Comment by spaghetti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaghetti | Hacker News Reader

Here's an idea that's only partially a joke: segment the user-base by yearly membership fees. Have the free tier, $10/year, $100/year and $1000/year. All tiers are 100% quarantined from each other.

There's upsides for Twitter: when 90% of my friends get the $100 plan there's a huge incentive for me to do the same. When all of my friends keep the free plan then there's no incentive for a loser like me to pollute the higher Twitter echelons.

Might be some tricky cases where I follow a celebrity who has the $1000 plan.

I know these ideas sound ridiculous. However considering the mainstream nature of these services and peoples' insatiable appetite for competition and one-upping each other it could work out. The prices for each tier would probably need some iteration to get closer to some global maximum.

Also I wonder if this could work for Facebook?

On the other hand, if 90% of my friends sign up for the $1000/year plan, and I cannot afford that, they just lost a user.

Would the people willing to pay a high amount make up for the loss of the lower-tier levels? (Keep in mind that this is the kind of decision that you cannot ctrl-z out of.)

Good question. I wonder what a good strategy would be for figuring out the near optimal pricing plan? The strategy would need to start off w/o painting yourself into a corner. In other words the initial pricing can't constrain future pricing adjustments by much. Also you'd want a strategy that allows for frequent adjustment down the road. Something like the Google "search algorithm" frequent tweaking.

Perhaps an increasing sequence of additional tiers could work? Start with just free. Then free or $10. Then free or $10 or $25 and so on. This avoids users feeling like they've been punished for being an early-adopter. Also users who aren't happy with their current tier can simply upgrade.

I don't think it's that tricky... instead of quarantine, make it like direct messaging: whoever pays more must opt-in to hear those paying less.

Very interesting idea. Might have some merit with a lot of tweaking.

But appeal to exclusivity and FOMO are often value drivers.

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