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Comment by snowstormsun | Hacker News Reader

I predict Bluesky will add some form of targeted advertisements in the future once the user base has grown to a certain size. Isn't that obvious? I'd assume that's also why investors are willing to invest.

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They are trying to avoid that. I hang around there pretty much. I expect premium services subscriptions will be the first try. If that works, and I think it could, that will be fine. The fact of it being a public benefit LLC makes the profitability requirement much less pressing.

Also, there will be revenue opportunities from being the canonical AT Proto first mover. It’s way too early to tell, or worry.

What does being a public benefit corp actually stop them from doing on a practical level? I'm not familiar with the classification.

I am, on the other hand, familiar with the likes of Blockchain Capital, from whom Bluesky has accepted 15 million dollars in Series A funding. At some point they're going to get crypto wallets and air drops integrated just like Keybase did and the profits will come out of scamming the uninformed.

I certainly hope it works because rebalancing the world away from X is a win for the world.

I'm not sure we have much precedent for that model working to sustain any form of social media for the masses. It has in my experience been great for specific services (happily paying for pinboard on a yearly subscription!) but I'm not sure it will work for aby service aspiring to be a universal town square.

Yeah, and then experts will use ad-free alternative clients and most people won't. But it will still be better than other social media systems that ban alternative clients.

I guess then Bluesky will ban alternative clients and start charging for API, a-la Musk?

They don't need to because the normies are profitable enough.

Could have said that at one point about Twitter or Reddit.

Do you not understand fiduciary responsibility? If they can charge and make more money they are effectively obligated to. They would need to sell their investors against the plan that everyone uses AND propose a plan that will make more money.

Reddit went through this around their IPO.

Do you not understand PBLLC? Also https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

That’s not how fiduciary responsibility works. It’s very easy to say, “we’re not going to do X because we don’t think it’s a good long term investment due to brand destruction”. This happens all of the time. It’s a complete myth that they are responsible to force short term charges for short term revenue.

What you’re confusing it with is shareholder pressure, which is orthogonal to duty. What Reddit went through was just kowtowing to large potential investors to increase IPO demand.

Blue Sky hasn't done an IPO.

I have never seen a more obviously telegraphed plan.

Ah, the circle of life for VC-funded social media... Let third party devs write cool apps, copy the features that stick, then pull their rug. Then proceed to squeeze ad revenue in a death spiral as the MAU gently falls off.

Who remembers App.net, after the first time Twitter tried banning third-party clients back in like 2012?

Twitter managed without banning alternative clients for 16 years, right up until the advent of Naughty Old Mr Car.

(They did vaguely try once, but there was such a backlash that they backed off.)

They did not manage, they made losses every single quarter but one.

Not sure where you got that one; they were net profitable for two full years at least. They were generally FCF-positive, and could have reached paper profitability fairly easily at the cost of reducing spending (though their shareholders likely wouldn’t have liked that; the markets like to see smallish tech companies spending what they take in, not paying a dividend, as a general rule).

Twitter was not a massively lucrative company, but the idea that it was financially near death is a myth.

Twitter didn't wait for Musk to attack alternative clients, or charging for API access. Pretty sure that's why it took him all of 5 minutes to flip the switch and turn everything completely off.

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https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/16/3248079/twitter-limits-ap...

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/16/17699626/twitter-third-pa...

> We’re committed to understanding why people hire 3rd party clients over our own apps.

https://www.androidauthority.com/heres-whats-really-happenin...

> To save you a click, the social network wants to charge up to $2899.99 per month for developers to use this new API on up to 250 users. Of course, that’s untenable. The developers don’t want to pay it and, frankly, neither do their users, us, you, or any other sane person. Additionally, a good third party Twitter app will clearly have more than 250 users. However, as Luke explains, this new API is never (and was never) for third party apps.

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