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Comment by nebqr | Hacker News Reader

I think that the (dead, gay) Something Awful forums model is a decent solution to content moderation and monetization.

An account is 10 dollars (lifetime). If you get banned, you have to pay 10 dollars again. Permabanned = can't come back.

Premium? (dms, search, custom avatar) 10 dollars.

Change your avatar? 5 dollars.

Change someone else's avatar? 10 dollars.

Ad free? 10 dollars.

Access to archives (posts over a certain number of years old) 10 dollars.

Not too expensive and no recurring costs for good citizens, prohibitively expensive for bots/trolls.

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You're missing the most important detail of why that worked. Forcing payment solves issues surrounding identity. Permabans on other platforms don't work when you can make a new email and sign up again. Sure, there's a cost to bans ($10) but it's minimal, but evading a permaban means finding a new means of payment not linked to your identity which is a lot harder. Not impossible, but enough that it stops most bad actors.

Yeah, it's a good system.

Also, on the forums, you can look at anyone's rap sheet and see exactly the post that they got banned (or probated or permabanned) for. Let's you know what sort of person you are dealing with.

I think there's a really good point in here that you sort of touch on that is lost on a lot of new products.

I'd pay $20 one-time for ad-free Twitter even though I can just have a (free) browser extension do it. I'd pay $20 one-time to remove all suggested posts/users/etc, even though the same extension does that too. Archival access would be really interesting on something like Twitter where just about everything gets archived externally or screenshotted anyway.

But the minute any of these become recurring costs, even on the order of $1/mo, I'm out.

I feel like the search for recurring revenue has hampered a lot of company's ability to make real revenue.

>I feel like the search for recurring revenue has hampered a lot of company's ability to make real revenue.

There's a weird mess of consumers and incentives on the internet.

Users generally don't want to pay, so now they're the product. Just to get users products offer unsustainable free services and then die when they reach the breaking point or fail to get folk to pay. Users get upset when the products ask them to pay or revoke their free tier or just vanish ...

Wash rinse repeat.

IIRC App.net was a pay version of twitter.

I loved the idea, it got a lot of attention, but it didn't pick up enough users to get going.

It was, with tiers for users, devs, etc. It lacked users, but it also was born in an environment where Twitter wasn't yet "awful" by most people's definition, let alone owned by someone with mixed popularity. If app.net launched today, it may be a different story.

I would certainly like to see more attempts as time goes on.

App.net went braindead in 2014 and finally died in 2017. 2014 was a long time ago in internet terms. Just look at Mastodon: people are always declaring it dead, but the project's official instances alone are bigger than App.net at peak and it's funded on Patreon subscriptions. Mastodon's part of the fediverse ranges from 750k to 1m active monthly users using this model before adding in comparable and compatible stuff like Pleroma and Misskey. There's been a shift in people's willingness to pay for services that doesn't start or stop with social media.

Edit to add: App.net also had the problem of needing to justify $3m in funding. It "failed" because its model couldn't do that quick enough to make investors happy. A normal platform with slow but steady growth that depends on subscriptions doesn't have that problem as long as the bills are paid and enough people are happy with it to maintain growth. Mastodon proves it can be done, still running and growing a half decade after the entire SV media declared it dead because they didn't understand how self-funded platforms work. Others can learn from and build on it.

> Change someone else's avatar

This is hilarious

That's the real money-maker.

EDIT: The way it ends up working on the forums is that if you do something to annoy someone that isn't against the rules, they can spend 10 bux and change your avatar to a photo of something that you don't want showing up on every post you make (and likely giant red text that says something like "Ask me about [something offensive]), and then you have to spend 5 bux to undo it.

Yup. Profiting directly from the drama. More drama? More money! At least in the short term. In the long term it just became a weird cliquey mess. I think that hurt their growth prospects as it put off potential new users. But those users just went to reddit anyways.. reddit consumed their entire audience in the end.

That's one way of looking at it. For someone who still loves that SA forums, reddit taking all of the low effort posters and 4chan taking all the racists/incels has been a real boon to the forums.

On rdrama.net you can buy awards with karma or money. These let you you ban a user, unban users, force them to include text in any comment ("Trans Lives matter") is a common one, or turn all of their text sideways.

It's hilarious to use and seems sustainable.

One-time fees are not very sustainable. Unless the model included essentially building an endowment the first ten years and then funding the business off of interest.

The SA forums have been going since 1999.

Lots of devices attached to ongoing services today are sold for a one-time fee. For most of their existence, Microsoft and Adobe had very sustainable businesses based on one-time fees. It is a fine model. Software companies today are addicted to "recurring revenue" (thinking that is the only way to get sustainable cash flow), but a lot of people will pay you $20 once who would never pay you $1/month, and there will always be new people using popular products.

One-time fees are a perfectly fine model for a business, even if it is unfashionable currently.

That was for desktop software. The era of buy it, download it and it's yours forever. Not an ongoing service.

Yeah, you would have to raise the one-time payment constantly in order to keep up with your own recurring costs, the more users you have the greater your costs will be.

You can also charge people their net present LTV upfront. For most forums, that's something like $10 worth of ads, which is why several popular forums worked well with a one-time $10 "pro" fee. You don't need recurring revenue from people to get their entire LTV, and you don't need an endowment to make that model sustainable. You need to make them pay you in whatever form maximizes your net present value (NPV).

Twitter, Facebook, and Google have used ads to collect revenue from their users in the past. SaaS apps and services today use recurring subscriptions, which is nice because it lets you match up your inflows to your outflows. Old desktop software, which had high recurring costs too, used single payments (although they also charged for updates). Modern desktop software tends to use subscription fees.

Companies need to make their revenue models match what customers expect in order to get payment. That means that you should be selling your SaaS as a subscription or a metered API even if you (hypothetically) do not have recurring costs. It also means that Twitter might have to stay with a $0/month fee and collect its revenue in the form of ads and "direct payments for services."

For Twitter, "influencers" might pay as much as $1000 for a "verified influencer" label on their profile despite that many of them are upset at $20/month, particularly if you make it annoying for them (so they feel that they are actually spending their money on getting "verified" and the verification will be hard to fake). Maybe you can get $100/year as a "renewal fee" on those labels, too. If you offered the rest of us a $50 "not a bot" green checkmark that takes a few custom photos and an ID, you will probably get plenty of those too.

It's all psychology. Fixed fees and recurring fees can have the same NPV. The game is maximizing that NPV.

They were releasing new version every other year. You cannot sell a new version of a website.

> and there will always be new people using popular products.

If you succeed in being the go-to platform for every new generation you might be able to coast on that. But the last 20 years have shown that each generation gets its own new social network.

Actuarial science might have a thing or two to say about that. All you need to do is make sure the average amount people pay is greater than the average cost for the life of an account. Before the recent explosion in subscription pricing for everything under the sun, we’d been selling software on one-time costs for fifty years. Subscriptions certainly are attractive and easier for businesses, probably easier to sell with freemium models, but they do have downsides like cancellations and not much money up front (may take longer to recoup investments).

> Unless the model included essentially building an endowment the first ten years and then funding the business off interest.

Ten dollars is surely much greater than the server costs for a single user for a month, or a year. That one-time cost may well be designed to be an endowment of sorts. Plus the avatar changing fees are probably, on average, not one-time fees.

I've gotten wildly differing responses from saying that New Twitter should just be a non-profit. Have a mission for public good, disclose financials, earn sufficient revenue to operate and pay employees. Wikipedia does it and their biggest drama is that they get way more donations than they even need. They also seem to manage moderating gobs of content with relatively little public drama.

A mixed model would be kind of interesting... Like, first time signing up it's free but if you get banned then you have to pay, if you get permabanned, tough luck.

That doesn't work because people just sign up again with a different email, bots can do this all day for free. Its the up-front payment method that makes it possible to effectively ban people.

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