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Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

• skybrian 7y ago
  I'm not sure if it's just the headline, but this seems like solving the wrong problem. Universal platforms fail at moderation. Moderation doesn't work unless the moderators are part of the community. Reddit and Mastodon are the ones to follow here (as well as Hacker News, or lobste.rs, or tildes.net, or a zillion specialized forums).
• standardUser 7y ago
  I joined immediately. We need this. And where else will we find an option with such a high profile and from people with such a good track record? It may actually have a chance.
• ishanjain28 7y ago
  This just makes me think why do I need a social network. I never did anything remotely useful on Facebook/Instagram(Although, Twitter is useful). Why would I want to use this?
  • asah 7y ago
    keeping in touch with family & friends - email, MMS, etc don't work.
    • magduf 7y ago
      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.
  • raincom 7y ago
    Now one can follow celebrities on instagram, facebook with their daily updates:)
    • ishanjain28 7y ago
      Okay point taken. 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).
  • TallGuyShort 7y ago
    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.
  • halbritt 7y ago
    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. So, there's one use case.
    • JohnFen 7y ago
      That's too bad. I'm lucky -- in my area, the burners, hippies, and makers don't use Facebook for coordination. They have mailing lists for that.
      • halbritt 7y ago
        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.
  • the_duke 7y ago
    This very site is a specialized social network... 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.
  • drstewart 7y ago
    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.
• danans 7y ago
  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.
  • lucideer 7y ago
    The likes of TikTok would disprove this guess, but given the age profile, your theory may still hold true if age-range-bound.
    • cumwolf 7y ago
      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
      • djsumdog 7y ago
        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.
• jcomis 7y ago
  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.
  • jandrese 7y ago
    100% agree. $12/month and you have to convince all of your friends to also shell out $12/month? Dead on arrival.
• josefresco 7y ago
  https://wt.social https://wt.social First I've heard of this, and there's no pricing (or really any) information on the website. Anyone have experience?
  • 37 7y ago
    FTA: >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.
    • josefresco 7y ago
      Yes I read that, however the site has no pricing information (which is terrible UX)
• stri8ed 7y ago
  Not a fan of that name.
• OatMilkLatte 7y ago
  "Rival" is a strong word. Nothing Jimmy Wales touches ever amounts to anything.
  • arthurcolle 7y ago
    Except maybe Wikipedia?
    • bawolff 7y ago
      Also fandom (aka wikia, aka wikicities) Although i agree he's had a lot of underwhelming projects, and i dont see anything particularly special with this one
  • WhyKill 7y ago
    yeah that wiki thing never amounted to anything more than being the ninth most popular website.
    • fgnkj 7y ago
      Yeah... talk to me when it's the first. Until then...
    • davidy123 7y ago
      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."
• coolspot 7y ago
  He have done that before with non-profit social network ([20]) and non-profit virtual mobile operator ([10]). [20] - tpo.com [10] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Operator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Operator
• chabes 7y ago
  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?
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago
    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.
    • Forbo 7y ago
      > there would be no reason for advertisers pay the social networks for the cost of these "free riders". Yes, there is: network effects.
    • chabes 7y ago
      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.
  • windsurfer 7y ago
    Could always use gift cards or prepaid credit cards.
• neogodless 7y ago
  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.
• maxaf 7y ago
  I could shell out $13/mo, or, you know... not use a social network. I don't use one now, and I'm doing just fine.
  • mholt 7y ago
    HN is a social network
    • workthrowaway 7y ago
      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...
      • TallGuyShort 7y ago
        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...
    • rexreed 7y ago
      It is neither social nor a network. But it is a good community forum.
      • hellofunk 7y ago
        And how is HN not social?
        • Finnucane 7y ago
          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.
• michaelmrose 7y ago
  Being asked to pay for something before using it is a hard sell.
• michaelmrose 7y ago
  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.
  • halflings 7y ago
    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.
    • magduf 7y ago
      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.
      • michaelmrose 7y ago
        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.
    • michaelmrose 7y ago
      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.
  • erulabs 7y ago
    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!
• ddingus 7y ago
  Why so much money? At scale, nowhere near $12.99 / month is needed.
  • cJ0th 7y ago
    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.
    • ddingus 7y ago
      Maybe it is not. I am saying that amount of money is not necessary. Different things.
• sweeneyrod 7y ago
  That article seems to incorrectly say it's a (mandatory) subscription model: Wales' tweets say donation-based.
  • yellowapple 7y ago
    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.
• KoftaBob 7y ago
  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?
• JohnFen 7y ago
  I really hope this effort is successful! I'd sign up myself, except that I don't really find much value in those sorts of services. But maybe I should sign up anyway, just to help it along...
• randomb_1979 7y ago
  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. :-)
  • krick 7y ago
    That's quite a manifesto you just wrote here, but 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.
• wtmt 7y ago
  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.
  • rolltiide 7y ago
    > seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants 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
    • windthrown 7y ago
      Expensive luxury prices are fine for certain products but can be detrimental to social and communication tools. 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.
• brianbreslin 7y ago
  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.
• grumpy8 7y ago
  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?
  • whatshisface 7y ago
    Is being exposed to fake news hurting you, or is being tracked?
    • Forbo 7y ago
      Yes.
• Havoc 7y ago
  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.
• ARandomerDude 7y ago
  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.
• Zenst 7y ago
  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.. 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318590
• degenerate 7y ago
  It appears the "changelog" of all posts, comments, articles, and edits is public right now... https://wt.social/recentchanges 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.
• bransonf 7y ago
  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.
  • mkskm 7y ago
    According to the announcement on Twitter it is free, just donation-based: - https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192160194693718017 https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192160194693718017 - https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192635476726947840 https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1192635476726947840
    • bransonf 7y ago
      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.
      • Nuzzerino 7y ago
        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.
  • 7y ago
• cryptozeus 7y ago
  This is not for the people who are complaining about the high price. Did anyone question what price we paid for free product like fb/insta ? Clearly this product is in infancy and trying to attract early adopters. In future price may come down and ui/ux will get better but it’s clearly not for everyone looking to escape into social media as entertainment.
  • marcus_holmes 7y ago
    I'm totally the target market for this. FB is just f$$ing depressing, and I only check in every couple of days now. I would happily pay for a regular dopamine fix that didn't include a shower of muppets saying things I find mildly irritating at best. I'm also totally over the BBC, ABC (Australia, not USA), and other MSM. Again, shower of muppets etc etc. What I really want is the early internet back again. I want some blogs to read, that are witty, intelligent and erudite. I want a feed reader that will let me know when they update. I want a news source that is likewise witty, erudite, intelligent and sceptical (the foremost asset of any journalist should be scepticism). I think I'll just go and find a bunch of blogs to follow. And start my own again. F$ck Facebook.
  • chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    "If you're complaining about the price, this isn't for you" is kind of a truism, but I'm not sure it's a helpful truism in this case. At a moment where the phrase "subscription fatigue" is sweeping into popular discourse, $100 a year is a hell of a big ask for a nascent social network. App.Net couldn't convince people to pay $50 a year earlier this decade; today Micro.blog is building a cult following as a paid Twitter alternative, but it's very consciously not trying to take on Twitter scale-wise -- and it's actually a full blog hosting service for $60 a year (with a free tier if you're already hosting your own blog you want to integrate with it).
    • indigodaddy 7y ago
      Is WP the only blog that can hook into the micro.blog platform? Any list of supported blog engines/platforms?
• psychometry 7y ago
  Really not impressed with their UI design. Looks like it was designed by programmers.
• rosybox 7y ago
  It's a nice idea but my social life doesn't revolve around news, it revolves around things I like to do and my friends and family, so this doesn't interest me. I also think social + news will just lead to you getting stuck in a bubble of news content your social group agrees with.
  • clamprecht 7y ago
    Exactly! If I could have a Facebook minus any news, that would be awesome.
  • ArlenBales 7y ago
    Surprised I had to scroll so far down this thread to find someone else with this sentiment. When did social networks become epicenters for sharing and arguing news and politics? Someone make a paid social network that forbids news and politics and you'll have my attention.
• francescopnpn 7y ago
  This is the worst attempt I've ever seen at building a social network. 3 out of 4 of the major social networks were started by 20-22yos, 4 out of 4 were initially for teens only, 3 out of 3 in the last 10 years were mobile-only, ios-only I could go on forever but the point is it doesn't even get the basics right. If you're interested in how one builds a successful social network check Nikita's tweets (sold TBH to Facebook 2 years ago for $100M) https://twitter.com/nikitabier https://twitter.com/nikitabier
  • melq 7y ago
    Not exactly large sample sizes. What social networks are ios only?
  • the_duke 7y ago
    > 4 out of 4 were initially for teens Facebook was for college students, not teens. But otherwise, yeah, if the plan is to capture a significant audience, this is a horrible attempt wrt to UI and messaging.
• jfengel 7y ago
  The problem isn't the network. The problem is the social -- your social, i.e. your friends. You can get the same effect on existing social media simply by not having them as friends, or blocking them. The people who enjoy fake news won't sign up for this. They'll stick with a network where they have "freedom of speech". They won't vanish, and they won't get any better educated. It's not as if you can make the urge to spread fake news vanish. Your racist cousin still exists, and he's still eagerly seeking out and re-posting obviously fake stories from outside what he dubs the "mainstream media" -- he won't suddenly come to his senses, and he certainly won't pay for the privilege. I think a better approach, if you want to use social media at all, is to tell people "I won't be friends with people who believe hateful BS." That's the only thing that might help: force them to choose between their friends and their desire to reinforce their group identity. Going to a different site might achieve that, but you don't need to spend money and you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Just use the existing tools.
• aquova 7y ago
  This seems to me to have the exact same problem that projects like Mastodon have, which is that people use social media because other people they know use social media. You can point out all the benefits the alternative sites have, but at the end of the day, 99% of people aren't going to want to completely start over on a new site that isn't going to offer anything that they can't already find on an established platform.
• tinyhouse 7y ago
  Just signed up. I could search for topics but not join as it says I'm number 60K+ in the waiting list and need to pay. First impression it looks like Reddit. I'm very skeptical people will pay $100/year for this. Reporting the number of members is pretty useless since I'm pretty sure they are not talking about paying ones.
  • mirimir 7y ago
    What are the payment options? Bitcoin maybe?
    • Forbo 7y ago
      From what I saw, they're accepting cards and PayPal.
      • mirimir 7y ago
        Thanks. What I figured. People who use Bitcoin would be too iffy for them.
    • spartas 7y ago
      Looks like Credit card and PayPal only. Definitely not Bitcoin. I've given Bitcoin to Wikipedia in the past (using the same email address). When I try to pay for a WT Social subscription with a credit card, I get a bit scary error message: Card Input Error(s): You cannot combine currencies on a single customer. This customer has had a subscription, coupon, or invoice item with a different currency.
      • mirimir 7y ago
        WTF? Don't some people have credit cards from different countries? Legally, I mean.
• yggda 7y ago
  Like others I don't understand the pricing here. For comparison in 2017, FB made $84 per US user, and $27 per EU user. So you're already paying more than you 'pay' facebook. > He doesn't expect the social network to be profitable I'd expect it to be more profitable than facebook at this price [1]https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-facebook-fb-make-money.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-fac...
  • rconti 7y ago
    probably an issue of scale
• INTPenis 7y ago
  Now that people have seen how fun Facebook is (after all it does have its benefits) I would love to wipe the slate clean and start over with a payed model. Maybe not as high as Netflix, because there would be no need for such heavy bandwidth use, but definitely yearly/monthly subscriptions. I don't use social media myself but I hear from family members and friends how fun it is to connect with far away relatives and of course organize and attend various social groups. But I'm skeptical as to whether wt.social will work with the big players still out there serving a majority of users.
• rocky1138 7y ago
  With things like GNU Social you can have your own social network effectively free and you 100% control it. How can this compete with that? The only real way is the network effect (all your friends are on it so you feel like you have no choice but to join because it's going to be very hard to get everyone to switch to your network). WT Social doesn't have that, so... ?
  • woofcat 7y ago
    The problem with all solutions to facebook (and this one) is getting a critical mass to join them. People use Facebook because _everyone_ is on facebook. I don't need to think "Is my cousins boyfriend on Facebook?" you just know they are. Without that assurance, you'll end up with two invites for a function, and that is more work for little gain.
    • pmoriarty 7y ago
      "People use Facebook because _everyone_ is on facebook." There was a time when everyone was not on Facebook. Every social network with a critical mass now started without one. Back around when Facebook started, MySpace was massive. Now it's extinct.
      • MadWombat 7y ago
        Exactly. But all this tells you is that there was some added value that Facebook brought that made people sign up even when it didn't have critical mass. Currently, the only network I know of that might be in the right place to compete with Facebook is Instagram. Which is basically the same, but with more pictures of food.
  • MadWombat 7y ago
    > With things like GNU Social you can have your own social network "I'm a mog - half man, half dog. I'm my own best friend."
  • dinkleberg 7y ago
    WT:Social is never going to have a Facebook level network effect, but it's certainly going to be higher than GNU Social. I just created an account 5 mins ago and I was number 100k+ so they're off to a good start.
• cfv 7y ago
  OK, so I signed up for it. Minimum salary where I live is about 400usd/mo, and it's asking me for 12usd/mo. I predict not that many people from my country will join any time soon.
• throwaway35784 7y ago
  People pay lots of money to join real world social networks, like country clubs, so I think something like paid online social networks will evolve.
• bransonf 7y ago
  From WT:Social's website > We will foster an environment where bad actors are removed because it is right, not because it suddenly affects our bottom-line. But what constitutes a bad actor?
  • mirimir 7y ago
    Bottom line, it's arguably anyone who Jimmy Wales doesn't like. I wonder if they'll refund fees paid. I might try it, if they accept Bitcoin. Which I doubt they do. But I don't even see a payment link at https://wt.social/ https://wt.social/ Maybe you must try creating an account first.
  • mikelyons 7y ago
    Potentially: Someone who's unmitigated selfishness harms others.
• chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  I love the idea of an alternate social network, and I'm fine with the idea of charging users. But in an era where free alternatives are bountiful (even if most of them are "free as in puppy"), where a full paid blog hosting service like Micro.blog -- which includes a social network timeline built on IndieWeb principles -- is only $5 a month, where "subscription fatigue" is entering the lexicon... this is just a bonkers amount of money to ask. If I were serious about building some kind of social network at this point and thought it would need a revenue stream to be sustainable, I'd try to: - find not just a niche but functionality that differentiates it from existing services in some way (if your service can be described as "Facebook for X," you've already lost, because the Facebook for all values of X already exists and is called "Facebook") - build on open protocols, IndieWeb style (including ActivityPub, although the first point suggests the service better not be "Mastodon for X," either) - if it makes sense, have a free tier that gives people some clue what they're signing up for, although not so much that it discourages them from actually, you know, signing up - charge a low enough rate that signing up doesn't feel like a huge commitment: say, $2 a month or $16 a year I'm surprised nobody has tried the low-cost route yet. Yes, I get it, those rates aren't going to be bringing you VC money and bazillion-dollar unicorn growth, but a relatively small number of paying users could create a sustainable, even profitable, small business for a few employees.
  • dcolkitt 7y ago
    I'm not necessarily if translates into online social media, but at least in meatspace there's no shortage of social clubs where the high price tag is a feature not a bug. They're called country clubs.
    • chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      Absolutely, and it'd be possible to create the social network equivalent of a country club. The questions I'd ask are (a) is that the kind of network that Jimmy Wales wants to create here, and (b) what's the value proposition? Obviously part of the value is saying "I am a member of this exclusive club," but that relies on the exclusive club actually impressing whoever you consider "the right people." :)
• greenhatman 7y ago
  Instead of ads, it will just have a huge banner on top with Jimmy Wales' face asking for donations.
• Porthos9K 7y ago
  I can pull the Associated Press' RSS feed for free. Likewise with the BBC and ProPublica and The Intercept. Why would I pay $13/month for news I can get for free without useless "social" features and data collection?
• sk84life 7y ago
  And build with.. oh donated money. Now we can donate more again :) Is anybody worrying how much Wikipedia pages are hiding researchers results ? Oh, please. I would rather use good ol' VK before these CIA books
  • thumbsdownnowx 7y ago
    So right.. big up!
  • Forbo 7y ago
    > Is anybody worrying how much Wikipedia pages are hiding researchers results ? Got an example you'd like to cite? Tried searching on my own, couldn't find anything off hand.
• qubex 7y ago
  I paid instantly for a yearly subscription (90 euros) because I really want the opportunity to support a project that keeps me in contact with my friends and interest groups and that doesn’t harvest me for my data. I’ve seen techies clamour for a subscription-based Facebook service for years... it’s clearly not in Facebook’s interest to pander to the opt-out-of-information-collection crowd, so I’m delighted somebody is providing an alternative and I’m willing to take the plunge and vote with my wallet.
• pixiemaster 7y ago
  Will these get rid of the annoying begging-banner on wikipedia in Q4? then sign me up!
• bladerunner85 7y ago
  these are all social networks right? why does everyone call them social media?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• pmoriarty 7y ago
  I always shake my head when Jimmy Wales is given so much credit for founding Wikipedia, while what he did was supply the money for it from the profit he made off his soft-core porn business, while Larry Sanger (who deserves most of the credit, including coming up with the name Wikipedia, with Wikipedia's most distinctive feature -- the so-called Neutral Point of View, and with managing the site itself) is virtually forgotten.
  • fittslickare 7y ago
    He did something. He is doing something now.
    • tills13 7y ago
      Exactly. Why does it matter?
  • eigenvalue 7y ago
    History is written by the victors, and unfortunately Sanger decided to instead focus on Nupedia, which was more focused on "experts" writing the articles. Ultimately it seems that Sanger didn't truly believe in the core underlying idea of Wikipedia, which is that allowing anyone to write/edit without any reputation or credentials (or even an account!) eventually leads to a good outcome. It's counter-intuitive to some degree that the noise of allowing the "unwashed masses" to contribute is outweighed by the ease of attracting new contributors combined with the decentralized, crowd-sourced corrections of the community.
  • soapboxrocket 7y ago
    This isn't really any different than most cases. Think Elon Musk started Tesla or SpaceX? Nope, he bought in just like Jimmy.
    • the_duke 7y ago
      Musk didn't found Tesla and is (somewhat inappropriately) labeled as a cofounder, but joined in Series A as an investor. But he very much did build SpaceX from nothing (well, his Paypal money), and his unconventional approach is responsible for their success.
• LeoPanthera 7y ago
  Since the article apparently lacks a link to the actual social network site: https://wt.social https://wt.social The article says that it's not free and there's membership fee. I'm not against that, but it doesn't say that anywhere on the front page. Presumably they tell you that after you've submitted the form containing your personal information. Kind of shady.
  • leoh 7y ago
    I signed up and it seems usable without payment. I wonder if it's region dependent.
• cdata 7y ago
  I usually donate to Wikimedia every year, and I was a donator for WikiTribune and followed it closely as it rolled out. I personally think that Wikipedia is one of the most valuable resources on the internet. Watching WikiTribune flounder in its early days left me feeling disillusioned. It quickly began to seem like a project lacking clear product vision (or else a team that could execute on such a vision). I eventually gave up waiting for the service to become useful as a daily news source and wrote it off. Glancing at WikiTribune now, it seems like wt.social is a pivot for the service (https://www.wikitribune.com/wt/news/article/101868/ https://www.wikitribune.com/wt/news/article/101868/). I hope it turns out well, because I strongly believe that the service Jimmy Wales initially described as WikiTribune is a good idea and something the internet needs. But, I think I'll wait on the sidelines this time around before getting too invested in the idea.
  • sleavey 7y ago
    > I personally think that Wikipedia is one of the most valuable resources on the internet. I would say it's the most important resource on the internet, beyond actual infrastructure like DNS. > Watching WikiTribune flounder in its early days left me feeling disillusioned. It quickly began to seem like a project lacking clear product vision (or else a team that could execute on such a vision). I eventually gave up waiting for the service to become useful as a daily news source and wrote it off. Me too - I donated in total about £200 since WikiTribune launched, and hoped with Jimmy Wales behind it that it could really take off. I like this pivot though, and believe the whole community-sourced content idea is better suited to a social media type site rather than a heavily hacked WordPress blog.
  • charwalker 7y ago
    I really miss the news app Circa. vs it's later reincarnations. Major stories broken down to factual info and direct quotes with each item a tile with the source indicated a link to their version of the story. I could catch up on a dozen major stories in minutes and track them as updates were pulled in as top level tiles with the new information and again link out to the source. Clean, accessible, felt very unbiased without any spin just data and events as reported, but no commercial value so floundered. well, it was bought out by Sinclair in 2015 and that's about as biased as shadow owners can be. The original incarnation was incredible.
• rak00n 7y ago
  If two PHP developer and a community person launches a social network, can we actually call it a Facebook rival? It's lightyears away from feature parity.
• JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  I don't understand why authors frequently use the term "quietly" in article titles. ZDNet is a fairly significant site, there is nothing 'quiet' about this at all. And if you wanted to actually compete with Facebook, you'd want to get this message everywhere possible. Network effects are real for a platform like Facebook.
• scandox 7y ago
  I love Wikipedia. I know almost nothing about Jimmy Wales bar hearing one radio interview with him the content of which I do not recall. And yet somehow his name is a negative for me. How does that happen?
  • kylek 7y ago
    <queue donation-time-of-the-year-puppy-dog-eyes photo>
• hanoz 7y ago
  This article is all over the place. It can't possibly be that everyone is expected to pay around $10 a month because: 1. Obviously almost nobody is going to be prepared to pay that, and 2. He wouldn't be talking about it not making a profit and having bare-bones staff if every one of a predicted 50-500 million users was going to paying that amount, just to run a social network, because he'd need an army of staff just shoveling money of the window to avoid making a profit on those figures. So it must be that it's donation based, but then again how does a monthly donation to jump a waiting list work? Do you go outside and rejoin the queue if you stop donating? The article is all very confused, and obviously the site itself doesn't help matters.
  • sleavey 7y ago
    I got an early invite because I donated to WikiTribune; I'm not sure if that meant I skipped some payment sign-up page, but I wasn't required to pay anything to obtain access wt.social.
    • hanoz 7y ago
      That settles that then, thank you. So what's it like on the inside, worth queuing for? I am intrigued. It's a terribly clunky name mind.
      • sleavey 7y ago
        It looks a bit like Facebook: a central column with your "feed" (which is populated with articles from a bunch of interests - "subwikis" - that you choose when you get in for the first time), a left column with other groups you might be interested in joining, and a right column with invite links for your friends, a list of your current groups, and recent changes. There's a bar at the top with notifications and search.
• TulliusCicero 7y ago
  "Since all content on the platform can be edited or deleted by other users, he believes there's a good incentive for good behavior by users." There is zero chance this policy survives having a million+ users intact.
  • fittslickare 7y ago
    Yes, as the wiki model is in despair.
    • TulliusCicero 7y ago
      Social network posts aren't a collection of verifiable facts. The idea of someone being able to edit my post about my family vacation strikes me as more than a little bizarre.
  • Loughla 7y ago
    It will become power users controlling the narrative. Sort of like how edits and that approval process on wikipedia operate right now.
    • corobo 7y ago
      Yeah I gotta be honest the two sites I both like and hate most on the internet are Wikipedia and StackOverflow. Great resources in most cases but my god the moderation is.. overbearing. I have my doubts that'll work for a social network. Good luck to them, but I'll have probably forgotten I signed up by the time they next send me an email. Side note you seem to be able to bypass the signup queue by visiting your own friend share link.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • sergiotapia 7y ago
    "Good behavior" is double speak for "following the groupthink". Just look at wikipedia for an example of how bad this can become, where 1/3 of all content is edited and moderated by one dude with all his biases. This wiki model is not the solution.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• ryacko 7y ago
  It might be worth mentioning that Wikipedia spent several million on creating a more trustworthy search engine without anything to show for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Foundation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Fo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single/2016-02-03#In_focus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/S... I have serious doubts of this particular endeavor's success with statements like these: "The business model of social-media companies, of pure advertising, is problematic," Wales told the publication. "It turns out the huge winner is low-quality content," he added.
• danielecook 7y ago
  Previously someone mentioned the idea of a $1/mo. social network. I think if someone were to make facebook in it's first ~2 years and keep it very basic it we would be good to go. The only features you need are: a profile picture, a wall, chat, and events. In other words - a photo of yourself, a way of publicly messaging, a way of privately messaging, and a way to coordinate social events. What else do you need for a 'social network?' I would pay $1/mo for that. The simpler the better.
  • rdiddly 7y ago
    Yeah, considering it's basically just a glorified CRUD app!
  • CodeCube 7y ago
    Anyone remember app.net?
    • WA9ACE 7y ago
      Yeah I feel like it's a very similar idea, however WhatsApp did get it's start for $1 a year after the first year iirc?
      • rosybox 7y ago
        Did that make WhatsApp any money?
        • bonzini 7y ago
          Yes, it had hundreds of millions of users.
    • classichasclass 7y ago
      I sure do. I miss it. I think it was doomed the moment it went freemium instead of strictly pay.
  • timdavila 7y ago
• burtonator 7y ago
  I'm paraphrasing Machiavelli here but he nailed it in regards to wicked men. "As long as there will be men there will be those that are wicked. As long as the good man restrains his behavior he will always lose to the wicked man. "... this is not an exact quote. Just paraphrasing. This is why all these strategies will fail in regards to Facebook. They just flat out play dirty... VERY dirty. The reason why bought Whatsapp is that they were paying users directly to spy on their phones and found that Whatsapp had a massive user adoption. Unless you're prepared to go evil there's no way to win against this.
• olivermarks 7y ago
  not impressed with what wikipedia became https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-... I don't feel Wales is trustworthy
• notadoc 7y ago
  The best social network is already on your phone. Call and text people you care to engage with.
• thewojo 7y ago
  They quietly should've hired a designer ;)
• dkural 7y ago
  What matters is not if you would pay $1, but if your friends/family are willing to pay $1. Without them the network is useless. I don't think one can build network effect fast enough with a paid (truly) social network.
• tomaszs 7y ago
  I find the concept awesome so i joined it as 201 person i suppose. Here is an invitation link for you: https://wt.social/gi/tomasz-smykowski/work/buwn https://wt.social/gi/tomasz-smykowski/work/buwn
• ratsmack 7y ago
  >We will foster an environment where bad actors are removed because it is right, not because it suddenly affects our bottom-line. Who will determine what a bad actor is and what criteria will be used. We have already seen the effect of people banned from sites for political and religious views, so do we really need another site that will just do the same?
  • thundergolfer 7y ago
    What exactly has been the effect? Which political and religious views are you talking about? I can think of instances of neo-Naxis being kicked off Facebook and Cloudflare, but no instances of it happening according to religious views? If you are OK with banning Nazis from a platform, then you’ve accepted the premise that certain bad actors should be removed, and now you’re in a debate about where the line should be drawn.
• abootstrapper 7y ago
  I deleted my social media accounts (save Hacker News) a few years ago. I’m so happy without them, I’d probably have to be paid to join a new one. Been there. Done that.
• qwerty456127 7y ago
  Cool. Where do I sign-up to give it a try?
• jammygit 7y ago
  Do they really not provide a link?
• ratfaced-guy 7y ago
  What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).
  • bonestamp2 7y ago
    > and for whatever reason I think the answer has to do with the user's voice and a sense of ownership: 1. Even if spam accounts sign up, their comments and posts rarely get to the top of the algorithm because user's have a voice in the matter (downvote low quality content, and upvote other higher quality content). 2. There is a sense of ownership on the part of the mods... people who are generally passionate about the area of interest in which they moderate. There have been a number of cases over the years where moderators were acting in bad faith and the users have voiced their concerns to the Admins, who frequently remove mods or even whole subs that are operating against the benefit of the community.
  • smt88 7y ago
    > What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs Isn't this basically what Disqus was trying to do? There were a lot of these. I think moderation ended up being a huge problem that none solved. > Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content I've had the opposite experience. I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site. I think it's reddit's right to do either -- purge or not purge -- but I'm not interested in the old reddit. The redesign is bad, but I'm not really a power user, so it's not a deal-breaker for me. You can always just use old.reddit.com anyway, right?
    • zionic 7y ago
      > I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site. Reddit, as a site, is built around you having to subscribe to things to see it on your front page. Are you saying that opinions you disagree with (toxic) merely existing invisibly prevents you from using a platform? Because if that's not the case you were never forced to interact with those subs unless you explicitly sought them out. The one exception would be /r/all, but again the default is your "home" page so you'd never see that content.
• z3t4 7y ago
  > We will never sell your data. I can/want to host my own data. > We will empower you to make your own choices about what content you are served I decide myself what sites I visit. Although in recent years I mostly use HN for discovery. There is only one problem though: Web authorization/id. When I publish family photos I don't want the whole world to see, only our relatives. I've setup basic HTTP auth and sent out username+password to all relatives. That however doesn't scale! And it's impractical. What we need is a public/private key that is generated by the browser, and which can be shared between many devices. You can have many keys, one for work, one for personal business, another one for gaming or what not, as many identities/keys as you want. When you visit a web page that wants to know your identity, like any websites that right now asks for a username/password. You get a dialog asking if you want to identify on that website, and what meta-data the website request and what you info you want to give it. Kinda like installing an app on Android or iPhone where you need to confirm the app permissions. Upon accepting the identify request, you pick an appropriate ID, then your browser sends the public key to the web server, and answers a challenge to make sure you are the owner of that ID. No more username/passwords to remember. As for me who is a content hoster, I simply chose from a GUI, depending on what server/app i'm using, which group or individual id/public key I want to give access. If an unknown id/key authenticates, depending on what server/app I'm using, I get a notification, asking me to add that ID/key to contacts or what not. Kinda like with social messenger apps. At this day and age, we need something better then usernames and passwords!
• samirillian 7y ago
  Would be cool if a social network was priced like taxes. If you make more money, you pay more. Don't know what kind of arrangement could conceivably create that system though.
• smt88 7y ago
  Among my friends (and many other people), social networking with people I know in real life has been replaced by chat apps and SMS. If I want to share news, I do it via group chat. I think this is common. For those who want social news in their particular ideological bubble, there's reddit. For those who want a news reader, there are many news apps. And for those who want to interact with strangers, there's Twitter. I'd love to support this, but I just can't think of a use-case for my life.
• acd 7y ago
  It is better to pay cash for online services than to pay through your private information. If the service is free you are the currency, all your interest are sold for profit. I would much rather pay for online services like email, news and content than to sell info about myself through ads to private companies. Useful services: Email Protonmail,fastmail Online video Peertube Paying for social media. Paying for newspapers online, this is so they do not have to sell their platform and independence to ads.
• komali2 7y ago
  Lol, if you try to create a "subwiki" that already exists, you get a 404 and the error is in the URL: > https://createsub/?url=/wt/emacs/&failed=This%20SubWiki%20already%20exists!%20Please%20join%20that%20SubWiki%20or%20try%20a%20different%20name https://createsub/?url=/wt/emacs/&failed=This%20SubWiki%20al....
• btmiller 7y ago
  WT:Social for the name of a Facebook rival makes it a total non-starter.
• zadkey 7y ago
  Not so quiet now that it's on the front page of hacker news.
• diveanon 7y ago
  It seem click-baity to call this a facebook rival until it has over a billion users and is having an impact on geopolitics and election rigging.
• softwaredoug 7y ago
  A lot of the good “social networks” these days are organized a single topic or community. Like a community slack/discord or moderated subreddit. I wonder whether there will be much of a market for open ended social networks into the 2020s as both twitter and Facebook have become cesspools... and frankly don’t feel like good places to interact with folks
• eitland 7y ago
  As someone who miss the original Whatsapp a lot I was about to reach for my wallet, but this seems to be more of a wiki than a social network to me: > Since all content on the platform can be edited or deleted by other users, he believes there's a good incentive for good behavior by users.
• fajr_rd 7y ago
  "It costs $12.99 a month or $100 a year in the US, or €12 a month or €90 a year in Europe" I would subscribe just for the outlandish concept of not ripping off Europeans.
• ggggtez 7y ago
  >Since all content on the platform can be edited or deleted by other users, he believes there's a good incentive for good behavior by users. This... from the Wikipedia guy? Oh boy, I'm not convinced.
• jonplackett 7y ago
  Am I being stingy by thinking them asking fo £10 a month is a a lot? How much does facebook make per user per month?
• wbhart 7y ago
  I don't think a social network based on subscription will work. Although I could afford it, only a tiny proportion of my Facebook friends could afford an expense like that. The endless unresearched opinion on Facebook drives me mad. But unless you only want to have friends who are rich enough to agree with you, this is dead in the water.
• cyborgx7 7y ago
  He also recently, very loudly, compared getting rid of private schools to the holocaust. https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1175811349810745344 https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1175811349810745344
• system2 7y ago
  There is absolutely no way people would pay $12 per month for social media. They already get it from others for free. It is not about news to anyone. It is about snooping and boosting ego. Jimmy Wales didn't understand the facebook audience I guess.
• 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
  Jimmy is a brilliant man. He created one of the most valuable sites on the net. But I think he is suffering from being in a bit of a feedback bubble. Problems of success I guess. I don't know anyone who says: I want a social media company to help combat the fake news I see. Having more flexibility on who sees what, more privacy in group conversations, ways to 'downvote' things not just 'like/love' (lop sided incentives), etc... those are things I've wanted from FB/Twitter/Instagram and I've heard other people want. It seems he is solving a problem no one wants a solution for. For all the media hype, I'm personally not convinced social media companies should be the arbitrators of what is fake news or not. I'll give Jimmy the benefit of doubt that his version of censorship will be the best, he has proven it with wikipedia. But I'm not sure censorship, even good ones, are what we need. For those who aren't anti-censorship, then you get the disagreement on what type of censorship we should focus on. In the US, it seems one side favors censoring the far left (as has happened historically with things like communism) and others choose censoring the far right as the priority (a more modern approach). I dislike both sides (extremes tend to be unhealthy) but as a free speech advocate, I want them to have their platform, as twisted and unhealthy as it is. The strength of good ideas should be such that they don't fear bad ones.
• Fezzik 7y ago
  This will simply never takeoff. The Goldilocks conditions that allowed Facebook to spread like wildfire will never exist again. You would have to find a large group desiring to use the platform (college kids) who help grow the user base, with few/any functional alternatives (Facebook already exists, so it cannot supplant itself), along with a newly booming internet thanks to university/household broadband access, etc... At this point, all the initial users of Facebook have children and grandparents that use Facebook... and it is multi-national. The idea that a spunky-yet-well-funded startup is going to even contend with them is silly. Not that I do not wish it would happen, and we can all think of reasons why it should happen, but once the reality of contending with 2+ billion active users kicks in, you realize the petite crowd of HN users that would go for this “Facebook rival” are utterly irrelevant. MySpace was a known brand that spent millions on rebranding after cleaning up its landing pages in 2012 and they went... nowhere. Justin Timberlake could not even save them.
• h0l0cube 7y ago
  What I really want is a 'Spotify for prominent newspapers', so I'm not confronted by paywalls for sites like NYT, Washington Post, Bloomberg, etc. That is something that I would pay for. What I won't pay for is multiple subscriptions to several prominent newspapers I'm interested in, that are linked everywhere, especially here. If WT:Social can provide content from all the biggest mastheads with one convenient subscription, I'm in.
• will_pseudonym 7y ago
  "Prestige" and quality of a social network that you have no connections within, don't matter one iota. The product is the website and infrastructure of the network, married with the users and their connections within. See: Google Plus. They (stupidly or naively) thought that using the cachet of exclusivity and invite emails would work in its benefit just as it did with Gmail, fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the product and the entire marketplace they were trying to succeed in.
• xivzgrev 7y ago
  The value of a social network is exponentially related to the number of nodes and connections. By putting a paywall up it’s sharply limiting that. What he’s trying to do is admirable but doesn’t make a lot of sense.
• ttraub 7y ago
  The secret to a good social network is reputation. Upvoted content floats to the top, while downvoted content is pushed out of sight. It's not always fair, and certainly does not always bring the best content to light, but it's a lot better than a purely level playing field of equals, where a fool's opinion is weighted exactly against that of a great philosopher. Charging for access is problematic, however. People have been trained to expect free stuff, and unfortunately it's not clear the value proposition of Wales' offering. To avoid seeing ads? To have vastly better content? To be a superior UX? He has a pretty tough row to hoe.
• fortran77 7y ago
  What I want is a decentralized Reddit with the same type of interaction that we have with our beloved Google search engine. So you are right, if Reddit is so central to our lives, why do we have such a hard time taking it down? Is it because we are so used to having it there that it's just not something we can imagine not having? No. I know a lot of us want to take it down. But the good thing about reddit is that it can be taken down. That's why it is one of the most interesting internet communities. It doesn't really have a "community" in the true sense of the word. But in reality, it has communities. And it doesn't matter how big or small those communities are; that's how the site functions. Reddit can be taken down and Reddit will be back with a new identity and a new identity will be created. We don't have to worry about it. So we have a choice.
• linusnext 7y ago
  Why is it every answer to this solved problem involves someone new playing go between in social networks? "Come to my alternative to X, where instead of X-corp handling all your data, Y-corp will!" The internet was not suppose to be like this...
• Iv 7y ago
  "It costs $12.99 a month" Yeah, not for me. Maybe journalists or news professionals can be interested, but it better has to bring value.
• Johnny555 7y ago
  Interesting idea, but $13/month is about 2X - 3X more than I'd be willing to pay. I pay Protonmail around $6/month, and I want to pay less than that for social media.
• JDiculous 7y ago
  I created an account, log in, and just see a page with a bunch of "subwikis" on completely random topics ("Woodworking", "Mountain Biking", and "Icelandic Horses" are the top 3) with no subwiki having more than 9 members, most only having 1 or 2. Now I will log out and probably never think to log back in again. (I know this might sound like I'm shallowly dismissing it, but this is just my honest experience as a random casual internet person. I hope they can make this more appealing and succeed, especially since I support any attempt at toppling proprietary monopolies).
  • chadlavi 7y ago
    This was my experience with ello. And mastodon for that matter.
  • jki275 7y ago
    Yeah, the onboarding shows that, but there are a bunch of subwikis that are actually active. I have no idea why they show ones that are not active when you onboard, that decision makes no sense at all.
• physicles 7y ago
  I’ve been living in China for some years, and you know what’s surprisingly not a terrible model for a social network? Wechat, if it were rebuilt by people who value freedom and privacy. Think of it like WhatsApp but with a feed — just enough social to help you stay connected with your IRL friends, without turning everything into political discussion. (And yes, I realize that it’s partly the censorship here that steers people away from politics and keeps it social, but I don’t think that’s all of it) I don’t see why a social network should also build in first class features for sharing and commenting on news. What’s the old adage about discussing politics and religion? Why should it even be POSSIBLE for me to argue with some nazi I don’t know in the comments section of an article my grandma shared with my uncle? Seriously, wtf? If you want a site purpose-built for discussing news as it goes viral, Reddit is fine for that. Interesting things about Wechat’s feed: - It’s not what you see when you open the app. Instead, the app opens to your messages. This is huge. - It’s strictly chronological. Yep. - Each time I open it, the 5th post is always an ad, and it’s labeled as such. - It’s trivially easy to restrict most people from seeing only the last week, or month, or six months of your posts. People you’re not friends with can’t see your posts BY DEFAULT. - When your friends post, you can only see comments and likes from your own friends. (it's easier to notice unexpected connections, which could be an upside or a downside depending on your situation) - If you want to re-share something, there’s no button for that: you have to open the page, copy the link, and post it again. This is obviously intended to make the censors’ jobs easier, but adding friction also cuts down on low effort sharing. How it’s otherwise different from Facebook: - There’s no such thing as viral posts. Sure, the same link might get shared in thousands of private groups, but the discussion isn’t shared. I think this is a feature, not a bug. Again, there are plenty of websites specifically for discussing news with strangers as it goes viral. - It’s mobile-first (basically, mobile only). You can’t see the feed on PC, so if you want to write an angry tirade about f-ing Yankees fans on your friend’s post, you’re gonna get sore thumbs. Again, adding friction means less trash makes it on the network. - Everyone has it hooked up to payment, so splitting the bill at the end of dinner is trivial. There’s even a feature for sending a bill to a group with N people that splits it N ways and shows who has and hasn’t paid. - (Probably some other stuff, but I basically stopped using Facebook 7 years ago when I moved to China, partly because my parents and old friends are on there sharing news stories I'd rather not know their stance on) Even aside from the censorship, Wechat isn’t perfect — its interface hasn’t changed in the 7 years I’ve been using it, so stupid stuff like pinning contacts or putting groups in a separate tab or even goddamn EVENTS aren’t things you can do in the app. But as a social network, it’s got most of the value while being way less problematic than Facebook.
• passwordreset 7y ago
  Just a FYI, but you don't need to pay the $12.99 or whatever it is to "jump the waitlist". Simply invite someone else, and when that someone else joins, you're automatically off the wait queue and able to view a feed or create subwikis. Join the subwiki called "Riffing" if you're into MST3K or Rifftrax. :)
• Yan-solucracy 7y ago
  Where's the code ? A social network that's not decentralized, distributed or open source ? I fail to see how this could be new or an improvment ?
• sytelus 7y ago
  To be contrarian, I feel ads are good and useful thing if done right. I look at ads as website working hard to figure out my needs. Ads connect products and companies which want to add value and the customer who otherwise might not discover them. It's win-win and normalizes platforms against paid services which vast majority of the world cannot afford. It's a slap in the face of 95% population when you say it just cost same as few coffee cups. I know the crowd here gets spooked when they see ads for product they were searching for. To me, its great that someone out there is trying to figure out proposing me competitive products I'm interested in right now. Again, its win win scenario but it has to done right (for example, no personal information transmitted to advertisers).
• xhruso00 7y ago
  Once there was a great presentation about App Store sales sorted by Categories. Outcome - social apps don't make money, do business category of apps.
• greypowerOz 7y ago
  i joined. First "friend request" i got was from some Bitcoin marketer who had subbed to "every" interest group.... I couldn't see any way to flag this person, report them for spam or otherwise mark them as someone I'm not interested in. I was also spammed by the "new posts in..." for subs i had not joined and have zero interest in getting email from. In short, this feels like something from the good old days when we all thought the internet was a small and friendly town... What the hell were they thinking!
• retpirato 7y ago
  If you don't like facebook try mewe. There's no ads & you get the basics for free, but you can pay for things like a dark theme or extra emojis in different themes. Mastodon is a good twitter replacement.
• edisonjoao 7y ago
  most of these people are one hit wonders.