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You can produce a viable alternative for Facebook for less than $1M upfront and pretty low running costs. Maybe $10/user/month or less. However, nobody has don
by John_KZ 8y ago
You can produce a viable alternative for Facebook for less than $1M upfront and pretty low running costs. Maybe $10/user/month or less.
However, nobody has done it. Why? Because it doesn't make any profit.
Everyone needs it, it would save a lot of resources otherwise wasted on useless products and bad political choices, and it would make public discourse much better, but nobody will pay for it.
This is the classic example of when the government should step in. We need to either create a Facebook tax (let people choose who to fund with it, but make sure they pay for it) or make FBs business model illegal. Both would work.
People know their long-term interests but they can't act on them unless corner-cutting is made illegal.
And the governments would have fixed the problem by now, only if Facebook wasn't offering politicians a cheap way to get reelected.
I'm open to new approaches but I can't figure out a solution for this to get funded.
- amelius 8y agoSolution: ban targeted advertising. Then even Facebook can't fund Facebook.
- chatmasta 8y agoSo I have to run English ads and just hope whoever reads them speaks the language?
- JackCh 8y agoBuy advertisements from whatever publication you think your target audience is most likely to read. That's how it used to work.
- John_KZ 8y agoAnd it worked a lot better than what Google does. I remember buying things I discovered through ads on my favorite magazines.
- amelius 8y agoYou can show a language-selector. After the user makes the selection, you show them the ad.
- dane-pgp 8y agoI like this solution (probably more than the Facebook Tax idea above) and hope that the GDPR will go some way towards this. However, there is another timebomb against Facebook hidden in the GDPR which I'm looking forward to seeing donate this week. The GDPR contains a section on Data Portability: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ mandating that "the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible." This means that someone with a Facebook account should be able to request that Facebook automatically send their posts to the accounts of their friends on other competing social networks. Obviously the question of what is "technically feasible" will be argued, but I think that a large, potentially monopolistic company like Facebook would have a hard time arguing that it couldn't implement something like ActivityPub: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ especially if its smaller (and European) competitors are able to implement it and interoperate with each other. Once you no longer have to be on Facebook to receive updates from your Facebook-using friends, I imagine that their empire will crumble relatively quickly.
- pmontra 8y agoAn unconventional idea: drop FB without creating any new alternative. Instead use other already existing channels: meet people in real life, send messages (I know, FB owns WhatApp). Despite their success there is no real need for social media networks like FB. As a demonstration, after 10 years of FB I started using it only to announce events which I already announce on Eventbrite, Meetup, LinkedIn, but no personal news, no reading of the news feed. Guess what, after months of that I still have all the friends I had before.
- John_KZ 8y agoFacebook has a lot of utility. We tend to look at Facebook through goggles of hatred because it's a corporate propaganda and brainwashing machine, but if you take that away, you have a neat way of keeping in touch with friends. Imagine if content and people were more discoverable, if you could filter the content you see, and better yet, if all the people who hate Facebook and its culture were on the platform because the culture wouldn't be monolithic anymore. It wouldn't be bad at all.