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Comment by jitix | Hacker News Reader

Great point, in the 90s people used to spend a fortune (relatively speaking) on taking, sharing and discovering pictures, consuming media and getting their news.

Now everyone wants everything for free, but won’t give anything in return. And they also want market returns on their stocks, 401ks, etc at the same time.

That being said, Meta/Google could implement a guaranteed privacy-first, ad-free option for something like $10-20 a month to give people the option to be a “customer” instead of “product”.

And as you said there is the whole mastodon/pixelfed/lemmy network that people could use, although many mastodon instances seem to be running into financial problems lately.

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If giving people the choice of an ad-free premium subscription was more profitable, they would do it. The issue with doing that is the users who pay are also the most desirable audience for advertisers.

A premium model also eventually creates two separate products. The free product is (at first) built for the needs of the users to attract them and get enough volume to support an advertisement model. Then, it is gradually built and focused toward the needs of the advertisers. That gradually shifts over time once the company has captured the market on both sides (this is a two-sided marketplace after all) to optimizing for the needs of the company. It’s harder to achieve this final end goal if you have a product that is optimized for the needs of the user, because you don’t have a two-sided marketplace anymore that can be exploited on both sides. Collecting money from businesses (advertisers) in bulk and providing them support can be easier and less costly than managing millions of premium users and supporting them.

I understand how the market works and how the Gompertz curve looks for new product lifecycles. I have a (professionally useless) masters degree in that.

My question is, what’s your solution?

The shareholders/stock market (largely represented by the board) will replace any CEO who doesn’t employ patterns (dark, fu, whatever) to maximize revenue. And private companies can’t raise capital easily nor can they give Options/RSUs to employees.

We are in the current state due to market equilibrium driven by people’s willingness to pay, and since I personally don’t like meta or Zuck I use Reddit on Brave + Mastodon + Dev.to for my social media dopamine hits. OOP could do the same.

I don’t know how old you are but growing up in the 90s I certainly remember (parents) paying for many of these things we now take for granted. The net negative result is that independent journalism is dead.

> My question is, what’s your solution?

Legislation around mergers and acquisitions. Enforcement of existing anti-trust legislation.

That’s being done now. Can’t think of the last time the SEC didn’t sue to block an acquisition in the last 3-4 years with a tech company.

Then the legislation isn't expansive enough.

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