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Comment by AitchEmArsey | Hacker News Reader

I'd pay $5-ish per month for social media if it came with no ads or data harvesting - just a more privately scoped version of Facebook with some of the useful bits like event scheduling and discussion groups. Of course the problem is getting non-technical people to value their attention and privacy at more than $5/month in order to catalyse the network effects.

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This has been tried though, app.net came and went. I mean if you want those things they exist in some form with Mastodon, Matrix/Element (not sure about the event scheduling).

app.net failed because they copied the most useless social network provider of them all.

Note that I specify provider above. Twitter is somewhat useful, but that is despite of, not because of the interaction design of it.

Edit: IIRC app.net was a bit overpriced and had some weird limitations too, although the latter might just be me remembering that they copied all the design mistakes of Twitter for no good reason.

Edit2: If anyone is in doubt at all: Twitter is popular because of the network effect. Everything else has been solved better by one or more competitors.

I've never had issues with the ads on social media. Some are indeed reasonable.

What I hate about FB or Instagram is the "look how great my life is" aspect.

It's super aggressive data harvesting and aggregation you need to be worried about. What's the end game when employers, landlords, insurers, creditors etc have a stream of your purchases, browser history, location history, offline friends, etc etc? Social credit much?

I've been hearing about this dystopian future for as long as I remember and don't really see it pan out as bad as it's described. In fact the existing credit reports or DMV records already are some form of personal data aggregation and I don't hear people losing sleep over it

The fact we've seen it coming doesn't make it wrong.

I've been saying for _years_ that what I really want is Facebook circa 2010.

How can a user confirm by himself that the company does not monetize the user data, without whistleblower news

Privacy in social media is a feature that is bound to self-discipline of the service provider

Paid services create a liability for the company to adhere to its terms, as the payments create a minimum floor for establishing damages in court.

A company could provide terms of service and perhaps an explicit creative works agreement defining the exact uses for which the company will use the data (to display on the website, to comply with legal requirements, etc).

It would still ultimately rely on a whistleblower or voluntary auditing, but the combination of clear damages and a not-open-ended terms of use would keep the company lawyers invested in keeping the company honest perhaps.

They probably can't, which is why I'm pessimistic about the idea being viable - unless there is some way for the application to be open-source and quasi-federated; for example with people/companies/communities hosting their own nodes - like Mastodon but with some kind of auto-discovery for regular users to make it approachable.

social media where you can only post pixel art images. That way if you want to say something, you gotta click it out.

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