Stop trying to make social networks succeed
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Things can just be what they are, grow naturally and then die naturally. I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to achieve an unnatural growth is probably not good for both the quality of the product and the long term stability of it.
I would love to see more niche things grow organically and fill a role for some people, at some time and not try to be everything for everyone. Because when that's the case, does anyone really enjoy it?
VC driven growth at all costs ("GaaC"), monetize later. That's when I first saw it.
Prior to that what I remember was mostly building a small business.
On one you grow and grow fast, needing multiple rounds, to exit.
The other was build a business with one or two rounds, then have a product that generates profit.
The GaaC method also means spreading the company into all kinds of things - maybe away from the core - which I think causes loss in the original value prop.
I also remember clearly that at the beginning of things with Facebook there was a strong sense from the press of "how the hell will this thing ever make money?" and big questions like that around the IPO. Hell, there was that going on for Google around their IPO, too.
There was a brief period from about 2001 to 2007 or 2008 or so when there was perhaps more responsibility to try to start on a more even revenue-earning foundation with sounder business plans. But that all blew up in the 2010s.
It's possible this was all tied into the massive cuts in interest rates, and QE etc after 2008 that made debt really cheap.
I don't get excited about new products or new tech because I know the cycle. Hype then bust. New thing comes out and I'm just meh about it, because it'll bust soon enough so it's not worth getting invested in it. Or new version will come out next year and break what I was used to, or it'll be an implicit subscription of having to buy new thing every year. But it's not really going to fix itself because it seems like everyone else loves the dopamine rush from the hype cycle, and they don't really seem to care about how ephemeral everything is.
Mark Zuckerberg an hour ago: "Our approach will be the same as all our other products: make the product work well first, then see if we can get it on a clear path to 1 billion people, and only then think about monetization at that point." https://www.threads.net/t/CuW5-eWL34x
at this point he's the world's leading expert on the enshittification cycle
I think your altruism is misplaced because they most certainly are thinking of $$$ first and foremost.
No it’s only a theory that emerged in the 70’s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine).
Meta did not spend enough time thinking about monetization in the long term, realized they were in a really rocky position due to Apple and Google owning the platforms Facebook ran on, and then desperately had to come up with a new platform they could monetize.
They've pushed it so hard now because they didn't think about monetization early.
An interesting thought is how many people are inadvertently bad, simply as a byproduct of what I touched on above
Meaning: Once we have hooked enough users, we'll make them the product.
Free lip piercing...
"We have a business model, its built on bullshit and blue skies."
Quote from my wise father about being careful when being recruited by a startup that sounds too good to be true.
Your father could have saved me…
...or a perpetual zombie state as a "brand" that has absolutely nothing to do with its original owner. Trusted names from my youth (GE, Westinghouse, Frigidaire, Maytag, Zenith, etc.) mean nothing these days. Packard Bell has been resurrected twice now.
As a teen I grinded for a few months building a b2b SaaS. A competitor launched a better version for free. The founder had a Harvard MBA and used VC funds to build this marketing tool.
Growing a product organically puts you at a disadvantage to companies that can ignore market fundamentals for years at a time. And if you do manage to grow, acquisitions that amount to life changing generational wealth is hard to ignore - and it's not like the future of your product is guaranteed.
Wall street needs returns. Tech is just the first to adapt to the loot-box economy but it'll spread. Anything that can be turned into a subscription model will be. Air-bags to air conditioning. We will own nothing and like it.
It begs the question, how did the larger unprofitable company become large in the first place? It wasn't by delivering goods and services at a fair price, it was by currying favor with those already in power. The romantic view that to succeed in a free market you sell goods and services at a fair price doesn't hold.
No, it’s that regulation is often used as a political tool to wield power over the players in the market.
Free markets are far from ideal. But they do make it a bit more difficult to game the system because there are fewer ways for a third party to interject itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen or even that it’s rare. Just more rare than if you turn politicians loose on the system.
I’m always amazed that people implicitly trust politicians, as though they’re unbiased referees trying to keep the game fair. Nope. The reasonable regulation you pass today will turn into some bizarre fiefdom in 10 years.
However, I think this depressing outlook is an artifact of how much technology is fixated on social capture in a digital space. In that medium, yes, it's all just ebbs and flows. The article put it beautifully: we kept thinking that usenet or AOL or myspace or facebook were going to win, but it has taken a few decades for us to realize that in actuality they are just fashion trends that happen to require some very technical people to knit.
However, that doesn't mean that _technology_ is this way. And in fact, this speaks to the odd word mangling we've all adopted in which "tech" has started to mean "social web oriented silicon valley startups or juggernauts". Technology is so much bigger than that, and true innovation stands on its own and persists through time. An actual _invention_ doesn't need to win hearts and minds, and it doesn't need to set trends. A wheelbarrow is a wheelbarrow, and once somebody conceives it, it will always be useful whenever you need wheelbarrow-like functionality. Its utility will be obvious and non-controversial. It is still possible to use our intellects to think of pure pareto improvement arrangements of atoms and bits that do a useful job. I think the engineering profession and the world has gotten a bit distracted from that truth. Uncharitably, you could blame it on a greedy obsession with taking over the world, which comes at the expense of doing well-defined and prosaically useful things for the world.
This is an accurate summary. And it’s completely normal to not be excited about this. I love tech, but this isn’t tech. The tech is just bait to achieve market dominance. The new age vultures do everything in their power to eliminate competition, the very fuel that makes markets work. So it’s not even business in the traditional sense either, it’s more similar to political power games.
Right, but that's not the point. VCs (and most founders / anyone holding equity) just want to get our before the hockey-stick graph starts turning into an S-graph. The product itself is mostly irrelevant (to everyone except the users that is).
Most efficient system in the world, ladies and gentlemen
Mass publishing is more useful and valuable the more people you can publish to at once.
It has nothing to do with VC. "Don't pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel" long predates vulture capitalists.
Absolutely, but that was happening long before the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc., came around to monetize it and convince people that they are the only ways to do it. They're cultural parasites.
You can see this incorporation of the internet with the classic Craiglist image: - https://scalecuts.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Craigslist-... - https://mediacloud.theweek.com/image/private/s--X-WVjvBW--/f...
From your example, Craigslist is itself is a capitalist institution, making >$100mm/year. Patagonia, Wikipedia, King Arthur Baking Company, Darn Tough Socks, Lodge cookware, are all capitalist too.
I think it's important for entrepreneurial-minded folks to have positive role models – it's possible to develop wealth for yourself, your customers, your employees, and your environment, and to do so with respect and dignity. In fact, a well-operated business is probably the most effective vehicle for having an outsized impact in your community, so defined.
The internet' scale allows great products to grow exponentially. A bunch of great software, sites, and tools took off and grew at a rapid rate. But we took the wrong lesson from this and thought "rapid growth=great product". So VCs have put growth above everything else, and are hoping they can figure out a product after, like a 2 year-old thinking that putting on his shoes will mean he gets to go outside.
Gradually? I happened around 1995 and it’s only ever slowed down for recessions.
It’s not a trend of companies it’s a trend of funding sources and strategies. If you take fifty million in funding, those guys want it back. And they want it back 10x. So when your favorite little company takes a funding round that is five times more money than they’ve ever seen total, let alone at once, your favorite little company is about to change into something ugly.
Just as an example, Halo Infinite came out and it had warts, but also had a good fundamentals for gameplay. Good speed and weapons. Every single comment was about armor cores and skins. I just didn't get it.
Buying a monthly pass for one of those games ends up feeling like a pretty good deal because it enables you to increase your engagement with the game by a lot for what feels like a good deal. AAA shooters that go down this rabbit hole feel like they’re spending more development effort pushing skins I don’t want while giving a half-backed game with the promise of improvement in the future that often never happens.
For the price of a monthly pass for Clash games, I’m easily getting more hours of enjoyment than dollars invested each month.
You have no idea how right you are. It increases your engagement. Not your enjoyment.
> Good speed and weapons. Every single comment was about armor cores and skins. I just didn't get it.
You have to play for something. To reach the end of the story. To grow a thing (city builders, minecraft). Or... for skins in a competitive shooter. But there are no skins unless you pay real money for the game you've already paid for. Oops?
I don't know when it happened, but at some point in the past it stopped being about playing games for fun, and turned into playing these things for something else - status maybe? I don't know how to describe what I'm thinking.
Edit: oh funny. I forgot they had pvp in them. Because I've always ignored it and in Elden ring you can't get invaded unless you ask for it, so I never was.
That means there are quite a few single player games that are off the table for me as well.
I was first a bit torn about Tears of the Kingdom, it was hard to get back to the world of Breath of the Wild. Then I found this cave, and then it was 2am, and four hours disappeared somewhere. Now I can't let it out of my hands...
But other than that, lately I've been far more excited about the Persona series, Nier Automata, Spike Chunsoft games (especially Danganronpa), The Witness (a bit older now), The Outer Wilds, Subnautica, Slay the Spire, Inscryption, and Vampire Survivors.
Tears of the Kingdom is probably the best pure exploration game ever made, with Outer Wilds being better in some ways, as it's simulating an entier solar system in real time and has some really clever ideas in it, but it's a smaller game overall. I think I pretty much fully explored Outer Wilds (except the expansion) in 20 hours, I've aleady put in 80 hours into TOTK and I've seen maybe 40% of the content so far.
The people getting rich with these methods don't care about quality or stability.
Look at HN, I know, run by a VC and it's not without some issues, but it is still better than most forums and social media to me specifically because of what it doesn't try to do. It has a specific goal and doesn't feel the need to try and extend beyond it.
My ideal is that in the future we will more communities like this, where it's built to address a group of users needs and not try and expand beyond it. Where the content and information is shaped in a form to meet the specific needs of the group using it and not generalized into the lowest common denominator so ad sales can go up. It feels unlikely at this point, but I still have hope.
Maybe this actually IS, the natural way to grow and die for a global social network
There's a sense that if you can't solve a huge societal problem (ideally several), it's not worth doing anything. It's really disempowering mindset because most of those problems are really hard to solve.
It's like all the focus is on what effect the thing you're building will have on the world, rather than just building something because you think it would be kinda neat if it existed.
The latter type of projects are the only sorts of projects I've had any success with. It's really liberating to not have to play some five dimensional chess game guessing what will make other people behave in certain ways and just using your own judgement to build what you like.
I think people underrate this idea, way too much.
Humans are a pretty diverse set of people. But we're similar enough that in a population with ~10^13 people, there's probably 10^4 people who are pretty much clones of you, in terms of your preference, taste, etc.
With the internet, it's never been cheaper to find them. Preconditioned on it being you or me, 10^3 of those people are probably browsing this website, for example.
I hope the fluctuations of fashion lean more towards assigning social value to smaller, more sustainable builders. The migration in that direction deserves to be bigger. I observe it happening personally, but tech media is lagging significantly behind, mainly because these people don't spend money on advertising or PR.
I think the world is fucked, especially in how it's planting incentives in our brains. For girls it's clothes, make-up, being fit. For guys it's cars, games, sex. And of course there's general consumerism that doesn't gender-discriminate anyone.
For tech people there's something else I hate with passion: creating images of great, world changing people. We aspire to be Zucks, Musks, Gateses, Holmes (yes, theranos). It's always bullshit to sell something or gain political power but the damage is done anyway. It's hard to live a simple life and enjoy simple things when everyone around expected you to look up to them and change the world. Many people believed their narration and became sociopaths that maximize gains on every opportunity. Even I was very drawn to "growth hacking" before. Now I see how crazy it all is.
Every time there were more of us. Basically, "look at how we are burning through your money by hiring all these people. Growth!"
Now, the actual growth, daily active users and all, that is an area of rampant fraud, but VCs seem to be OK with it until the company runs out of runway. THEN it's a total scandal, even though all they need to do is pop the hood for 5 minutes to see how the numbers are arrived at.
I think the bigger issue is equating success with active user count. Social networks love to brag about their number of active users. It's all they care about. It doesn't matter if they're making the world a worse place, ruining lives, making people depressed, turning everyone into swiping zombies, taking information that was previously accessible and moving it inside a walled garden. That doesn't matter. If they have more active users, they're more successful.
However, look at HN as a counter example. It's a decent community and I think the reason for that is not setting growth as the metric of success. HN has enough content to keep people interested. What's the purpose of more users after that point? Yes, they'll create additional revenue, but if they can't provide equally engaging content or comments, they're just going to drag the quality of the community down (a trade that most businesses gladly accept).
This is the world we live in though. Everyone is focused on numbers. All people care about is followers, likes, or subscribers, and they'll happily sell their soul if they can grow those numbers. Companies don't care, they'll promote whatever garbage gets the most clicks and keeps those active users up. Advertisers don't care, they'll sponsor whoever has the highest number of views. It's a sad state of affairs.
I'm all about the human rights as my first concern so any fellow SJWs reading can rest assured they don't need to interrogate me about whether I know about this or that type of oppression. BUT, can I just for a moment talk about how literally tasteless life has become?
Here in Canada, we have for my whole life had a different Special K than USans. Closest I could describe it is it was like flat rice krispies with a different kinda flavor, sort of like the American one but not completely.
The private equity that owns the Kelloggs brand now shut down the Canadian factory, which is the only place that made that Special K. Now we have "Original" on our shelves, in an extra bit of gaslighting.
I like candy, always have. I took the notion the other day to go find some Kraft Chocolate Flavor Caramels. Lately they're called Fudgies. Most lately they're discontinued.
Nothing small or niche that doesn't produce a specific profit margin is safe.
The two are heavily-overlapped, for sure. But in the last 25 years, it feels like the horse (tech) has been steadily placed further and further behind the cart (VC).
This is something I didn't really understand when I was younger.
In every online community that has had some amount of hype surrounding it, there are prominent figures either hyping it up further or spreading doom and gloom when the metrics don't match their expectations.
What I didn't get when I was younger was that this doesn't need to affect me at all. Unlike the people mentioned above, my financial or reputational interests don't align with the size of the online communities I participate in. For me it comes down to "do I enjoy participating".
If you aren't an advertiser, streamer, content creator or anything of the sort, you don't really benefit from hype, growth or any of those things. So don't let these things affect your enjoyment of talking to people online or playing video games with them etc.
I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers doing it.
“Prank” channels come to my mind at this. Like the one that got shot semi-recently for messing with people, who then said it was “worth it”.
It’s a shame how hard people can hyperfocus on fake Internet points and even let it hurt their actual relationships. I had a friend who was intensely upset over a comment suggesting a new camera angle because it “made their channel look bad” to be constructively criticized.
Seeing the effects of social interactions with millions of people (albeit virtual) does something weird to the brain.
And the irony is that the people who think this way tend to be less likely to have anything worthwhile to offer.
Unless someone generates a social network based on a paywall and exclusivity that somehow delights the business model just doesn't work for the user.
While I do think content creators should be treated fairly by platforms to make the game fair... This doesn't really affect me and it often feels like that's all certain content creators will fixate upon, rather than making quality content.
I think it's sometimes a strategy of deception, to make it seem like the speaker is so much more important or dangerous that they need to be suppressed by the powerful.
Isn't that the issue? How is "a lot", and is that number representative for everyone who publishes text, video, pictures,... on the Internet or, more limited, the Web, or, even more limited, a handful of online platforms?
> making quality content
I'd argue that quality is in the eye of the beholder. Online, both trash and treasure co-exist. Moreover, one man's trash is another's treasure as quality is, always, subjective value attribution.
The big challenge has always been discovery. The so-called "big" social networks got big because the introduction of a "wall" or a "feed" changed how we, denizens of the internet, interact with the Web: from "pull" to "push". The vast majority of internet users don't collect and curate links: they just consume a feed that pushes updates from their "network". Or "subreddits", or "channels".
Incidentally, how's consuming feeds of pushed content all that different from flipping television channels? Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent does echo eerily in this digital future.
>Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
...
>Prodigy was upset that people were, by and large, using the free communication service they tossed on there just to have more content and not their weird Random Garbage You Don’t Need Storefront. And in many ways, that complaint has only gotten louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.
1) People with no technical skills or knowledge (can't setup their own web site) want to be able to publish text, photo, and video content to the public, to a community, and/or to their direct contacts. They do not want to have to use any technology other than their phone, and they refuse to pay for this with any amount of money.
2) Since there are texts, photos, and videos being published, people want to be able to gather all the published content that interests them in one place for convenient reading.
As long as people have these needs, someone will make software that fulfills them, regardless of how they measure success.
Because people can't be serving the content directly from their phone, we have no way to do this today without some form of cloud hosting. Non-technical people can't set that up themselves. And even if they could, it would cost them money. The only solution we have right now is for some organization to create and manage a centralized-ish platform.
Even if that organization were a benevolent non-profit, it needs to pay the bills for hosting and labor. You could maybe ride on donations, but good luck with that. Therefore, the organization needs to somehow extract some value from the non-paying users. This inevitably leads to advertising, selling user data, locking users into a walled garden, and all the other mechanisms we have seen that harm the platform in order to get the resources to keep it alive.
And this is the key to making a successful social network that will last. How can you meet those two needs, and pay the bandwidth and storage bills, without doing any of the things that make the platform suck? Nobody's figured it out yet!
Many people (especially tech people) have an almost psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services. But do we always have to cater to those people, who'd refuse to pay $10 per year for an ad-free social network? I even suspect that a paid social network would be of higher quality, since the payment is an effective barrier against bots and some low-quality users.
> who'd refuse to pay $10 per year
I've not actually seen many services that charge $10 per year. Most instead charge $5 per month / $50 per year. The few services I know of that do charge in the range of what you specify are near universally regarded as really good value.
Something for $10 per year is usually a promotion, and maybe a good place to get started. Since the social media giants have been giving it for free for a decade...
That is what confuses me...we are strongly in favor of privacy and tracker blocking, but then get upset when we have to pay money to join a social media. Are there any third options to support platforms that don't require payments, or advertisement viewing?
Speak for yourself; whenever I have the option to pay to remove ads on a service I get value from, I sign up nigh immediately. And on top of that, I'm always running with aggressive ad and tracker blockers running.
If given the option, I would have paid a small yearly fee to use Instagram back ~10 years ago when the platform was actually decent and didn't do icky things to push engagement up.
Of course, the problem is that most people would not have paid a yearly fee to use Instagram, so if payment were required, it would be a ghost town. And, all things being equal, advertisers would prefer that there isn't an ad-free paid option, since then the ads reach fewer people.
I have never heard any argument about classism or blocking out poor people applied to the devices needed to get online, the computers, the phones. Strange, isn't it?
That is VERY flawed logic that suggests a very privileged life. Growing up my family was downright poor to the point we sometimes lost electricity because we had to buy bologna and bread for supper instead. We used an ancient PC that was given to us to access the internet which was 10$/month for dialup, but even that sometimes got cut out, again, because we needed food. Having spent most of my childhood in a trailer park with disparaged people, it often comes down to a mix of tough situations, bad luck, and poor life choices. Should we really punish them for it by locking things behind a paywall? I don't think so. Also should we have our privacy be violated to support the poor? Also no.
This is why I am trying to brainstorm a third option...one that isn't classist but still allows for privacy. Its a tough question and I am having trouble coming up with solutions...but a third option HAS to exist somewhere.
As for your point about classism not being applied to the devices themselves, that is because you could fall out of a tree and hit five cell phones on your way down. If you know pretty much anyone, they probably have a spare old phone they haven't touched in years they can let you have if you can't afford your own. People also throw them out all the time so you can get one out of the trash and it will still be plenty useable. With public WiFi, no matter how poor you are you can still access the internet. Its a weird time where even the homeless can access Facebook without even having to pay for a device
Poverty or a poor upbringing is not a badge of honour, but many people see it as such and maybe you've become accustomed to easily shutting up anybody by saying that they have no idea what it's like being poor. Okay, but how do you make progress from that?
I stand by my point that if somebody can't pay a very small yearly fee for access to the content or service they want, then they weren't that interested. If you are so poor that you can't afford $10 per year, then you have much bigger problems than accessing some online content of interest. The goal for a person in that situation or somebody who wants to help them is to get out of poverty, not to cope.
As for getting the devices for free, the same argument could be applied to online content: You can get information for free at a library, you can socialize with any friend by meeting in person. It's a less convenient experience than having it at home, but using a discarded device is also a less convenient experience.
I find your arguments about "classism" a bit strange. Is it "classism" that some stuff is more expensive in the supermarket? Is it "classism" that the plumber charges his hourly fee to the poor as well as to the rich? That an iPhone costs a thousand dollars?
Is it "classism" that an employer pays a wage that is much lower than what the worker produces? Yes! Is it "classism" that you have to indebt yourself for life to afford a home or pay rent for literally nothing? Yes! Is it classism that a large percentage of the population spend their whole life without ever having done anything productive, because they have unlimited taps for money taken as taxes from workers? Yes!
But instead of being upset at those who are to blame for poverty, it is easier to direct that rage towards some internet poster like me, who dares to suggest that not everything should be free.
Here are what I see as the options to have online services:
1. Current ad-fueled, spam-ridden content and social networks
2. Cheap paid content and social networks
3. Creators work for free, making content for your benefit without any reimbursement. After some time they burn out or can't afford the time it takes.
4. Pirating. Mainstream creators can take it, small time creators go broke.
5. You vote for communism so that content creators get paid by the government and everybody can benefit for free. The content will be what the communist government prefers for you to have.
I prefer option 2.
I don't view it as a badge of honor, but I know that its almost always privileged people that suggest locking the lower classes out of information. That pisses me off like nothing else. People are all for the poor until it comes down to actually finding solutions.
>As for getting the devices for free, the same argument could be applied to online content
Not particularly unless piracy gets involved. If we lock everything behind a paywall, going to the library or downloading information won't do jack.
>I find your arguments about "classism" a bit strange. Is it "classism" that some stuff is more expensive in the supermarket? Is it "classism" that the plumber charges his hourly fee to the poor as well as to the rich? That an iPhone costs a thousand dollars?
I am talking about information. Not physical goods. You are applying the logic of limited physical goods to online services that are virtually unlimited. Bandwidth is cheap.
As for if #2 gets implemented, I guarantee you that this will not work. Paid content will not be cheap. Never has been and never will. In your other comments you bring up that you foresee services being a mere 10$ a year. The price hikes and predatory practices that online services have had prove that at best you are naive. If #2 happens, I fully support people doing #4.
Now there are other options. Look at Coffeezilla on YouTube...doesn't run ads, but runs entirely off of donations. Other youtubers do the same thing. They set up a patreon, give benefits and incentives to do so, and for those that can't afford to support they watch for free. PBS had a similar thing going when analogue airwaves were legal for TV and still does to some extent with their streaming service. Some shows you have to pay for but the important stuff, such as newshour, are completely free for everyone to watch.
For large scale digital projects, some features could be locked behind a paywall whereas the majority of content is free. That is how Discord makes its money. The ad/paid dichotomy does not exist...there are other options that allow people to freely access content and communicate with people in ways that normally they would not be able to afford.
> If we lock everything behind a paywall, going to the library or downloading information won't do jack.
Go to a library. You can find a whole bunch of paywalled newspapers and magazines to read for free there. Not to mention... books.
> As for if #2 gets implemented, I guarantee you that this will not work. Paid content will not be cheap. Never has been and never will. In your other comments you bring up that you foresee services being a mere 10$ a year.
You can get some excellent content for $10 per year, but a more normal price is around $50 per year - which is still dirt cheap. I chose $10 per year as an example, because that's the price point where people start complaining about how broke they are and can't they just have it for free.
> I am talking about information. Not physical goods. You are applying the logic of limited physical goods to online services that are virtually unlimited. Bandwidth is cheap.
This is the problem right here. The false assumption. People need to spend a whole lot of time and effort and usually also money to create content and information. They need to get paid, they need to sustain themselves. Or you'll just have some hobby bloggers writing about their Raspberry Pi.
Why don't you apply this argument to a restaurant? The ingredients in your meal are cheap, so why should you pay for your meal? Since the labour of the people making and serving apparently has no value. Why aren't Ubers just the cost of gas? Etc.
If small time content creators can't get paid, they'll do something else. That content will not exist to pirate. You will only have ad- and scam-fueled mainstream content. I suspect your answer is probably "Good, fuck them!", but I think that's an unnecessary loss for the world and human knowledge.
That applies to paywalled content too, my guy. That logic doesn't work.
>You can get some excellent content for $10 per year, but a more normal price is around $50 per year - which is still dirt cheap
I have never seen any content anywhere be available for 10$ a year, and 50$ a year isn't cheap unless you provide a LOOOOOT of content. Even if it is worth it, most people living paycheck to paycheck can't afford that.
>Why don't you apply this argument to a restaurant? The ingredients in your meal are cheap, so why should you pay for your meal? Since the labour of the people making and serving apparently has no value. Why aren't Ubers just the cost of gas? Etc.
All of those things are more expensive than bandwidth and are also scarce physical goods. Yes, I know, labor costs are a thing and so is electricity, etc. Thats why I brought up a mixed-payment model such as Discord. You might not make as much money as Facebook with their ad-based services, but if you want to serve the biggest amount of people that is a logical way to go. The service is free, but non-essential extras cost. Works for both parties.
>If small time content creators can't get paid, they'll do something else. That content will not exist to pirate.
I find that this is rarely true, and is hyperbole at best. Very few small time content creators paywall their content. Rather, they sell merch and accept donations. "But, what if they don't win the lottery and get big?" Yeah, they wouldn't be making that money anyway even if it were paywalled.
As for big time content creators, such as Disney, they also make the vast majority of their money off of merch. The actual ticket sales are a small fraction of total revenue so piracy is an extremely small dent in profit.
I say all this to say this...paywalls are not the answer to this problem. Its not a dichotomy like people want to assume. These past few days I have researched alternative revenue models, even brought up a few in this discussion, and paywalling is too restrictive to make any sort of sense for most consumers that are broke or value their money.
Not at all. If you charge for your content or services, you're starting to get an okay reimbursement at some hundreds of subscribers. With ad-supported content on social media, you need to count your audience in tens or hundreds of thousands if you want to make more than $20 per month.
> 50$ a year isn't cheap unless you provide a LOOOOOT of content.
Curiosity Stream have promotions for $10 per year, if you needed an example.
It's all about the quality of content, which it seems you don't care much for. $50 per year is cheap for a local newspaper, for example. Yet, most people think like you and that's why local journalism is dying. The result is that people sit at home and rage about Trump or Biden and know everything about the Titanic submarine, but have no clue about what's going on in their neighborhood or region. Information that is of very high value and can have a huge impact on the person who was too cheap to pay a pittance for it.
> All of those things are more expensive than bandwidth and are also scarce physical goods.
Labour is not a scarce physical good. That's what you're paying for in the restaurant. But if the result is on a screen instead of on a plate, suddenly the creator doesn't deserve to get paid. Maybe a donation, if and only if you feel like it and are in a good mood.
> Very few small time content creators paywall their content. Rather, they sell merch and accept donations.
Just take a look at how many projects abandoned because the creators moved on because they couldn't afford the monetary cost or time. Things that where enjoyed by thousands, but that very few wanted to contribute to, neither in time, money or effort. I've seen this many times. Websites that were huge in user base and impact, getting maybe a couple of hundred dollars per month in donations, while the user base is counted in millions. Or sites giving away great stuff for free for years and then started asking for payment. Do you think anybody is grateful for the years of free content? No, they're outraged that the creators don't continue making the stuff for free anymore. "Greedy", "beggar" and such are what content creators get called when they dare to charge or ask for donations.
Those still there and asking for donations and selling merch are those who didn't move on. Individual paywalls are hard because most creators aren't that technical to be able to set it up. That's why I think paywalls work better as an umbrella service.
> and paywalling is too restrictive to make any sort of sense for most consumers that are broke or value their money.
They aren't consumers if they don't pay, that's the thing. Why should anybody care about them? I hope these kind of people fucking stay on TikTok or go offline. They contribute nothing, why the hell should anybody care about them?
You seriously think that people are going to pay you without already knowing what you put out? The only people that can get by with paywalling everything already had a following when the content became paywalled. People don't have infinite money to throw at random strangers, so unless you have a hell of a marketing campaign for your indie blog/youtube channel/whatever nobody is going to pay.
> Curiosity Stream have promotions for $10 per year, if you needed an example . . . It's all about the quality of content, which it seems you don't care much for.
Wow, rude. Also Curiosity stream is a terrible example because most of those documentaries are older than the streaming service itself, and are available for free on their official youtube channels. Its only benefit is that it congregates the content into one space.
>Yet, most people think like you and that's why local journalism is dying. The result is that people sit at home and rage about Trump or Biden and know everything about the Titanic submarine, but have no clue about what's going on in their neighborhood or region. Information that is of very high value and can have a huge impact on the person who was too cheap to pay a pittance for it.
Hyperbole. Look, if you are so uninvolved with your community that you need a local newspaper to spoon-feed you what is happening in your own back yard, that is entirely on you. I have never paid for a local newspaper, but because I spend a lot of time in my community, both doing volunteer work and talking with neighbors, I don't need one. If their payment models are so outdated that they cannot stay in business, that is on them. I have no moral obligation to give them money, and neither do you.
>Labour is not a scarce physical good. That's what you're paying for in the restaurant.
IDK about you but I don't go to restaurants unless they offer some unique product. Most people that value money, including myself, eat at home because restaurants are usually a fat waste of money. Just because they are putting in effort does not mean they deserve my money. Thats a logical fallacy.
>Maybe a donation, if and only if you feel like it and are in a good mood.
You seem to completely misunderstand the donation model. It is an extension of the "base is free, extras are more" payment model that has fans pay more. Its not charity. It is a transaction for people who truly love the content and can afford the extra money. Want behind the scenes footage? Extra episodes of your favorite podcast? Go to Patreon and unlock them for whatever amount a month.
>Just take a look at how many projects abandoned because the creators moved on because they couldn't afford the monetary cost or time. Things that where enjoyed by thousands, but that very few wanted to contribute to, neither in time, money or effort. I've seen this many times.
Thats on them for not finding a monetization model that works for them.
>No, they're outraged that the creators don't continue making the stuff for free anymore. "Greedy", "beggar" and such are what content creators get called when they dare to charge or ask for donations.
While name calling is wrong, I agree, it is not the consumer's responsibility to keep a business afloat. If they want donations, like I said earlier, they need to provide incentives to do so. There are plenty of ways to do this depending on the business.
>They aren't consumers if they don't pay, that's the thing. Why should anybody care about them? I hope these kind of people fucking stay on TikTok or go offline. They contribute nothing, why the hell should anybody care about them?
"If they don't have money, why should I care about them?" See, that's the classist attitude I was talking about the other day. For one, consumers only consume content. Its in the name. Payment is entirely coincidental. Other payment models that are not paywalled service everybody. Have an animation series that is popular with kids? Most people wouldn't pay for it, but around Christmastime when bonuses come in, even the completely destitute will buy at least something for their family around that time. There is a reason merch works for the most popular content creators.
It seems to me that #1, you assume consumers have infinite money for infinite streaming services, and that if they don't it is because they don't want it hard enough. And #2, don't seem to understand that effort is not equal to deserving money, especially during times like now when inflation is out of control and few people are willing to spend. And #3, that somehow paywalls make content less spammy and higher quality. None of these are true. Just look at Locals, Substack, Medium, and people that use Patreon to paywall ALL of their content...you will never see content that is lower quality.
Paywalls are one of the least industrious, most outdated, and ineffectual models possible. Unless you have lots of money to magically throw around, its terrible for the consumer and alternatives are superior.
No, it is "If they don't want to pay me anything, why should I work for free for them?" - because you don't want to acknowledge that an actual person has to do hard work to create things.
> It seems to me that #1, you assume consumers have infinite money for infinite streaming services, and that if they don't it is because they don't want it hard enough.
Nobody has infinite money, and even if they did, they don't have infinite time to spend on consuming content. But there are an infinite amount of consumers, for all intents and purposes, so everybody who produces something good should be ideally be able to find enough paying consumers to continue with their craft. There are niches, simply. But yes, every person has to prioritize and budget how they spend their money, what they want most and what they can skip.
> effort is not equal to deserving money
If what they produce is so bad that they don't deserve getting reimbursed for it, why do you insist that people should have access to it for free? It's like going to the restaurant and saying that the food is so disgusting that I won't pay for it, but please can I have it for free I really want it and hey why are you locking me out?
> You seriously think that people are going to pay you without already knowing what you put out?
That's not how it works. Trials, snippets, limited content is how it works. Depending entirely on what you sell. Word of mouth, etc.
> Wow, rude. Also Curiosity stream is a terrible example because most of those documentaries are older than the streaming service itself, and are available for free on their official youtube channels. Its only benefit is that it congregates the content into one space.
I wasn't intending to be rude. You wrote that there had to be "a looooot" of content behind a paywall for it to be worth paying, so I understood it as that quantity was of more importance than quality. If Curiosity Stream is a terrible example, let me ask you if there is any paid example that you consider good value at all?
> Look, if you are so uninvolved with your community that you need a local newspaper to spoon-feed you what is happening in your own back yard, that is entirely on you.
Good journalism is way better than gossip, because they actually go and interview the people involved, and make room for a more open discussion. But not everybody is interested, not everybody has to be.
> Paywalls are one of the least industrious, most outdated, and ineffectual models possible. Unless you have lots of money to magically throw around, its terrible for the consumer and alternatives are superior.
Paywalls are the only sustainable way forward for creators, but they should be better packaged to benefit both seller and buyer better. Subscription fatigue is real and creators would benefit to team up under umbrellas, so that there is plenty for the consumer within the subscription, and plenty of consumers interested in paying. So instead of convincing 1000 subscribers to pay you $5 each, you'll team up with 9 other creators and have 100 000 subscribers paying $5 each for the umbrella subscription.
There is a bit of a highly honed instinct that paying for it doesn't make you not the product and is thus a rip off. Cable TV has ads and it keeps on creeping in, just like how paying to not be spammed doesn't work because it only signals to the danes that you have the geld and thus are a better target.
And what is the risk exactly? If a paid service starts introducing ads, you can cancel. You can cancel cable TV as well.
> Many people (especially tech people) have an almost psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services.
I'd guess it is exactly because we know how cheap running base social network is, how little value is in all the feature and fidelity overhead and realize that ultimately we aren't invited to pay for the service, but for the whole bullshit business built on top of it.
I still struggle with understanding why we can't remain within decentralised forums. Was it such a hassle to check like four URLs a day to see what was happening in the threads you participated in? Are centralised feeds such a core necessity to us?
I loved forums, but with the modern legal landscape, liability for uploaded content, DMCA requests, etc. I would never want to run/moderate one - and that was true even before the current swarm of LLM-generated spam.
As I've implied elsewhere, I like little geek communities too, but the big easy networks can and have fulfilled an important purpose of essentially being a better world "town square" than, e.g. network news.
They're incredibly far from perfect, but they've done a LOT of good, and are likely to continue to be necessary.
And a LOT of bad.
Overall, do the costs of global social networks outweigh the benefits? I'm skeptical.
By 2015 they were almost all incredibly harmful and mostly valueless.
Popular forums are high value targets as they both tend to be central in the PageRank graph (so link spam has historically paid off very well as black hat SEO); while also sitting on large user databases with associated emails.
So there are non-stop intrusion attempts and ceaseless bot spam. Operating a forum is a lot of thankless maintenance. It's not made better by the fact that a lot of the older forum software had nightmarish upgrade procedures.
> Operating a forum is a lot of thankless maintenance.
If you are to run any sort of site, you just kind of got to expect it. Who here thanks HN for their service?
Their favorite IRC server SysOP, Discord server owner?
Forum's were slow on delivering content.
The world is now driven by media and that was a PITA to host. If the webmaster didn't allow image uploads and even when so, you couldn't normally link elsewhere; were forced to register an account. Wait for a verification email, wait for an administrator to approve your account and then gain 10 posts. Text is time consuming to read and too write, like this comment.
They were more a leisure activity rather than what the internet has become now. Adaptability never happened and with the failure of evolving with real-time with the next generation who were starting out with internet enabled phones and gadgets caused their downfall.
They may of suited the generation, however they were not a fit for the upcoming younger generations. And if you can't target and gain their attention; expect to go extinct.
Code bases were too lumpy and such a mess; to make any modifications, to adapt it to anything else took a fair chunk of time and skill.
Proboards, Zetaboards, Invasion tried. Services where you could spawn an instantaneous forum for you and communities. It had momentum and than fell apart as did the death of AngelFire, GeoCities.
My two-cents.
I don't know this is true in general. Only in very noisy environments, which is like the opposite of what a forum is. The harder you clamor for attention, the harder it is to actually capture it because you're creating an environment where capturing attention for more than three seconds is impossible.
If you create a low-noise environment, you can capture attention for a long time.
If I'm browsing for music, and if the introduction doesn't catch me, I'll randomly skip to somewhere in the middle and if then normally pass.
It's known if a comment is wall of text, like this one it's ignored.
I don't own any social accounts apart from HN, Reddit and Discord. Never owned any yet how the internet drives out content I feel it effects all.
As far as sites go, I look at very few. And if there's slow flow of information I tend to get frustrated.
We are all hunting for that dopamine hit.
you see people thanking the mods like dang on here all the time. it's basically a meme. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
even if they didn't, why should they? this site is used as advertising for YC and their job ads. why should they get extra thanks for maintaining a forum for its ad space? do you also thank Facebook or Twitter for its moderation?
I'm not saying there's not engagement.
I'm saying they were not designed for that. Unlike Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
People decided to check more than 4. It's inevitable, you find a forum and start checking it, then find another, then another, and soon you have dozens of low volume forums, all adding to a small amount of messages.
RSS would have solved this problem, if the sites that published feeds actually made the feeds work. There's no need of centralization of the creation, but you must be able to centralize them someway.
And also, sharing a login between all of them is a very nice feature. Managing accounts is always a bother.
People keep using this word when talking about what’s been happening with the internet recently- but they don’t realise how close it is to the actual answer. RSS has been around forever and it’s exactly what is needed. A feed reader can check thousands of blogs, comment sections, youtube channels, newsletters (imagine never being asked for your email randomly ever again), podcasts, whatever.
The real issue is (and should be) discovery. Make feeds more obvious (say, it was integrated into modern browsers. Some sort of first class “feed detected” icon) and then all you need is search, which has also been solved forever (hopefully it stays that way…).
Firefox and Safari used to have this during the web 2.0 years, back when RSS was at its peak: https://blog.markheadrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/fir... https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/image...
The browsers themselves were RSS readers.
However, it's pretty clear that network effects matter in social networks and other forms of IT. In some sense this is precisely why some people feel burned at the moment, in part.
In that regard, I don't really blame people for selling a social network or manipulating uptake, even if I don't like the network itself. It's how these things proceed in part.
I also agree with the author that it's ok if a community is small. I've come to the opinion that sometimes having a smaller community can be a good thing.
On the other hand, some platforms — the web, email — are pretty dominant, and we've lacked an open social network platform that solves the problem of putting content distribution directly in the hands of content producers. Part of what Mastodon, Bluesky, and Lemmy are trying to do is be that platform.
I also think it's normal for developers to want to make as many users of their products happy. So to the extent they make lots of users happy, they're happier?
I don't know about "open", but YouTube does this pretty well IMO. Search results aren't based on your profile, and it all seems pretty un-"managed", in a Twitter Files sense. I know it does do demonetization if people complain, but while it's not perfect, it's not unreasonable.
Are we sure that your profile doesn't affect search results? I'd expect the opposite, considering it's Google and one of the things they're known for is changing search results based on your profile.
But then it turns out that money you got from the above will be far and beyond more than you'll ever earn by having people pay for the service. Your VCs and ad networks will want more engagement so you'll start down the dark path of increasing that all while showering yourself in money and not giving a single shit about the average person.
I highly doubt that the actual essential infrastructure required to run it is going to cost more than 8 billion dollars/year. Twitter costs about $5 billion a year. Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year, enough to cover the costs, offer some dividend, and put some money aside for a rainy day. We're not fucking about with R&D because we're BoringBook, we're making a boring product that doesn't need to do anything fancy. It's a utility company. Pension funds can invest in it safe in the knowledge that they will get a small but reliable dividend year after a year. The silly VC money can go towards innovative tech like AR or growing meat in petridishes or medical research or something. We don't need it fucking around and messing with the social structure of society anymore.
Ok, so who are you getting that money from? I mean from me that $1 is some inconsiderable fraction of my income, it's nothing. But there lies the problem with income inequality in the world. For a huge portion of people you're asking for a pretty damned considerable payment for something they can get for 'free' from somewhere else. That other ad ran company is paying off influencers and 'cool kids' to be solely on their product with their ad and VC money while charging nothing. It will grow quickly while your site founders.
The problem here is you want to develop a 'rational' and 'reasonable' product. This would be useful if humans in mass were either of those things. The world would be a much better place if people were not dumb, including myself. But here we are.
> That other ad ran company is paying off influencers and 'cool kids' to be solely on their product with their ad and VC money while charging nothing. It will grow quickly while your site founders.
Maybe. But what if it was a cool kid celebrity who made the site in the first place? There's a bunch of them out there, and quite a few who want to make the world a better place. Maybe if the vision was explained to them they'd get on board for free.
And the counterpoint is that there's been plenty of social networks that have had cool kids jump on board that have turned out to be duds. Everyone was raving about that audio chat room one during the pandemic and I can't even remember the name of it now.
> Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year
With 1 billion users, $2/year gives you $2B/year, not $16B/year.
> offer some dividend
Honestly, I think we explicitly don't want this. We should go for a non-profit model, where the company is required to put most/all of its revenue toward running the business, and cannot distribute dividends. If we have shareholders and dividends and whatnot, that's just an incentive for the owners to push for greater profits so their dividends go up.
You mention utilities, and that just makes me think of my local electric/gas utility, PG&E, which is a public, for-profit corporation, listed on a stock exchange. Years ago they even used to pay a dividend. They completely suck, and have been responsible for people's deaths. This is not at all the model we should strive for when it comes to a social-network-as-utility.
I was doing the max theoretical if we had all 8 billion humans signed up. The better approach would be to do something pegged to the minimum wage in the country but it's pointless trying to create completely theoretical finances for an imaginary company in a forum thread. The general idea I'm trying to get across is we could charge a vastly lower price for these things if there weren't such greedy and power hungry motivations underlying their financial and corporate structures.
> This is not at all the model we should strive for when it comes to a social-network-as-utility.
I agree it does seem like something that it would probably be better served via a non-profit but it's probably a tough sell. Maybe something like a cooperative might be a nice compromise.
So where else will you get the money? Do you really think you can get a loan for that? Sell bonds? I doubt it.
Wikipedia is a giant global website that runs entirely on donations. I'd wager there are alternatives out there to the MBA/VC orthodoxy.
> But, to this day, there are more people in the world without an account on Facebook than people with one.
So that's an upper bound of what, four billion people? I think basically anyone watching would consider that a success!
When people are wondering which social network will "succeed", they're not watching the different apps duke it out like a sports tournament. They just want to find a space in which they can communicate with most of the people they care about.
It's not normal to be a Krassenstein or a BrooklynDadDefiant or whatever - those people are nuts.
I appreciate the realist point of view in this paragraph and the two that precede it.
I’d like to go a step further and propose that we should deemphasize the explicit desire to develop communities online for what feels like the sake of having an online community. Online communities should be derivatives of offline identities, roles, interests etc, more often than not. But as more people seem to find “themselves” in a digital landscape that isn’t inherently social as much as it is social under certain contexts, the lines are being blurred, or disregarded entirely.
I used to be indifferent to federated networks, but I now understand the appeal of them when it comes down to being able to engage with predefined communities.
There is a lot to be said about the number one issue that newcomers confront being “which instance do I join?”.
Stop trying to make anything better.
Stop trying to create any kind of social space.
Just read my blog. Subscribe to my newsletter.
That's all you need.
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...
Better than #4 of the garbagetown list of social media trajectory.
On a grand enough scale, sure. If we expand the scope of "social network" very slightly to consider things like the web and email, this fact becomes less clear. I am fairly young, and I suspect at least email will be used for the rest of my life. The difference between the modern landscape for new protocols and the landscape when the early internet protocols were made is that there was little struggle for power. People made things they wanted, and they took off if other people wanted the same thing.
Now we have a bunch of competition for what is essentially the same experience. Does that mean there will never be one dominant protocol (or shudders, one application) for social media? I wouldn't bet on that claim. I think it will just take longer to reach somewhere that we land on as a common denominator.
It seems to be that a protocol must be flexible enough to support the division of communities and migration of users, like the article says is human nature. Protocols can support that though - email is one such protocol that does. ActivityPub is another, seems to be the route that we are headed towards right now.
There are clearly properties of a social network that users would like to see: ease of use, reach, quality of content and moderation while also allowing for openness and free speech. Working toward a future where something like this exists at scale is worthwhile and a workable-enough definition of success.
Incredibly reductionist interpretation of the article.
A tiny private forum that only serves two people is successful if those two people only care about talking with each other.
Zuck will consider Threads a success if it gets to 1 billion users; that's still "only" an eighth of the world population, but that doesn't matter because the people running it get to define what success means to them.
Meta launched a new platform today and got 10M people to sign up in the first 7 hours.
I am lost for words. Not sure how anyone still wants anything to do with Meta. How can you possibly want more social platforms by Meta. Meta couldn't die fast enough in my opinion.
And yet, millions of people signed up. I guess social networks can still succeed.
I've never much understood the appeal of Twitter, because the discussions devolve and it seems like the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. Also the UI makes it hard to follow threads; I much prefer a nested layout a la HN to whatever Twitter is.
Some people seem to be totally fine with the idea of a platform that sells data about them to third parties, and tries to track them all over the internet. Because they believe they get value out of the platform, but are unable or unwilling to pay for it with their own money.
I'm not like these people, but I understand that they exist, and more or less understand why they want what they want.
This resonates with me. The beauty of the Web was to allow you to find your niche anywhere in the world from your own place of living. But that concept has been contaminated and taken over by your typical big corporation. It is now diluted by hostile ads, psychological warfare, and manipulation, all while, on the surface, pitching you the idea that you can "cater" your experience to whatever you like.
The Web, or any community that is online or offline, should incite togetherness through a common good, whether it's artistic in nature or for the betterment of a community. Before the Web or BBS, this was done in forms of artist communities and forums in person. Seeking to return to this format, but with the aide of the Web is probably something I would prefer, but highly unlikely because younger generations seem to only live in their phones and in a Web reality.
The rest is definitely true though, all social networks are doomed for the same result: disappear into the void or become riddled with ads and so many additional services that the core network moves on. We'll keep repeating this cycle until the universal social network is actually achieved. I'm ok with that, having made several transitions already it's nothing new.
That wasn't one tiny piece. The central thesis of the article was against the idea of a universal social network. Literally: "stop dreaming of a universal network."
Can't we enjoy the Twitter replacements being smaller communities and leave it at that, enjoy it while we can? Since it's a long understood pattern that a community will degrade as it gets larger, even without Musk type shittery.
hmm, really disagree here. if you look at history the consolidation of "networks" is insane. we used to be way more fragmented, now if you pick the top 10 social networks worldwide you probably cover 90%+ of the internet connected population. hell, Facebook alone has 40% MAUs of all living humans!
a few hundred years ago what eg newspapers had that kind of reach? nothing even remotely in the same league.
I wish protocols like mastodon or nostr would allow to federate all of these.
I am not part of any "social network community" that I know of (apart from maybe HN) but I still occasionally use twitter, mainly as a substitute for blogs of the people I'd like to hear from, and get some comedy. They are from diverse communities and I certainly won't join everything and check everything.
On a side note though, Meta just changed their whole narrative in one day after being dragged for the last year over the Metaverse. If I were an investor I'd be very bullish on Meta. What was considered a colossal failure in over hiring helped result in a chance to add a new growing platform.
The type of social media figures that are broadcasters will face a particularly challenging situation. I recently heard a Chrome Devrel person complain about it. They used to just post announcements on Twitter and take some feedback there as well. Now they have to go and try to reach this audience across Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Discord, Bluesky, Threads...a growing list. And there's no network effect where you get a mass following for free, you have to painstakingly build it up on each network independently.
Big "winners" in this space can be dangerous, but they can also be an important tool/unfortunate necessity when it comes to national or global "news."
Which is to say, yes, I want a good replacement for Twitter because social media more-or-less succeeded where "the Rodney King story" failed.
Could you please explain this? I know what the Rodney King story is, but I don't understand the relevance here.
When the Rodney King thing happened, black folks like myself were like "Finally, the world will see how horrible the cops can be. We will have a trial and get justice."
That didn't remotely happen. It's not until social media that we got e.g. BLM and even the concept of a "Karen." IMHO, it's been absolutely instrumental.
This has nothing to do with age. I wouldn't recommend assuming that you're older than me.
> "Finally, the world will see how horrible the cops can be. We will have a trial and get justice."
> That didn't remotely happen.
How has that changed? The George Floyd verdict for example is an extreme rarity. Cops are almost always acquitted.
> It's not until social media that we got e.g. BLM and even the concept of a "Karen." IMHO, it's been absolutely instrumental.
How does social media affect the verdict of trials? And what does "Karen" have to do with this?
As you'll recall, the Rodney King verdict resulted in massive multi-day riots in Los Angeles, without any help from social media, which didn't exist yet. The world was paying attention.
It's A LOT better now than then; I'd say a much larger chunk, perhaps a majority of white people more-or-less didn't really believe in "police brutality," not in a way such they would act on it.
[0] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/white-journalists-are-t...
Many people are trying ...
The problem with trying is that no one agrees.
"Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one."
Again, today's social networks want to grow in users, so it is not up to the author to say that we should stop making social networks succeed.
"We" don't know any such thing.
This is silly. You don't need social media to keep in touch with your friends and family. Pick up the phone, or at least write an email.
They are the hot glue underneath a AML/KYC-based identity verification systems at scale and the sticky requirement for anyone looking to build such a system at scale. There is no better verification than social context for identity, and at core these are giant graph databases that have personal histories which can be leveraged for social credit and reputation applications.
Watching these oligarchs jockey to try to concentrate people into social platforms is clearly more than a casual priority, so that’s why I suspect multiple motives that exceed the intrinsic social value of the platforms. It’s been my learning that the really massive companies in Silicon Valley a often have a back door leverage-style data platform to try to build a monopolistic position at some future inflection point in addition to their “front and center” business.
I further suspect is a land grab to try to build the “WeChat of the West,” which explains quite clearly the relatively sky-high Twitter purchase (at least vs revenues) price as simply attaching a financial valuation to a portion of the initial userbase more than makes up for the purchase price.
People are very focused on the front side applications (the social network hook) but the true value of these businesses is in building the next generations of FICO.
When I read comments like, “Our communities are worth a lot more than the underlying tool used at some point in time.”, and “We are selling them, we are transforming them into a simple commercial asset for the makers of the tool we are using, the tool which exploits us.” I do wonder if people think as I do that it’s far more extensive than simple social networking companies. The approach to global finance is incredibly clear: social credit is the new core and communities are the oil of social credit.
In the end it’s all about financial inclusion, as is laid out in this WEF article that explains just why social credit applications are so important to financial inclusion and global growth:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/this-new-approach-to-...
So, consider that niche social networks do not serve this purpose very well, and so there is little incentive to “build small” at this stage. I’d love to see more social network applications that are focused on quality connections myself, and for a while that was Reddit. But Reddit’a value was really just the aggregation of all the independent communities that used to exist in forums and similar into one website.
These are the declared plans from the man himself:
https://me.mashable.com/tech/27088/twitter-20-undergoes-a-ma...
That isn’t exactly hidden.
Perhaps the true intentions of Meta/Zuck/Facebook are underdisclosed, but after their KYC fiasco with crypto it’s clear they want to go there and just haven’t been able to cement the regulatory relationships yet or simply got on the wrong side of the regulatory compliance community and aren’t yet reingratiated into their good graces. But you will see another attempt at direct financial instrumentation on their properties as it’s the most valuable application of their data.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/28/faceboo...
And as to coordination, to deny attempts to concentrate power through coordinating the military industrial complex would be a foolhardy argument at this point, though there are clearly competing groups and philosophies.
I’m suggesting it’s more like a classic SV land grab… because that’s what it really is. And people’s connection and resultant financial enablement data is the prize underneath social networks, because it clearly is. And the person doing it is talking openly about what they are doing, so calling it a “conspiracy theory” is patently incorrect as a conspiracy would require some kind of secretive collusion to exist and all of this is discussed and public information shared by the architects themselves.
We should be concerned about how concentrated data collection and management is as the power is profound when combined with mature AI, not accusing one another of “conspiracies” at this point. I’ve long advocated for something like a “Privacy Bill of Rights,” but I fear the genie is too far out of the bottle now that the ruling classes have become aware of the profound technological potential of the data expressed through social finance.
After all, as they say, to control a city, control the water. A country? Food. The world? Finance.
I also don’t think it particularly matters what price was paid or whether it’s in the SEXY theme or 420 reference, as it’s common to see these kinds of number games among purchases by the super rich in my personal experience. It’s the general degree of size category of valuation that matters, not the numeric humor Elon injects into his numbers.
How many houses have I seen go for 1,234,567 or 2,345,678 in the offer paperwork? Same for cars and watch prices. I’ll say: more than a few. It’s all a game of points, leverage and reputation at the highest personal wealth levels. The self declared bon vivants consider themselves reincarnated Pharos destined to inherit the earth and love to play financial games with numbers on purchases and sales. That doesn’t make them any less of a business decision.
Trying to get social media users out of "big number go up" mindset is really, really hard. Twitter has something like 450 million active users, and a lot of them are miserable with it, especially the heavier users. But if you try to suggest maybe just not using it, it seems like it is a "foregone conclusion" that it is the only way to go, as if there's no possible way to just do something else. Why go somewhere where you can get 100 meaningless "like" button clicks when you can go on twitter and get tens of thousands of meaningless "like" button clicks?
The worse part is that this mindset is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because users that think this way don't think it's worth bothering with anything that has less than a hundred million users. Naturally, this helps ensure that most of the growth will continue to go to just a handful of highly popular networks, since they're the only ones worth bothering with. While counts of users are meaningless, there are some knock-on effects to having most people believe alternatives are worthless. For people who produce art or videos or other forms of content, it means that you pretty much have to use the mainstream platforms, because a large amount of people are unwilling to use anything else even to follow people they're interested in, which also depresses your ability to grow and succeed. While monetary success and internet fame should absolutely never be the goal of social media or the internet, the fact remains that if you are an artist on the Internet, you are not going to get as many commissions or as much business opportunity if you're not on huge platforms like Twitter, and that means that the financial sustainability of a lot of internet creative works depends on a few tech companies.
But that's kind of the thing. That's basically WHY federated networks are good and we should want them to succeed. Indeed, it is true that there is no meaningful success metric for a social network. However, the "success" of the Fediverse is a bit different: I think it "succeeds" when it becomes viable to publish on ActivityPub as a complete alternative to needing to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But of course, that's not a constant value. It's not some constant amount of users. It depends on many factors. However, it will be pretty obvious when you see it, because it will come in the form of seeing people do healthy business over just ActivityPub.
I empathize if this sounds arbitrary or pointless, but I think a lot of people don't grasp the impact of this. For all of its flaws, this would effectively mean that you could go back to running your own damn sites, because they can participate in ActivityPub just the same as anyone else.
ActivityPub could fill the void left by the downturn in popularity of RSS, and then some.