It's like a tragedy of the commons, except there's only one party destroying all resources for themself
They never learn. GM, GE, RCA, you name it. They always want to make more money now now NOW. They don't understand they're taking on a metaphorical loan. They don't understand the interest they have to pay.
It's the ultimate greedy algorithm. Just make the decision that makes the most money right now, every time, over and over and over again. Don't look at anything else.
They are optimizing for short-medium term profits. The people there in the early days pull the ejection code when the “interest” is due. The company coasts until some private equity runs the numbers and realizes the parts are worth more than the whole.
This is capitalism. You are using “interest” (a finance term) seemingly in a moral / ethical critique. If so, use a moral / ethical term instead.
There are still plenty of vulture investors who find a way to trick the market in the short-to-medium term. I'm not convinced Facebook is a case of that, even though I hate what they do.
Social media was fueled by a decade of low interest.
I understand that's not going to net hundreds of billions in revenue, but surely a site like that could keep the lights on and the engineers paid at scale.
But the number of people willing to pay for their accounts on this stuff is vanishingly small.
So either you run this as a side project and accept that it's losing money, or you start running ads. And the moment you start running ads is the moment your most profitable choice becomes slowly turning your site more and more addictive, so that people spend more and more time on it and see more and more ads.
(Or you can keep the place small and constrained to people who have a high chance of being able to kick some money in for the bills, I'm only paying about half my Mastodon instance's fees because of making this choice.)
Or you can create a huge societal shift where we decide that having non-profit social sites is a good thing, and that they should be funded by the state, even if many of the views on them contradict the views of the giant bags of money pretending to be humans who are currently in control of the country. Ideally this societal shift would make it much harder for these giant bags of money to exist, as well.
Oh also getting people to stick around on a site that's not built to be addictive is surprisingly hard.
For over a decade, I used Facebook lite messenger app which was built for countries with spotty, slow internet. It was less than a tenth of the size of the US messenger (of course it was unavailable in the app store and had to be installed via apk), was fast and easy to use (no stories, feeds, money sharing, animations), and was much better at doing the one thing it was supposed to be for, messaging people. It finally stopped working a couple of years ago and the regular app is a bloated mess where chats are an afterthought.
And why? Ads. You need more engagement so you can show people more ads. You need more content, so you have more things to attach ads to. You to autoplay videos to get people to watch more and see more ads. You have to run trackers so you can better target your ads. It’s the ads, not the functions, that make the modern internet too expensive to be funded by individuals.
2000s Facebook was able to run just fine on 2000s internet and storage. It would take a trivial amount of modern data and a fraction of modern storage to run now.
Facebook made $160bn last year, and profits were about $70bn, an almost 50% profit margin, and that's considering they're investing in a lot of crap.
There should be a middle ground between "minting gold coins" (Facebook) and "no money to pay the image hosting bills" somewhere in there.
I agree a non-profit approach might be the only option to avoid the same long term problems we've seen time and again.
Didn't Meta try to offer this in the EU and they said no you have to let people use the free one without targeting any ads to them
Users don't like a contract radically changing from under them, and shifting from free to paid is breaking a contract in an immediately understandable way.
That case was about forcing users to choose between personalized ads or a paid subscription. I can understand why the EU would reject that.
A case like that is outside of the scope of my argument. My proposal is a site that offers subscriptions with no free ad supported option at all, which the EU wouldn't have an issue with.
Why do you understand why that should be rejected? I don't personally understand it at all. How can it be possible for users to get free Facebook and not give up any personal data to it? There would be no money coming in to keep the site running...
If social media were paid, it would effectively be another barrier between people with different means connecting with each other.
From the perspective of the EU and their regulatory environment (vis a vis GDPR) and given Facebook's reach and size, it fits with how they approach big tech and privacy.
| another barrier between people
It's been said enough before that cheap is always better than free. If the costs can be kept low enough, the benefits of removing ads and data-mining from the equation can be worth it. And there's always the option of regional pricing where that makes sense.
Does anybody here know of an alternative that works like 2010 Facebook?
And the least we can do is make it costly and difficult for them.
So basically, what literally happened after the enclosure of the commons, lol