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Comment by justaguyhere | Hacker News Reader

I am not a fan of his, but is the situation going change unless people are willing to pay for these services? Most people wouldn't even pay for something as useful/important as email, let alone social networking (I can never understand the need for something like Facebook)

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Yes, someone should make a messaging app with end-to-end encryption that costs $1/year. I think it would do well.

edit: this is supposed to be a WhatsApp joke.

It’s called Threema:

https://threema.ch/en

(Signal is free, though, and Open Source …)

Yes, but, in contrast to Threema, you have to provide your phone number in order to use Signal, which results in an immediate loss of anonymity.

WhatsApp didn’t have end-to-end encryption when they were using the subscription model though.

Whatsapp never really did this. This is a common misconception especially around here. Whatsapp did $10M in revenue in 2013 and $15M in the first half of 2014. This is with a user base of 400M active users at the beginning of 2014 and 700M active users at the beginning of 2015 (and getting to 950M, 1.2B, and 1.5B over the next three years).

When Whatsapp did charge for iOS users, it was a one time payment as well. So not yearly regardless.

The app wouldn’t have the popularity it does have if it charged everyone $1 a year. That’s significant to some people vs others. Especially when looking at WhatsApp’s global user base.

Whatsapp was operating at a loss during its high growth time period before the Facebook acquisition.

I’ll pay. So what are my options? What paid, ad-free social network is there that most of my contacts are on?

There isn’t one. LinkedIn is sort of an exception but it’s not for general use. The market isn’t providing s supply of these products so I don’t see how you can say there’s no demand. New social networks have such high barriers to entry that you can’t just point at some random failed paid one as an example. Loads of free ones fail too.

What would be interesting is if Facebook offered a paid, no data-mining option. But they do t seem interested in innovating.

People pay for internet access. They can hang something at the end of their internet access pipe which supplies them with these services at their own cost (electricity and hardware, mostly when using free software). So yes, it is possible to envision a future where this situation has changed for the better.

People pay for internet access

Isn't it like saying "I paid for the car, why do I have to pay for gas"? Somebody has to pay for engineers, infrastructure etc. If not the end users, then the advertisers.

I guess it is the mindset/understanding. The same person who won't pay $1 for email (for example) will pay for Netflix, because somehow in their mind, it takes money to make movies but it doesn't take money to write software or run servers.

No, that equivalent would be 'I paid for the car, for gas, insurance, car maintenance and for maintenance of the roads, why would I need to pay to drive to the city'. Indeed, why would you?

I'm talking about distributed services here, 'run your own' as in run an instance for your family and any friends you care to provide those services for. I've been doing this literally for decades, ever since I got a permanent internet connection in the 90's. Others here are doing the same, this is not some outlandish concept.

By paying for internet access you pay to have the ability to send data all over the world. If you then also pay for a device which can provide services with that data using free software, which interacts with other such devices owned and operated by other people who likewise pay for internet access and for those devices and the power to run them (etc) there is no need to pay yet again to use those services.

There is no need to pay engineers to run the services as they're running on your own hardware using free software. You already pay for infrastructure through your internet access payments. You pay for your own infrastructure at home.

Realistically, this is impractical for 98% of the population. I say this as somebody who has run his own mail server in the past, and got sick of the endless hassle of maintaining and securing it.

'run your own' as in run an instance for your family... I've been doing this literally for decades

Okay, do you also fix your car, make your clothes, fix your plumbing...?

How can we reasonably expect an average person to install, configure, maintain non trivial systems like emails?

We get paid to do things we want to do and are good at, and we pay others for services/goods that we need but aren't capable (or don't have the time or interest) of doing it ourselves. It is unreasonable and impractical to expect everyone to do everything themselves.

Yes [1].

Nobody expects the average person to install 'non-trivial systems like emails', just like nobody expects them to configure, build and install Android or iOS on their mobile devices yet still they use those devices without undue problems. They even update the things to new releases, mostly without problems. The reason for that is that someone went to the effort of packing up Android and iOS so that it is possible for just about anyone to install them on their devices.

> We get paid to do things we want to do and are good at, and we pay others for services/goods that we need but aren't capable (or don't have the time or interest) of doing it ourselves. It is unreasonable and impractical to expect everyone to do everything themselves.

This is where free software enters the equation, a few people working on a project like this can make a huge difference. Maybe those people get paid to work on free software, maybe not, this is irrelevant in this context. What is relevant is that digital technology does away with scarcity, the work of a few or one can be made accessible to the world without cost other than that of internet access (for which, as stated, the user already pays).

[1] While I do not have a car myself I do fix my wife's as well as my motorbikes and tractors. I generally do not make my clothes but I do fix them. Yes, I fix my own plumbing, not that strange given that I restored and partly built our house which includes installing said plumbing. I'm currently building roof trusses for yet another build-out. Specialisation is for insects.

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