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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Imagine this:

A "free" ad-driven social networking site that brings in gigantic revenue, but that has to pay thousands of high-priced engineers to implement all of the cruft you just described.

versus ...

A subscription-based, non-ad-driven social networking site (perhaps operating as a member-owned cooperative?) that brings in much more modest revenue but that also can operate with many fewer engineers because it can be largely cruft-free.

I know there have been a gazillion attempts at the latter and none has succeeded in any way comparable to the "free" sites. It's too bad, because if any of them were to ever achieve Facebook scale, the subscription price would probably be quite modest.

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I think the biggest assumption you're making here is that most people care about ads - and they don't. Fundamentally, when I'm scrolling through Facebook or Instagram or Reddit or whatever, I just don't care that I see ads while I'm scrolling. I'm not going to pay $1/2/3/4/5 a month to avoid something I don't care about, and that's really only the value add of a subscription-based service. I'd also say most folks don't find Facebook's data policies as egregious as the tech community does.

I'd really like to understand how does one not care about ads. To me it's like potholes on road. It would require terrific willpower to ignore them.

Although it's getting harder and harder since many platforms try to blend their ads in with the actual site content, I can avoid them reliably well by checking metadata such as the poster, some indication that it's an ad, or if the content is clearly different from what I was expecting.

I wouldn't say it's as bad as potholes on the road, since ads are more predictable.

I'm not interested in the ads, so I don't notice them if they're not shoved in front of what I am interested in.

I can see that if you consider ads to be inherently offensive, you would notice them wherever they appear, and be annoyed.

But that's not where most people are.

People do. My dad doesn't install an adblocker because he simply doesn't care. I wouldn't either if it wasn't for the serious performance impact.

Being unwilling to pay for the service suggests to me that the entire experience has no meaningful value.

Economists have done studies where they tried to determine how much someone would need to be paid to stop using Facebook for a year. Maybe people are not willing to pay for the service, but they would rather have the service than $X.

I don't think it's just about the ads themselves. It's about the fact that when a site is free, its users become the product, and there are all sorts of user-hostile design decisions made, which leads to all sorts of unnecessary bloat.

Think of it as the difference between a for-profit bank and a credit union. The bank exists to maximize returns for its shareholders. The credit union exists solely for benefit of its members. So the credit union isn't going to try to employ sneaky fine-print fees, because that's not what the members want.

In a similar vein, you might not care about ads and may have trained yourself to ignore them, but you might care about performance, which is sluggish because of all the cruft, or you might care about privacy, or you might care about being marketed to in more subtle ways than display ads.

Food for thought- the value of each user is radically different when accounting for geographic (i.e. income) markets.

For subscription to work, you either:

1- undercharge users from wealthier countries

2- price poorer users out of you platform

3- give up on the idea of worldwide adoption (Facebook scale, as you say) entirely

4- attempt to charge different amounts by country of origin, and watch your users cheat the system mercilessly

5- go freemium, and suffer the same fate that news organizations do- find that far too few are willing to pay to go ad-free, stick ads back into the free version, and end up leaking data anyway

I suppose 4 might be the most feasible option, but once it is obvious that some people pay more for the exact same value, they are likely to assume that the product has less value than it actually does, feeling that they are being ripped off.

In short, there is probably a good reason that paid services will never reach Facebook scale.

What you argue here could probably be said about half the companies admitted to any YC batch, and still there are successes. Maybe the glass can be half full too?

I think the catch is focusing on "Facebook scale" in terms of users on a social network. I am not aware of any YC companies at close to their scale (or potential to get there) without being ad driven, freemium or running on borrowed money.

Small social networks are fine for what they are and, I think, have much more flexible options for getting the bills paid.

6. Option 4, but just relax about the outcome.

At ardour.org, we offer 3 tiers of subscriptions ($1, $4 and $10 per month) named to target different economic conditions. We also offer a single fixed payment with a suggested but editable cost based on OECD data about the cost of dining out.

We're not trying to maximise revenue, which is perhaps an important difference between us and, oh, Facebook :)

> A subscription-based, non-ad-driven social networking site (perhaps operating as a member-owned cooperative?) that brings in much more modest revenue but that also can operate with many fewer engineers because it can be largely cruft-free.

I, too, loved App.net. Alas, seems that people won't even pay a couple bucks a month to see what their friends are eating for lunch.

People instinctively know the value of something when asked to part with their money. :D

Yet they still spend their time on it. Huh.

People know their friends are not on App.net, but are on Facebook.

Or in other words:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

People just don’t want to pay for social networking platforms. We’ve been conditioned to think that these things should be free.

I think social media is as social as sitting in a bar where everyone tries to get you to listen to their stories and look at their photos. To respond to someone in the bar you can send a text, which they might respond to somewhere in the future. Therefore, I am not planning to pay for it, since it is not adding (much) value to my life.

Perhaps it's just a figure of speech, but I feel you should be challenged on the use of 'been conditioned to'. I see conditioning misused as an explanation all the time in tech discussions. This isn't an example of conditioning, but of anchoring, which if you want to view it through the lens of learning theory is an example of modelling rather than conditioning. But really it's better understood through the lens of behavioural economics. A value has been established and normalised, and other values are judged against it.

The reason I bring it up is that in changing user norms, it's much less helpful to think about them in stimulus response terms, than in terms of modelling other users behavior - which itself is guided by limitations on our capacity to process information, and heuristics which though adaptive are poorly adjusted to the modern media landscape. So people didn't flock to facebook initially because they were conditioned to prefer it - they used it because (in addition to offering a peek into the lives of others, it was cool). Conditioning is an important part of why people become addicted to the reward loops of social networking sites, but it's an insufficient explanation for their appeal and often misapplied.

Well, they are free, so that probably contributes to that perception.

> I know there have been a gazillion attempts at the latter and none has succeeded in any way comparable to the "free" sites. It's too bad, because if any of them were to ever achieve Facebook scale, the subscription price would probably be quite modest.

MeWe is freemium (paid extra stickers and storage) and is actually nice, at least the parts I've seen, a lot like Google+ - a friendly neighborhood full of photographers, chili enthusiasts etc.

Of course most people are going to go with twitter, but if you'd like something more like Google+ or what Facebook could have been you might want to try MeWe.

Facebook's problem is that a subscription fee would drastically limit adoption and prevent them from monopolizing the social graph. They see more potential to make money without charging users directly.

> the subscription price would probably be quite modest

Yes. It would be set to the minimum required to dissuade banned users (e.g. spammers) from continuing to create new accounts. This amount would still likely be well above cost.

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