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Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty skeptical of their ability to build a functioning social network, purely from a technical perspective. It's a complicated problem to solve at any meaningful degree of scale.

With that said I think some people here might be too quick to dismiss the market opportunity a new social network could take advantage of.

You'll frequently see messages here about how terrible Reddit has gotten, in part because of heavy-handed moderation.

A new social media that says, "we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.

Again, I doubt this particular app will succeed but I also wouldn't be surprised if the demand was real.

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> It's a complicated problem to solve at any meaningful degree of scale.

I doubt this is necessarily true. Modern social media is complex engineering specifically because of the demands of the Panopticon department for determining your users' underwear color for your advertisers.

If your software is for political community and/or propaganda purposes and not for the benefit of advertisers, I'd bet anything that your technical complexity drops by an absolutely enormous factor. You're CRUDing text, images, and social graph data, maybe you're storing videos in an s3 bucket. And you're probably doing some basic sharding and caching.

> A new social media that says, "we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.

I agree there is demand for a non-moderated social network, but I'm pretty sure this isn't it. From their own term's of service:

> users may not “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...

> we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.

A reasonable pitch to users. But to advertisers and others? Not so much.

If you create a social platform that appeals very strongly to a small minority but where the content creates strong objection in a larger group, then companies don’t want to be seen there. And running a social media platform is expensive. User demand isn’t what I’d worry about, it’s sales (of ads and paid subscriptions). I don’t think there is a market for either of those if Parler/Gab were any indication.

>>[T]he content creates strong objection in a larger group, then companies don’t want to be seen there.

Why would you need advertising or even make money in the traditional sense for that matter? We have seen how social media companies have entered into overt political actions to control narratives. Trump is attempting to build his own version of this. And it's still early but he's not doing a bad job so far, he's raking in tons of money from investors. These "investors" aren't looking to make money, they are investing in political influence similar to those people who were pumping billions into the Clinton foundation to buy access/influence.

> Why would you need advertising or even make money in the traditional sense for that matter?

You don't. But running these operations at scale is extremely expensive, so you need a lot of income. It's possible to run it as a money sink provided you e.g. have investor money or, as in the case of previous right wing attempts, "donor money". But regardless of how the money is raised, it's rarely a charity that can go on forever. Everything we have seen so far indicates this isn't really a viable investment. Gab, Parler and similar have exactly this business model: operate at a loss through donor money. The audience isn't nearly big enough to motivate the spend, and the cost scales linearly with the audience unless there is a big ad income. The question shouldn't be why this should fail, but what sets it apart from Gab and Parler, other than "This time it's Trump".

> A new social media that says, "we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.

Doesn't this already exist in the form of Gab? I think they don't remove content except NSFW/pronography, doxing, and violations of US law.

>A new social media that says, "we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.

And then they will face the same market forces as Facebook and Reddit, and be forced to either capitulate or remain a tiny niche. Which may sound fine to a programmer, but anyone investing serious money into this will force their hand. And then the cycle repeats.

I don't understand why anyone investing money would be a serious issue. Trump has enough money to keep it going until he can get ad revenue or subscriptions, so I don't see why he would need to sell it or capitulate to market forces unless he wanted to. I would have a hard time believing that Trump is not approaching it as a business.

>I would have a hard time believing that Trump is not approaching it as a business.

I also have a hard time believing he would invest a single a penny of his own money into this. He's a repulsive human being, but he's not an idiot. And his investors will be calling the shots.

If it’s like every other Trump-branded venture, he’s happy to get paid to lend his name and equally happy to leave customers and business partners in the lurch as soon as he sees something more interesting.

This assumes Facebook and Reddit operate solely from the consequences of market forces.

As we saw with Tumblr, trying to sanitize a platform to make it corporate-friendly can also be a great way to shoot yourself in the foot. If the operators are smart, they will be happy with a target audience of "just" 75 million people in the US and right-leaning advertisers.

I agree. I’m the admin for a couple moderately sized FB groups (roughly 250k users each). The amount of content that is attempted to be posted by troll farms and bots is staggering. We originally had less moderation, and once the troll farms see they are being successful the amount of fake posts quickly outnumber the real posts. And I’m not talking about just misinformation. One troll farm (I think it was one farm as all the profiles were from the same city in the Philippines) was just posting ASCII art pornography. I give them 3 months of being open to the general public before being overrun with spam.

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