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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

As a fierce Facebook critic, I admit that Facebook itself is a company with amazing teams and outstandingly built services. Too bad it's also the company with the worst possible track record on privacy, who championed scientifically engineered attention grabbing as a tech tool.

I would sincerely like to see a paid for version of Facebook. I would easily fork out as much as I fork out for Netflix for a service that would offer me the same functions without all the profiling, with more granular control on shaping the user experience (i.e. I would rearrange my FB dashboard to focus on groups, events and messaging, while having the newsfeed as a secondary page).

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Sure, but would you be willing to pay $25/year? That's about how much Facebook's ARPU (average revenue per user) is in the US right now.

That's only $2 a month, very reasonable.

They could provide it as an option and let those who want to pay pay, and those who don't not?

I would easily fork out as much as I fork out for Netflix

So 4 times as much.

So I can have me and my four friends?

Realistically, as the early adopter, I'd have to pay for myself and my 731 facebook friends, since none of them would want to pay for it. So, like, closer to $18k a year.

I use adblock so my ARPU is 0. Can I get a discount? :-)

Hah, you'd think. Just because you're not clicking on ads on Facebook, doesn't mean you're not ratting on your friends whenever you use Facebook. By liking things and talking to friends, they can correlate what your friends would probably like to see and show them better ads which they are then more likely to click on. By talking to some friends but not others, you tell Facebook who is most likely to like your likes. By your message's contents, you tell Facebook what your friends like to talk about. The list goes on and on.

Not quite 0. If you participate in liking, sharing, or commenting on Facebook posts that were sponsored at some point further up the chain, then you are part of the value that Facebook offers to those advertisers. (Advertisers are paying for the initial exposure and the network effect.)

That ARPU is on a quarterly basis...

Wouldn't a paid Facebook still collect most of the same data on you? Especially w.r.t. a dating feature? How can you be confident that data would never be used in a way you wouldn't want? It's not just "how it's used today" that's the big concern, here.

You could design a paid Google that did less tracking, less personalization - how do you design a paid FB without your personal info?

Well, I would accept a partial solution. Pay 49,99€ a year, and we track only the information we really need to make the service work fine for you. We won't use that to cater ads to you, and you have the option to create your own dashboard. For me it would be better to have a composition window and then a dashboard with groups I care about, events, other apps I use.

Even if they don’t profile you directly, how do you feel about the fact that your non-paying friends would still be profiled?

> I would easily fork out as much as I fork out for Netflix

You don't understand how Facebook makes money.

They sell advertising to companies who are willing to pay because you came and spend money on their site / purchased their product.

It is NOT true that everyone clicked ad and ended up buying a product. Only minority did. Hence, if you can afford to fork out serious cash like Netflix fee, you are statistically much more worth to advertisers than someone who would only pay $1, or as majority - would click ad and left with abandoned/empty basket.

You will never see paid version of Facebook.

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