as an immediate hurdle.

What you most likely really want for a self-sustaining social network is community funding where some self-clustering communal unit (the finding of which might be hard as here too you likely want communities to network and organically overlap together) is encouraged to grow organically as a network and raise funds together.

You can somewhat see experiments in this space in the Mastodon world where some instances try to define community boundaries, and find ways to together pay instance hosting costs.

Community funding as a topic also brings up the question of tax-funded as an option or even a necessity. Are social networks a public good? Are they maybe the true "highways" of the internet that should be governed as such?

A subscription doesn't necessarily have to be a barrier to new users. You could offer basic functionality for free with a subscription to unlock extra features. This sort of model has been very successful in other areas.

The freemium model is exactly what Internations uses. It's free to join but you have to pay to unlock certain features [1]. Unfortunately the market already has free alternatives (e.g. Meetup.com, Eventbrite, Slack.com etc.) that are more mainstream, have a larger inventory of events and people (network effect again), and that work better so it's pretty hard to provide a sufficiently differentiated product worth paying for.

[1] https://www.internations.org/support/faq/membership

I'm not super familiar with Meetup or Eventbrite, but Slack is freemium too.

It looks like Internations locks up basic functionality rather than bonus features. You can't have much of a social network if you can't "join groups and attend their activities"

Discord App does this really nicely. They keep their platform free for basic usage but you've to buy the bling. A vain, yet fun, spending keeps the platform alive.

People buy glittery items like make overs, buttons, or GIFs (not sure), very similar to what reddit gives you when you're gilded.

Probably, a social network can sell virtual tractors & houses to keep their platform alive.

Why do people have to pay for themselves? I’d pay for me and my social circle.

I’m sure there are lots of people who would pay for their friends. Most people have like 4 good friends, max, anyways. The rest are really just acquaintances, who may be on the network because someone else sponsored them.

And that’s how it can start off. Me and my close friends. I don’t really talk to the whole world so I don’t need the whole world on it. But if I have an acquaintance who is on the platform then great, we can connect on there, too.

And it doesn’t have to be a ridiculous sum. The company can still be very profitable with charging only $1/person/month. With 5 people that’s $60/yr. Facebook makes ~$25 per person in the US and Canada. That works out to 1/5 of facebook’s per-person profit. If a company made 1/5 of facebook’s profit (at facebooks scale), it would be an incredibly successful business.

Plus, facebook has a bunch of crappy UI that exists for the sole purpose of shipping ads. Without the incentive to ship ads to the user, the experience for the users would be waaaaay better. And without the need to collect and analyze so much data about each user, and then manage an ad distribution platform on top of that, the costs of running the platform would be lower.

I wonder how much of this problem is based in the subscription, or being satisfied with how existing networks already work? It's sad how current Facebook is seen as still not having enough disadvantages to it that they outweigh the advantages from a big following.

This seems to be such a key factor that you have to almost intentionally wreck the network for people to eventually, reluctantly, leave.

How about a model, where it is free to join and then you pay for extra storage or something. Sort of like iCloud.

I wonder if a 60 or 90 day free period would help [0]. This would allow you to invite people, who could then themselves try it out. After the free period if enough of your circle decided to stay, you could too.

[0] I feel 30 would be to short to round everyone up and get them to actually try it.

Amazon could probably make this happen as part of the prime membership. Seems like a natural next step given they've already got the photo portion covered

Except that Prime members still see ads and their data is still collected.

Facebook makes something like $25 per user on average. I’d pay that to Facebook if it meant no advertising and no tracking all year.

That's only in the US and Canada, globally it's more something like $5.

And you and I (and probably some more people of HN) would pay that. But 99% of the 2 billion people that use FB wouldn't.

I wouldn't pay a single dollar.

Case in point :-)

I wish it could at least be an option for those who'd prefer this way.

Definitely, agree. Like YouTube Red.

Wow. I thought the subscription fee of my suggestion might be problematic, as in too high. But if true, this is just plain ridiculous. That would also give you a chronological timeline and a much quicker way to sift through your feed and know when you're "done" than now.