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Comment by chimi | Hacker News Reader

It's more fundamentally about this: Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)?

A lot of people don't want to be the product and believe when a company focuses on them as a customer rather than them as eyeballs to be sold to advertisers, who are the customer, then a better service is the outcome for the users of the service.

With app.net the user is the customer. With Facebook and Twitter, the user is the product. With App.Net user interests and service provider interests are aligned. The provider wants the service to be better for the users.

With Facebook and Twitter and other ad supported products the users who value their privacy have intentions which are constantly at odds with the service provider whose intention is to continually open up details about the individuals so that those details can be used to improve ad success rates and profitability.

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"Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)?"

Where's the evidence that suggests that millions of people care about this distinction enough to pay for it?

> Where's the evidence that suggests that millions of people care about this distinction enough to pay for it?

Where's the evidence that suggests millions of people have to join?

Isn't that self-evident? People post to Facebook and Twitter to be heard. Currently, they seem to post on App.net about App.net. That's not sustainable.

Personally, I use Twitter mostly to talk to people in the fields I work in, namely hacking and journalism. I don't see how either of those communities will move to App.net wholesale. If you want me to pay money just to have a conversation with you, I'm probably going to decide to just not have the conversation.

Ads on Facebook and Twitter don't bother me. I won't be paying to get rid of them. I don't even use AdBlock to get rid of them for free (partially because I think it's unethical to do).

> Isn't that self-evident? People post to Facebook and Twitter to be heard. Currently, they seem to post on App.net about App.net. That's not sustainable.

My first post on Twitter was "trying to figure out WTF Twitter is". I subsequently didn't post for six months. I wouldn't judge the platform on what's posted in the first 30 days of existence. As for sustainability, $500k in revenue is more than Twitter had for years.

I'm not judging the platform on its first 30 days. I just don't see a path to it being useful. What's the path that you see?

A smaller, more closely knit site that doesn't have to worry as much about Twitter's antagonism towards the third-party developers who helped make them succeed.

I don't know if it'll work, but I certainly hope it does.

I imagine it being pretty spam-free if it costs $50/year, as a bonus.

That's not revenue. It's a donation. That's a pretty big difference. I know the counterargument will be that people are paying to use the service. That's like saying people who fund a project on Kickstarter are paying for the product. They aren't. They're paying for the development, which is one-time in nature and a donation.

From the join.app.net page:

> You will be committing to pre-paying a full year of "member" tier service.

It was unclear to me if the $50 covers that or I'm expected to pay for membership at that point, on top of my donation towards development.

Recent decisions made by Twitter are all about optimizing the site for advertising revenues.

I don't think Twitter has any other choice because they chose the free path from the start. I highly doubt Twitter would suddenly switch to a premium/freemium model.

While Twitter has empowered revolutions, I think the quality of the community has degraded though.

I believe that if people pay for being part of a community, people would care to improve its quality. If something is free, people just won't take care of it.

On Twitter, you make your own community, right? Most people who have your problem would unfollow people instead of paying $50/year to have conversations with a small portion of their Twitter audience.

> Recent decisions made by Twitter are all about optimizing the site for advertising revenues.

Sure, well, lets all hope that app.net will not run out of subscription fees. My take is that in a situation where IF this gets more popular and costs to sustain its life-pulse will grow, its plausible Dalton will have to choose between #1 shutting it down if not enough money flows in (and piss off all who still want to contribute and don't care that others won't pay), or #2 find a different way of bringing the money in. Let's hope its nor advertising.

> If something is free, people just won't take care of it.

Sure, that's why the Hackers News group is built upon 99% bots and is constantly filled in with spammers and haters. That's why every day you have high quality content uploaded to YouTube, for free to watch.

People don't care whether something is free or not; people care whether that something brings them any value, then they look at the price, whether they can afford it or not.

I really don't get this "quality of the community" has degraded argument. I hear the same about Facebook.

If the quality is degrading it's because of YOUR friends and YOUR choices about who to follow. Other people including myself simply hide posts or unfollow when the SNR becomes too low.

But wouldn't it be so much nicer if you didn't have to ignore the little people?

I can't reply directly so I will reply here "People post to Facebook and Twitter to be heard."

I use facebook and twitter to be heard by my friends. I don't need a massive audience to get utility from the service. Brands and celebrities are the ones that want to be heard by tons of people. Twitter and Facebook are just a different type of ad platforms for them.

If my friends are on app.net, I will use it. Most people I know wouldn't pay for it though. Perhaps app.net would be good to allow power users to sponsor their friends.

"If my friends are on app.net, I will use it."

This is the crux of the matter. I don't see how enough of my friends will ever be on App.net for me to pay for it, especially when I already use free products that have the same functionality.

> Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)?

So, what explicit rights does the customer have over that which they get with Facebook or Twitter? Do I have voting rights for features? Is the business model solid? I mean, $500,000 is great and all, but that needs to last an entire year all while supporting future development. Sure, they can get new people on board, but what's their plan for that?

As for being the customer, it means little. As we've learned from experience, being a customer doesn't mean anything. You ask a question about being the product or being the customer as if being a customer actually gives you something, when in reality, it doesn't. I mean, in this case, you get a years worth of service. After that, nothing else is promised.

So, beyond the years worth of service, what do you really get? What are they promising? Because so far from what I see, the reality differs from the promise.

Excellent point. I've been the customer of many services that still either close or get bought out by companies that I didn't want to do business with in the first place. I had no real 'rights' as a customer. Just because I'm not the product via ad views doesn't mean I (as part of a large customer base) don't make an excellent acquisition/takeover target. Will Caldwell sell out for $10 million? Probably not. Might he sell out for, say... $300 million? Possibly, and then I've yet again been turned in to a product for sale.

That's one of the reasons why a distributed open-source version of the service might be the best option.

At the very least it means that I - as someone that values privacy - do not have to be in a necessarily antagonistic relationship with the company that provides the service.

> So, what explicit rights does the customer have over that which they get with Facebook or Twitter? Do I have voting rights for features?

No the features will automatically get better, because you pay for the quality and all the plebs won't get in.

And then there's Diaspora and Identica where you're neither product nor customer...

Or you could just install AdBlock. The argument about privacy doesn't really makes sense either, it is still a private company/product.

True. One advantage of a paid social network I haven't heard mentioned is the fact spam likely won't exist as it does on Twitter.

What made you assume that just because app will be subscription-based, there will be large enough portion of that $$ cheddar that will make app less spammy then, for example, Twitter?

Spammer pay thousands of dollars for fresh emailing lists, simply because enough uneducated people will get cough in their nets. You think they won't be able to afford $50?

Ultimately, its up to Dalton and his executive skills (is he going to be the CEO?) to build a company's structure and split the fee the smart way (have a decent anti-spam team) to keep the site fun and clean [of spam].

>Spammer pay thousands of dollars for fresh emailing lists, simply because enough uneducated people will get cough in their nets. You think they won't be able to afford $50?

True, that alone might not do it. The $50 paired with a rudimentary reporting system might limit the use of a single account to a small time period in which the ROI wouldn't be worth it.

> A lot of people don't want to be the product and believe ...

It seems to me that the vast majority of people do not care and will just use whatever everyone else is using. If open-source, federated alternatives such as Identica do not have many users, then I don't understand how App.net can hope to get enough to matter.

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