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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed the Monsters Inc reference and the turning of it on its head central to this piece. But we've said/argued this for years and at the end of the day engagement = ad reach = profits and until the economics there change any for-profit social media will gravitate towards engagement. Hell ANY media gravitates toward engagement and outrage bait. An actual community built around Mastodon seems possible, and there's community discussions around private group chats but they will always remain niche and not profitable.

I don't get what https://savannahhq.com is and what the value add is there but that seems to be what he's interested in, niche + small communities.

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I think the problem is that while engagement may be the source of profits that is short-term thinking. If joy based engagement drives profits and keeps users on your site long-term it may be worth it to take the short-term revenue boost that anger-based engagement brings you if it slowly drives people away from your site.

Of course it isn't completely clear if anger-based engagement actually drives most people away. In that case it is actually Facebook's fiduciary duty to capitalize on it which seems to be a failing on our society.

Facebook is still not shrinking in the US in terms of users. So even if there is a long term cost it seems well beyond the time horizon companies care about.

Community isn’t social media.

You don't advertise to your community. If you do you're actively killing it.

Community is made up of people making connections and building relationships with other people. Savannah CRM helps you manage those connections and relationships.

Yes I agree, I think this is basically the point I was trying to make distilled.

Well said! Outrage sells and it is easy to keep it stoked. Everyone is addicted to free. If we get rid of ads, how does (even the barest bones) Twitter keep the lights on?

I wonder if there is a cross-over between Patreon, Substack and Twitter. This would probably work for niches but not writ large. But at the end of the day, we need to find a way to pay for what we value because that is how we get more of it. Interested in new ideas in this space....

The Medium/Spotify model -- per-user constant subscription fee, apportioned to content creators on the basis of their views + some time-viewing / read-to-end adjustments to discourage clickbaiting -- seems fairly decent, but really requires a global platform to work.

But product companies don't like it because they can't scale revenue user-transparently by repackaging data (e.g. building new / better ad products), and raising prices for users sucks.

The original sin is that the web was free, and the consequence of that, once post-content-scarcity in a free market system, has been continual sleight of hand to make money from "free."

If everyone has gotten in the habit of paying for quality content... we'd have a very different world now.

(And this said as a hard-charging "information wants to be free" type. But the end commercial result nowadays is terrible)

I'd prefer not to live in the AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve blackhole that was the Internet before "the original sin that the web was free." Originally, it wasn't free.

I do agree with you that it would have been better if the payment-related features of the HTTP spec weren't just dead-on-arrival stubs.

But the internet before AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve was pretty awesome. And free (aside from connection costs -- but that's no different than today).

> The original sin is that the web was free

I disagree. The thing that has destroyed much of what made the internet great is that it became ad-driven.

And how could it not have become ad-driven?

Choices have consequences. We made a choice (free), and now we live with the consequences (ad models).

Well, that there was a rich and vibrant internet before advertising existed on it seems to indicate it's entirely possible.

But I don't think we chose ad-supported. The ads came in before anyone was seriously thinking about how to charge people for things. The decision was made for us. And even if we did pay cash money, the ads would have come anyway if history is any indication.

So perhaps the degradation of the internet in this way was inevitable. Still, it's a real loss and a real shame.

The academic, and then niche, Internet was always a fundamentally different dynamic than once you let everyone in. Eternal September etc. I'm not sure post-mass market the "early Internet" was still a stable outcome.

I'd agree that we (the users) certainly didn't chose ad-supported. At least in any more specific way than saying "I like free things more than not free things" ("we" as in a majority).

And I don't think pay-for-things or any other not-ads model was fundamentally flawed... it just wasn't superior or even at parity at the time that ads took off (i.e. DoubleClick/AdWords)... and so we got ads.

And I'm not arguing that we should have ads! No one would be happier than me if they disappeared from the face of the Internet tomorrow, at least in massively-tracked form.

But I do think moving past them requires an honest appraisal of why they exist -- people, on the whole, are cheapskates.

We're in a thread about social networks, so the content is still provided for free by users while the host company tries to monetize. You can't be making the point that providing content for free wasn't sustainable...

Spotify seems to be investing a lot into ads recently.

This. And also this:

> We still want our members to be happy, right?

... we might want that, but do the people running the platforms?

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