Is that a serious question? Social networks are dependent on network effects. Having a subscription immediately increases the barrier to entry too high for people to be able to get their friends on the same platform.
My feeling is that we have entered an age that youth is not naive anymore and would happily pay $3/month (at least in the US) for a non-tracking all-round communication service.
Just asked my teenage siblings and both of them responded that they don't care that they are tracked and aren't sure why they'd pay. Only an anecdote, but there you go.
Mine too, believe me! My idea is to allow a group to contribute to cover a certain amount per year for their entire network, depending on the size of it. $50.00 split by 15-20 family/friend members would be pretty affordable. I would say a smaller more intimate network would be a major step in the right direction.
> My feeling is that we have entered an age that youth is not naive anymore and would happily pay $3/month (at least in the US) for a non-tracking all-round communication service.
Probably not, but there just might be enough, youth (or people just out of the edge of that category with contacts inside of it) that will pay $10/month for such a service plus the privilege of sponsoring 9 of their friends with free accounts. Who, would of course have the option of upgrading to paid, getting their own 9 giveaway accounts, and returning the giveaway account to their sponsor.
Which, sure, might be as little as $1/user/mo., rather than $3.
I'm pretty skeptical of this claim. The barrier from $0.00 to $0.01 is huge, and it's even moreso with people young enough to not have credit cards.
It's not that "oh, if it'd succeed someone would have done it by now," but the attempts I've seen at this make me think that it'd be very difficult to even try.
It's not Harvard students you need. There aren't that many of them and they already have their own social networks. You need to market to middle- and high-schoolers. Because by the time they're in college and could afford $3/month, they've already got outlets.
The youth - under 18 - may or may not have a problem with it. However, they also can't readily do the actual payment portion of the deal and would have to buy a gift card or ask their parents - and their parents may object, especially if they are poor.
Do what Whatsapp did, free for the first year, then something really really low, but covers the cost of servers and headcount. Done right, this is probably around 0.50-1 a month for a really high quality service.
A spotify subscription is more valuable than whatever option a social network could offer. Facebook makes a boatload off ads so there's no way they would just turn the option off even with a small subscription. Plus, not enough users care about ads. Most of the comments on this forum will be preaching to the choir.
I'm not so sure about that. A lot of people are not completely comfortable with Facebook using their data and I think a substantial number of people might be willing to pay, not primarily to get rid of ads but to have a sense of privacy. If they get rid of ads that a nice bonus. Saying it's never going to happen is like saying that people will never pay for music online. A lot of people believed that to be true just a couple of years ago and yet ...
I contributed to the Kickstarter for an open social network called Disapora seven years ago[1].
It's open source now[2], there's no advertising, and you can host your own "pod" (page) or you can use another host. https://joindiaspora.com is the main site.
Hardly anyone uses it because... hardly anyone uses it. And it's a little more technical than getting on Facebook.
Besides the obvious remarks about people not caring a lot about their privacy and not wanting to pay a cent for a social network the biggest problem is a coordination problem: Facebook satisfied a nearly universal desire for online social interactions and as a consequence gradually all your friends joined the network. That was something new and exciting. Replicating this huge social pull effect once more is incredibly difficult - you'd have to create an entirely new kind of social network.
The only way for other business models to work will be to ban collecting invasive info about your users. Otherwise we're stuck with the spy-vertising economy forever. Boycotts (Boycott what? Most of the Internet at this point?) won't work for the same reason we can't just rely on boycotts to enforce e.g environmental regulations or safe workplace standards.
Is this supposed to be a bad thing? If I were a non-profit working on teen depression and suicide, this sounds like an amazing innovation. My intervention and education dollar would go much further.
I don't understand the sinister outlook, especially from people who in other contexts--e.g. cryptography & terrorism--would adamantly claim that technology is neutral and that the net benefit from innovation is with rare exception to the betterment of society.
> I don't understand the sinister outlook, especially from people who in other contexts--e.g. cryptography & terrorism--would adamantly claim that technology is neutral and that the net benefit from innovation is with rare exception to the betterment of society.
There's no contradiction here. "Technology" in the abstract may be neutral, and specific technologies might even be neutral, but that doesn't mean that specific applications of specific technologies are necessarily neutral. And in this case, we're discussing the lattermost - the ability to market teenagers' feelings of depression[0] to advertisers.
That's only neutral if you think that the set of advertisers who might be interested in that information is either a completely unknown set or a set of advertisers that is, on the whole "neutral", after being weighted by their willingness to pay.
[0] conflating mildly the DSM-IV diagnostic criterion of 'worthlessness or guilt' with the clinical diagnosis, but nobody's keeping score here
Non-profits strive to place human outcomes over financial results. Many corporations are either unwilling or unable to do so, beyond what is required by law.
Market forces aren't well suited, on their own, to deal with these kind of externalities.
The same can be said of cryptography. Why believe that cryptography is more likely to be used for lawful and social beneficial purposes than for, e.g., terrorism, tax evasion, child abuse, etc.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter were in actuality the first adopters of cryptography, especially if you include other illegal uses such as copyright violation.
We could easily say that free market dynamics suggest that the cost+benefit will higher for criminals, especially unless and until cryptography becomes ubiquitous. So why not nip it in the bud? That's been the argument coming from the law enforcement and intelligence communities all along.
Yet engineers are defensive and optimistic about the beneficial usages of cryptography. They're dismissive of usages such as the encrypted iPhones used by the San Bernardino terrorists. And they focus on seemingly esoteric benefits--like improved security from extortionists--that most common people overlook or discount.
I tend to _agree_ with those engineers, am similarly defensive and optimistic regarding cryptography, and place a high value on benefits not obvious to others. I think it's worthwhile to be consistent here. Any distinctions one can concoct to differentiate Facebook and their advertisers from, e.g., non-profits, can easily be turned around later.
The emphasis shouldn't be on _presumed_ abuses, guilt by association, etc. It should be on hard data of actual usage and actual outcomes, with attention paid to implicit biases in collection and reporting. We also need to compare this against alternatives, taking into account (and quantifying) the futility of criminalization or regulation, etc.
> Non profits strive to place human outcomes over financial results. Most corporations are either unwilling or unable to do so, beyond what is required by law.
This is incredibly reductive. A non-profit can strive to place human outcomes over financial results, but nothing requires them to, and there are plenty of forces that push them in the other direction as well.
Conversely, for-profit corporations might not strive to place human outcomes over financial results, but nothing prevents them from doing so[0], and some in fact do.
The "non-profit" vs. "for-profit" distinction tells you literally nothing about a company's ethics.
[0] Every time this topic comes up, someone brings up Dodge v. Ford, which (a) is not the most relevant precedent, even in Michigan law; (b) does not actually establish the precedent that people citing it usually thinks it does, even in Michigan law, (c) was soundly rejected in other states shortly after the Michigan decision, and (d) has since been overturned (in the part that is relevant here) in Michigan.
I was just about to post to AskHN about how much data these social network behemoths can garner from unposted data, i.e., I write something into my status box or a comment like "fuck the police," then delete without posting, is that data gathered and mined? My gut and brain say yes, because it's easily possible to gather it and with the little bit of research I found no evidence that really shows one way or another what happens behind closed doors at these mega companies.
I remember reading about this a few years ago, and observed network activity using Facebook. They certainly did capture what you type but fail to post. I would put serious money on them mining that data, too, since it can reveal someone's true uncensored thoughts.
I'm going to take a weekend and build a javascript capturing tool that does just this, so I can open the source up and get a viral post on HN, that should spark some discussion
Has anyone managed to capture unposted thoughts being sent over the wire(less)? I've read the claim that this is done but I don't any relevant network activity when I type and discard something in Chrome...
Putting aside the question of whether these folks are serving malicious JS to users, seeing no network activity at the same time as your keystrokes doesn't tell you much. The client could easily be caching your keystrokes locally, then uploading in a batch with any AJAX call.
You can set your state of mind along with your status now, so I guess this isn't really surprising - if that's how they do it (I only skimmed the article.)
What's new, really? This is just another data point people are willingly handing over for Facebook to sell as per the terms of service.
There are probably studies out there by universities and other organizations about how teens insecure about X, Y or Z tend to enjoy consuming products A, B or C. Facebook can easily recoup this information with pages and posts teens tend to like. They could also analyze the tones of their comments with some AI though this is not as advanced as we may think.
There are probably a gazillion other variables they can play with to end up with pretty good results about what teens are insecure about and how they tend to behave on Facebook and specially what kind of ads they're most to likely to click on. Note that they don't sell this info to their clients, they just show the ads to the right people.
Facebook seems to know I have ADHD and suggested a few "fidget toys". I actually like those ads.
I could see targeted ads for things like full-spectrum lights (used for people with seasonal affective disorder) or Headspace (app for meditation) being a good thing.
But it could, eventually, theoretically? Ideally if it were good at its job it could point out things that you weren't consciously aware of before and then suggest appropriate courses of action. Advertising may not be the best medium for this, but perhaps another app that analyses your facebook habits/behaviors. Doesnt even need to be facebook specific. I think its worth some research effort.
i think we can call it a diagnoses. i also think the worst case is more insidious. there's gotta a psychological effect of some super smart computer saying you have X all the time. Facebook is pervasive. imagine WebMD-syndrome if everyone was browsing WebMD 3 hours a day.
