Unsustainable situations always seem to go on for longer than you expect, but I wonder if we're finally getting to be just a year or three out from Adpocalypse, when the ad-supported internet companies finally end up having to face head on that you can not serve two masters.
I wonder if there's going to be a market developing for services that look like current services, but actually cost money somehow. Probably a billion-dollar-level opportunity for figuring out how to charge for a Facebook or Google or Twitter a couple of bucks a month.
(If you are seriously inclined to take this on, which I would support, bear in mind that the answer to these questions, for all sorts of reasons, is never "It's just Facebook, with a subscription." Facebook, to take one example, has been deeply structured around advertising for years now. You can't take the end result and just remove advertising from it. You need to start back at the beginning and rethink the whole thing, figuring out how to get people to spend some money on it. And I can all but promise "It's Facebook, but cares about your privacy" is a dead letter too, as that has been tried. I don't know what the answers are, just some of the problems. It'll take some serious thought to solve this.)
You're really overestimating people's willingness to pay for a service that's already free and convenient. There's really no good comp for tens of millions of users switching from a free service to a paid service just to avoid ads/conspiracy theories.
Did you miss my last paragraph?
I mean, if "just reconceptualize the entire idea of a social network" sounds easy to you, well... go for it. But it doesn't sound easy to me, which is why I said "It'll take some serious thought to solve this."
No.
>It'll take some serious thought to solve this.
I disagree. No amount of serious thought is going to come up with a solution to reroute an established aspect of modern human nature. The only way this happens is a black swan event that (by definition) nobody is going to see coming.
Even completely free you can be profitable just selling 'credits' to send e-gifts etc. Facebook is functionally crippled, they still don't even have a dislike button.
Would you care to tell us more about this/these ??
A lack of a dislike button is functionally crippled? Please stop with the hyperbole. They have reasons for this and have rolled out other reaction types a while ago, and all of this is a miniscule amount of the functionality they offer to billions of people.
Isn't the current state of the average person's use of the Internet completely contradictory to this?
That's brilliant.
It can't come fast enough for me, but I highly doubt that's only 3 years away. It will also be remembered as the .com crash 2.0.
I mean, I personally already do (in the form of various services, such as usenet), but I'm talking about larger portions of the internet. I think maybe the exclusivity via paywall of the right service might actually draw users in.
Perhaps the federal government could find a budget every year to fund a website that provides exactly this, and that those managing it are not employees of the government.
The first thought I had was that maybe UN should run something like this, but still, there's an issue that affects us regardless of who is running the service - social media are heavily network-effect-dependent. Unless you're willing to literally have a law against using privately-owned social media and forcing people into government-provided services, any attempt of building such a service will likely fail simply because Twitter, FB and Reddit are already there, and regular people won't have any strong incentive to jump ship.
(http://www.eternal-september.org/ if you want your own free text-only feed)
This was inevitable. All the above-mentioned services are funded - in large part - by ads. When it came to choosing between serving the users vs. the advertisers the latter would always win in the long run because they were the paying customers.
What's needed is some sort of "public" space on the internet that's not controlled by corporate (and increasingly advertising) interests. Non-profits like Wikipedia and archive.org come close, but aren't meant for real time communication. Ironically, technologies like SMS are also somewhat neutral because they were conceived before advertising became the dominant business model on mobile and have no hooks for "curation" and "engagement".