These services are so fucking needy. It's like they were designed by broken people. How about some respectful technology that knows its place, and can say "hey, you've accomplished the task you wanted to do here, so go do something else."
It was the second time that I realized the clip was from TikTok. Honestly, I appreciate it.
I certainly haven't. Other than maybe Nintendo suggesting go outside breaks or something.
A few other regular games do it too.
From bitter experience: people don't like being told they're done for the day. It wears you down having to explain it.
Add in the profit motive and it's easy to see why people cave to adding infiniscrolling
In 2019, Instagram only made around $11.98 per user annually.
Imagine if you could pay $12 a year and never see an ad, never be manipulated by an algorithm, never have to worry about any of that. All engineering would be focused on retaining you as a user, not as a market segment for advertisers. The incentive wouldn't be to addict you with an infinite scroll but to provide enough value for you to maintain the annual cost. Possibly even minimizing the attention it demands because the greatest profits is in justifying the subscription while encouraging the least amount of resource use.
Unfortunately, growth-hacking meant VC subsidized growth with free services and there was no way that subscriptions could compete.
The question is if anyone could ever sell low cost, user-centric subscription-based apps in a world where free (but not really) is taken for granted.
So now you need to charge significantly more than $12 to make up for that. The higher price makes the paid users even more valuable to advertisers. Eventually the service slips in a few ads because it’s just too much money to leave on the table.
Cable TV started as an ad free subscription service. I’m not saying it can’t work, but historically most subscription services don’t stay ad free forever.
This is true, for two reasons: Declining profit as markets mature and the need for investors to see greater returns YOY. Eventually, all companies turn to more intense methods of profit extraction.
This isn't specific to digital services of course, we're seeing the effects of this broadly across the economy.
One way to put off the inevitable (for potentially quite some time) would be to bootstrap instead of taking investment. Easier said than done, of course, but maybe not impossible since the hardest part may be breaking open the market in the first place and it might be a lot easier to build an alternative app in a mature space than it was to create Instagram in 2010.
What “negative externalities” are you referring to?
Dynamic pricing would probably offend both audiences - "what do you mean the algorithm thinks I'm worthless?" "what do you mean that I'm worth thousands of dollars to you?"
[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2...
those will be the first users willing to pay to opt out of ads.
The service would have to be built from the ground-up to not have a free option, it would have to be equalized across all users. Again, this is where the difficulty lies in an economy that already offers so much for free.
IF someone could pull it off, they would benefit from the gym membership effect of people keeping the subscription while barely using the service (and it's resources).
There would also be considerable savings on the engineering and sales side if you cut all adtech out of the equation and provide a simple time-series feed.
“Wait that’s all my eyes are worth?!”
Well, yes, it does come down to this, and I'd say the answer is very clearly that this cannot be done, at least not at any scale remotely close to the scale of the big free social media networks.
In a normal market there would be competition and an equilibrium would be reached, but where network effects dominate, it takes something like Signal to make a dent in this regard. That said, there's no reason that a non-profit version of instagram couldn't eventually compete or dominate by charging users a pittance.
On the other hand, subscription models are fine for new entrants, even with VC hyper-growth expectations - there are still billions of users to capture even if per-user revenue is fixed! Then the game becomes delivering as much value to these customers as possible to attract more paying users.
Perhaps this is another malincentive that comes about from monopolies.
This is true, but only applies to the "tech unicorn" VC-funded model. There are other ways to build businesses and if the model we're used to always ends up with such terrible social results, maybe it's time we strongly considered them.