Yes, this is what the article says. This means we must force them to.
Advertising represents 98.5% of Facebook's revenue and you're proposing that we (btw, who is "we"? They are a global company) tell them they can't run ads? What exactly remains for the 43,000 employees and the 5% of the S&P500 market cap that you just decided to eliminate?
It's not impossible to imagine that, say, Microsoft and Apple, in competition for users, could start filtering advertisements in the browsers. That this pulls users from Chrome. And changes the landscape yet another time.
In the absence of abusive advertising people would not suddenly stop spending money. They might even be more inclined to seek out new experiences without a constant mental assault by the largest corporations with the deepest coffers to bury them in their ads. Regardless of the way it goes, advertising is absolutely a net deficit to a small business - they don't have the capital resources or scale to permeate culture the way large corporations can. And if they are expending their limited resources trying to participate in the rat race they are sacrificing value to their existing customers and shortchanging their own growth for what is effectively an extortion of participation - if everyone else is deluged in manipulation to rob them and you don't participate there will be no money left over once the wallet has been rung dry by as many emotional vectors as possible for them to find you.
And with ads the mechanism is really obvious—-it helps people identify products that solve their problems.
The economy growing is not necessarily a good thing. For instance, the economy would get bigger if the government passed a law requiring everyone to buy mud pies — a mud pie industry would spring up, employ lots of people, and add to the country's GDP. But society wouldn't be better to live in for it, because mud pies are useless. Likewise, the economy would be smaller if people didn't constantly replace their clothes to keep up with the latest corporate-engineered fashion, or if they stopped buying books like Rich Guy's System for Making Guaranteed Free Money in Real Estate, but people would still be better off if they did.
But I don't really think that adverse economic impact is one of them.
The shortsightedness of such thinking amazes me.
If people couldn't easily monetize the platform the way Facebook does it opens up the market for diverse platforms. Monetizing email service is notoriously difficult and Gmails lack of in-app advertising sets a playing field nobody else can exploit for massive growth. That has probably in large part been what has kept IMAP alive while XMPP and other open communication protocols died - the ubiquity and lack of ability to dilute the user experience with ads for profit keeps predatory competition out. That hasn't stopped Google from doing some seedy shit in recent years with their position but even they have to be conservative on radical anti-user behavior that would drive their base off Gmail - because their userbase can leave. Its the beauty of decentralization.
It seems more delusional to predict the future (nobody would use it) with confidence.
I know framing such things as false dichotomies is kinda what educated Western intellectuals do, but God or nature impose no such limitations on us. We are free to think, negotiate, create hybrid solutions and adjust as necessary, and so forth and so on. We have the ability to largely be the masters of our own destiny, but waking up and making that choice is our responsibility, not God's.
Ok then, can you restate your prediction of the future without the use of figures of speech? Calling people delusional who disagree with an utterly vague warning seems a bit inappropriate.
> It's easy to settle the question with a poll: ask people worldwide if you 'd pay $40/year for FB. My bet would be it's < 5%
I like this much better, as it is no longer suggestive that certain approaches cannot be done for certain reasons, and instead only poses a perfectly valid question with an explicitly speculative bet about what the answer would be. Fantastic.
Or more likely, the AT&T/Verizon model of charging $0.10 / message which was the norm before internet-based communication became common.
Google offers me Gmail for $5/mo. Why won't they do that with search? Why won't FB or Twitter do the same? Ad-free google search is easily worth >$28/yr and I'd gladly pay it.
Given the enormous armies of engineers in the employ of Google, FB, Twitter, etc, and the fact that Google already offers paid services on non-search products, the ONLY explanation is malice.
How about instead we just stop using Facebook? I dropped it 3 years ago and haven't missed it one bit.
Yes. I dropped it much earlier than that, and have suffered no inconvenience or problem as a result.
What is the correct price? Do Facebook and other internet companies have some sort of a God given right to at least their current revenues? If so, why do I have to comply with a whole slew of laws and regulations that society has "decided" are better for the greater good, but we can't impose similar restrictions on them?
> Also the necessary 20% price increase every year
Lest the executives maybe make more money but a smaller profit margin? How about instead of spending resources on psychological exploitation of their userbase, they either cancel that expenditure or redirect it to adding beneficial features that users want to pay for?
> How about instead we just stop using Facebook?
If that can solve the problem, I'm happy to consider it.
> I dropped it 3 years ago and haven't missed it one bit.
And yet, we still seem to have a problem.
Once again, an utterly obvious problem seems unfixable because of some combination of excessive corporate influence over politicians combined with a disinterested public who seems to have been convinced that humans live in a world whose parameters we have absolutely no control over, all while being told how superior, powerful, and necessary democracy is. Meanwhile, over in China, when something is causing problems, the problem maker is asked to stop, and if he doesn't, he is made to stop, or else. And from anything I've seen, the Chinese government seems to be improving the well being of their citizens at a rapid pace (in both relative and absolute terms), and they have high support from the public, despite the lack of absolutely necessary Democracy.
Why is it that a bi-partisan group of politicians can't get together to come up with a plan to improve the situation, and while they're doing that telegraph to these social media companies that something is going to be done, possibly very much not to their liking, so it might be in their best interests to come up with a plan B of their own that is fundamentally different than the pure advertising model of the day? Of course, there are many reasons for this, one of them being that the political system in most Western countries is effectively broken and outdated, completely incapable of managing the complexities of the over-optimized societies that the scientists and technologists have built for us, while no corresponding discipline developed to handle important questions like whether just because we can do something, should we do it?
As always, I imagine we will just continue the charade of pointing our fingers at each other and the Russians, fiddling while Rome burns, as China grows ever more powerful and socially united.
I hope I at least live long enough to see how this will be explained away in the future as something that "no one" could see coming, just as "no one" could have seen the 2008 housing bubble coming.
Would you be willing to excerpt some particular quotes that you believe were most compelling in your formation of this perception?
Facebook has around 2.45B monthly active users. On a global basis, they would need to charge every user $28/yr to make the same annual revenue. I'm not sure what studies to cite, but I think it's relatively safe to say they'd lose a significant portion of their userbase if they started charging, and thus would need to charge a whole lot more than $28/yr per user.
While I can appreciate the notion, there's a zero percent chance any large social media platform like Facebook will ever ban ads.