[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How to avoid social media enshitification, i...
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Ask HN: How to avoid social media enshitification, if no one pays
for it?
During the time of "The Social Dilemma", the idea of "if you are
not paying for the product, you are the product" was so often
repeated that it became a cliche. Everyone was talking about how
bad all of the tech companies were tracking you, how Big Tech was
destroying small businesses with their practices, how it was
responsible for destroying mental health of younger people and even
how it was destroying civic debate by increasing polarization and
deepening the political and ideological divide. Today, during an
interview where Elon Musk merely suggests that Twitter could start
charging from all users as a way to fight the spammers and to keep
away people who do not actually bring value to the network [0],
_all of the reports_ are about how stupid the idea is and how such
a move would kill Twitter. One could brush it off as mere "Musk
derangement Syndrome" or sensationalist media trying to capitalize
on the latest current thing, but as someone who has been working on
a "healthy" alternative to social media that works on the exact
same principle of charging small amounts from all users [1], and
struggling to figure out if this can ever be a viable business [2],
I am genuinely puzzled: if every company that offers free services
is "evil" and people do not want to pay for access to networks, how
the hell is this whole thing supposed to work? Is this just
another example of people virtue signalling and failing to
(literally) put their money where their mouths are, or is there any
real alternative to this that I am not seeing? [0]:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/19/elon-musk-
twitter-x-subscription-fees-users-posts [1]: https://communick.com
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674034
Author : rglullis
Score : 9 points
Date : 2023-09-20 21:30 UTC (1 hours ago)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I disagree that charging for usage is guaranteed to kill Twitter.
|
| Charging is a non-starter for a newcomer due to the chicken & egg
| problem (nobody would pay for a platform with no users, thus it
| never gains any users), but it's not clear what will happen if an
| _established_ platform with significant influence starts
| charging. It 's worth a shot.
|
| It could very well be that charging a reasonable amount for
| access ends up being sustainable and actually improves the
| platform, both in terms of fighting against unauthorized spam
| (bots, etc) but also "authorized" spam aka ads and other dark
| patterns since user-hostile features no longer make sense if it's
| those same users who now pay for it.
|
| When it comes to monetizing social media without ads, one
| solution could be to get businesses/commercial entities to
| subsidize everyone else - using the network for personal use is
| free but no commercial content is allowed; for that a paid
| "business" account is required which in turn subsidizes free
| users.
| rglullis wrote:
| I'm totally on board with the idea for them to try it. At the
| very least, it would be some validation to those that kept
| complaining about "Social Dilemma" stuff and it would show that
| you can have a viable business if your network focuses more on
| quality than quantity.
|
| The only thing that baffles me is that it seems that _people_
| do not want to pay for the _service_ of social media. People
| don 't mind paying their phone or water bills, but for some
| strange reason using an internet service that requires an
| infinite amount of bandwidth and storage (not to mention human
| effort in moderation and feature development) should either be
| free or have some other ulterior motivation to justify its
| price tag.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > if every company that offers free services is "evil" and people
| do not want to pay for access to networks, how the hell is this
| whole thing supposed to work?
|
| Seems pretty simple to me; cut "companies" out entirely.
|
| The problem with Twitter isn't so much _paying_ for it as
| _monetizing_ it. Monetization is an endless user-experience
| sinkhole that optimizes for the lowest-common-denominator and
| never ends. Locking users in a sinking ship is a bad business
| model, Twitter only got away with it because it took 10 years to
| sink and Dorsey had a great poker face.
|
| Platforms like Mastodon decimate this problem, for me. Instead of
| engineering for monetization, people optimized for user
| experience. Advertisements don't exist, because they harm the UX
| and get optimized out; you're not a competitive Mastodon server
| if you run ads.
|
| I've heard convincing arguements that decentralized platforms
| lack real-world celebrities, but I only see that as a plus in a
| post-Musk world.
| rglullis wrote:
| This simply does not scale.
|
| Small instances from enthusiasts _are_ being funded by the
| person /people running it, but if we assume that one "small
| instance" can serve up to 100 people while costing pocket
| change to the admin, we would need _20 million_ "hobbyists"
| running their instances if the fediverse is to become an
| alternative to Facebook or Instagram.
|
| Larger instances based on donations are _all_ struggling.
| Fosstodon started open and donation based and promised to take
| any surplus and donate to the upstream projects. Their last
| donation was in 2021 [0]. Now they even closed down for new
| signups and made it invite-only. Newsie.social, an instance
| made for journalists have 20000 sign ups, 2300 active users and
| less than 2% of the active user base contributes. The admin has
| been pleading for support in an attempt to keep it open, but it
| 's quite likely they will announce it will close. It's
| ridiculous.
|
| [0]: https://hub.fosstodon.org/finances/
| wmf wrote:
| Mastodon servers still have to be paid for. The current
| martyrdom system isn't scalable or sustainable.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Oh, for sure. But they also have to compete with each other
| if they want users, which has so-far prevented any form of
| advertising on public instances.
|
| Plus, martyrdom seems to be par for the course if you're not
| willing to make a Facebook account. I'm perfectly content
| sitting opposite of Twitter, but your mileage may vary.
| wmf wrote:
| I meant the instance admins are martyrs because they're
| doing high-stakes moderation for free and they receive only
| abuse in return. Pitting instance admins in a race-to-the-
| bottom competition where they have no hope of ever being
| compensated is inhumane.
| rglullis wrote:
| This is the main reason why I refuse to open my instance
| and make it donation-based. I'd rather pay to have an
| over provisioned server for my 5 active users than having
| to deal with entitled "supporters" who think that their
| donation would give them with the right to judge me for
| everything I say or do.
| jdougan wrote:
| > cut "companies" out entirely.
|
| As written, that is probably not possible. As long as people
| don't want to manage their own services someone will offer to
| do it for them, and one of the corporate forms is the natural
| way to structure that, particularly in the presence of
| liability laws.
|
| I expect to eventually see a mastodon service that does do ads
| as I think the current system is unsustainable with current
| attitudes. I have no idea how they'll make ads acceptable, but
| I have faith in the creativity of people looking to make a
| steady buck. Once they have the extra income, that will make it
| less likely to collapse than its peers, so evolution will kick
| in and many will do whatever it is that stabilized the income.
| wmf wrote:
| Yeah, this is a big problem. The EU solution would be to fund it
| with taxes but obviously that won't work everywhere. Maybe a few
| megacorps could run social media as a loss leader but it's hard
| to imagine why they'd want to.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > The EU solution would be to fund it with taxes
|
| That doesn't seem to be anywhere in their plans, unless you're
| accusing market regulators of being taxpayer-funded (in which
| case, guilty-as-charged).
|
| Currently, the only EU solution has been demanding
| interoperability of platforms. How that's done is up to
| individual companies, unless they use it for anticompetitive
| purposes.
| wmf wrote:
| I think the Doctorowists would say that interoperable shit is
| still shit. If they want social media with no user cost, no
| ads, and no tracking of any kind... that boxes them into a
| very small design space.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't mind paying for things that are worth paying for at all.
| I do it all the time.
|
| However, when it comes to services, they tend to spy on you
| whether or not you pay for them. I won't pay for a service solely
| on the basis that it would improve the privacy situation because
| I don't think that it generally does.
|
| As to Twitter specifically, I don't find value in it sufficient
| to be worth paying for, so I wouldn't. But I don't use it anyway,
| so I wouldn't count as a lost customer.
| gdulli wrote:
| First, Twitter just isn't as much fun as it used to be. People
| are there out of inertia and inability to port their followers,
| not delight.
|
| Second, Twitter Blue still has ads so you're still the product.
|
| > how the hell is this whole thing supposed to work?
|
| Twitter was relatively recently profitable. Surely they got
| bloated and through layoffs could have gotten back there or
| close. And the prior ownership would have stayed centrist enough
| to avoid pissing off either side's advertisers or users at scale.
|
| And maybe the prior ownership could have launched a paid tier
| that people felt good about, rather than taking away features and
| APIs and selling an experience that was lesser than what we'd
| been used to getting for free.
| dongping wrote:
| Perhaps serving plain text data is cheap enough so that it can be
| done as a non-profit/hobbyist project?
|
| The problem is that people don't like to read text, and thus the
| above proposed social network might not have widespread adoption,
| thus reducing the network effect.
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(page generated 2023-09-20 23:01 UTC)