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Comment by martinshen | Hacker News Reader

We get it... the ad model is broken, a subscription model is, in theory, always better. It's simpler. Generally, simpler is better. However, I don't think the app.net experiment will succeed.

I'll be brief:

- Outside of phones (& WhatsApp), I can't think of a single paid non-business communication platform.

- App.net will not have a good one-player or even two-player mode (good 1-player: DropBox, Github, Evernote).

- All paid services have at least 10x less users than Twitter.

- If it does succeed, twitter could just copy you.

The biggest problem with Facebook web ads is twofold:

1) They display the same ads on every page (regardless of context)

2) They rely on the advertiser to know their target market. (Most often, the advertiser doesn't even know)

I'll try to write up something on this later.

[edited for formatting]

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> We get it... the ad model is broken, a subscription model is, in theory, always better... However, I don't think the app.net experiment will succeed.

I agree that if App.net succeeds it will be construed as a data point for this line of reasoning, but I think Dalton's business experiment should be regarded as independent of his technical experiment. Things fail for lots of reasons, not just because free is better than paid.

> - If it does succeed, twitter could just copy you.

By that logic, MySpace could have just copied Facebook.

> - App.net will not have a good one-player or even two-player mode (good 1-player: DropBox, Github, Evernote).

That seems like a given, but I wonder if it's a foregone conclusion that App.net will turn into the same kind of thing as Twitter. After all, technically there isn't a huge difference between HN and Reddit, but the way they're used is very different. Even cultural differences can be dramatic. I haven't invested in App.net, but I do find myself toying with the idea of having something I could use like Twitter, but without being Twitter, and I admit I find the idea attractive. If I could control whether the messages are public or private, I could see using it as a pub/sub framework if the payloads were essentially encoded API messages. That's not something I'd be inclined to try out with Twitter, even though it's free.

I guess I'm saying subtle differences can be meaningful; maybe they can be the difference between success and failure.

1. In the past even five years, we've seen huge changes and experiments in business models (just saying that these have been tried at scale in the past 5 years). Some have been successful, others have not: In-app purchases (Zynga), SaaS (37 Signals), Freemium (DropBox), Daily Deals (Groupon), Early Advantage Buying (Pinboard), User's Choose (HumbleBundle), Razor/Blades (Nexus 7, PSP), $.99 (iTunes, Google Play) etc. I'm not arguing that free is always better than paid, just that in app.net's case, it probably is.

2. The core difference between "MySpace + Facebook" vs. "Twitter + App.Net" is that the reason (at least published) why App.Net is better is because it isn't supported by ads (& that the Twitter team is focused on how to sell ads diminishing the importance of the user). I don't believe that this is a strong enough reason to change my user behavior.

3. Subtle differences can be meaningful. Agreed.

I guess who knows what will happen with app.net but I think the great biz model experiment will only accelerate in general.

If we agree that the ad-supported model is broken, why not try to create an alternative?

You absolutely should. But it doesn't look like this IS the alternative (at least the viable one).

That said, no one appears to have any other firm ideas about what the viable alternative should look like (only what it shouldn't). And as it's your money and not mine, I say go for it, good luck!

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