Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

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I think the problem is more fundamental than this: When your monetization model is tied to usage, then of course you will try to maximize usage, rather than user benefit. It can't be any other way if your reward function is tied to product usage.

Contrast with a car: Their monetization model does not depend on how much I drive it - as long as I find it useful enough to buy. Or a gym, where it actually runs in reverse - the gym makes more money when I use the product less, just so long as I don't leave.

Microsoft office or Mario Kart do not need me to be addicted - they just need me to buy the software. Even Photoshop with a subscription model doesn't pursue addiction strategies - why would they? Just make it useful enough for me to keep paying for it, and that's plenty good. Maybe it's actually closer to the gym in that sense.

Which products are the ones that require addiction?? The ones that are free to use but cost money to provide.

IOW - In many ways this is our fault for expecting social media and many other services to be provided to us for free, relying on ads to pay for it.

I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it? My guess is close enough to zero to ensure failure. But I tell you what - I'd probably pay for it myself. And I'd be very lonely.

Edit: Replaced all-caps with italics.

I think you are correct, the root problem is that the targeted advertisement model is far more profitable than any paid model, thus outcompeting every sustainable alternative.

I personally think the solution is simple, yet fairly draconian and therefore hard to implement due to the inevitable political backlash: ban all targeted advertising. You can still run ads on digital platforms, but the outcome of the heuristic used to pick an ad must be independent of user derived data, including session data, ip address, time of day, country, past viewing history and so on.

Whilst thoroughly supporting the ban hammer on most forms of advertising, I'm pragmatic enough to understand multiple strategies are required.

We need to educate friends and family about ads, help them understand the harms, give them tools to avoid them.

No one should be browsing the internet without an ad blocker in 2025, certainly no one we love.

This is completely wild to me. I honestly do most of my clothes shopping through Instagram/Facebook ads. I enjoy that targeted advertising shows me new products and companies that I'm interested in, often very niche stuff that I don't come across otherwise. I would so much rather see that than ads for life insurance, penis pills, ambulance chasers, or whatever other bullcrap goes to the lowest common denominator. The ads that get read on podcasts are a great example of this.

Worshipping the elite won't make you become one of them...

Very thoughtful contribution, thank you.

I'll just say this: make the algorithm work for you.

If I'm going to pay for something by watching ads, I much rather watch fewer, higher value, more targeted ads. Untargeted ads are less valuable (to me, the advertiser, and the ad publisher), so I would have to see a lot more of them to pay for the content I consume.

I'm really not big on advertising. I dislike ads as much as anyone, especially when they're obnoxious and intrusive.

But I feel like a lot of people, on here especially, have this "all advertising is the devil period lalalala" attitude, but it does have real value. People don't like that it's been taken to a psychologically manipulative science of big brands being shoved down your throat. But I have genuinely found the ad experience on FB/IG to be the best there ever was. I do legitimately find out about things that I end up buying and liking and people ask where I got it and laugh when I say "a Facebook ad."

Founder of a social-media-adjacent startup here — 100% agree that monetization model, moreso than funding etc is the core problem.

The decisions for which I am most grateful my co-founders and I have made, from day one, were to 1) have a monetization model that's not reliant on usage and 2) not set goals against usage.

Granted, we're a bit of a peculiar case because of the market we serve (giving parents a screen-free alternative to smartphones and social media for their kids). But personally, my experience here has given me hope that other monetization models _can_ pave the way for non-addictive social products to flourish.

> I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it?

In 2022, mastodon.social was provisioned at a cost of 0.6EUR/year/user for 191k users [1]. This price is payable even by many people in poor countries. People would pay for something like this same as they pay for other stuff, assuming it was well designed and gave users power to do stuff.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385

The server costs would be tiny compared to moderation, legal, and R&D.

0.6 EUR/year/person was the entire cost including moderation and R&D. I don't think any legal costs were incurred. If you built a federated social media where individual instances are responsible for their own moderation, then the software maker doesn't have to incur those costs.

Seems like only solution for social media is to make it as open-source, tax-funded public service. No-engagement/gamification, no-ads, no-spyware.

And yet probably less alone than when using polluted and terrible social media.

I would pay, FWIW. I am actively looking for a decent community of humans online that isn’t run by selling data to AI farms or trying to get my eyeballs all the time. Unfortunately social media ate many of the places I previously used to call home.

As long as the founders aren't looking to make billions, it's very possible to run a healthy social media platform, as evidenced by Front Porch Forum [1]. 20 employees, human moderators (gasp)! There's also Metafilter which is paid [2].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/10/front-p...

[2] https://www.metafilter.com/

> The current sign-up fee is US$5; it's a one-time fee and is the only cost associated with using the site.[1]

That's…surprisingly cheap. Which reminds me that I keep meaning to set up an SDF or tildeverse account.

[1] https://www.metafilter.com/faq.mefi#1

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