The apps have become so 'social' and zyngafied to the point of almost being unplayable. (Constant spam for other apps, 'fake' notifications for Zynga app updates, HUGE decrease in performance, and so on)
The day quora fucked with user settings, I deleted my quora account.
I put my mouth where my money is. I am not content to be fucked with.
I have never had a facebook account for the same reasons.
I am sensing there is a market here.... (I'm lying... there has always ben a market here - just nobody with balls to tackle it - plus given the NSAs BS.. I am guessing there is one HNer that has not only the balls, but the technical chops to handle a great service... RDL)
Doesn't necessarily mean cashmoney.
It's normally "I put my money where my mouth is". As in, you're not just talk.
It's not that there isn't a market. It's that that market is very high-maintenance and, if you look at other similar products, probably extremely difficult to effectively monetize. Targeting users who come with the twin attributes of being touchy and quick to leave and are probably unresponsive to advertising and other straightforward "you don't pay" models does not strike me as a brilliant decision. The success stories in the described niche--Tarsnap comes to mind--seem mostly to be very small businesses or strange attempts at capturing the zeitgeist a la App.net. (Tarsnap being a small business isn't an inherent negative; I personally have little use for the "startup startup startup, business plans optional" silliness that seems to be infecting the tech sector and cperciva has built a great product. But you're not complaining about Dropbox, you're complaining about Quora and Facebook, which have very different business needs.)
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Or, put another, admittedly more cynical way: I don't know many people who want to cater to a market segment that will hate them as soon as they start needing to find ways to make payroll. Some people price themselves into or out of a market segment. You behave yourself out of what have heretofore been economically viable ones. Which is totally fine if that's your bag, but following that up with complaints that people who want to make money aren't interested in catering you is...curious.
There are generally easier ways to make money than to build low-barrier-to-departure services for demanding, temperamental people. So it goes.
So therefore the multi-billion dollar question is, what is it about the ways that companies are making payroll from these services that annoys people and are there any other ways of making these kinds of services pay for themselves that are less intrusive and annoying. Is an extremely difficult problem, admittedly, and just solving it isn't enough, it would also have to be implemented very well.
Wanting to use on your own terms services that depend on network effects generally means either not using the services or shouting into an empty well.
Is that a serious question? If so: because at some point a larger, but highly competitive market promises much less profit than a smaller one that is completely untapped.