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Comment by mycorrhizal | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but what is a better alternative?

Let's say you have a subscriber model, but than what kind of world will it be where only the wealthy have access to these communication technologies and access to social information.

Or you have a hybrid ad model with the ability to opt out by paying some fee. Than what kind of world will that be when privacy is a luxury item limited to how much you can afford.

The best solution I can think of is keeping the current model, but adding regulation and government oversight to limit some of the most damaging effects i.e. creating platforms that abuse human psychology to keep people clicking and make them addicted to these platforms.

I'm genuinely interested in other models people suggest.

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In the past the function of the "phone company" was a paid for service which provided for your communication needs. You didn't have to listen to ads before you could talk to your friends but you did occasionally get unwanted calls.

This medium reached people rich and poor, all around the world.

The challenge here is greed.

One of the interesting topics in economics is the ability to subvert the supply-demand curve by extracting economic value without the participants awareness. In classical economics the equilibrium point is met when the buyer thinks they are paying too much and the seller thinks they are getting to little for a good or service. In the idealized experiment the buyer doesn't have any other choice, nor does the seller have any other customer to turn to.

But in our internet connected world there is an "invisible" (to the buyer) stream of value which is personal information about the buyer. To date there hasn't been a good way for the buyer to see or negotiate that value. GPDR helps that but it doesn't go far enough in some ways.

What GPDR doesn't supply (yet?) is the practical way of enforcing the theft of personally identifiable information for financial gain. So in your example of a hybrid ad model, if you 'opt out' and now pay a fee, how do you know that they aren't still just selling your data? And if they are selling your data to get extra value out of you being a customer, what recourse do you have when you discover it? What risk are they taking by pursuing that path and maximizing their revenue?

EDIT: From the article -- At the time of the sale, WhatsApp was profitable with fee revenue, although it is unclear by how much. (99 cents per year)

I don’t know how old you are, but phone calls were really expensive in the decades before 2000. It’s not something low income people could afford to do very often.

Your talking about long distance, local calls were inexpensive and available to all for low prices.

Right, being able to talk to anyone in the world for free is a HUGE improvement.

Depends on how "local" was defined in your area.

We had multiple independent local phone companies one place I lived. I could call into the next state for free (and by dialing just five numbers), but my friends two miles away in the same state were 35¢ a minute.

Phone calls were expensive because telcos were (still are) a monopoly. Phone calls got cheaper only because they eventually got competition from VOIP-like solutions.

I expect this depends a lot on where you were living in the decades before 2000 and what you mean by "phone calls".

In much of the US, in the 70's, 80's, and 90's a telephone had a fixed monthly fee and 'free' calling to any other phone in the local area. Phone penetration was over 90%[1] in 1970 and rose to over 95% by 1980 suggesting that even those at 50% below the poverty line in 1980 (roughly 6% of the US population) had access to a telephone.

So for many living in the US they have probably experienced being able to talk with all of their friends for "free" as long as they want, and if they were old enough arguing with siblings about who got to use the phone longest.

Further, in the "current" epoch, the article suggested that WhatsApp was profitable at 99 cents per year when it was acquired. I would not be surprised if that it is still the case that such a messaging service does not require advertising revenue to be cash flow positive. It just needs enough subscribers.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/189959/housing-units-wit...

My first boyfriend was born in the late 70s (UK) and hos family didn’t own a phone — not one landline phone between them — because phones were too expensive.

I was early 80s, and watched landline and mobile costs fall to negligible levels.

My current girlfriend was born in the late 80s (USA, but world traveler with family work), and I think from the start of highschool onward pretty much always assumed there was an internet connection and too-cheap-to-care calls even before everyone made their own VOIP/video chat messengers.

I grew up in LA in the 80s. Yes, "local" calls were free and that probably covered most of the people you went to school with. If you had friends or family members 20+ miles away (commonplace for car-centric LA) it was pretty easy to rack up huge bills.

Most of us had family outside of our area code which meant large bills if we wanted to talk to them on a regular basis.

I understand, although we can argue about 'Most of us' versus 'Some of us'. My experience was that my need for out of area calls went up only after I moved from where I went to high school to where I went to college. And many of my friends stayed local. There was a great piece in the NY Times about 3 years ago that talked about how the typical American lives within 18 miles of their family.(found it https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...)

Something that came with the Internet, and didn't exist for me prior to its existence, was a large body of friends who were not local to me. Today, if I had to go back to metered long distance rather than what we have today it would absolutely be cost prohibitive! And clearly some people move around more than others and for them they might have a lot of friends and family outside of their local calling region back then as well.

The bottom line is that I can see the point you were making but I think we disagree on the magnitude of its impact on the general population that was living with phones at that time.

If it was too expensive to dial out or accept collect, life went on for people rich and poor. I think we’ve entered a world where opting out of constant communication (like not answering your phone) is completely alien and in some cases unacceptable, which in turn makes the prospect of constant communication valuable. But I’m not sure how many use cases are out there for how constant digital connection improves outcomes for acute life events or quality of life in general, but the assumption is that it does (despite growing research to the contrary).

> I think we’ve entered a world where opting out of constant communication (like not answering your phone) is completely alien and in some cases unacceptable

I left my smartphone and my smartwatch in my smart home when I went to work today (guess I'm not that smart).

I hear through the grapevine that my wife is losing her coolant because she can't text me every ten minutes, or locate me with Find My Friends.

I think I'll stop at a tiki bar on the way home.

You're right! The phone model of pay-for-use has made telecommunications available all over the world to all kinds of people.

Yet, it might be worth contemplating a few details about that. First, it took decades to do so. During almost all of that period, phone use was very expensive for most people, making it something reserved for the rich. It's taken from 1876 to today for almost the entire world to have phone service.

Second, expansion of phone services was often controlled and directed by monopolistic companies. They invariably acted in incredibly greedy ways and had no compunctions about abusing their position(s). Extortionate long distance rates, asserting that only company-owned systems could touch the networks, and more were normal.

I understand why you view phone access as a good model, fundamentally different from an ad-based or subscriber-based model. Yet, it's possible that this approach historically had some rather significant drawbacks that might be worth contemplating.

You are conflating the model with shifts in technology. The US landline infrastructure was really expensive on a per-user basis. Mobile was much cheaper to implement, and the shift from analog to digital audio drastically decreased the cost of call transmission.

Those same digital technologies mean a regulated social media monopoly could be much narrower. E.g., we could split Facebook into infra and client apps, or core features versus add-ons. You could make the social graph owned by a non-profit, and regulate it with a board where client app developers are represented. That would provide a much better balance of power than we saw with telcos versus consumers.

Mobile was also very expensive for a long time, and thus primarily reserved for the rich. Shifting from analog to digital was something telcos did mainly to lower their costs to enable them to extract higher profits.

So, you're right! Shifts in technology brought prices down to a point where they're affordable to most! That's something enabled by a model that inherently advantages the rich over the poor. But the economic incentives created and encouraged by history and the model are just a detail, not worthy of inspection or being considered part of how we got here.

Right?

As for your proposal, I don't share your optimism for regulated monopolies here. They're a wonderful model for basic needs that everyone shares and that little change will be needed to over time. This describes electricity, water, and in some cases data transport.

It's certainly possible that social media services to date have hit this basic level of common infrastructure. If so, I clearly just don't understand exactly which services that covers or how they're the same level of fundamental as water. Can you help me with this? I need to understand before I can figure out if dismembering Facebook into a publicly owned council-run monopoly is the best way forward.

Especially because this would also probably mean doing something to ensure other, non-council-run social network providers didn't spring up and replace PublicBook.

My point was that your apparent objection to the phone company analogy to finding ways to fund social networks was based in a false comparison. If you now agree your objection was wrong, and that social networks could now be funded in ways besides eyeball sales, then I don't see a need to pursue that further.

I honestly don't believe your "help me understand" routine is anything but syrupy and disingenuous, an online rope-a-dope. If you're actually serious, please demonstrate that by providing your own best guess as to a plausible split and your concerns about the model; I'll do my best to help you with that.

I agree that there are most certainly alternate means by which a social network could be funded. Subscriptions, pay-per-use, and public funding all come to mind. I don't agree that this invalidates my previous points about phone networks and their history. New technologies enabled prices coming down because a long history made it worth investing in. Nothing about those technologies or price reductions was inevitable.

I can think of several plausible ways to split up Facebook. The one I can think of that adheres most closely to the basic utility model would be for only the most foundational service to be handled by a regulated monopoly. That, I expect, would be a pseudonymous social graph where people can add and remove connections. Anything on top of that would be handled by third-party providers.

I can imagine other services that some people might consider foundational and thus desire to lump in with the above. Some might consider posts, walls, profiles, and groups part of it. Some might even consider chat part of the foundation.

The "online rope-a-dope" you describe is my attempt to avoid telling people that I am reasonably sure they are being silly. It's always possible that there's genuinely something I don't understand about the positions. It's happened before, it's happening now, and it will continue to happen in the future. It generally doesn't, but telling people I think they are being silly is generally not conducive to productive conversation.

Being over-the-top syrupy nice tends to go over better than pointed criticism, which tends to make people defensive. For example...

Under which set of laws would Facebook be nationalized in your proposal? American? French? English? Turkish? Saudi? What effect would this have on effects to combat fake news and hate speech? Whose definitions of "fake news" and "hate speech"? How are you going to make sure that users don't migrate to a new, better, and non-regulated-monopoly social network the way people migrated to Facebook from MySpace? Are you just going to take over that one too? How do you propose to ensure that client app developers with access to the ruling council don't use their position to push away other client app developers?

These aren't pointlessly detailed questions. They're ones that spring to mind almost immediately, and ones that any serious proposal that merited consideration would need to wrestle with. Some of them are major points of public policy which differ very significantly from polity to polity.

I would like to understand that you've gone through these questions and arrived at good answers. I want that to be true.

You're probably feeling defensive right now. A little attacked. Which is why I couched the whole thing in asking you to help me understand, because a person who feels attacked is not a person who is genuinely listening.

>In the past the function of the "phone company" was a paid for service which provided for your communication needs. You didn't have to listen to ads before you could talk to your friends

As a point of interest, back when people used dialaround numbers to get lower long distance rates (800-Easy-ITT for ITT, 800-Pin-Drop for SPRINT, 950-4MCI for MCI, or 1010-NJB for New Jersey Bell, etc...) there was at least one service that would make you listen to an ad before connecting the call. In exchange, you got a super-low rate.

I don't know if it failed because of the advertising, or because the line quality was terrible.

WhatsApp had a subscriber model (99 cents per year). It was still very successful in India, a relatively poor country. I remember visiting villages in India, where people who are quite poor by western standards, still preferred using WhatsApp to other services.

I think that reasonably priced subscription model, perhaps taking in account the per capita income of the country, could help preserve privacy while also ensuring mass access to technologies.

The problem is greedy attitude of people. As long as one can earn more by selling user information, there is no incentive for reasonably priced subscription model.

Do you know that those Indian people had actually paid for WhatsApp? I never had to pay, and most people I know (UK) don't seem to have done either. I don't know what the criteria was but it'd be pretty weird if they were charging people more aggressively in India than the UK. Maybe the whole not charging thing was a bug, it's always seemed weird.

I don’t think many if any Indian people actually paid for Whatsapp. Most people overall didn’t pay for it.

> Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but what is a better alternative?

> Let's say you have a subscriber model,

There was a company with a subscriber model. It worked pretty well and we loved it. Facebook bought it and destroyed the very idea behind it.

> but than what kind of world will it be where only the wealthy have access to these communication technologies and access to social information.

The same kind of world were all kinds of tech is expensive at first and then becomes cheaper and cheaper as it approaches and enter mainstream usage?

Nobody would argue today that we should have refused luxury cars to add airbags because "what kind of world would it be where only the rich has access to safer cars".

In the same way we shouldn't argue against people paying for better products.

That said, I think WhatsApp were planning to add other paid options like API access etc before they got eaten by Facebook.

How about crowdsourcing a social network? Look at synology NAS boxes-they have a ton of apps. They have even developed a stupid-proof way of connecting NAS boxes securely over the net without opening router ports. If i choose to install the synology 'chat' app, i could designate a fraction of the NAS space as a se[arate volume to be used soley by the app and sandboxed from my LAN. And just as synology boxen can sync with each other silently, securely and in the background- this 'chat' app can interact with the millions of other synology boxen. Of course to be a member of this ad-free, toll free network - you need a synology box in this model. But after all, it's just a linux box - however the tech for connecting them securely requires a handshake mediated by a server at SYNOLOGY. And they provide all this FREE. It is similar to the iMessage network that apple runs. And again you need an iPhone to be on that network.

A decentralized social network, built on peer-to-peer connections, allowing people to connect with one another without being intermediated and monetized by some central party? Sounds idyllic!

Is it possible that perhaps this has been considered before, and perhaps even implemented?

Isnt this what diaspora and mastodon are doing?

Maybe!

It's also what email is.

not really. email and list serves are somewhat 'dead'. they are distributed in chunky dumps only every so many hours. bbses are closer to what engage people. conversations are updated in a more granular fashion with a greater respect for timeliness. the point i was making is the current existence of a turn-key box that could be the building block of a publicly administered peer to peer network. the power of peer pressure is not to be underestimated. even my son who is a software engineer, knowledgeable about android, hacks his pixel , etc is moving to an iPhone because he has many friends - not software savvy - who are all on iPhones and iMessage each other , FaceTime themselves, etc. The magic can happen with A box that you can turn on and simply click an 'install' button that gets a peer to peer chat app that runs in a sandbox, shares some of your NAS space, is always on - A hooli box to make a new internet

You're right on all your points. In detail, no less! Such a system could indeed be marvelous, a system to make a new internet for a new generation.

Yet, you're describing email still in essence. A system where people interact very rapidly in a distributed, authority-less magic box based network. Email happens to be chunk-y, though in practice it tends to be nearly as fast as chat.

But I'll humor you. Now you're describing XMPP. Magic sandboxed chat applications, peer-to-peer, NAS storage, authority-free, and monitization-free. Wrap it up in Docker or something, and you have your turnkey magic. Right? Right!

You still have all the problems that come with this. For example, stemming abuse is a major problem with decentralized systems. How do you stop spammers? Appeal to the decentralized community and hope? Peer pressure has never been enough to stop this. Authority and trust problems run rife. Most users are too ignorant and unskilled to look after their systems properly, which is a problem you won't be able to magic away.

I'm trying to be nice here. You're re-inventing email, in a way that does nothing to stem the basic problems of email. You have all the idealism that created email to begin with - lovely, beautiful, admirable idealism! - and little of the pragmatism.

Fundamentally, there have been two kinds of decentralized, authority-less, un-monetized networks: those that are unpopular and those that become popular enough to be subject to a ton of abuse. Abuse that leads to professional service offerings that re-centralize, re-intermediate, and re-monetize the services in order to make them usable to ordinary people again. It's absolutely possible that your idea would be neither of those! It's just that so far I've not been shown anything convincing that this could be the case.

There is no shortage of options out there, the issue is onboarding people. Even google couldn't swing it with google plus.

It was called a BBS network. One example was ARBNet.

Let's say you have a subscriber model, but than what kind of world will it be where only the wealthy have access to these communication technologies and access to social information.

This is a strawman. I give you Usenet and IRC as counter examples.

I believe the Facebook business model can be safely stripped down to the humane kind while still keeping viable. The revenue it can generate by displaying organic ads without excessive user surveillance (analyzing a user's likes and the kinds of ads they tend to click is ok, spying on every website they visit is not), without messing with politics and without selling data about the users to 3rd parties can still be enough to cover all the relevant expenses and generate profits (probably a way more humble than now yet positive) for the investors.

Facebook can also employ the experience of it's Russian clone vk.com and let users share music (sharing the music that you like and that expresses the mood you'd like to share is a great way to communicate and many people love it!) while requiring those users who'd like to play long playlists in background pay a subscription fee.

A number of other premium features that can add value to a subscription comes on to my mind as well: invisible mode (I'd pay for it immediately - I really hate when others can see if I'm online or if I've read their message, I have been actively hating this for years, this is infuriating yet I don't mind if solving this problem would cost a dollar or two per month), posts promotion, additional typesetting features, profile promotion (top-suggest everybody to add me as a friend), verified status for whoever wants it (not just celebrities), voluntary additional surveillance/curation (for parents willing to protect their underage kids) etc. Introducing a cryptocurrency dedicated to replace old-fashioned likes (e.g. every time somebody likes your post/comment you get a coin) yet traded at a cryptocurrency exchange and accepted as a way of paying for the premium features can be another opportunity. Organic possibilities are limitless.

phones worked for decades with fees. probably can't bring that model back but just pointing out the world still worked when communicating cost money. we had subsidies for the poor (no idea how effective they were)

note I'm not suggesting we go back to that model. only pointing out we had a non ad based system before

Free version for those with verified low income?

(I've been toying with models like this for awhile, and not to say its an easy or simple solution to implement, especially when considering bad actors, but it seems the best chance at getting something "fair")

Alternatively could steal from games and add "cosmetics". Charge extra for things like themes that personalize but don't necessarily improve the experience. Items with enough value that people will "want" it but not "need" it.

What's the definition of "low income"? It would vary wildly from country to country.

Not saying I support the original idea, but there's objective, widely agreed-upon definitions for poverty, so it should be possible to transfer these to define low income.

> objective, widely agreed-upon definitions for poverty

No, there aren’t; this is a political line that doesn’t make any sense at all. This is why “livable wage” is a phrase: just getting above the poverty line does not imply you can live on your income. The poverty line is pegged too low to be meaningful, at least here in US.

Like everything that exists in the real world, it doesn't have to be perfect.

...right, but if you don't care about how accurate it is, the value of distinguishing people is questionable.

The widely agreed upon definition of poverty varies hugely from country to country.

Proof of work from non-paying customers? Something that benefits the company (retweet to pay), or better yet, something that makes the world better? (eg pick up trash, socialize with an invalid, etc.)

Whilst creepy, I love the idea of a proof of work system like this, something that anyone can participate in. I just don't see how it could be achieved in a way that couldn't be gamed.

> only the wealthy

Roughly $40 billion in revenue, divided by 2 billion users. Only the very poorest wouldn’t be able to afford it.

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