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You are making a huge assumption here, namely that advertising-supported services that cost billions to develop and maintain, and which generate billions in advertising revenue, would still cost billions to develop and maintain if they were not generating billions in advertising revenue. This assumption is in my opinion entirely incorrect.

The underlying reason for those services having both high costs and high revenues is that they have extremely high volume of users. I'm sure something like Duck Duck Go has much lower operational costs, even though it's providing not substantially different service than Google's search engine.

My point is that the cost and revenues are not a function of each other as much as they're both a function of usage. Once you get a high volume of users, it's pretty natural to convert at least a small part of that to advertising revenue, even if doesn't fit well to your platform (cf. Twitter). It takes a principled decision not to dip into that revenue source -- I remember once reading how Jason Calacanis was pissed at Jimmy Wales for not wanting to include ads on Wikipedia.

Compare Twitter with Mastodon Social. Twitter employs 3000 people and it's a hugely complex piece of software. Meanwhile, Mastodon is mostly built by a single guy, and a small volunteer community.

Majority of that complexity is not there to make user experience better. I actively use both platforms, and I find that Mastodon provides a better user experience in pretty much every way. The UI is snappier, it has better features for interacting with others, it doesn't restrict the API, and so on.

The main cost of Twitter comes from building tools to monetize and exploit the users of the platform.

> The main cost of Twitter comes from building tools to monetize and exploit the users of the platform.

Which is precisely my point. Or at least one half of it.

Yup, I'm just expanding on that to illustrate with a concrete example that you don't need megacorps to build these kinds of platforms in practice.

As I recall, the internet behemoths settled on ad revenue when other forms of generating revenue failed for their systems. People were not willing to pay monthly for Facebook nor google search. But maybe that’ll change after people react to the current situation.

Your choices aren't between tracking and subscription, they're between tracking, subscription, and advertisement. You can advertise without tracking (contextually, the original claim of AdWords) and you can sell tracking data to non-advertisers. To say that the economic model of the internet depends on privacy violation is a "the world has to be this bad" argument that just doesn't hold up, especially given the memory of internet advertisements in the time before so much brainpower was funneled in to tracking us.

Except that what we actually have now is "tracking and advertisement" with the former being largely covert, but probably as big, if not bigger as a commercial driver. Watch as loads of the Internet lose their shit over users introducing privacy measures, and very little actually seeming to be done to introduce advertising that doesn't violate privacy.

That invasive advertising surveillance must happen — or we wont be able to afford to stay in touch with each other — is a very common argument, but not a convincing one to me. This was zucc’s argument to Congress for extracting as much personal data as possible from people.

Surely there must be a middle ground between an app that people enjoy using being worth $570B and employing 25,000 experts to tweak it slightly, and being worth less than nothing after server costs.

I agree with you that should a decentralized social media app take off, it’s likely to be less profitable, but I dont think that necessarily means that no-one wants to work on it, that no-one wants to use it, or that it won’t exist.

That invasive advertising surveillance must happen — or we wont be able to afford to stay in touch with each other — is a very common argument

Just yesterday a Google spokesmodel talked about “balancing user privacy against business needs”

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/29/california_data_pri...

But making profits is not a human right!

The products wouldn't exist if they didn't make a profit. So really, it's balancing user privacy against user desire for the product to exist.

Corporations are people too and profit is the oxygen they need.

Balance compliance with the law against desire to make profits, is the accurate translation. Pure Silicon Valley.

Yeah I love seeing corporations have their liberty curtailed in jail when they break the law. /s

Don't assume the cost of the infrastructure for privacy-invasive advertising is free, or that it's just automatically easy to do such things once you're offering some other user-facing service. Acquiring, storing, correlating, and sharing all of that user data is very expensive in architectural terms. It will vary by business model, but I would imagine anywhere from 20-80% of operating costs go out the window if you architect your systems to only offer the services users actually wanted.

"I’m thinking of friends who get upset at learning the government is spying on everyone, who simultaneously post countless intimate details of their lives on Facebook (or Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)"

This is not a contradiction. When you post, you can choose, what informations get out. You have control. (in theory)

When you get spied on, you can't choose. In other words, yes the whole world may see pictures of me and my friends (even though I don't post on those services), but I still don't share my bedroom insights nor pillow talk.

"Because our personal data is incorporated into a highly networked system (the various ad platforms), is worth much more than if it isolated, or “decentralized.” Actually this is IMHO a myth. It is worth more to the ad companies. But not to me. In fact, my data is more interesting and more valuable to me than to the ad system. When I can run apps (including AI) which work for me doing aggregation across all kinds of data about me they will provide me with much greater power. Personal data integration. AIs which work for me, report to me. Being able to write trusted apps which have read/access to all aspects of a person's life, not just the stuff they shared in a social network silo.

Yeah it really irked me when I discovered that I couldn't easily review the tracks that I "loved" with Apple music. When researching just why I found some disingenuous nonsense on the Apple support forums about how they use it to help provide a better experience.

Yeah, tanks hows about I get to see the tunes that I liked myself and make those judgements. Never pressed the "love" button again.

I presume this is what you're getting at. That these companies get to harvest my data and make insights about me that I don't get to make myself.

WhatsApp used to work and be profitable for Ç99 a year.

was it worth not selling at that amount of profitability though?

Ask founders, ask users.

users don't have a decision in the sale.

You think they weren't impacted ?

Mastodon Social is a perfect example of a thriving decentralized platform. It is a network of small communities that are mostly run by volunteers or are supported by the users directly. There are no ads or exploitation of users in this system.

Hosting is incredibly cheap nowadays, and the whole point behind decentralization is that no single server has to host all the users. You can run a Digital Ocean server for 5 bucks a month and host your own community. Meanwhile, containarization makes it much simpler to deploy and keep complex apps up to date.

Other decentralized services such as PeerTube are also popping up, and all these services are able to talk to one another via an open protocol called ActivityPub.

You might be wondering how people are supposed to make money off this and the answer is that they aren't. We don't need walled gardens and megacorps mining our data in order to talk to one another.

> Unless a new system, that allows individuals more fine grained control over how their data is designed to aggregate with mass numbers of other users’ data

DRM for user data: you have a stock of data about yourself and everytime someone want to access it they have to ask for permission using the DRM you have put in.

Some of the most valuable data we have is our purchase history. That lets advertisers know what we buy. They can then target us better.

ShopIn is working to decentralize buying personas and put users in the drivers seat of how companies can use that data.

It’ll be interesting to see how it works.