Come for the network, pay for the tool | Hacker News Reader

Come for the network, pay for the tool

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64 pointscookingoils11 comments

Paid communities aren't new. AOL was a paid community. Anyone remember Apple's eWorld?

I'm not denying that the economics of the internet are evolving, it just irks me our industry comes full circle to the same stuff we hashed through decades ago and people act like it is a new phenomenon.

> AOL was a paid community.

Did the majority of people paying for AOL really pay for it for access to AOL services, rather than thinking of it mostly as an Internet (and email) service provider, that just happened to offer some value-added gated-community-portal services? Were those portal services an actual selling point?

Maybe a better example is paying in phone minutes to dial into a BBS. Sure, that money isn't going to the BBS (unless it's on a 900 number)—but users are still being charged by the minute to be there, so they're constantly doing an ROI calculation and only staying if they're getting real value out of the place.

> Did the majority of people paying for AOL really pay for it for access to AOL services

Yes, they really did. Before the web grew, AOL had far more content in its services. There were discussions, communities, even early MMORPGs. They devolved into an ISP and email later.

There was a time before the web. Netscape didn't release its first versions until almost 1995. Usenet wasn't added to AOL until 1993. IIRC chat rooms, mail, and freeware downloads were big AOL features in those days. This is the same time frame as OP was referring to (eWorld was '94-'96).

Yes, they were advertising for "AOL Keywords" to simplify discovery of content, along with other value-add services like "homework help" Perhaps "AOL Keywords" were the precursor to hashtags.

Apparently a “Bloomberg Hacker News clone” exists, according to this article. Does anyone have access to it? Is it good?

The author doesn't seem to reference it but the title looks to be a riff on the 2015 article "Come for the tool, stay for the network": https://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the...

> Bloomberg is an example of the classic Web 2.0 business maxim “come for the tool, stay for the network.” But the inverse trajectory, from which this essay takes its name, is now equally viable: “come for the network, pay for the tool.” Just as built-in social networks are a moat for information products, customized tooling is a moat for social networks.1

I don't know if the post has been updated, but unless I misread something it is explicitly mentioned now.

The example paid communities are trivial -- they're hobbyist groups when contrasted against the social media companies this article is trying to compare against.

and it starts with quite an unsubstantiated claim " and audiences are slowly but surely evacuating the big social media companies"

- The Emergence of Paid Communities

- Paid Communities Are a New Business Model for Bespoke Social Media

Meanwhile, MetaFilter just turned 21 years old.

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