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Comment by goatherders | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: how much would you pay each year for that?

I believe that if FB asked users to pay even a dollar a year more than half of the users would disappear.

I absolutely would pay for it as Messenger and Events are both great products, but like you I know most people wouldn't and that they succeed because everyone uses them.

But I don't actually have a problem with the ads. Ads targeted at me on Facebook are pretty good - they're often things I actually want to know about (like upcoming gigs in my area). I don't mind them and don't have a problem with their inclusion in my feed - it's the algorithmic content tangentially related to my friends which I detest.

Here in Europe messaging systems took off around year 2000 because they were free alternatives to SMSes. Network effects were small and people switched a lot. Those effects are huge now but I believe that if we had to start paying for Messenger or WhatsApp we would switch to something else, probably Telegram.

WhatsApp used to require a small payment many years ago but would extend the free trial period if one did not pay. Maybe they were A/B testing the willingness of people to pay. They even blocked the app for a few days sometimes, then invariably unblocked it after a few days. Somebody paid, almost everybody didn't.

About Events, I didn't even know they have an app for that. I looked for it on Google Play and didn't find it. Is it part of the Facebook app? I saw people using Eventbrite when showing up at events. No in person events yet after the end of the lockdown.

They have a standalone app called Local but I was talking about events within the main app. Being able to easily see what my friends are doing each weekend and what else is on in my city is great (especially as we no longer have weekly street press).

The idea of replacing ads with direct payments isn't entirely new, and the reason for it failing far more often than not is that nobody is willing to spend what they represent in ad-value themselves.

If you just divide FB's revenue by users you'll get, say $20/year (no idea, someone look it up).

But if FB were to offer an ad-free experience for $20, the users willing to pay will be the most valuable. If you're willing to pay $20, you are probably worth $40 in advertising. Maybe you'd be willing to pay $40? Turns out those people are worth $80.

And that's sort of the problem with chasing as much revenue as possible and is why capitalism has been in the crosshairs for conversations on equity as of late.

I think the idea has merit, a paid social media platform that fosters engagement with people you care about rather than driving "engagement" with the goal of more ad revenue.

You oughta open a FB quarterly presentation some day, it is quite eye opening how off the charts they are in terms of user monetization. $20 yearly wouldn't cut it at all, in North America the average revenue per user (ARPU, trailing 12-months) is about $145 (yes, $145 * 253M monthly active users). It's not even enough to match the worldwide ARPU (about $29, for 2.6B users). The value FB extracts from it's users, particularly in NA, is simply astonishing, I'll leave you to Googling the ARPU of other web platforms to get an idea.

https://investor.fb.com/financials/?section=quarterlyearning...

I actually feel quite accomplished to be less than <50% off without ever having the slightest interest in reading their financial reports.

This! I have been trying to make this point for a while. I will be quoting this whenever I can :)

Maybe they could price discriminate based on how much you are worth in advertising.

The where some numbers in 2016 saying that a US user was worth around $60 per year, EU users a little less (around $40). The users in the rest of the world is worth only a few dollars a year, if anything.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-...

Zero

Because I believe that Facebook is such an utterly untrustworthy company that they would still sell me out to the highest bidder.

Note that I ditched my FB account in 2014 and never used any of their other properties, including WhatsApp.

Yeh 100%. The entire premise is that the social offering of FB is free (for the most part, of course users pay in data). I read an interesting article yday on why the 'free' offering of tech companies like FB allows them to thrive versus say an Uber-like tech company that has an explicit cost associated to it even though that is the delivery of a more tangible product i.e. getting from point a to b.

Interesting article on social capital as currency and why social platforms delay monetisation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708585

interestingly enough the average facebook user spends 60 minutes per day on the site. That's about two full weeks per year. If having to pay one dollar for the service isn't even worth it, that tells you something about how much people actually value their usage of facebook.

One of the simpler ways to fix social ills and misallocated resources is to utilize the price mechanism.

Leaving them with hundreds of millions of dollars a year?

How much do you think would it cost? Much less than you could get out of simple banner ads, actually.

I would happily pay(for Insta, Whatsapp, etc but not for fb) around $3-$5 per month for this.

I’d pay $1/year to block my uncle’s right wing conspiracy drivel without blocking his posts of my cousin’s kids.

But, what about when he posts pics of the cousin's kids wearing T-shirts he bought them containing propaganda slogans? :-)

This is the thing that bugs me the most about the feed.

They seem to be very good at categorizing things. After all, it's the foundation of their entire business model: placing people into a giant ontology of subjects and then selling access to that ontology to advertisers.

It's hard for me to believe that they can't notice that I basically hide every single political post no matter the subject that appears on my timeline. You'd think it would be easy for them to de-prioritize these and it would make the whole experience more appealing.

Yes. I imagine, we would have hashtags, and algorithmic hashtags (in case your uncle stops using #rightWingConsiracy hashtab because everybody is filtering it?) and ability to filter by hashtags (with ability to selectively pick whether you block algorithmic hashtags, or normal hashtags). The problem I see is that your uncle might get offended that FB is marking his posts #rightWingConspiracy).

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