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Comment by xibalba | Hacker News Reader

Acton is being incredibly disingenuous and it is disappointing. When you sell your company to another for $19B, you should surely know that the expectations for monetization will be very heavy indeed. Well beyond Acton's suggested metered-user model.

I'm certainly no great fan of Facebook, but anyone who thinks that they deserve to use a service free of charge and also avoid advertising is extremely entitled and disconnected from reality. There is no free lunch.

None of this is to excuse FB's bad behavior. The fact that they claimed they wouldn't attempt to link accounts but had teams elsewhere in FB working on that very task is yet another example of the true nature of that company and its highest ranking people.

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Facebook could have tried innovating with new types of business models and set an example. Instead...

> Facebook could have tried innovating with new types of business models and set an example.

Such as? This kind of handwavy "they could have invented something else that no one else has managed to think of" ignores the possibility that perhaps that other business model doesn't exist.

Of course, they could have charged as Acton suggested, but there is no way that model would have supported their $19B purchase price.

I mean, I don't believe that in 2018, we have tried every possible business model in existence. What if I could pay $50 a year to be excluded from their advertising and tracking across the internet? $100? $10/mo? There are absolutely alternative ways of asking for payment for their service, without necessarily compromising their main revenue stream. Will they work? Who knows, because they aren't even bothering to try!

EDIT: And as much as this particular conversation is throwing Facebook under the bus, I feel this holds just as true for Google and the rest of our industry as a whole with a few notable exceptions.

> [...] anyone who thinks that they deserve to use a service free of charge and also avoid advertising is extremely entitled and disconnected from reality. There is no free lunch.

We are using Hacker News, free of charge, without advertising. Or for a bigger example, most Wikipedia users have never donated and yet use the service with zero advertising. Or there's Signal, as mentioned in the article, and countless other examples.

Perhaps there is a free lunch after all.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps there's value in the community that rewards its owners in other ways.

Hacker News is subsidized by perhaps the most successful venture capital firm of all time. Wikipedia routinely raises lots and lots of money via donation. Signal is funded by a multi-billionaire.

There is never a free lunch. Employees must be compensated, capital equipment must be bought/rented. The revenue has to come from somewhere.

Neither of Hacker News nor Wikipedia nor Signal was purchased to the tune of $19B. So who set that price? Let me assure you, Facebook would have gladly paid less. And, of course, Facebook bought WhatsApp with the intention of turning a profit. The rest follows logically.

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