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Comment by RickS | Hacker News Reader

There's so much right with your take here, IMO.

It flies in the face of so much opposition from reality – much of it credible – like how the hell do you make money when you eschew walled gardens, engagement boosters, and adtech friendly practices? Do people even want to make the tradeoffs they'd have to? Is regulation too heavyhanded?

Will it be that for as long as these systems can be turned into money machines, old money will use them to print new money? Perhaps.

But the mentality of "open at all costs, profits be damned" feels like one we in the tech industry have gradually let slip from our ethos, and it's so core to the old web. I miss it.

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I can't help but feel that the Internet is hamstrung by overreliance on advertising as a revenue model ...

All of the opposing forces you describe simply evaporate if you charge a fee for access to the API.

Something small and unobtrusive but which would at twitter scale add up to an awful lot of moolah.

Because you're not trying to monetise your users beyond that it doesn't really matter if loads of people stop using because the network effect isn't important.

But at the end of the day it's all about monitoring the activities of mass populations as much as it is about direct advertising revenue, and that's too priceless for the big corps to let go of.

Why would network effect not be important? Even without the advertising model, your profits would still depend on user count, no?

No, that's not the network effect I'm thinking of.

To wit: The value intrinsic in the relationships between your users ("The Network") - to the point that you want all users whether paying or not.

That would be just as important for a subscription based service. If your friends use the service, you're much more likely to continue using it and keep paying the monthly fee.

Yawn

It matters if loads of people stop using it to the point that you can't keep the lights on.

I'd suspect that "loads," in fact the majority, of twitter users would not pay anything out of their own pocket to use it.

These remarks don't really address the points I was making.

Firstly, if people want to use it, and pay for it, even small charges at mass scale pay off. Something like twitter doesn't cost a lot to run in particular at unit cost.

If they don't, GOTO 10: "the Internet is hamstrung by overreliance on advertising as a revenue model"

How else do you monetise your service?

Sounds like it isn’t very valuable then.

> Something small and unobtrusive but which would at twitter scale add up to an awful lot of moolah.

That only works if there is something else preventing competitors from monetizing end-user attention instead. That's possible, but (I don't think) probable.

"like how the hell do you make money "

Well, you could charge for it. But of course you wouldn't be able to compete with free - you'd have to have competitors who needed to charge too.

They do exist but are pretty niche. The WELL comes to mind. www.well.com

If it's any help I applaud every newspaper that puts up a paywall, and more are doing it. It only came about when the industry was (is) about to be completely wiped out and there weren't really alternatives though. But if you're not paying your journalists, someone else is paying them to tell you what to think.

I miss the old internet too :-( . It had so much promise.

>Well, you could charge for it. But of course you wouldn't be able to compete with free - you'd have to have competitors who needed to charge too.

Are you sure about that? Twitter's annual revenue is 2.4 billion dollars, and they have 300 million users. $0.55/month per user is all it would take to match their current revenue.

Sure, when a service is getting up off the ground, you can't beat free, but for one that's established, like Facebook or Twitter, the subscription fees can be made miniscule.

As long as the advertising model is used, a set of perverse incentives exist that encourage social platforms to treat advertisers as more important than users, to inflate their user numbers, to lie about views, to tolerate fake accounts and harassment, and to close their APIs.

A $1 premium ad-free option with 50% adoption would increase twitter's revenue and remove the perverse incentives.

> A $1 premium ad-free option with 50% adoption would increase twitter's revenue and remove the perverse incentives.

It would. A $1 ad-free option would see nowhere close to 50% adoption though.

This assumes that all Twitter users are actual people and that one person doesn't have multiple accounts all over the place. I would imagine that, although still not a major issue, the cost would be a bit higher for users and that's only factoring in users that find enough utility in Twitter to think that it's worth paying for.

And as soon as they do that somebody else will start a free clone to siphon off their users, and people will abandon Twitter. Getting people from $0-$1 is a lot harder than $1-$5. Humans aren't very rational.

For that matter, note that mobile game companies found out it was harder to get all your users to pay $5 for a game than to get 1% of your users to pay hundreds.

I just had this same conversation with a colleague. The old internet was really the civilized wild west. All the idealogical virtue of sharing and learning was plentiful and you had to have some basic technical skill to contribute or be involved enough to learn how to do it. Now, any curmudgeon can post whatever brain farts pop out with a frequency that only rivals that of their actual mouths.

Exactly this. Before you could ignore the lone racist person in the neighborhood. Now, they can go online, create a forum and gather together...

so much for the promise of connecting the world...

When was that "before", though?

Stormfront was probably the best-known forum like that before Gab. And it has been around since early 90s, first as a BBS, then as an actual web site.

Mostly before Facebook and Twitter gained mass userbase, before they made it easy for anyone with a smartphone post all their thoughts

Maybe the nice thing about the old internet was that it felt distinct from the rest of life, instead of an integral part of it - or, frighteningly, much of the foundation. Bad things happened on the internet (or AOL, Prodigy, etc.) in 1994 but then I just signed off and went about my day. Also, it felt like something most people hadn't quite figured out yet and, well, of course it was going to attract eccentrics of all stripes - including some less savoury ones.

I loved the internet, and Prodigy, when I was a kid in the 90's and 12 year old me would be shocked to hear that sometimes I dream of going to a cabin with just a landline, radio, and desk for writing letters for a month.

Wow, you exactly nailed how it felt back then. You mentally switched modes “ok, now I’m online”, and it felt distinctly from “real life”, mostly because accessing it was hard (compared to the present). I think the problem with current internet is that life outside is mostly the same as in 20-30 years ago, and we have artificially overvalued internet presence (youtubers, influencers, online tracking, data leaks, etc)

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