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Just as some people pay for fastmail I am pretty sure there'd be some people paying an entrance fee to a social network. Wasn't the social network of last week

Just as some people pay for fastmail I am pretty sure there'd be some people paying an entrance fee to a social network. Wasn't the social network of last week, vero, supposed to be like that ?

overcast 9y ago
Email is a poor comparison, because you're connecting to millions of other people using gmail/yahoo/whatever, for free. The correct comparison would be if eMail was a universally paid for service. It would NOT be what it is today.
- johnchristopher 9y ago
  I am not comparing the aims or the essence of the service. I am expression the opinion that social networks can be a paid-for service just like email, music or video can.
  - overcast 9y ago
    Right, but the problem here is that social networks need to grow exponentially. Without massive growth, they are useless, because you're not connected to anyone else. Email works, because everyone has email, mostly because it's free. Which leads to fast adoption.
macintux 9y ago
Network effects are brutally hard to overcome. https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/app-net-shut-down/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/app-net-shut-down...
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  It's not network effects. It's hostile copyright and network access law. There's no reason that you shouldn't be able to interact with the content streams from both Twitter and App.Net at the same time, for example, except that our legal system allows the dominant company to sue the scrappy upstart into oblivion if they begin to do so. This is not theoretical; small companies are destroyed frequently by BigCo breaking out the lawyers for supposed violations of the CFAA and the Copyright Act. This sorry legal situation has completely obliterated meaningful competition in the online space, and we are letting them get away with it when we just hand-wave that it's because of "network effects". There's no reason that YoungSiteA shouldn't be able to act as a user agent on my behalf to access and reskin OldSiteB. If it could, the negative impact of switching providers would be small.

Just as some people pay for fastmail I am pretty sure there'd be some people paying an entrance fee to a social network. Wasn't the social network of last week, vero, supposed to be like that ?

overcast 9y ago

Email is a poor comparison, because you're connecting to millions of other people using gmail/yahoo/whatever, for free. The correct comparison would be if eMail was a universally paid for service. It would NOT be what it is today.

johnchristopher 9y ago
I am not comparing the aims or the essence of the service. I am expression the opinion that social networks can be a paid-for service just like email, music or video can.
- overcast 9y ago
  Right, but the problem here is that social networks need to grow exponentially. Without massive growth, they are useless, because you're not connected to anyone else. Email works, because everyone has email, mostly because it's free. Which leads to fast adoption.

macintux 9y ago

Network effects are brutally hard to overcome. https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/app-net-shut-down/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/app-net-shut-down...

cookiecaper 9y ago
It's not network effects. It's hostile copyright and network access law. There's no reason that you shouldn't be able to interact with the content streams from both Twitter and App.Net at the same time, for example, except that our legal system allows the dominant company to sue the scrappy upstart into oblivion if they begin to do so. This is not theoretical; small companies are destroyed frequently by BigCo breaking out the lawyers for supposed violations of the CFAA and the Copyright Act. This sorry legal situation has completely obliterated meaningful competition in the online space, and we are letting them get away with it when we just hand-wave that it's because of "network effects". There's no reason that YoungSiteA shouldn't be able to act as a user agent on my behalf to access and reskin OldSiteB. If it could, the negative impact of switching providers would be small.