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Comment by Tomminn | Hacker News Reader

I suspect it'd depend entirely on whether facebook costs everybody $1000/year, or just them.

If facebook costed everybody $1000/year, I would definitely stop using it, because the network would be immediately broken since everybody would know everybody with any sense would stop using it.

If facebook only costed only me $1000/year, I would know the network was still intact, and I would consider it.

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I think if facebook started charging me, and only me, any price I would say "What the heck is this? Why only me?" and rage quit facebook.

It's more of a thought exercise because he was making a point that people would expect all users would disappear if there was suddenly a fee like that (for everyone), which, invariably would affect how much the product is worth to them. That's why this only works backwards - asking people to quit for a reward.

If everybody has to pay $1000 a part of your network will disappear due to not having the sum available regardless of the value of the service.

Then everybody else would have to decide if the rest of the network still provides value to them, so a few more would disappear. At some point you'd reach an equilibrium where either a small portion of the original network is happy with what they still have for the money, or the whole network collapses.

It doesn't feel like people would quit because of the expectation that "everybody with any sense would stop using it". You could already say that now about FB, and you could definitely say it for many other products. Yet they are still used.

Now is not a bad time to rage quit Facebook either.

I quit, but no rage required. Just boredom.

I also think that if Facebook started charging everybody any price (like $10/year, or even $1/year), many people (not all of them obviously) would definitely stop using it, and then the network would be immediately broken because of that, as its value would quickly spiral down since the current value proposition of Facebook as a user is that perceptually basically everyone and their dog is on Facebook.

This question (can Facebook charge people to use its service?) is fundamentally vastly different from the one in the article, which basically is: can someone kill Facebook by buying enough people out of using it?

The latter is a true hypothetical as US law prevents charging different rates to different users for the exact same product/service.

It does? There's quite a few counterexamples to that, such as airline fares, cars, etc.

The example above is Facebook charging a single person $1k/year while not charging other people. That's called price discrimination: https://econsultancy.com/what-is-price-discrimination-and-is...

It would be a slam dunk lawsuit.

You can still offer discounts (airline tickets, Adobe, etc.) or negotiate pricing (cars, etc.) legally.

But, it is illegal to isolate someone and charge them more without justification as in OC's example.

So yes, Facebook charging a single person $1k/year is a true hypothetical. It couldn't happen legally in the US.

Can you show evidence of this? What about airline tickets?

No it doesn't.

Yes, it's called price discrimination: https://econsultancy.com/what-is-price-discrimination-and-is...

Different customers get different discounts on all sorts of goods and services, reflecting the various importance of the customer, difficulty of dealing with them, etc. We get an x% discount off list on Cisco network kit, I assume that others get y% or z%.

Yes, but it matters who gets those discounts. If you took a prior action to earn the discount no problem. If it's assigned randomly, no problem.

If Costco charges $1k for a bagel and gives it away to everyone for free except insists on you paying, that's a problem. You're not allowed to isolate discounts based on race, gender, etc. So Costco would have to have a pretty creative reason for making you pay and no one else. It wouldn't hold up in court and it would be price discrimination.

Then Adobe has a huge legal problem.

Frankly, I do not understand your logic.

If it costs everyone $1000, there will be many many many people who cannot afford that.

If it costs only me $1000, I'd stop using it because... well I already stopped using it so I did it for free actually.

First case, that's the point. Nobody would use it so everybody would move onto something else.

Second case, being the only one out (i.e. the black sheep) means you might consider paying for it to not stand out.

The logic is that Facebook is currently worth $1000 but would be worth much less because of the many people who would stop using it if it had that cost.

Oh, now that makes sense. Thanks.

Similar logic also works the other way. If someone really offered all Facebook users $1000 to quit for a year, almost everyone would quit because even those who currently value it above $1000 know that it won't be worth that much after most of their network quits. The actual cost to get, say, 50% of users to quit is probably much less than $1000 apiece.

Does paying addicts to stop smoking work? If that doesn't then the same will apply here.

First yes I think it does. Second this is more like paying people not to smoke a particular brand - they could change to another.

I'll need some proof of your claim. It makes no sense to me. Cos the intuitive thing is for addicts to use that money for binge smoking.

Huh, nicotine dependency doesn't really work like that. Most smokers don't spend all their money on cigarettes, and go on smoking binges when they have more money...

Source: I smoke, and about half the people I know do too.

A roundabout way of saying "I don't use Facebook so I'm better than you"

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