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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Maybe there's an opportunity here for someone to do to Facebook what Craigslist did to print newspapers. What people want is a way to keep in touch with their friends. But that's not a big revenue generator. So the "social networks" put in ads, "sponsored tweets", and other crap. Then users get fed up and leave. (Doubling down on ads as the number of users drops is called "pulling a Myspace").

A basic friends-only system isn't that expensive to run. A low-budget operation like Craigslist could do it with a modest staff. A low fee or infrequent ads could bring in enough revenue to keep it running.

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>A basic friends-only system isn't that expensive to run.

The expense depends on what the baseline for "basic" is.

I believe today's average consumer would want basic features to include photos and video sharing. (This consumer expectation having been conditioned by previous $0/month social networks like Facebook.) Needless to say, this requires expensive datacenters with petabytes of harddrives. Rising storage infrastructure costs and was the #1 driver of Facebook costs in 2006. It may still be today. I don't know. I believe storage is still Snapchat's biggest cost component of Google Cloud payments.

So either run a text version of a social network or put storage limits to keep the social network "cheap" to run. My guess is that the typical non-HN type of user would prefer the ads so it's still $0 per month with the ability to share lots of baby photos.

One idea: let people pay if they want to, move old posts and videos to Amazon Glacier or similar long-term storage, and let paid users expedite the retrieval. Matching the Glacier terms, free users have to wait 5-12 hours to see old posts and videos, while paid users can see them in 1-5 minutes.

Who said that the nextgen soc platform will need persistent storage? Just remove everything once it's viewed and leverage the clients for storage.

Good point.

Now a "Freemium" app might work. Text is free. Pictures up to a limit are free. A few seconds of video with an expiration time is free. More pictures, longer video, and long term storage all cost.

Fortnite is "freemium", and bringing in over $1BN a year without ads.

I've been thinking about this myself. Small bits of text is free. The occasional photo is free. Maybe not video.

You could also treat brand pages as what they really are: advertising. Charge them a weekly/yearly fee to have the ability to run such a page.

>A basic friends-only system isn't that expensive to run. A low-budget operation like Craigslist could do it with a modest staff. A low fee or infrequent ads could bring in enough revenue to keep it running.

The technical aspects of such a service are trivial. People try to build new social media sites every day. The problem is building up a network effect. Getting to the scale of Facebook may not ever be possible again for a small startup because the friction for switching services is so great. Until there is some massive technological leap like the internet again, there's really nothing compelling enough for the average person to bother.

Start the same way Facebook did - with the frats at the elite colleges.

The thing is called "personal weblogs", or "blogs" for short.

Yea, I think what we really need is more tools for enabling build to build there own stuff.

It's really not. A configurable feed of updates from friends is, in fact, a distinct digital product. That seems self-evident to be honest.

Blogs are a good answer for the question "how do I post?", but not a good answer for the question "how do I read?". Most people want some kind of aggregator. There are many aggregators out there, but if the answer to the question "how do I post?" is different from the answer to the question "how do I read?", then most people won't overcome the technical friction. Facebook, Twitter, etc. solved the problem by answering both questions, along with other important questions like "how do I restrict who can read my posts?" and "how do I bring in my friends and family?".

I'd really love to see a resurgence of blogs, but any replacement for Facebook needs adequate answers to the kind of questions that blogs always left unanswered.

How about good old fashion RSS for subs? and Password protected sites? The argument you're making is exactly the problem, it is easy, so they capture you and your info.

> infrequent ads could bring in enough revenue to keep it running.

I think you'd have a hard time finding people that would believe that infrequent ads would remain infrequent.

What people want is a way to keep in touch with their friends

Well, that, and the other thing FB got really really good at: I hardly use FB for friends. I use it to track all sports/music/scenes I'm interested in. It has become my number one source for tracking events. There's, as far as I know, nothing which comes closes in aggregating all of that.

The most basic "friends" system is, IMO, an authenticated mailing list with P2P sharing for pictures and movies. Not a lot of money to be made there at all, though it fits the bills for privacy and decentralization.

It would be great to have the Solid version of facebook where users control their own data with a great UI that accesses the data only as allowed by the users.

Yup. And if you get enough users to make it onto Zuck's radar, he'll buy you for unicorn money and you'll be rich! Hey.. whatsapp?

Isnt this what Mastodon is trying to be?

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