6 ms·

Stallman is my hero. All social media is terrible, and all of it is impossible to profit from, and I bet all of it will eventually fail. Facebook doesn't make

Stallman is my hero. All social media is terrible, and all of it is impossible to profit from, and I bet all of it will eventually fail. Facebook doesn't make any money from social media, they make money from side businesses that are tacked onto their social media platform. Anyone who is interested in social blogging should have their own website (wordpress.com is free) with RSS support so people who like what you write can follow your posts. RSS is not controlled by any corporation. That is the internet way of doing social media. this is slightly off-topic but I read Zuckerberg's accounts got hacked because he used 'dadada' as a password on multiple services. People have called him a genius, he does not appear to be that exactly.

newscracker 10y ago
> Anyone who is interested in social blogging should have their own website (wordpress.com is free) The free wordpress.com blogs may show ads to users (who're not logged in) so that Automattic can make money. It's very likely that there's profiling and tracking going on there too.
- simbalion 10y ago
  Fair enough, but the wordpress software itself can be installed on a private server. Hosting solutions are cheap as heck these days.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I agree with you. I am very careful to use a blank browser profile when I occasionally log onto FB to see what family and friends post, but I generally see it as low value. I may be old fashioned but I really prefer using email and use my own blog on my own domain. Also: if you haven't already tried it, give Gnu Social a try. It has some rough edges but I enjoy it, and it feels good paying my Gnu Social site operator little bits of bitcoin so he can afford to keep it running. Gnu Social is federated but it seems to take a while for shared posts to percolate around to other servers.
morgante 10y ago
> Facebook doesn't make any money from social media, they make money from side businesses that are tacked onto their social media platform. Newspapers never made money, they just made money from side businesses that were tacked onto their social media platform. TV shows don't make money, they just make money from side businesses that are tacked onto their shows. Just because you don't like a business model doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Advertising has been a successful business model for literally centuries.
- pdonis 10y ago
  > Newspapers never made money Sure they did; they sold subscriptions, and if you didn't have a subscription and wanted a copy, you bought one. > TV shows don't make money Sure they do; practically nobody gets broadcast TV any more, it's all paid cable or paid satellite or something of that sort. Granted that's a very indirect way of paying for individual shows, but now you can even do that directly with, for example, Netflix. > Advertising has been a successful business model for literally centuries. I agree that advertising has been around for many centuries, but it hasn't been a business model for most of that time; it's been a cost of doing business. According to Wikipedia[1], the first newspaper to have paid advertising was in 1836. And the first businesses to make money solely from advertising revenue (which is what "advertising as a successful business model" means to me) are much more recent than that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising
  - morgante 10y ago
    Just because advertising isn't their only revenue source doesn't mean that it wasn't intrinsic to maintaining the profitability and viability of numerous media organizations. > And the first businesses to make money solely from advertising revenue Strictly speaking, that means Facebook is also not using an advertising business model.
- beedogs 10y ago
  > Advertising has been a successful business model for literally centuries. Surely this explains why nearly every news site out there has been throwing up ad-blocker nag screens over the past few years. They must really be raking that revenue in! Not a troubled financial model at all, no sir!
beefsack 10y ago
Protocols trump services. I'm just as miffed that Slack became the developer chat platform of choice nowadays, it has many of the problems attributed to social network services.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
746F7475 10y ago
How can wordpress keep it's doors open if all Facebook users started free blogs? Last time I checked it wasn't nearly as easy to create wordpress site or a blog post as it is to create facebook update. Same rings true with RSS, it's not nearly as easy as using facebook feed(s). As for Zuckerbergs password, if you don't care about the account then password doesn't matter.
- simbalion 10y ago
  It's extremely simple to set up a wordpress website. What is not simple is completely customizing a wordpress website. But you can't really do that with facebook _at all_. And the level of customization Facebook does offer is replicated in free Wordpress plugins. So they are comparable. I suspect Wordpress appears more complicated because it has more buttons.

newscracker 10y ago

> Anyone who is interested in social blogging should have their own website (wordpress.com is free) The free wordpress.com blogs may show ads to users (who're not logged in) so that Automattic can make money. It's very likely that there's profiling and tracking going on there too.

simbalion 10y ago
Fair enough, but the wordpress software itself can be installed on a private server. Hosting solutions are cheap as heck these days.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I agree with you. I am very careful to use a blank browser profile when I occasionally log onto FB to see what family and friends post, but I generally see it as low value. I may be old fashioned but I really prefer using email and use my own blog on my own domain. Also: if you haven't already tried it, give Gnu Social a try. It has some rough edges but I enjoy it, and it feels good paying my Gnu Social site operator little bits of bitcoin so he can afford to keep it running. Gnu Social is federated but it seems to take a while for shared posts to percolate around to other servers.

morgante 10y ago

> Facebook doesn't make any money from social media, they make money from side businesses that are tacked onto their social media platform. Newspapers never made money, they just made money from side businesses that were tacked onto their social media platform. TV shows don't make money, they just make money from side businesses that are tacked onto their shows. Just because you don't like a business model doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Advertising has been a successful business model for literally centuries.

pdonis 10y ago
> Newspapers never made money Sure they did; they sold subscriptions, and if you didn't have a subscription and wanted a copy, you bought one. > TV shows don't make money Sure they do; practically nobody gets broadcast TV any more, it's all paid cable or paid satellite or something of that sort. Granted that's a very indirect way of paying for individual shows, but now you can even do that directly with, for example, Netflix. > Advertising has been a successful business model for literally centuries. I agree that advertising has been around for many centuries, but it hasn't been a business model for most of that time; it's been a cost of doing business. According to Wikipedia[1], the first newspaper to have paid advertising was in 1836. And the first businesses to make money solely from advertising revenue (which is what "advertising as a successful business model" means to me) are much more recent than that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising
- morgante 10y ago
  Just because advertising isn't their only revenue source doesn't mean that it wasn't intrinsic to maintaining the profitability and viability of numerous media organizations. > And the first businesses to make money solely from advertising revenue Strictly speaking, that means Facebook is also not using an advertising business model.
beedogs 10y ago
> Advertising has been a successful business model for literally centuries. Surely this explains why nearly every news site out there has been throwing up ad-blocker nag screens over the past few years. They must really be raking that revenue in! Not a troubled financial model at all, no sir!

beefsack 10y ago

Protocols trump services. I'm just as miffed that Slack became the developer chat platform of choice nowadays, it has many of the problems attributed to social network services.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

746F7475 10y ago

How can wordpress keep it's doors open if all Facebook users started free blogs? Last time I checked it wasn't nearly as easy to create wordpress site or a blog post as it is to create facebook update. Same rings true with RSS, it's not nearly as easy as using facebook feed(s). As for Zuckerbergs password, if you don't care about the account then password doesn't matter.

simbalion 10y ago
It's extremely simple to set up a wordpress website. What is not simple is completely customizing a wordpress website. But you can't really do that with facebook _at all_. And the level of customization Facebook does offer is replicated in free Wordpress plugins. So they are comparable. I suspect Wordpress appears more complicated because it has more buttons.