The closest to an alternative model that works here is wikipedia. They achieve it by having a different default for user generated content - that it doesn't remain unless it is strictly on topic (you can't just write your random thoughts and shitposts in an article) - and by having a social mission that attracts donations. (They also run incredibly lean, which other mass market sites could definitely learn from.)
Another alternative model being pursued is the federated approach. I think this approach in principle but I don't think it will ever reach the mass market hundreds of millions of active users position of the mainstream social media products. Its solution to the problem is that some subset of power users will self-host and absorb the costs, either via individual altruism or something, or by developing some other model. I think this will end up centralizing, with a small number of nodes hosting most of the usage, and probably eventually falling back to advertising to cover costs. But I dunno, we'll see, maybe this will work.
Another more successful model is to just not be mass market at all, like HN and other various message boards. This reduces costs both for hosting and moderation and can then be justified by some non-financial benefit (like tacit advertisement for YC in the case of HN, or by tight community camaraderie for niche message boards).
Then another model that works is subscriptions. This drops the active user count massively and generally makes it harder to get traction, but I think it works the best of any of these when the stars align. I'd rather be Netflix or the NYT than Twitter or Reddit.
The model that isn't sustainable is a permanently investor funded one.
Often when these products launch - they have zero advertising, zero features to make money - they are totally aimed at growing market share - totally focused on the user.
Then it's inevitably downhill from there - whether it's people not being prepared to pay ( eg Blue ticks ) or complaining about advertising or scrapping of data.
One of the damaging effects of the large amount of investor funded products is that it makes it very difficult for the user supported ( paid ) ones to thrive.
Perhaps the current state is because we are not at equilibrium - and as regulation, and the market matures it will become a bit more sane.
The government can. These companies could be nationalized, or the government could make their own competing sites if they were interested in doing so. But they're just not.
It takes more than just the means. It takes a will to do it.
https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/
Though I am not sure the political will exists.
But I do quite like your proposal for how it could be accomplished technically through federation. It at least sidesteps the problem of the government building it through their fundamentally broken technology "procurement" processes.
In essence that's a user ( indirectly through taxes ) supported model.
In the UK, the BBC follows that model ( the license fee is in effect a tax in all but name ) - and it's model is constantly under attack from certain quarters.
Indeed the BBC has being doing pilots in the social space - with SOLID and data pods.
See https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/together-pod
The key question here is any of this stuff actually important enough for centralized funded.
Let's not forget, there is also the spectre of government control - you know the government security services will have full access.
I found myself struggling with Linked Data for quite some time now, and I have struggled with the idea that perhaps part of the problem with adoption of Linked Data is existing mental interia of RMDBS or other systems.
I like the idea - kinda back to a decentralised web of peers like it was in the early days.
However the complexity of the technology is certainty off-putting - I'm not enough of an expert to tell how much of that complexity is adherence to a tech stack ( like RDF, SPARQL ) and how much is simply the complexity of the underlying problem.
I would say the guys behind it seem fairly pragmatic. As an example while the technology allows you to self host, they acknowledge that most people won't be able/want to - and are looking to enable providers as well.
I think one of the problems with the LD/RDF community is it can attract the type of person that things 'we just need a single well defined data model for the universe'.
I think trying to get one schema to rule them all is doomed to failure - for two reasons
- for ontologies to be effective all the users of that ontology have to have a shared understanding of the ontology - simple a written down definition isn't enough.
- the world can be viewed from multiple angles - even if you could agree one view, it's not going to be optimal for all use cases.
However as I said, the SOLID project doesn't appear to be falling into that trap - it appears very focused and pragmatic.
I’ve been trying to work on an alternative solution to SOLID, but I’m always double checking myself just to make sure that I’m not just simply failing to grasp the concepts.
I had half an idea yesterday on this from HN:
Or maybe to protect against that, there's a strict moderation governance document for that to the effect of "If it's not illegal, it flies". That could still get rough since there's lots of non-illegal content you could put on there which people wouldn't want to see.
Independently hosted nodes still feel like the way to go to me. No hard authority, just people talking with people and moderating to set the tone they want for their community. If the moderators are jerks, moving to a different node should be easy (thus putting the power into the hands of the users to abide by the governance they find most agreeable) and not cause you to exile yourself from your civic community.
You know how community meetings and town halls are awful and fruitless because they're filled to the brim with the noisiest cranks and they can't be kicked out because they're still members of the public after all, and nobody else participates because it's maddening to be around all those noisy cranks? Like that, but web scale.
I'm sure the noisy cranks would love this, but I'm not interested in it.
As a follow question: is this a solvable problem between host moderation and user self moderation?
In other words: Let’s pretend NPR hosts a Reddit-like site whose primary objective is to facilitate discussion on topics shared by NPR.
NPR doesn’t outright ban everything unless it violates some terrible things.
Could user moderation NPR Reddit also expand on this? So long as they fall under the same guidelines?
I ask this question because it seems to me that there does exist some useful moderation: there are well moderated Reddits and for the most part Wikipedia is also pretty well moderated.
Wikipedia is self moderated and there are well moderated Reddits. The host of the ActivityPub site doesn’t have to do all the moderation, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason that users themselves couldn’t “mute” troublesome posters from their own feeds, right?
The person who set up the server doesn't, no, they can appoint moderators that lack administrative privileges. I don't recall at the moment if moderators have the ability to federate/defederate with peers, and that might be an implementation detail anyway. This is probably the way a large well-run node should work - developing a team of moderators from within the community.
> there doesn’t seem to be a reason that users themselves couldn’t “mute” troublesome posters from their own feeds, right?
This is true as far as it goes, but if a node federates with peers that dump a high volume of content onto the network the user doesn't want to see, then the user will find it a headache to manually filter just what they want to see (approximately the feeling of manually filtering out email spam). So some filtering should be done by the host.
I think the killer feature of federation in general (particularly in the context of social media) is that it decouples user account administration (and by extension, data collection) from the network effect. I run my own node that just has my account on it, but I can still benefit from the network by federating with other nodes.
Which today is primarily Google, Amazon, Meta, and yes, even Apple
I was under the impression that Apple makes most of its money from margins on hardware sales, with services a growing percentage (Apple TV, App Store).
The "advertising and marketing" that is involved with Apple is them spending money on it so people know about what they sell, and not so much Apple taking in advertising and marketing money (which Google and Meta do).
Apple does not live or die off advertisements like some others, but they are definitely a victim of this downward trend. As their margins on hardware shrink, their relationship with China comes under threat, and their monopoly on The App Store becomes less certain, it will be interesting to see how well they resist this pattern.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/10/19/apples-...
Oh, wait, it's not just that. It's also greed. Greedy customers wanting things without paying what they're worth, greedy entrepreneurs not wanting to grow a business steady, healthy and organically, greedy investors, greedy software engineers, etc, etc.
What expectation of knowledge make the average person taking a deal, greedy? And how many people taking that deal meet that expectation of knowledge?
To flesh out the point I assume they were making is that customers unfairly adjust their expectations around an unsustainable, too-good-to-be-true edge case, rather than recognizing it for what it is. And consequently scoff at anything that doesn’t now align with what they’ve unfairly shifted their expectations to.
I disagree with this. While this group certainly exists, there's a far larger segment of people that have a variable cost-return analysis eschewing towards rock bottom that inevitably lends itself to buying shittier products.
In other words, a lot of people are cheapskates.
You can make a stellar game app but even charging one flat $5 fee will absolutely tank your downloads because people would rather play hundreds of ad-ridden shitty lootbox gambling games for free. And what's worse, they'll even try to pirate your game for the fuck of it too.
It plagues food shelves with increasingly worse results. People don't give a shit about cage free, roaming organically grass fed whatever eggs. Sure, some do, but not most. Oh, Carton B costs 20 cents less than Carton A? Bingo. I just saved 20 cents. The eggs taste practically the same (they don't). But it gets them 90% there, and that's a compromise most people are fine with because they saved money. This trickles up to the producers, who obviously emphasize Carton A production now. Let it go on for long enough, with a little bit of poor government oversight, and you can even sell Carton A eggs as Carton B, and reap more from the suckers who think they're getting a better product. It's greed all the way around, and people fuck themselves constantly because of it. It's why we have laws and building codes and health and safety regulations. Society functions on setting the minimum bar for everything, because otherwise we devolve into chaos. And people constantly love to fucking limbo.
The amount of piracy that occurs and the number of bad things that happen because consumers buy purely based on price without doing basic research shows that yes, the customers are greedy.
It depends on how you define "work". They may not work in the way that the users were led to believe, but often enough someone got rich, and in that sense they do work.
Ie a lot of these are the equivalent of giving away free ( investor funded ) banana fritters, getting decent uptake and using it to declare that the market in banana fritters is huge, but when you start to charge for them it turns our the market is quite small.
Another way the business models don't work is the companies start off assuming no costs around policing - like a shop with no security whatsoever. Works fine for a while, but as it grows and people realise it's got no security they start to get targeted, and costs go up.