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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and there is a huge problem connected to that:

If you don’t play this game you’ll lose. Look at Europe for example, they haven’t played the VC game properly and thus have no really significant tech player compared to the US / China.

So what options are left? Play the game or be ruled by those that play it.

I’d rather play even if moral erosion is required.

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I think Europe is moving g toward digital independence even more. They've still got Instagram and WhatsApp and everything, but I can see them moving more aggressively toward Facebooks core business model (ie, programmatic adverising) and essentially creating a European internet bubble. Would be nice for Europeans to be able to have their own social media sites which operate less aggressively on your attention span - like Facebook circa 2009 or even MySpace. Chronological feeds, less invasive advertising practices.

We are building a social network with chronological feed.

I am thinking how to make it sustainable without raising VC funding but not doing aggressive ad targeting. Obviously people are not going to pay for a social network. So maybe just very generic sponsered links?

Could do what redsit does and offer programmatic advertising targeted based on subreddits

Yeah.. simple keyword matching might work.

But one for the rare case of ours taking off

Maybe the model should be more like public roads - for-profit companies are involved in building parts of them but they don't control the whole system.

> I’d rather play even if moral erosion is required.

Gross.

Yes. But what’s the alternative?

Integrity.

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