While I agree that the free model is unsustainable, there are better ways than charging £10/mo for one social media site. A lot of people are struggling at the moment.

What would you suggest? Genuinely curious

Much of the Fediverse operates under a “pay what you can” model, and it seems plenty sustainable to me.

It's not. None of the donation-based instances are in the black, if you factor in the cost of the admins and moderators. Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because it became too big for its own sake, the admin couldn't handle anymore then shuts it down.

Much like any tech company, hardware and operational costs are a small fraction of the total expenses.

> if you factor in the cost of the admins and moderators

It is not possible to factor that “cost” in. They're volunteers: they're donating their time, and their time has no market value. Electricity, however, does.

> Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because

Every other month there is a big website going offline. A big social group disbanding. This is the normal way of things: human social structures don't endure like friendships do.

All of that is fine and good if we were talking about servers that were made for 100-200 people. This is not the case. When we are talking about servers that are house as many people as a large village, we are way past the realm of "community".

> human social structures don't endure like friendships do

IOW, the donation-based instances are not sustainable. If you want to have a service that you can rely on, you will need to resort to a professional service.

Nothing is indefinitely sustainable, and businesses are no exception. When the people involved don't want to do it any more, you have the same problem, whether it's volunteers volunteering, or professionals professionaling.

Twitter isn’t exactly a mandatory good.

If I had a dollar for everyone that say this, I would have a lot more than the $20/year I am getting from my only two customers on my mastodon instance.

Should HN limits the ability to comments only to paying visitors?

Is HN funded by ads? Is there a paid version of it?

HN is a sort of ad. This place was made as a recruitment funnel for a VC firm.

Also there are occasionally overt ads for companies funded by said VC firm inserted into the list on the front page. You can recognize these because they have the comment sections disabled.

None of the YC companies pay for the job listings. So no, HN by itself is not a business, so it makes no sense to debate whether it "ad-funded" or not.

The fact that there is someone with deep pockets that see this whole network as an opportunity for building their branding does not mean that they look at a balance sheet, or find "advertisers" in case their fund makes an expected loss, or anything like that.

HN is funded as an ad.

I understand what you are trying to say, but it makes absolutely no sense and it's terrible word-thinking.

Let me repeat. HN, by itself, is not a business. It is pointless to talk about its "business model", "funding", "revenue" or whether is breaks even or not. HN is not a core part of YC.

Twitter/Facebook/Reddit are at its core social media networks. They wouldn't exist as businesses if they are not expecting to get any type of revenue based on their social media offering. There is no way to compare any of them with HN.

> "HN, by itself, is not a business"

Who said HN is a business? I never said that, you seem to be reading between lines, words I didn't write. To reiterate, you asked if HN is funded by ads. I responded that HN is an ad (an ad, not a business), and furthermore often contains overt ads. And I never said anything about Twitter/Facebook/Reddit at all.

Anyway, if you want to argue with the version of me that exists in your imagination, you obviously don't need the real me here for it. So peace out.

> I responded that HN is an ad

And that is a ridiculous statement.

> And I never said anything about Twitter/Facebook/Reddit at all.

Then you interjected without any relation to the context of the conversation, and instead made this flawed and unrelated argument about "HN as an ad".

Took me few minutes to find this one[1]. Looks like the pricing was $50/yr for full feature, with free plan for up to 40 following. Over 110k users at some point. Shut down in 2017.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net