I think it is way more than the "ninth most popular website." I'm quite sure the Web would be a very different place if it hadn't existed. In fact, I would rank Wikipedia alongside the Web and perhaps the Internet. Not only did it establish that information about nearly everything would be available free and without commercial motivations (obviously, with tremendous caveats, but still far closer to those ideals than any of its contemporaries), it also provides an incredible corpus that is the basis of many machine learning approaches. With the excuses people make on a daily basis, there's no assurance something like Wikipedia would have happened the same way. And it continues to develop important projects. Separately, Wales doesn't deserve all the credit, but I just can't leave that the summary of "Wikipedia" is it's "almost as popular as Facebook."
I’m all for finding alternatives to the ad-based models that plague social media (and the web, in general), but how will people without bank accounts use such a system?
Free social networks (as in free beer) only accept users who don't have a bank accounts because the networks expect them to have one in the near future. Otherwise, there would be no reason for advertisers pay the social networks for the cost of these "free riders". Everybody ends up being monetized, that's the plan.
I haven’t had a bank account for the last 8 years. How long do you expect they will wait for me to get a bank account? What about people who banks won’t work with?
I disagree with this notion that users are “free riders”. Users bring content to these platforms. Without users, the platforms themselves are absolutely useless.
In the article, it mentions that signing up is free, but there's a waiting list. 25,000 members (sorry 78,000) but only 200 have paid to bypass the waiting list. Beyond that, the signup page doesn't have enough information for me to share my information, which includes email and birth date.
I spend more time on HN than all other social media (reddit, facebook, instagram, whatever) combined. Isn't user engagement what matters from a consumer perspective?
HN isn't a social network. It's centered around topics (articles, Show/Ask HN, ...) rather than individuals. There's no way for me to follow or contact a particular user.
It's not the same as following in the traditional "use the follow to populate a timeline or feed" sense. I don't come to HN wondering "what did my peeps comment today?", rather I come to glance at particular stories, and perhaps read the comments.
The "engagement" aspect of HN is in the quality of items that make it to the front page, and in the comments. It's not in the slow drip-drip-drip of near-real-time notification regarding the activities of specific users.
is it? i mean there were online boards and forums that had this comments/replies structure, joel on software anyone?. well minus the points. but those were never called social networks...
I wouldn't have called it a social network - there's really no graph of user connections, unless you want to consider a graph of directional has-replied-to or has-upvoted links, but that's pushing it.
But if another technology added an embedded HN clone, they would call it "social networking features", probably...
The main difference between a 'social media' forum and a topical forum is that in a topical forum there's some expectation of staying more or less, you know, on topic. There is some functional overlap, but more limited domain.
What the US government really wants is all your public online accounts.
They used the broad and not fully defined definition of the word to their advantage.
What a social media site is, is something I think we are all collectively defining. It's too new to be really set in stone.
Also, even though words have broad meanings, it doesn't make it right to use it that way, since social customs would make the person using such definitions unintelligible. For example, if I said in my introduction at a party to a woman "I'm gay", she will likely take it to mean 'I'm homosexual', not 'I'm happy'. Both are completely valid dictionary uses. Only one has a valid use in any modern context.
Social media is generally defined as media where the primary intent is socializing. For me, that means it is more about communicating with friends and family in a manner that is directed to furthering my understanding of them, and their understanding of me. These sites would be like facebook, twitter, instagram, etc
Sites like HN, webmasterworld, blackhatworld, etc... are more about advancing knowlledge in a specific area. Socializing is a secondary consequence. These could be considered 'quasi' social media accounts.
Based on the current definition of social media, even comments on a news site or blog, 'could' qualify. But then again we run into the issue that if you use words in non-standard ways you can become unintelligible to your fellow humans, undermining the whole purpose and concept of language. If I said 'I read a comment on social media' and really meant 'I read a comment on cnn.com' people would not understand what I'm saying. It would be odd and awkward.
So would you say that Reddit isn't a social network? I would have agreed at inception, but not anymore. I'd say the lines have blurred enough to look at any site where commenting is one of the primary functions as "social".
Who are my friends then? You've got access to my profile, if this is a social network you should be able to find out who my friends are, right?
This website contains no meaningful information about my relationships with other people. And more to the point, the way I use this site is not abnormal; people who leave lots of information about their social relationships on HN seem to be in a minority. You might claim that comments such as these, between you and I, are social interactions. I would counter by saying these are not meaningful social interactions. Don't take this personally but I don't know you and I don't plan on ever knowing you.
Although I would definitely consider HN to be a social network, the number of comments here disagreeing made me look into it a bit more. According to Wikipedia both Hacker News and Reddit are "social news websites".
$13/month does feel like an odd price point to me. I imagine people would compare to what they pay for Netflix, HULU, etc, and wonder why this is so high.
I would prefer a decentralized social network based on boxes you plug into your router with content shared in a way that fellow users bear the weight of shared content like torrents.
You could rent the box or buy outright with money to develop paid for by a premium on the box or by the rent wherein even a modest rent would outstrip the cost of buying like a cable box.
Sounds good in theory, but that is so far removed from what 99% of social media users do.
Nobody wants to rent/buy boxes, handle routers, etc. ; most users are on mobile, on the go.
Well the idea is they plug the box in at home, and the box is the server that contains all their shared data (photos, etc.) and lets them control how it's shared with others. Sure, they can access it from their phone, but the phone wouldn't be the server. The whole idea is that each user has control over their own data, instead of just handing it over to some big tech company.
Ideally no more complicated than setting up their phone and adding personal info/pictures. With an app store that defaults to installing only from official channels but with the ability to add channels more so like linux repos than the google play store.
How many users don't have home internet? You could also pay money for someone else to run it for you and later decide that paying $100 once was better than paying $10 a month forever. Note $10 a month x 5 years = $600.
That’s essentially what a Mastadon instance is. If it’s hosted at home or on someone’s cloud account - the difference is only in connectivity speed. I’m extremely hopefully, perhaps naively, that a new internet isn’t going to be based on blockchain or owning data or any foundational change - it will be based on the ability for people to host their own server-side software again. The App Stores democratized client side apps, but they forced a huge centralization into platforms.
What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center... one that encourages and assists with cloud native design and aims to reduce load rather than hope you architect incorrectly and happily charge for the waste.
Perhaps I’m being naive, but it feels like a tooling problem, not a social or political or economic one. Anyways, I’ve quit my job at Stripe and just finished YCS19 with the goal of closing the gap between Facebook/Mastadon, Medium/yourBlog, Minecraft.com and a docker image...
And you’re totally correct about renting home server “boxes” too - except most house holds already have plenty of compute and connectivity - it’s just that installing / managing server software is completely out of reach to most people (and some developers!). It doesn’t need to be grandmas running router software - just the family nerd able to create on the internet again - and reliable enough software you’d actually invite grandma to signup!
> What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center... one that encourages and assists with cloud native design and aims to reduce load rather than hope you architect incorrectly and happily charge for the waste.
Sandstorm tried this, and they got very very far.
I think it was ingenious, but the sysadmin in me was very skeptical about the HA/scaling story (there was none). I guess it's fine for self-hosting for yourself&friends, but there should be an easy way forward - after all, Kubernetes commoditised clustering (I mean - once you're past setup).
Where can I follow your efforts? You mention KubeSail in your profile, but that seems developer-oriented?
We (Sandstorm) had an HA/scaling story, which we called "Blackrock"[0], and it was (and still is) the basis for the Sandstorm Oasis hosting service. I actually think we spent far too much time on that part too early. It turns out we could have operated Oasis by running regular single-machine Sandstorm on a beefy (though not that beefy) VM and been fine -- honestly, we would have had fewer outages and better performance. We probably should have spent our time making the platform work better for developers and end users instead, and built out the scalability later when customers really demanded it...
> We probably should have spent our time making the platform work better for developers and end users instead [...].
I keep a number of folders / bookmarks / stickies, where I save all the quotes like this one, so that I can then stumble upon them randomly. This is the single most important thing to keep in mind when building any kind of a platform. Developers particularly, are often the most important users of your product, since they will over time help drive the momentum and keep on bringing value.
KubeSail is the company, yes - and developer oriented only in the sense that it’s not “Enterprise” - the idea is to make cloud native accessible to everyone - to make hosting your own apps fun and easy and cheap again! We have a long way to go and haven’t launched anywhere yet, but you can join the mailing list or just signup now for a free cluster namespace :)
"What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center"
Ease of deployment is one thing, but managing and troubleshooting these deployments is another. Ordinary people generally don't want to do any of these things.
There are some people who have both the technical aptitude and desire to do these things, but they'll likely always be a small minority. An even smaller minority will be willing to do these things long-term without getting paid.
> I would prefer a decentralized social network based on boxes you plug into your router with content shared in a way that fellow users bear the weight of shared content like torrents.
This is something that the SoLiD (Social Linked Data) initiative, based on web and linked-data standards, is expressly built to support; your "box" would implement what the initiative calls a Personal Online Datastore, or POD. Though "federated" third-party hosting of such datastores is also allowed for, of course.
Yes, this is something that the user would have to check out. My ISP is Comcast (a regular consumer account, not business). My contract specifically says that I am allowed to run servers from my home, as long as they aren't intended to be used by the general public.
I've been running my own servers from home for a very, very long time and it has never been an issue.
Running a social media node would probably count as "intended for the general public", but I'd bet that Comcast wouldn't really notice or care unless the amount of traffic exceeds a certain level or they start getting abuse complaints.
For this to succeed, I think you'd need a company that provided boxes as a service. Instead of having to order anything and plug it in, you just sign up online, the same as today's social networks.
Here's the twist: the company (presumably a non-profit or social purpose corp) would also offer the ability to buy your box, at which point they mail it to you; when you plug it in, your existing data is copied to it and you begin to self-host instead.
This makes it easy to sign up for and try out, while also offering a path toward self-hosting, once you decide you like it and don't want to keep paying the monthly fee.
There was some hype around something called "Freedom Box" [1] a while ago, but it seemed to have gone quiet. Things like this pop up every now and then, and then tend to disappear.
What? The Freedom Box project seems to still be going strong. The associated, pluggable hardware has "disappeared" mostly because it doesn't seem to do much over what a plain old single-board computer (SBC) or mini-PC can do already.
This is pretty much the only thing I use FB for, and even here it's not that much. It lets me keep tabs on people I rarely communicate with, and gives me a way to easily communicate with them if I want to say "hi" after a year of no communication. For people I'm not that close with (not enough to exchange phone numbers), it lets me keep a list of these mere acquaintances.
Although, The "celebrities"(I am more interested in following Engineers, Computer Scientists. These guys are my "celebrities") I would want to follow are not on facebook/instagram(Or they don't share anything I'd be interested in on those platforms).
I enjoy some of the content I find on Instagram from interesting individuals and companies. But for me the value of Facebook is its ubiquity - nothing comes close to it for being able to contact old friends from other countries, from schools, from various social circles, etc.
And for that reason the "quietly launched" thing here kinds of defeats the point of any Facebook rival for me.
In the bay area, I have hundreds of acquaintances that are burners, hippies, makers, etc. I've been keeping up with these folks for nearly two decades now and would like to continue to do so as they have enriched my life immeasurably. Many of us get together on at least a yearly basis and often do special events together. All the other tools that we would've used to communicate and coordinate with each other have died in favor of facebook.
I suspect the community here is just too large for something like a mailing list. I mean, there are mailing list, but they're less generalized than I like.
I've never done anything useful with an IDE as a Ruby developer. Why do IDEs like IntelliJ even exist? I personally don't have a need for them, and I refuse to understand that other people have different needs and wants.
Just my guess, but I bet that from this point on, few people (in the developed world) will race to sign up for a new social network. Why? Given the societal and personal costs (and benefits) that we've seen with previous social networks, a lot of lay people are re-evaluating the utility that such services provide them. In many cases, the answer is to keep your current social network, but increasingly disengage from it. Sometimes people find that they actually prefer to be less frequently "connected" to people in their lives, whether family/friends or casual acquaintances, especially given some of the caustic personality traits often displayed on social networks.
Also, many of today's recent non-FB social network successes (Whatsapp, etc) were launched before the general perception of social networking, and internet services in general, became increasingly skeptical. Outside of tech, or people with very narrow interest verticals not served by mainstream social networks, I don't know anyone who is looking for yet another generic social network.
Curiously, if true, this plays both the the detriment and benefit of established social networks: their primary, most profitable users are not likely to flee, but they are also likely to be less engaged.
TikTok is a great example of people being willing to join new social media but it's a niche social media app compared to fb/twitter... and in a lot of ways fills a void that Vine left, so i agree but think it's kind of an exception right now
A lot of people have been throwing up Mastodon/Pleroma/Fediverse on this thread and I think, like TikTok, you're going after a different segment: randos you don't know.
Mastodon/Fediverse instances feel like a nice big random AOL chat room, or Reddit threads in the Twitter format. It won't connect you to your current social groups (except the very few who are like 'Yea I'm on that. Here, follow me), but rather help you exchange ideas with a bunch of randos. Which is something that was pretty damn cool about the early Internet really.
I agree that people aren't looking for new social networks, but I do wonder about your view of disengaging from Facebook. I keep reading about it on HN but I'm not seeing it myself. I wonder if it's a US-centric view.
It's certainly becoming a more and more popular perspective with my demographic (20-something's in the UK). Most people haven't quite checked out just yet, but mainly use facebook for messenger and events, and are generally becoming:
1. Disengaged with the platform
2. Concerned about how much it knows about our lives
In the last few months, I've seen this go from something that only techies cared about to an increasingly mainstream point of view.
> 1. Disengaged with the platform 2. Concerned about how much it knows about our lives
Disengagement is an effect, not a cause, but I'd argue that the primary cause of disengagement is that the balance of dopamine increasing "happy" social networking experiences vs neutral or anger inducing negative experiences on social networks has shifted to the neutral/negative.
Even on the "happy" side, there's only so many recycled life-affirming aphorisms, or happy photos from other peoples' lives you can see in your newsfeed before you start to tune them out. On the negative side, produced content on social networks has turned toward the increasingly attention-grabbing, and occasionally even psychologically injurious. So if the happy stuff isn't making you so happy anymore, and you tire of the negative stuff, what do you do? Disengage.
According to Pew research, Facebook usage in the US has been flat since 2016, neither gaining nor losing overall.
However, the age breakdown of those users has changed a lot. Facebook has absolutely hemorrhaged users younger than about 45. The majority of American FB users are in the 46-76 year old range now, with 68% of US FB users aged 50 or older.
In the US, anyway, Facebook is for old farts and businesses.
Not US-specific, but it's absolutely a developed-country specific view. People are treating it more like they treat alcohol - fun to participate in every so often, but not healthy to do daily.
Might be a US-centric view, I live in Europe and I’ve started seeing less and less engagement on FB for some time now. Granted, me and my friends are in our late-30s, early-40s so we’re pretty busy with life generally speaking, but even so public sharing of stuff is at least an order of magnitude lower compared to 2012-2013. Most of the conversation has moved into private groups that are hosted by FB or WhatsApp.
I have a fairly large network of friends that existed before FB really had wide adoption. The platform they were on eventually died in favor of facebook.
At this point, I'd like to preserve that network of friends independent of facebook and most of those folks feel similarly. In that sense, there is at least some demand for a social network that isn't evil.
I feel the same. I find social networks pretty valuable but don't like or trust Facebook. I'd happily sign up (and pay for) a social network that brought the same benefits but was (1.) ad-free and (2.) didn't employ tons of people trying to maximize my engagement.
Then check out https://joinmastodon.org/ you can either host it yourself or join someone else's server where you can either pay/donate or just use it for free.
So mastondon is an open source twitter clone right? is there anything out there yet or in the works that is more in line with Facebook's product offerings with out the surveillance and tracking?
Kind of, Mastodon is the 'Twitter' part of the fediverse, PeerTube is the 'YouTube' part, Pixelfed is the 'Instagram' part, there are even people who try to use ActivityPub for things you do on GitHub normally. And you can follow and interact between all of them (theoretically and to some degree actually too).
But what you're looking for sounds mostly like Diaspora, which is quite old, it's from back in the Google+ days, and never really took off.
I was on Mastodon for more than a year and loved it: great conversation that reminded me of the hope and promise of the Internet in the late 90's. Then my instance admin went AWOL, the site crashed, and all of my data and social graph were lost. I still can't get the admin to respond to emails. I could host my own server but who really has the technical know-how and time to do that kind of work? Mastodon has got to solve the reliability and/or portability problem. If I could have recovered my social graph on another instance, I would still be on the network.
On my instance I can (manually) request a backup every 7 days. It would be nice if this could be automated but it's all media etc. so it's quite big for email. If the admin would have announced that they would switch off the server you could have moved easily which is possible at least since v3.0
I donated to the admin's Patreon account in excess of his hosting fees. But, that didn't cover his time, apparently. The admin is still active on GitHub after the server crashed; I guess he just lost interest.
You can start somewhere and then if you see that it doesn't stick around you can easily move your account to a different server and take all your followers with you, it's build into the software. In that sense it's even nicer than email where you need to tell everyone that you moved on to a different email-address manually.
For your use case, what part of your need isn't provided by a phone/address-book? I suspect it's the receipt of broadcast messages from your friend network? If so, then yes, you need a social network with features like FB.
Personally, I'd rather not receive those kind of messages - I only want to receive messages that someone specifically thought to send to me. Doing so dramatically reduces noise. The only exception to this is broadcast messages from important networks with built-in hard trust boundaries (the email list for my kids' classroom, my neighborhood watch list, the Whatsapp group with only me, my wife, my brother, and sister in law - not even parents), and even on those, I will leave if they become more of a cost than a benefit.
> Well, HN is a social network with broadcasting features
HN is pull actuated, not push. I have to register interest in topics by commenting before I get responses, and those responses are not part of the main feed. I have to go to my comments page to look for the responses. I don't get notified just because a particular user made a comment or post, because it is topic-centered, not user-centered.
And even with all that, if HN ever rises to a level of routine toxicity that the moderation via community or moderators isn't keeping in check, I'll leave.
Broadcast messages from people you care about are nice. So and so had a baby, or whatever else is going on in their life. It's why FB was useful for before it became a continuous stream of reposted drivel.
I like to keep up with what's going on in people's lives at a scale greater than one to one interactions can support. In my view, there's definitely an upside to technology that supports a number of friends and acquaintances roughly 10x what one could support otherwise.
Hell, even linkedin is somewhat useful to be able to keep up with what old colleagues are up to and reconnect at times.
There is an exception to this. A lot of people race to sign up on new networks to secure valuable and limited usernames or urls early in case the network does become a big deal someday.
I think this is a tiny number of people, but even then, how would an early username or URL on a hypothetically successful new social network benefit you anyway? Unless you are already a "big deal" yourself for other reasons, a particular username on a social network isn't going to turn you in to one.
Whatever one might think about social network "influencers", their influence is ultimately rooted in something about them (looks, charisma, knowledge, marketing dept strategy), not their username.
The way other social media platforms have solved this problem is by targeting younger demographics first, those that are making social media accounts for the first time.
For these "greenfield" users, there is no need to convince their friends to leave their existing social media platform, because there is none.
Every day, middle schoolers get smartphones for the first time, and the majority of them probably aren't going to make Facebook accounts, but rather Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok, etc.
At least on my FB feed (which is indeed becoming less full over time), at least once a week someone will raise the question of 'is there anywhere to go after Facebook?' So at least some people are looking.
> I don't know anyone who is looking for yet another generic social network.
Right — people don't go actively seeking a generic alternative to something they already have. They do although, hear about new services that do something different. Similar to TikTok, or Instagram, it will hit on a niche interest and expand from there. The current market leaders will ignore it long enough (opportunity not big enough) that by the time they see it as a threat, it's too late.
I think faking growth until you achieve actual growth is the time-honored tradition of social media websites, and can flip a failure into a success by getting people to feel that, "Am I missing out?" feeling again.
I don't think WT:Social is doing that right now though, so not sure what their plan is to combat what you're talking about.
You may be right but I went ahead and signed up for wt.social and paid for a year's subscription. Who knows - maybe something interesting will come from this.
I like the idea, but that price is going to keep out many, many people. I'd guess around $1/month would work, but even then, in the eyes of most you are competing with free.
i think it could actually work. a couple of messengers (slightly different product but still...) have tried offering good alternatives to whatsapp at a sensible price. It turns out, people aren't motivated to switch even if the price is low.
When you make it expensive, otoh, it feels exclusive. After some reputation is built you can somewhat lower the price and perhaps many people are thrilled that they can join a very exclusive club.
whether this works out remains to be seen. success in this area is hardly likely but I doubt pricing is the determining factor.
Considering that when you sign up you're put in a waiting list that can be bypassed by a monthly or yearly subscription (or by bringing on a bunch of users via referral links), I'd say "subscription model" is perfectly correct.
Curious what more experienced engineers/founders think of this:
I feel that one way to solve both the ownership over data problems and minimize server costs is to use some sort of P2P system where all posts, images, videos, etc are hosted locally. This could be through a browser extension when on a computer, within local storage on mobile apps, etc.
When a user pulls up their feed, it would be directly pulling posts from the locally hosted accounts of those they follow, similar to torrenting. With the bulk of data center costs offloaded to P2P, the remaining server costs could run on donations, similar to how Wikipedia does now.
I'm not sure if a social network like this currently exists, or if I'm missing some potential problems with the concept. Thoughts?
Governments around the world should demand Facebook either place a permanent ad banner promoting WT:Social front and center on their website for everyone from that country, or they can pay $x00 million in fines per month. If Facebook chooses to pay the fine, half the fine should then be donated to WT:Social to keep their site running and the rest can be distributed back to the taxpayers. :-)
2. More importantly: imagine it happens. Who would actually make a switch?
I mean, really, who chooses to use FB, because he likes FB? I don't think I know a single example. For the last year or so it even (finally!) became trendy among non-techy people to hate FB, but so what? People stay because their social circles stay. In fact, it's been quite a while since I don't actually feel pressured to use FB by induviduals, but rather the stuff like climbing club using FB as a platform to announce events and gather groups to go camping and stuff.
WT:Social might become of use as a very niche social network for news, but no way it can be seriously viewed as FB's rival. And even if they could, they are fighting for the yesterday's market, meanwhile Facebook builds the future, where their helpless users will willingly spend their lives in Oculus helmets socializing with their FB "friends" on VR beaches. Or whatever.
I checked it out by creating an account. It detected my country as India, and showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Contrast this to (using current conversion rates from INR to USD):
* Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that account sharing among a few people is quite common.
* Amazon Prime (with two day shipping plus Prime Video and Prime Music) costs about $14 a year.
* A print newspaper subscription of any major national newspaper would cost about $2.8 or even a lot lesser per month.
* An Audible subscription (one free credit a month) costs $2.8 a month, with lower prices on audiobooks and discounts on them.
* Some premium news publications cost about $30-$45 a year.
I'm not saying that this is similar to Netflix or Amazon or a national newspaper, but it's more about how the more popular as well as niche/premium services have priced themselves and how people perceive value. Comparatively, this $12.99/month or $100/year social network focused on news seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants. It could've probably done better with a currency adjusted or purchasing power parity specific rate. For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US).
Having talked about the pricing, the UI doesn't look great either. I saw a list of groups to choose from and the page looked like it was built more than a decade ago. It ought to look like a modern website (with more bells and whistles) if it wants to command more than premium rates. Even Facebook's site, which I think looks outdated, cluttered and ugly, looks better in comparison.
But Facebook's model, for instance, also prices people out. I am entirely unwilling to use Facebook because I consider it far too expensive. True, I'm paying with data rather than cash, but it's still paying. From my point of view, $12.99/mo is actually cheaper (assuming that paying that means I'm not going to be datamined).
Being “priced out” because you personally value your data more than others is a valid viewpoint, but that’s not the same thing as being priced out because you don’t have money.
That seems like a difference in viewpoint. I can understand your stance, but I don't share it. To me, being "priced out" means that something costs more than you are willing and able to pay.
Fair enough. I was just trying say that being unwilling to pay is very different than being unable to pay.
Charging a high price for a luxury brand is a fine business model but I wouldn’t consider a product accessible to only some socioeconomic groups to a be a Facebook competitor (as indicated in the article).
My general observation (anecdotal) is that people are more willing to pay a whole lot more for physical goods than for services (including apps, content and Internet connectivity).
Depends on the signaling value of the apps and content. Remember that one of the first iPhone apps was one that cost $500 and did nothing but print "I am rich" to the screen.
This is why the ad model works better. Local advertisers can bid on his data to show 5 cent ads where someone in northamerica may be worth 5 dollars. Trying to price this as a monthly service removes the ability to offer different prices per region without getting into fairness or causing people to get around the rules by signing up in different regions but watching from another.
Netflix has many problems with this model and is currently trying to find a solution. There are services setup to fool netflix into providing content outside of geograpical areas that they are liceased for.
An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook on his phone even if he lives in USA since his attention is not worth anything.
> An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook ...
A system in which a poor person making $30k/year and spends $500/year on products or content advertised via Facebook versus a rich person who makes $1M/year and spends $10k on products/content via facebook is not exactly progressive. The poor person ends up paying 1.6% of their income, while the rich person spends 0.1%.
The poor person spends 16X of their takehome earnings than the rich person, not exactly progressive.
I agree that regional or currency based pricing is not easy and comes with its own problems. But Wikipedia is one of those sites that's freely available and used by people around the world. I wouldn't have thought of the Wikipedia founder starting a venture that charges so much. The 2018-2019 fundraising report by Wikimedia Foundation [1] shows that all the countries in Asia combined contributed less than Australia and New Zealand put together. So he/they must have deep insight into how much money comes from where and the respective ability and willingness of people to donate from different places. They could've as well priced it proportionally with some adjustments on that data.
Part of Prime is getting you to give them $120 membership fee so you feel youre getting some kind of bonus buying from them ("free shipping") which reduces comparison shopping. I'm probably not going to buy $100/year memberships to costco, walmart, amazon, and target, even though im half way there and really tempted to pull the trigger on another.
The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me from going into the store and impulse buying something on a shelf once a month.
As far as Amazon Prime, I have to believe the price of shipping is built into the products, and the membership is for other psychological and behavior control reasons.
Is part of this social network price the same thing. A cost to make it exclusive, acts as a bit of a spam filter. Then after having sunk money into it, you feel the need to make it worthwhile. I never think "ive been watching too much prime I better get my value out of netflix this month" but a communication tool might be different.
I agree with you on the Amazon Prime membership triggering impulse purchases, stickiness with the one day or two day deliveries and of course, shipping built into the products' prices. But Amazon Prime video here (in India) has a lot of local content and gets many new movies quickly onto it. My assessment is that Prime Video is probably a bigger attraction for people here (perhaps with Prime Music) than two day shipping alone (which is not very widely available on many products).
The one nice thing about Prime vs Prime video, is they advertise both prices separately, so we can at least get a peak at what percent of the prime cost amazon thinks video is worth. We know they arent selling Video by itself at a loss, it wouldnt make sense to give away video as a loss leader, if you arent snagging people elsewhere.
Gotta be smart, I think Amazon technically paid me to have prime one year and this year I've negatived a good chunk of it. Any time they have the 1$ digital credit for delay shipping I select it which then subsidizes a good chunk of my eBook purchases. I think I've had 4$ in credit just this week and have another 1$ I'll get whenever the 5$ shoehorn I ordered yesterday ships.
This post shows how smart Amazon's Prime strategy is. We have someone probably spending thousands of dollars with Amazon (and Amazon taking a good chunk of that in commission) bragging about getting some free ebooks.
Spending money I'd spend at a brick and mortar store, that I'd have to drive to using oil life/tire life/gasoline/brake pad life/brake rotor life while also losing time.
Instead, I can think "oh hey I need to get a shoe horn, the heels on the uppers of the slip-ons I wear to church are getting funky" or "ah crap, I forgot to stop and get a new belt on the way home and this one is getting pretty loose on the last notch and I don't think this synthetic material is going to be happy if I punch a new hole" or "instead of driving to 6 stores hoping to find filters for my air purifier, I can buy 2 on Amazon right here on the toilet and be good for the next 2 years" and "my xlear nasal spray is about empty here at work and this heat is really drying my nose out, I'll just order another now instead of waiting until I go to the grocery Saturday" and "I need another USB C cable, this one is starting to get pretty stressed, I'll order one on Amazon instead of driving miles out of my way to go to Walmart or Best Buy hoping they have one".
Those are this week's purchases. All things I needed, all things I would have had to buy somewhere, all things I got a 1$ credit for which I will use towards eBooks I would have purchased either way.
Or last week when I ordered a tofu press, I have no idea where to buy a tofu press in the real world but wasting gobs of paper towels and using books just wasn't doing it for me.
It's not like I opened Amazon in a moment of boredom and said "let's see what I should waste money on today".
Related, I went to buy a shoe stretcher on Amazon. Had to buy 3 before I got one that wasn't complete garbage.
I'd have gone to someplace local but none of the local places have much inventory for quality goods anymore either...
For me Amazon is still a net win in regards to convenience, but there are a lot of things I just won't buy.
Heck for a little while earlier this year the official Sonicare page was somehow taken over by people selling knock-off replacement heads, all the links from the manufacturers verified page went to obviously fraudulent misspelled products.
>For me Amazon is still a net win in regards to convenience, but there are a lot of things I just won't buy.
Yeah for me it's mostly books (digital and physical), Amazon basics stuff and stuff I can't get anywhere locally (that I know of) like a tofu press or hard to counterfeit stuff like my televisions/an iPad Air 2/my reconditioned vitamix.
The only time Amazon has done that, the buyers were refunded (and that's not just Bezos being polite, that's a meaningful legal obligation if it's a purchase).
Newspaper prices are offset by advertising costs. It costs a bomb to advertise in newspapers and those are the primary revenue drivers for the newspaper publisher.
In the case of Amazon, they are interested in you. You are the primary customer providing them will data points to feed their advertising business. Again, subsidize the cost of Prime membership but get folks to give up data in return. Prime no longer is about hassle free shipping. Prime serves as a vehicle to gobble up all kinds of data to serve their ad business. This is how i look at Amazon and Prime.
Netflix is in the content delivery business, for now. Hence they have to charge full price. If, and when their business model changes to become advertisement driven, you will see changes in the prices charged to end users.
Also get the executive. At the end of the year you get back 2% or $60, whichever is higher. So if you can front the extra $60, there's no reason to not do it.
I agree Amazon Prime is a trap. Without it the free shipping starts at around €29. That alone makes me bundle my purchases, which hinders impulse buying.
Based on observing Prime members I feel most people would be much better off without the subscription.
This exact reason has helped me stop frivolous purchases as soon as I discontinued my prime membership.
I hate paying for shipping and most of the time the items in my cart are < $25 at which point I ask myself if I really need this item. If I really need it, I go to the target/Wal-Mart near my place since they always price match. Not renewing my prime membership has been by very liberating!
I don't see why this should be expected of any company honestly. If I want to price for the country that I'm trying to sell to, why should I be forced to care about or focus on a market segment that doesn't matter much to me?
> showed the price to jump the waitlist ... as $12.99 a month or $100 a year.
Yeah, not a big fan of this. You could buy very nice cloud hosting for $12.99 a month, and run your own instance of a federated social network like Mastodon.
You could stand one up and your parents join it? Yes, not everyone can stand up their own self hosted stuff. In fact few of us can. There's a huge missing gap between your phone/desktop applications and just installing and running hosted applications, but I digress.
I stood up a Mastodon instance and invited a bunch of my friends. Only like 3 of us use it, but it's up and connected to the greater Fediverse.
Why is there even a wait list at all? This feels sketchy from first use. And to not be up front about the cost before getting my personal information is, I feel, dishonest.
How can he expect to create a platform of honest people if he is dishonest from the point of account creation?
Why on earth does it feel sketchy to you. As far as I can tell this service will be devoid of adverts and tracking, which means that it will be entirely funded by subscribers. You can't really expect him to buy all the servers and bandwidth and provide it all to you for nothing out of his own pocket. That's just stupid. It seems to me the idea is that early access subscribers pay for the initial equipment. They then release an initial block of free accounts. As they get more paying subscribers they can invest in more infrastructure and release more free accounts.
If they were just to give accounts out free immediately they would be inundated and the servers might not be able to cope.
This allows them to grow the service organically with paying subscribers supporting the "freeloaders".
Yeah. I knew (from TFA) that there was a charge to jump the queue. But there's no mention of that on the signup page. And no mention that they don't accept ~anonymous payments.
>showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month
That's the cost to jump the waitlist, not the ongoing price for what will be (he hopes) the majority of users. Back when Facebook was Ivy-league only, there were TONS of students I knew who would have paid to get access. As it gets less exclusive the price will come down or become free
The price is not $12.99/month, it's free. The $12.99/month are for those that want to support the service financially, it's donationware similar to wikipedia. Jimmy Wales said the idea is that a small minority will pay for the service for everyone.
> For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US).
That's fairly country-dependant - I actually sent some feedback to Cloudflare expressing my disappointment with their pricing - it's currently 5.30 USD in my country with 20% lower purchasing power than the USA.
I recall Cloudflare mentioning something about the priced being proportionate to whatever a Big Mac costs. [1] Perhaps Cloudflare got it wrong with your country or a Big Mac costs a lot more than in the US (that sounds weird)?
Canada - Big Mac here is about the same absolute cost as the US before accounting for 20% PPP difference, and then Cloudflare rounded the American price down (from $5.51 to $5) and the Canadian price up (from $6.65 to $7) - so it's only a couple dollars, but it doesn't feel like good value. (Particularly compared to other consumer services, e.g. Apple Arcade, Dropbox, Netflix are only +1 CAD over their USD price starting from a higher base price, Spotify and Apple Music are priced with CAD at par, etc.)
I love what Jimmy contributed to the world with Wikipedia. This, however, is DOA. The site barely communicates a value-proposition, doesn't give me a sense of what's behind the curtain unless I pay $13/month. C'mon the best practices for building product are WIDELY available now.
Silly question but on facebook/twitter, most of the fake news I'm getting isn't from ads but from random people I've added over the years that are sharing a bunch of crap. The fact that they'd be paying to access that social network wouldn't change what they're sharing on it.. or would it?
Ouch. Think he's missing the mark quite severely there.
Merit or not, the whole "if it's free you're the product" thinking hasn't really sunk in with people outside of heavy tech.
So while this might make sense to you and me, I can see 13USD being a tough sell for the average user. Which is a deathblow to something that inherently requires critical momentum.
Facebook is "free," this is $100/year. Even if Facebook weren't already the giant it is, that fact alone would determine the outcome in the social space.
He also less quietly launched a Social Media strike only 4 months ago, which now has a whole new perspective given this.
My thoughts at the time, which I said "EDIT ADD Had a quick look for `related` interests and see that he is CIO of Everipedia, which is decentralizing encyclopedia writing from an article in March: https://www.wired.com/story/larry-sanger-declaration-of-digi.... But I'd not cry foul even if they did produce their own decentralised social media platform; Kinda hope they do actually. Competition does have its upsides."
I've had a hunch lately that someone would try to create a paid social network, but I never thought the idea would work for the reasons that social media became so popular to begin with.
Facebook is popular because it is free, it is easy, it is convenient. Old people, kids, a large proportion of the population has no understanding of how they get all this for free. And most of them don't care. They interact with ads just like it's any other content in their feed. They are happy they get something with so many features without having to pay for it.
Social networks that advertise privacy or no ads have limited appeal because the only group that really cares about this is (maybe) teenagers, and younger adults who are in touch with privacy politics.
Sorry, my understanding is that there is a waiting list unless you're willing to pay. Even still, I don't ever think a donation-based social network will be able to outcompete a free (but totally selling your data) social network.
Competing by what measure? If quantity is your measure, of course you can never beat free, and I'm sure Jimmy Wales knows this too, having founded the free Encyclopedia.
People won't pay for a platform unless they're using it, so you can be sure that of the users that are paying, they're likely to be engaged.
I don't know about you, but social networks tend to suck when the users aren't even logging in. I don't need a billion users or even a million on a given platform to necessarily find reasonably good interactions on it.
586 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadFirst I've heard of this, and there's no pricing (or really any) information on the website. Anyone have experience?
>It costs $12.99 a month or $100 a year in the US, or €12 a month or €90 a year in Europe. It's £10 and £80 in the UK.
Although i agree he's had a lot of underwhelming projects, and i dont see anything particularly special with this one
[20] - tpo.com
[10] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Operator
Yes, there is: network effects.
I disagree with this notion that users are “free riders”. Users bring content to these platforms. Without users, the platforms themselves are absolutely useless.
Watches TV on Phone/Tablet/Laptop
So this is not good enough for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=maxaf
Is that because there is no way to get notified by email when a new comment is made by the user?
The "engagement" aspect of HN is in the quality of items that make it to the front page, and in the comments. It's not in the slow drip-drip-drip of near-real-time notification regarding the activities of specific users.
But if another technology added an embedded HN clone, they would call it "social networking features", probably...
It's really not.
If you want a US Visa you need to tell them your HK account.
[1] https://redbus2us.com/us-visa-forms-ds-160-260-has-social-me...
The DF-160 form lists a set of social networks, not otherwise accessable that I've found, here:
https://ceac.state.gov/GenNIV/General/complete/complete_cont...
Included are: Ask.fm, Douban, Flikr, Google+, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pinterest, Qzone (QQ), Redit, Sina Waibo, Tencent Weibo, Tumblr, Twitter, Twoo, Vine, Vkontakte (VK), Youko, YouTube, and "none".
Hacker News is conspicuously missing.
They used the broad and not fully defined definition of the word to their advantage.
What a social media site is, is something I think we are all collectively defining. It's too new to be really set in stone.
Also, even though words have broad meanings, it doesn't make it right to use it that way, since social customs would make the person using such definitions unintelligible. For example, if I said in my introduction at a party to a woman "I'm gay", she will likely take it to mean 'I'm homosexual', not 'I'm happy'. Both are completely valid dictionary uses. Only one has a valid use in any modern context.
Social media is generally defined as media where the primary intent is socializing. For me, that means it is more about communicating with friends and family in a manner that is directed to furthering my understanding of them, and their understanding of me. These sites would be like facebook, twitter, instagram, etc
Sites like HN, webmasterworld, blackhatworld, etc... are more about advancing knowlledge in a specific area. Socializing is a secondary consequence. These could be considered 'quasi' social media accounts.
Based on the current definition of social media, even comments on a news site or blog, 'could' qualify. But then again we run into the issue that if you use words in non-standard ways you can become unintelligible to your fellow humans, undermining the whole purpose and concept of language. If I said 'I read a comment on social media' and really meant 'I read a comment on cnn.com' people would not understand what I'm saying. It would be odd and awkward.
This website contains no meaningful information about my relationships with other people. And more to the point, the way I use this site is not abnormal; people who leave lots of information about their social relationships on HN seem to be in a minority. You might claim that comments such as these, between you and I, are social interactions. I would counter by saying these are not meaningful social interactions. Don't take this personally but I don't know you and I don't plan on ever knowing you.
You could rent the box or buy outright with money to develop paid for by a premium on the box or by the rent wherein even a modest rent would outstrip the cost of buying like a cable box.
What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center... one that encourages and assists with cloud native design and aims to reduce load rather than hope you architect incorrectly and happily charge for the waste.
Perhaps I’m being naive, but it feels like a tooling problem, not a social or political or economic one. Anyways, I’ve quit my job at Stripe and just finished YCS19 with the goal of closing the gap between Facebook/Mastadon, Medium/yourBlog, Minecraft.com and a docker image...
And you’re totally correct about renting home server “boxes” too - except most house holds already have plenty of compute and connectivity - it’s just that installing / managing server software is completely out of reach to most people (and some developers!). It doesn’t need to be grandmas running router software - just the family nerd able to create on the internet again - and reliable enough software you’d actually invite grandma to signup!
Sandstorm tried this, and they got very very far.
I think it was ingenious, but the sysadmin in me was very skeptical about the HA/scaling story (there was none). I guess it's fine for self-hosting for yourself&friends, but there should be an easy way forward - after all, Kubernetes commoditised clustering (I mean - once you're past setup).
Where can I follow your efforts? You mention KubeSail in your profile, but that seems developer-oriented?
[0] https://github.com/sandstorm-io/blackrock
> We probably should have spent our time making the platform work better for developers and end users instead [...].
I keep a number of folders / bookmarks / stickies, where I save all the quotes like this one, so that I can then stumble upon them randomly. This is the single most important thing to keep in mind when building any kind of a platform. Developers particularly, are often the most important users of your product, since they will over time help drive the momentum and keep on bringing value.
Thank you for this reminder.
Ease of deployment is one thing, but managing and troubleshooting these deployments is another. Ordinary people generally don't want to do any of these things.
There are some people who have both the technical aptitude and desire to do these things, but they'll likely always be a small minority. An even smaller minority will be willing to do these things long-term without getting paid.
This is something that the SoLiD (Social Linked Data) initiative, based on web and linked-data standards, is expressly built to support; your "box" would implement what the initiative calls a Personal Online Datastore, or POD. Though "federated" third-party hosting of such datastores is also allowed for, of course.
I've been running my own servers from home for a very, very long time and it has never been an issue.
Running a social media node would probably count as "intended for the general public", but I'd bet that Comcast wouldn't really notice or care unless the amount of traffic exceeds a certain level or they start getting abuse complaints.
Here's the twist: the company (presumably a non-profit or social purpose corp) would also offer the ability to buy your box, at which point they mail it to you; when you plug it in, your existing data is copied to it and you begin to self-host instead.
This makes it easy to sign up for and try out, while also offering a path toward self-hosting, once you decide you like it and don't want to keep paying the monthly fee.
[1] https://freedombox.org/
Why would I want to use this?
Although, The "celebrities"(I am more interested in following Engineers, Computer Scientists. These guys are my "celebrities") I would want to follow are not on facebook/instagram(Or they don't share anything I'd be interested in on those platforms).
And for that reason the "quietly launched" thing here kinds of defeats the point of any Facebook rival for me.
So, there's one use case.
I'm lucky -- in my area, the burners, hippies, and makers don't use Facebook for coordination. They have mailing lists for that.
Reddit is a big social network with many specialized groups.
The (sparse) descriptions of wt.social sound more like a variant of Reddit than anything else.
But the presentation is horrible.
Also, many of today's recent non-FB social network successes (Whatsapp, etc) were launched before the general perception of social networking, and internet services in general, became increasingly skeptical. Outside of tech, or people with very narrow interest verticals not served by mainstream social networks, I don't know anyone who is looking for yet another generic social network.
Curiously, if true, this plays both the the detriment and benefit of established social networks: their primary, most profitable users are not likely to flee, but they are also likely to be less engaged.
Mastodon/Fediverse instances feel like a nice big random AOL chat room, or Reddit threads in the Twitter format. It won't connect you to your current social groups (except the very few who are like 'Yea I'm on that. Here, follow me), but rather help you exchange ideas with a bunch of randos. Which is something that was pretty damn cool about the early Internet really.
1. Disengaged with the platform 2. Concerned about how much it knows about our lives
In the last few months, I've seen this go from something that only techies cared about to an increasingly mainstream point of view.
Disengagement is an effect, not a cause, but I'd argue that the primary cause of disengagement is that the balance of dopamine increasing "happy" social networking experiences vs neutral or anger inducing negative experiences on social networks has shifted to the neutral/negative.
Even on the "happy" side, there's only so many recycled life-affirming aphorisms, or happy photos from other peoples' lives you can see in your newsfeed before you start to tune them out. On the negative side, produced content on social networks has turned toward the increasingly attention-grabbing, and occasionally even psychologically injurious. So if the happy stuff isn't making you so happy anymore, and you tire of the negative stuff, what do you do? Disengage.
However, the age breakdown of those users has changed a lot. Facebook has absolutely hemorrhaged users younger than about 45. The majority of American FB users are in the 46-76 year old range now, with 68% of US FB users aged 50 or older.
In the US, anyway, Facebook is for old farts and businesses.
Not US-specific, but it's absolutely a developed-country specific view. People are treating it more like they treat alcohol - fun to participate in every so often, but not healthy to do daily.
I think a lot of HN sentiment has to do with age and timing.
Lots of tech-savvy, younger people used it 10+ years ago when it was hot and semi-exclusive. Now their older and it's less hot and exclusive.
At this point, I'd like to preserve that network of friends independent of facebook and most of those folks feel similarly. In that sense, there is at least some demand for a social network that isn't evil.
But what you're looking for sounds mostly like Diaspora, which is quite old, it's from back in the Google+ days, and never really took off.
1. Host it yourself
2. Use one of the paid instances backed by an established company (I use Librem Social)
Perhaps over time some ad supported Mastodon instances will pop up for those willing to pay that way.
Personally, I'd rather not receive those kind of messages - I only want to receive messages that someone specifically thought to send to me. Doing so dramatically reduces noise. The only exception to this is broadcast messages from important networks with built-in hard trust boundaries (the email list for my kids' classroom, my neighborhood watch list, the Whatsapp group with only me, my wife, my brother, and sister in law - not even parents), and even on those, I will leave if they become more of a cost than a benefit.
(This isn't intended to be a "gotcha", just to stimulate reflection on why it's different)
HN is pull actuated, not push. I have to register interest in topics by commenting before I get responses, and those responses are not part of the main feed. I have to go to my comments page to look for the responses. I don't get notified just because a particular user made a comment or post, because it is topic-centered, not user-centered.
And even with all that, if HN ever rises to a level of routine toxicity that the moderation via community or moderators isn't keeping in check, I'll leave.
Broadcast messages from people you care about are nice. So and so had a baby, or whatever else is going on in their life. It's why FB was useful for before it became a continuous stream of reposted drivel.
I like to keep up with what's going on in people's lives at a scale greater than one to one interactions can support. In my view, there's definitely an upside to technology that supports a number of friends and acquaintances roughly 10x what one could support otherwise.
Hell, even linkedin is somewhat useful to be able to keep up with what old colleagues are up to and reconnect at times.
What are the chances that actually exists though? Like, for more than a couple years?
Whatever one might think about social network "influencers", their influence is ultimately rooted in something about them (looks, charisma, knowledge, marketing dept strategy), not their username.
For these "greenfield" users, there is no need to convince their friends to leave their existing social media platform, because there is none.
Every day, middle schoolers get smartphones for the first time, and the majority of them probably aren't going to make Facebook accounts, but rather Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok, etc.
"Are you on Facebook?"
"My mom setup an account for me when I was 5, but I never use it. I don't even think I installed it on this phone..."
Right — people don't go actively seeking a generic alternative to something they already have. They do although, hear about new services that do something different. Similar to TikTok, or Instagram, it will hit on a niche interest and expand from there. The current market leaders will ignore it long enough (opportunity not big enough) that by the time they see it as a threat, it's too late.
I don't think WT:Social is doing that right now though, so not sure what their plan is to combat what you're talking about.
At scale, nowhere near $12.99 / month is needed.
When you make it expensive, otoh, it feels exclusive. After some reputation is built you can somewhat lower the price and perhaps many people are thrilled that they can join a very exclusive club.
whether this works out remains to be seen. success in this area is hardly likely but I doubt pricing is the determining factor.
I am saying that amount of money is not necessary.
Different things.
I feel that one way to solve both the ownership over data problems and minimize server costs is to use some sort of P2P system where all posts, images, videos, etc are hosted locally. This could be through a browser extension when on a computer, within local storage on mobile apps, etc.
When a user pulls up their feed, it would be directly pulling posts from the locally hosted accounts of those they follow, similar to torrenting. With the bulk of data center costs offloaded to P2P, the remaining server costs could run on donations, similar to how Wikipedia does now.
I'm not sure if a social network like this currently exists, or if I'm missing some potential problems with the concept. Thoughts?
But maybe I should sign up anyway, just to help it along...
1. It won't happen.
2. More importantly: imagine it happens. Who would actually make a switch?
I mean, really, who chooses to use FB, because he likes FB? I don't think I know a single example. For the last year or so it even (finally!) became trendy among non-techy people to hate FB, but so what? People stay because their social circles stay. In fact, it's been quite a while since I don't actually feel pressured to use FB by induviduals, but rather the stuff like climbing club using FB as a platform to announce events and gather groups to go camping and stuff.
WT:Social might become of use as a very niche social network for news, but no way it can be seriously viewed as FB's rival. And even if they could, they are fighting for the yesterday's market, meanwhile Facebook builds the future, where their helpless users will willingly spend their lives in Oculus helmets socializing with their FB "friends" on VR beaches. Or whatever.
* Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that account sharing among a few people is quite common.
* Amazon Prime (with two day shipping plus Prime Video and Prime Music) costs about $14 a year.
* A print newspaper subscription of any major national newspaper would cost about $2.8 or even a lot lesser per month.
* An Audible subscription (one free credit a month) costs $2.8 a month, with lower prices on audiobooks and discounts on them.
* Some premium news publications cost about $30-$45 a year.
I'm not saying that this is similar to Netflix or Amazon or a national newspaper, but it's more about how the more popular as well as niche/premium services have priced themselves and how people perceive value. Comparatively, this $12.99/month or $100/year social network focused on news seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants. It could've probably done better with a currency adjusted or purchasing power parity specific rate. For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US).
Having talked about the pricing, the UI doesn't look great either. I saw a list of groups to choose from and the page looked like it was built more than a decade ago. It ought to look like a modern website (with more bells and whistles) if it wants to command more than premium rates. Even Facebook's site, which I think looks outdated, cluttered and ugly, looks better in comparison.
Perfect great!
Imagine it’s intentional and a pretty effective way of doing business
Now lets just critique why it isn’t a luxury brand
I can easily afford this product myself but I don’t want to pay for a social network if a portion of my friends/contacts are priced out.
But Facebook's model, for instance, also prices people out. I am entirely unwilling to use Facebook because I consider it far too expensive. True, I'm paying with data rather than cash, but it's still paying. From my point of view, $12.99/mo is actually cheaper (assuming that paying that means I'm not going to be datamined).
Charging a high price for a luxury brand is a fine business model but I wouldn’t consider a product accessible to only some socioeconomic groups to a be a Facebook competitor (as indicated in the article).
A system in which a poor person making $30k/year and spends $500/year on products or content advertised via Facebook versus a rich person who makes $1M/year and spends $10k on products/content via facebook is not exactly progressive. The poor person ends up paying 1.6% of their income, while the rich person spends 0.1%.
The poor person spends 16X of their takehome earnings than the rich person, not exactly progressive.
[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report
The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me from going into the store and impulse buying something on a shelf once a month.
As far as Amazon Prime, I have to believe the price of shipping is built into the products, and the membership is for other psychological and behavior control reasons.
Is part of this social network price the same thing. A cost to make it exclusive, acts as a bit of a spam filter. Then after having sunk money into it, you feel the need to make it worthwhile. I never think "ive been watching too much prime I better get my value out of netflix this month" but a communication tool might be different.
Instead, I can think "oh hey I need to get a shoe horn, the heels on the uppers of the slip-ons I wear to church are getting funky" or "ah crap, I forgot to stop and get a new belt on the way home and this one is getting pretty loose on the last notch and I don't think this synthetic material is going to be happy if I punch a new hole" or "instead of driving to 6 stores hoping to find filters for my air purifier, I can buy 2 on Amazon right here on the toilet and be good for the next 2 years" and "my xlear nasal spray is about empty here at work and this heat is really drying my nose out, I'll just order another now instead of waiting until I go to the grocery Saturday" and "I need another USB C cable, this one is starting to get pretty stressed, I'll order one on Amazon instead of driving miles out of my way to go to Walmart or Best Buy hoping they have one".
Those are this week's purchases. All things I needed, all things I would have had to buy somewhere, all things I got a 1$ credit for which I will use towards eBooks I would have purchased either way.
Or last week when I ordered a tofu press, I have no idea where to buy a tofu press in the real world but wasting gobs of paper towels and using books just wasn't doing it for me.
It's not like I opened Amazon in a moment of boredom and said "let's see what I should waste money on today".
Related, I went to buy a shoe stretcher on Amazon. Had to buy 3 before I got one that wasn't complete garbage.
I'd have gone to someplace local but none of the local places have much inventory for quality goods anymore either...
For me Amazon is still a net win in regards to convenience, but there are a lot of things I just won't buy.
Heck for a little while earlier this year the official Sonicare page was somehow taken over by people selling knock-off replacement heads, all the links from the manufacturers verified page went to obviously fraudulent misspelled products.
Yeah for me it's mostly books (digital and physical), Amazon basics stuff and stuff I can't get anywhere locally (that I know of) like a tofu press or hard to counterfeit stuff like my televisions/an iPad Air 2/my reconditioned vitamix.
https://calibre-ebook.com/
Besides, I don't think I've ever re-read an eBook. If I think I'll refer to something again I buy it in print.
Amazon $119, 5% cash back on Amazon CC, Prime Now has minimums, includes Whole Foods, has music and video included. Video is $108 by itself.
Walmart Grocery $98. (their CC is a 1 year bonus, not forever)
Costco $60-120 (120 price gets you 2% yearly cash back.)
Target Shipt $99, 5% back on Redcard, free Debit Redcard is all thats needed for free standard shipping, shipt is for same day like Now.
At the moment upgrading from 2day/nextday to same day costs around $100/year.
Netflix is in the content delivery business, for now. Hence they have to charge full price. If, and when their business model changes to become advertisement driven, you will see changes in the prices charged to end users.
Consistently great quality + deals.
Right now they're selling a Costco-sized box of 1,500 Legos for $40.
Man, you can't just put information like this out there. I can't be trusted with this knowledge.
Based on observing Prime members I feel most people would be much better off without the subscription.
I hate paying for shipping and most of the time the items in my cart are < $25 at which point I ask myself if I really need this item. If I really need it, I go to the target/Wal-Mart near my place since they always price match. Not renewing my prime membership has been by very liberating!
Yeah, not a big fan of this. You could buy very nice cloud hosting for $12.99 a month, and run your own instance of a federated social network like Mastodon.
I stood up a Mastodon instance and invited a bunch of my friends. Only like 3 of us use it, but it's up and connected to the greater Fediverse.
Google+, now's your time to shine!
How can he expect to create a platform of honest people if he is dishonest from the point of account creation?
This is not the way to do it.
If they were just to give accounts out free immediately they would be inundated and the servers might not be able to cope.
This allows them to grow the service organically with paying subscribers supporting the "freeloaders".
Hope that clears it up.
Current wait list: 60,000 people (estimated hold time 30 days) but you can jump the queue for $12.99/mo or $100/yr.
Done. Honest. Transparent.
The site's current account flow is infected with dark patterns and turns off those familiar with them, like me.
That's the cost to jump the waitlist, not the ongoing price for what will be (he hopes) the majority of users. Back when Facebook was Ivy-league only, there were TONS of students I knew who would have paid to get access. As it gets less exclusive the price will come down or become free
You MUST have localized pricing for these types of apps. We're going to cut our pricing for India, and basically all developing nations.
Students too... if you have a university email we'll give you a discount on top of your normal region-specific discounts.
It's a fools errand otherwise. These users will just NOT convert.
EDIT: I logged out and back in and it looks like it let me in without paying...
That's fairly country-dependant - I actually sent some feedback to Cloudflare expressing my disappointment with their pricing - it's currently 5.30 USD in my country with 20% lower purchasing power than the USA.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
And they need volume to make it work. So this pricing seems like a big mistake to me.
Merit or not, the whole "if it's free you're the product" thinking hasn't really sunk in with people outside of heavy tech.
So while this might make sense to you and me, I can see 13USD being a tough sell for the average user. Which is a deathblow to something that inherently requires critical momentum.
My thoughts at the time, which I said "EDIT ADD Had a quick look for `related` interests and see that he is CIO of Everipedia, which is decentralizing encyclopedia writing from an article in March: https://www.wired.com/story/larry-sanger-declaration-of-digi.... But I'd not cry foul even if they did produce their own decentralised social media platform; Kinda hope they do actually. Competition does have its upsides."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318590
https://wt.social/recentchanges
Mostly nothing interesting, people testing the system out. The whole site feels like a post-dotcom-boom experience... a slightly styled Craigslist.
Facebook is popular because it is free, it is easy, it is convenient. Old people, kids, a large proportion of the population has no understanding of how they get all this for free. And most of them don't care. They interact with ads just like it's any other content in their feed. They are happy they get something with so many features without having to pay for it.
Social networks that advertise privacy or no ads have limited appeal because the only group that really cares about this is (maybe) teenagers, and younger adults who are in touch with privacy politics.
- https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192160194693718017
- https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192635476726947840
People won't pay for a platform unless they're using it, so you can be sure that of the users that are paying, they're likely to be engaged.
I don't know about you, but social networks tend to suck when the users aren't even logging in. I don't need a billion users or even a million on a given platform to necessarily find reasonably good interactions on it.