I run a Mastodon instance for myself and some friends. It's got about 250 accounts total. The hosting costs are about evenly split between myself and friends willing to throw me some money via Patreon. It is not making me money and I do not want it to make me money because then it would probably require a lot of my time to deal with moderating it. I don't want to have to do that or hire anyone to do it.
I run it to have a space that's free from the bullshit corporate social media does in the name of "increasing engagement" to make more profit off of ad views. I like that I can visit my instance, catch up on the local timeline and the stuff I'm personally following, and then be done with it for most of the day, versus opening up a corporate site that's had tons of very smart people sink a lot of time and effort into figuring out how to keep me there for hours on end, whether or not I'm better off for it.
You make the comparison to AT&T. They charge a lot of money for the service that they provide, and as you mention, they don't do all the shady things that social platforms do.
Most other great tech products are provided by businesses. Apple is the prime example of a company that is both (a) massively successful and (b) not hostile to their users' privacy.
The value is in the network infrastructure, not the so-called "tech companies" operating on it as middlemen, spying on internet users as a so-called "business".
We as users already pay for that infrastructure. We pay for an internet connection. The network infrastructure is already monetised.
That network infrastructure is worth something even if every single tech company ceased to exist. Would you stop paying for internet access just because some website went offline.
The large websites many people are using are 100% user-generated content, much of it being in the form of human communication. That so-called content is not going to disappear if tech companies stop spying for money. (We often hear of tech company users losing their content when the companies discontinue so-called "service". Not surprising since the companies serve advertisers, not users.) The tech companies are not the content creators. Generally, users do not pay tech companies for service and tech companies do not pay users for content. Tech companies are middlemen.
"Tech" companies want you to believe "This is how it must be. There is no other way." They want you to believe they are "the internet". But the menu is not the meal. The map is not the territory. The middleman has no inherent value. He must leech to survive.
People online often comment that "Facebook" (not to mention many other tech company websites) could be written, for free, in a weekend, and what makes Facebook so popular is not the people who write PHP for Zuckerberg, it is the network effects, the fortuitous timing and luck that Facebook has enjoyed to become so large.
What has been done to date can be replicated by others, but Big Tech wants people to accept another "default assumption": massive scale, all under single ownership, is a requirement.
AT&T was broken up and we did not lose telephone service. Around the world, customers of one telephone company are able to call customers of other telephone companies.
These are the same policies Wikipedia has had for over a decade, with only relatively minor changes. Are you saying they're being interpreted differently? Could you give an example?
> with only relatively minor changes
Relatively minor changes have huge effect on the content of articles. The linked article also addresses how Wikipedia has banned conservative sources from Wikipedia including Fox News, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post. "In short, and with few exceptions, only globalist, progressive mainstream sources—and sources friendly to globalist progressivism—are permitted."
Every claim in a Wikipedia article must be accompanied with a source. Claims that are only covered by conservative media and not covered at all by mainstream (liberal) media, cannot be referenced as a source in a Wikipedia article. This leads to conservative viewpoints being removed from articles. Which directly causes articles to become biased towards mainstream viewpoints.
That checks out.
at least US intelligence agencies used to hide behind private news sources until they started hiring the intelligence people outright.
They're a state backed propaganda machine pushing the state's narrative, but resisting any other narrative when the current opposition in power because they've been entirely staffed by activist journalists.
The BBC works directly with the UK Foreign Office to push propaganda to destabilise other countries: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of...
FWIW I don’t think it’s an MI6 backed site
Anyone suggesting Bellingcat is more reliable than Wikileaks is regurgitating establishment talking points.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. Single-purpose accounts are not cool in general, because pre-existing agendas aren't sympatico with curiosity, which is the core value of this site.
It’s clear based on user behavior that users like the experience that centralized, for-profit social media networks provide. That experience invariably is very expensive to deliver… Dramatically more expensive than serving Wikipedia, for example, and the costs grow faster as the number of users increase.
So, in order to deliver the user experience that real people have demonstrated their preference for, one of the key inputs is exceptionally large (and increasing) amounts of money.
In order to be sustainable, that money has to come from somewhere. Targeted ads aren’t the only option, but no viable competitor has been discovered.
The reason why targeted ads are so productive here is because the value of the network grows non-linearly (up to a point) with each additional user. If you charge an entrance fee to each user, your network will be smaller and therefore outrageously less valuable than any network that does not charge an entrance fee.
Therefore, so long as any social network is willing to make their network free to enter, effectively no network with a comparable service can charge for usage.
Importantly, not only will the free social network be more valuable than the paid social network in relative terms, it will also be more valuable in absolute terms – both in terms of value received per user and number of users receiving value. So, it may be possible to regulate free social networks out of existence, but doing so would necessarily destroy a lot of user value in the process.
Perhaps there is some type of patronage or donation-based model that could both enable the free entry price and avoid the pitfalls of the ads-based business model. However, an organization like this is unlikely to attract the technical talent necessary to build competitive products.
Of course, like both of us mentioned, other models and competitive ecosystems exist. Centralized social networks have not killed email or instant messaging or blogs or websites. Those things are, by every measure, actually way bigger than they ever have been. So in a sense, the thing you’re hoping for is already here, it’s just not the dominant modality chosen by other people.
There are fair questions to ask about the power that ownership and control of a centralized social network imbues. Though, I think those are orthogonal concerns to the question of funding mechanisms.
In sum, I think the world you’ve expressed desire for does, indeed, already exist. It happens to co-exist with the world that you have expressed distaste for. While I am empathetic to your distaste for social media’s influence and business model, I think it’s important to recognize both why it exists and the ways in which it’s existence is not strictly zero sum.
I am confident if a free simple social network had caught on among college users about the time wikipedia started then facebook or myspace never would have been commercially viable.
Almost all users prefer no ads and privacy to ads and no privacy.
I disagree that that experience needs to be expensive to deliver. Imagine a decentralised social media network hosted on its users compute devices, kind of like email used to be. Aside from large streaming videos not that much processing power or storage is required per user.
Further I do not know if enough people would be willing to pay for access to a social media site for it to ever reach millions of users. Even at 1 USD a month per person people wouldn't join in unless millions were already there to make it worthwhile.
I don't think this is a given, and it's not that expensive to deliver either - the problem is more with the de facto monopoly of network position. But there are lags on all these kinds of activities, and user behaviour today, is conditioned on user experience yesterday, it may not predict well user behaviour in the future. Social media is still new, the experience of having it delivered to a mobile phone barely 10 years out of the box for most of the world.
Consider a marketing team that predicted the future of the book by looking only at input from the reading habits of a kindergarten, and ignoring any correlation with how those would change as the kids got older. Note that none of this has anything to do with payment per se, and neither does today's social "advertising enabled" media.
If you're listing those as Facebook alternatives, you misunderstand the key ingredient that made Facebook get adopted by billions of non-technical mainstream users: the real name identities.
The other communications platforms of dial-up BBSs, USENET, Geocities, personal Wordpress, vBulletin/phpBB forums, AOL AIM ... do not have strong real-name identities for non-tech people to find each other. Anonymous/pseudonymous online handles and cryptic login names have too much friction of discovery and are not scalable to a billion users. (Previous comment about the real Rolodex acting as database primary key: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15294086)
Facebook (possibly accidentally) bootstrapped the psychology of users creating logins with their real name in 2004 because Harvard students want to find each other on the service. In turn, as other schools were added on, other students were motivated to use their real names to interact with friends in other schools. The social graph of real names becomes so viable that old high school alumni that were "lost" can now find each other again and grandparents can easily now keep track of grandchildren's baby photos. The fake names of USENET and other forums prevent that from happening.
Emails don't work for social network growth because you can't derive an email address from a real name you know. Someone has to tell you the exact spelling of their email address. With Facebook, you can just find them by their real name (or their real phone number) and send a "friend request".
>All these options worked for expressing one's self online
The secret sauce to Facebook's dominance is its accumulation of real identities and not because it gives Facebook users a way to "express themselves". E.g. A lot of grandparents following grandchildren photos don't post anything.
Consider direction of cause & effect:
- easier evolution of platform: a bunch of users login with real names to follow/poke each other --> easy to build on that network into groups for discussion, shared calendar events, share news articles, etc
- harder to grow platform: start with discussion forum software with fake names --> impossible to build a giant sticky social network graph from that base
Facebook & Linkedin built on real names. WhatsApp growth built on real phone numbers.
Platforms built on real identities will naturally centralize because nobody has come up with a viable decentralized alternative for a universal identity database. Ideas like web-of-trust, blockchain, keybase.io, etc don't accomplish the same thing as Facebook's real_id database.
[To downvoters, if you have a better explanation of how Facebook got mass adoption by non-tech people in ways that didn't happen with USENET and vBulletin web discussion forums, please reply with your thoughts.]
It's not like facebook required one in the beginning either. You could signup with joe s and many of these profiles still exist.
The secret was the rollout (the school network connected to your edu email), and other tricks like getting you to give your login/password so hotmail contacts could be downloaded.
The journey to the top has a lot of little wins. Real names were a step added much later and connected with their ad network strategy.
I understand but my comment wasn't trying to explain Facebook competitive market value by reducing it to only to real names. To beat Friendster, beat Google+, and get to its successful IPO, one can point to many things ... e.g. the addictive NewsFeed rollout in September 2006... and free unlimited disk space for photos, photo tagging of friends, etc.
My comment to gp's quote was how Facebook as a social network works very differently from USENET/Geocities/vBulletin/AOL_AIM. One can't point to those older communications alternatives and say they work "just as well". On those platforms, there's a fundamental difference that prevents people from even finding each other.
When they opened the floodgates it was a chance for normal people to associate with fancy harvard people and show how they were too cool for MySpace now.
You would be hard pressed to duplicate that kind of buzz anymore.
Finding people you know on Facebook is only one aspect of their success and it's probably the most heavily network dependant one. The other thing that drove adoption was the relative simplicity of publishing content. Your Facebook profile was/is essentially a dumbed down webpage where you can post text, links and photos. You also get free hosting, free "email" in the form of messaging, and a bag of other features that you would normally have to set up yourself and pay for. They did a good enough job of providing all of the killer features of the internet for free to average, non-technical users.
Because it's hard to get people to enter that information. In contrast, Harvard students in 2004 were highly motivated and that started everything off.
From 2005 to 2008, the killer feature of Facebook was entering your real information when signing up and then Facebook showing all the real people in life that were connected to you. E.g... old high school friends finding each other again. Likewise, signing up for Facebook means you also wanted to "be found" by others. It was the first mainstream service to successfully accomplish this. Myspace didn't do it. Friendster tried but their webpage performance was too slow.
>The other thing that drove adoption was the relative simplicity of publishing content.
Most Facebook users do not "publish content". Most just follow their friends or read links passed on by friends (or the algorithm). [EDIT for clarity: I mean "publish content" the way that gp I replied to cited "blogs/personal websites"]
By publish content I mean post links, photos, comments, rants, etc. Do people no longer do that on Facebook?
There is a difference between providing infrastructure for social connection and farming/harvestings/leveraging the information gathered from what is constructed on that infrastructure.
The current situation is akin to if AT&T had listened in on all phone conversations (assuming no technical barriers) and sold ads based on what you said to friends and family. Before you made a call you would need to listen to a personalised ad on your reciever.
Before facebook or myspace or twitter there were blogs/personal websites, forums, email and instant messaging. All these options worked for expressing one's self online and none of them were under a centralised, for-profit entity.
Wikipedia is a good example of a decentralised social network although it appears to be increasingly infected with the reddit/twitter virus.