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Comment by banachtarski | Hacker News Reader

I understand this goes against the current ethos but honestly, you can't provide an essentially free service and expect things to just keep running sustainably. Nobody has proven that a social network can be run successfully without advertising and analyzing user data. I wonder what Mr. Koum offered as a counter-proposal for keeping the lights on at what should be an exorbitant cost with their userbase. My guess is, not enough, if anything.

Note: I do not work for facebook, nor am I huge on any social media, although I am a "light" user of both facebook and twitter.

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Whatsapp is not really a social network, it's a (not very complex) IM. The costs are probably quite different (number of features, long-term storage of media, concurrent access to the same messages, etc). Supposedly they were running with only 50 engineers supporting 900M users when they were acquired. I don't know their hardware costs, but overall it doesn't seem like an expensive operation.

It still needs to have a business purpose. 50 engineers + salaries/insurance + server costs for billions of users. Yea, not cheap.

They only raised $60M total until getting acquired, so it can't be that expensive.

I'm not sure how you explain to future investors that you want to raise 60 M with no plan on returning that investment. Companies != charities.

...selling advertising via selling your users’ data for analysis is the easiest way to pay for the services but it’s at the cost of the users‘ basic privacy.

There must be a better way (albeit more difficult for the software company).

How about users actually paying for it? I’d pay a small amount

Ok WHY then, has nobody tried said better way. Why won't anyone invest in it? The point I'm trying to make is that it's unproven. Maybe you're willing to pay a small amount (and what amount is that exactly). What about the rest of the world?

I think people "want" there to be an easy solution to this and are just pointing out problems without considering whether such a solution even exists.

signal?

What about it? They are funded by non-profit. Unless you're suggesting you're going to get anything near the feature set of current for-profit social networks. No major common features = no adoption by the general public. I'm talking face filters, gifs, emojis, stickers, videos, reactions, and the list goes on.

Whatsapp doesn't have many of those, yet they have 1.5 billion users.

In fact, I think Signal has more of that stuff; there's no Gif Search in WA: https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/

Yes because they were a "free" messaging service that could supplant expensive SMS carriers. They are different products at the end of the day, and a messaging service was acquired by a social network. Anyone can get tons of users selling a product at a loss. This is the standard startup story.

Why don't you approach an investor yourself and just start it.

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