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> How much more honest a relationship it might be if Facebook charged for its wares. The author seems to think that Facebook would suddenly stop doing all the

> How much more honest a relationship it might be if Facebook charged for its wares. The author seems to think that Facebook would suddenly stop doing all the other things it does to make money, once a user would pay. Of course they would not. On the contrary: Facebook would see those paying users as extra valuable for tracking, keep harassing and confusing them until they click the wrong button once, and then sell that "premium" user data for more.

bonestamp2 5y ago
I would actually consider using Facebook if I could pay for it and not be tracked or datamined. There is a let a legit use case for sharing photos, personal stories, and discussing news and information with a curated list of your friends and family.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Sure, but “and not be tracked” is the part @Maarten88 (and I) don’t believe will happen even if you do pay.
- Sleepytime 5y ago
  I see this often, but the trust problem still exists. There's no universe where I can trust Facebook (or Google or...) To not track me. Others have their own standards, but I don't feel like it's unreasonable to consider them APTs no different than the spyware of old. They have datacenters dedicated to exactly that. How can my data be reliably segregated so that it's not 'accidentally' included later? Even if the data stays all first-party, they make so many copies and it gets put in so many datasets across the world that co-mingling and abuse of it just feels inevitable at that scale.
  - BTCOG 5y ago
    Uploading your daily business, personal photos, and down to what you eat to a profile on someone else's servers was never a good idea from the very start. I find it pretty amusing how it becomes outrage and parroting after the fact that bad news comes out about Facebook. We knew what Facebook was doing in 2008-2012 era as well but nobody parroted these old and tired narratives then.
    - intergalplan 5y ago
      I've always taken Zuck's infamous "dumb fucks" comment to come from a place of astonishment, more than malice. Posting tons of private info under your own name online was strongly against Web norms at the time, but all those newbies didn't know that. FB and others made it normal, but the reasons it was a bad idea to begin with didn't go away.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        >against Web norms at the time I would even say it was against social norms. Don't talk to strangers. Don't give away your phone number. Don't give away your address. Don't tell state your mother's maiden name. It was such a simple thing to get all of those new people on social media to give up all of that very personal information without hesitation. Yet, if some random person at the supermarket asked you any of those questions in person you'd definitely raise an eyebrow and walk away. SocialEngineering++
      - BTCOG 5y ago
        Exactly. If you used the internet from the beginning you clearly saw how Facebook is a data harvesting scam. By late 2010 I'd chatted with several engineers at Facebook about how they were clearly storing all chats/messages indefinitely, even if you deleted your PMs. So to the dude up there downvoting me, yes, many of us in tech knew this very early on. It was literally the goal of Facebook from the time you ever heard about Facebook.
    - reaperducer 5y ago
      We knew what Facebook was doing in 2008-2012 era as well but nobody parroted these old and tired narratives then. We didn't know that Facebook was compiling dossiers on every human being on the planet, even the ones without Facebook accounts.
      - sneak 5y ago
        Everyone paying attention when Path et al were uploading whole phone address books (which lead to Apple adding it as a specific permission in the next iOS) knew this data was getting stored indefinitely.
- Guest42 5y ago
  I think for me that a pay model without advertising would've been enough to prevent me from quitting, but now that I no longer have to put that energy into the website and my emotional associations with it, I am gone.
- intergalplan 5y ago
  "Social" should be an Internet protocol. The only reason it's not is that we basically stopped making protocols (well, ones that gain any meaningful traction, anyway—I'm aware there are some lightly-used efforts at social protocols) because all the companies in a position to push them to a meaningful number of users are better served by making interoperability difficult. The "free" services spyvertising economy, where captive non-paying user count & eyeball time is what matters, is why things are this way.
  - karmelapple 5y ago
    When you say a protocol, do you mean in the same way http is a protocol? Like a new way to communicate that web browsers would start adopting? Because in my opinion the browsers would need to make it as easy to use as any other website or phone app if it were ever to gain traction.
    - intergalplan 5y ago
      Usenet, email, http, XMPP, IRC, et c. Yes, just like those. In combination, that bunch is already not too far off. The trouble is that anything trying to do that is competing with "free" spyvertising services, which have no incentive to integrate with them (i.e. implement the protocol), unless it's to do it temporarily to eat their meager market share before cutting them off. IMO that dynamic is why protocols have stagnated for decades. Working on a client or server for some new protocol is thankless when you know it'll be niche at best, and more likely DOA. Making a go at a business with one is insane in this market. So they stagnate. No new ones catch hold, and old ones make slow progress at best, or gradually die.
  - nactivint 5y ago
    ActivityPub is more than lightly used, it just isn't used by people you want to associate with. You pretty much have to either accept radical leftism and hang out with tankies or you get to hang out with the actual Nazis that are blocked by the "mainstream" leftist servers Yes yes, there's radicalization for everyone! God forbid you want to use social media for something besides political fighting though
IgorPartola 5y ago
This. If Facebook charged $5 to buy the app or $1/month then it wouldn’t be valued nearly as highly as it is now.
- e-clinton 5y ago
  Except FB makes $40/year in revenue from folks in the US across all their apps.
  - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
    I was just thinking that Facebook would seem to fit into the sort-of-standard pricing of $5/mo, or $50/yr. If they'd opt you out of ALL advertising for this, that would be something worth considering. They could charge this, and actually make MORE from paying customers. But I'm pretty sure that they would pull the cable stunt, and eventually let ads creep into paying accounts. I deleted my account when the COVID nonsense started. They'd have to pay ME to get back on, and watch morons bloviate about anything involving math or science. I have plenty of my own moronic bloviating, thanks.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      I think that allowing people to pay and genuinely stopping mining their data would hit FB a lot harder than just $30-40 per year. I’d bet on a correlation between users that are worth more than average and ones who’d pay to avoid being tracked. It’s a claim I have no evidence to support.
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    But their valuation isn’t directly based on that number. That’s the floor on their valuation. The ceiling is “how much more do you think they could extract per person?” Soon as they set a price and drop their current model they in effect put a ceiling on how much they can extract per person since upping the price won’t really work out so well. This grounds their valuation.
- lostlogin 5y ago
notsureaboutpg 5y ago
Yes, anyone who runs a business with digital customers knows this. iOS and Mac users pay more as a group so they are more valuable so they are all the more important to track and guide down various "marketing funnels".
bryanlarsen 5y ago
This used to be why newspapers charged money. Newspapers used to make 80% of their revenue from advertising. Theoretically lowering or eliminating altogether their cover price would increase their distribution by much more than the loss of revenue from the cover price. However, a paying customer is worth a lot more to an advertiser than a free customer so newspapers kept charging.
- maest 5y ago
  Also, pre-digital, incremental distribution costs weren't virtually 0.
  - est31 5y ago
    Indeed you can serve html content quite cheaply from your server, where you had to create and deliver physical matter to the readers before. But when you get your newspaper ads to 10k households instead of 1k, doesn't that increase the value of those ads by a factor 10 to the advertiser? The only thing I could think of would be spam prevention (you don't want someone to order 100 examples of your newspaper), but there are also other ways to combat spam.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    Distribution costs were about 20% of their expenses. Cover & subscription revenue was also about 20%. Let's assume that other expenses are about 60% and profit about 20%. Let's assume that making the paper free would increase distribution by 10X. So gross revenue would be 800%. Subtract 200% for distribution, and 60% fixed expenses leaving profit of 540%/20% or a 27X increase in profit. Obviously it wasn't a 27X increase in profit to stop charging for the paper. Why not? Because a free reader wasn't worth the same as a paid reader -- a paid reader was worth about 100X a free reader. Most free newspapers weren't actually read, and paying readers are a much more valuable demographic to advertisers.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
      > Distribution costs were about 20% of their expenses. It depends where. Where I live they were negotiated individually but in the range of 25-40%.
chakalakasp 5y ago
It's like my local newspaper's way of handling paid subscriptions. Read as many articles online as you want through the tiny little window we allow the actual content to exist in, sandwiched between animated clickbait ads, some which masquerade as other news stories, with the occasional popup.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  It's your newspaper's way of getting you to get the print version. Dead tree ads are far more valuable than online ones. As someone who subscribes to several dead tree newspapers and magazines, it's a much better experience than anything I've ever seen digitally. (Except for those that allow PDF downloads.)
whatever1 5y ago
Cable companies are also double dipping. High charge rates + advertising
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Cable companies are also double dipping. High charge rates + advertising Even Apple does this now. Charge higher prices for the hardware, but still include (unequal) advertising inside the OS. https://twitter.com/Reaperducer/status/1390696646854397955?s=20 https://twitter.com/Reaperducer/status/1390696646854397955?s...
- bonestamp2 5y ago
  Yes, and that advertising can be highly targeted if you're using their DNS.
ryanhuff 5y ago
In the early days of cable television, there were no commercials. But, we know how that ended up. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  And that's why we have Netflix today. If Netflix started pushing commercials I'd leave immediately, and I think a lot of other people would too. Meanwhile Netflix is printing money like crazy.
  - oehpr 5y ago
    Netflix did start pushing commercials. They started testing pre-rolls in 2017. They faced huge backlash over it, but they still want to.
    - pgayed 5y ago
      Despite 429 points (ATOW), this article is no longer visible from the hn main page.
    - boredwithlife 5y ago
      The push now is to have ai-generated items in the show to be used for advertising. That can on the table: it may be coke for you but Pepsi for your friend. The background radio ads in the show, maybe direct advertising. More subtle, still print
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    They've really gone right up to the line with autoplaying trailers from the browse screen though...
    - nogbit 5y ago
      You can disable that in the settings menu
bertil 5y ago
> sell that "premium" user data for more Facebook doesn’t sell user data. They also happen to be the only company with a process in place to fight against other company doing it.

bonestamp2 5y ago

I would actually consider using Facebook if I could pay for it and not be tracked or datamined. There is a let a legit use case for sharing photos, personal stories, and discussing news and information with a curated list of your friends and family.

ben_w 5y ago
Sure, but “and not be tracked” is the part @Maarten88 (and I) don’t believe will happen even if you do pay.
Sleepytime 5y ago
I see this often, but the trust problem still exists. There's no universe where I can trust Facebook (or Google or...) To not track me. Others have their own standards, but I don't feel like it's unreasonable to consider them APTs no different than the spyware of old. They have datacenters dedicated to exactly that. How can my data be reliably segregated so that it's not 'accidentally' included later? Even if the data stays all first-party, they make so many copies and it gets put in so many datasets across the world that co-mingling and abuse of it just feels inevitable at that scale.
- BTCOG 5y ago
  Uploading your daily business, personal photos, and down to what you eat to a profile on someone else's servers was never a good idea from the very start. I find it pretty amusing how it becomes outrage and parroting after the fact that bad news comes out about Facebook. We knew what Facebook was doing in 2008-2012 era as well but nobody parroted these old and tired narratives then.
  - intergalplan 5y ago
    I've always taken Zuck's infamous "dumb fucks" comment to come from a place of astonishment, more than malice. Posting tons of private info under your own name online was strongly against Web norms at the time, but all those newbies didn't know that. FB and others made it normal, but the reasons it was a bad idea to begin with didn't go away.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      >against Web norms at the time I would even say it was against social norms. Don't talk to strangers. Don't give away your phone number. Don't give away your address. Don't tell state your mother's maiden name. It was such a simple thing to get all of those new people on social media to give up all of that very personal information without hesitation. Yet, if some random person at the supermarket asked you any of those questions in person you'd definitely raise an eyebrow and walk away. SocialEngineering++
    - BTCOG 5y ago
      Exactly. If you used the internet from the beginning you clearly saw how Facebook is a data harvesting scam. By late 2010 I'd chatted with several engineers at Facebook about how they were clearly storing all chats/messages indefinitely, even if you deleted your PMs. So to the dude up there downvoting me, yes, many of us in tech knew this very early on. It was literally the goal of Facebook from the time you ever heard about Facebook.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    We knew what Facebook was doing in 2008-2012 era as well but nobody parroted these old and tired narratives then. We didn't know that Facebook was compiling dossiers on every human being on the planet, even the ones without Facebook accounts.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Everyone paying attention when Path et al were uploading whole phone address books (which lead to Apple adding it as a specific permission in the next iOS) knew this data was getting stored indefinitely.
Guest42 5y ago
I think for me that a pay model without advertising would've been enough to prevent me from quitting, but now that I no longer have to put that energy into the website and my emotional associations with it, I am gone.
intergalplan 5y ago
"Social" should be an Internet protocol. The only reason it's not is that we basically stopped making protocols (well, ones that gain any meaningful traction, anyway—I'm aware there are some lightly-used efforts at social protocols) because all the companies in a position to push them to a meaningful number of users are better served by making interoperability difficult. The "free" services spyvertising economy, where captive non-paying user count & eyeball time is what matters, is why things are this way.
- karmelapple 5y ago
  When you say a protocol, do you mean in the same way http is a protocol? Like a new way to communicate that web browsers would start adopting? Because in my opinion the browsers would need to make it as easy to use as any other website or phone app if it were ever to gain traction.
  - intergalplan 5y ago
    Usenet, email, http, XMPP, IRC, et c. Yes, just like those. In combination, that bunch is already not too far off. The trouble is that anything trying to do that is competing with "free" spyvertising services, which have no incentive to integrate with them (i.e. implement the protocol), unless it's to do it temporarily to eat their meager market share before cutting them off. IMO that dynamic is why protocols have stagnated for decades. Working on a client or server for some new protocol is thankless when you know it'll be niche at best, and more likely DOA. Making a go at a business with one is insane in this market. So they stagnate. No new ones catch hold, and old ones make slow progress at best, or gradually die.
- nactivint 5y ago
  ActivityPub is more than lightly used, it just isn't used by people you want to associate with. You pretty much have to either accept radical leftism and hang out with tankies or you get to hang out with the actual Nazis that are blocked by the "mainstream" leftist servers Yes yes, there's radicalization for everyone! God forbid you want to use social media for something besides political fighting though

IgorPartola 5y ago

This. If Facebook charged $5 to buy the app or $1/month then it wouldn’t be valued nearly as highly as it is now.

e-clinton 5y ago
Except FB makes $40/year in revenue from folks in the US across all their apps.
- TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  I was just thinking that Facebook would seem to fit into the sort-of-standard pricing of $5/mo, or $50/yr. If they'd opt you out of ALL advertising for this, that would be something worth considering. They could charge this, and actually make MORE from paying customers. But I'm pretty sure that they would pull the cable stunt, and eventually let ads creep into paying accounts. I deleted my account when the COVID nonsense started. They'd have to pay ME to get back on, and watch morons bloviate about anything involving math or science. I have plenty of my own moronic bloviating, thanks.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    I think that allowing people to pay and genuinely stopping mining their data would hit FB a lot harder than just $30-40 per year. I’d bet on a correlation between users that are worth more than average and ones who’d pay to avoid being tracked. It’s a claim I have no evidence to support.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  But their valuation isn’t directly based on that number. That’s the floor on their valuation. The ceiling is “how much more do you think they could extract per person?” Soon as they set a price and drop their current model they in effect put a ceiling on how much they can extract per person since upping the price won’t really work out so well. This grounds their valuation.
lostlogin 5y ago

notsureaboutpg 5y ago

Yes, anyone who runs a business with digital customers knows this. iOS and Mac users pay more as a group so they are more valuable so they are all the more important to track and guide down various "marketing funnels".

bryanlarsen 5y ago

This used to be why newspapers charged money. Newspapers used to make 80% of their revenue from advertising. Theoretically lowering or eliminating altogether their cover price would increase their distribution by much more than the loss of revenue from the cover price. However, a paying customer is worth a lot more to an advertiser than a free customer so newspapers kept charging.

maest 5y ago
Also, pre-digital, incremental distribution costs weren't virtually 0.
- est31 5y ago
  Indeed you can serve html content quite cheaply from your server, where you had to create and deliver physical matter to the readers before. But when you get your newspaper ads to 10k households instead of 1k, doesn't that increase the value of those ads by a factor 10 to the advertiser? The only thing I could think of would be spam prevention (you don't want someone to order 100 examples of your newspaper), but there are also other ways to combat spam.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Distribution costs were about 20% of their expenses. Cover & subscription revenue was also about 20%. Let's assume that other expenses are about 60% and profit about 20%. Let's assume that making the paper free would increase distribution by 10X. So gross revenue would be 800%. Subtract 200% for distribution, and 60% fixed expenses leaving profit of 540%/20% or a 27X increase in profit. Obviously it wasn't a 27X increase in profit to stop charging for the paper. Why not? Because a free reader wasn't worth the same as a paid reader -- a paid reader was worth about 100X a free reader. Most free newspapers weren't actually read, and paying readers are a much more valuable demographic to advertisers.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
    > Distribution costs were about 20% of their expenses. It depends where. Where I live they were negotiated individually but in the range of 25-40%.

chakalakasp 5y ago

It's like my local newspaper's way of handling paid subscriptions. Read as many articles online as you want through the tiny little window we allow the actual content to exist in, sandwiched between animated clickbait ads, some which masquerade as other news stories, with the occasional popup.

reaperducer 5y ago
It's your newspaper's way of getting you to get the print version. Dead tree ads are far more valuable than online ones. As someone who subscribes to several dead tree newspapers and magazines, it's a much better experience than anything I've ever seen digitally. (Except for those that allow PDF downloads.)

whatever1 5y ago

Cable companies are also double dipping. High charge rates + advertising

reaperducer 5y ago
Cable companies are also double dipping. High charge rates + advertising Even Apple does this now. Charge higher prices for the hardware, but still include (unequal) advertising inside the OS. https://twitter.com/Reaperducer/status/1390696646854397955?s=20 https://twitter.com/Reaperducer/status/1390696646854397955?s...
bonestamp2 5y ago
Yes, and that advertising can be highly targeted if you're using their DNS.

ryanhuff 5y ago

In the early days of cable television, there were no commercials. But, we know how that ended up. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

Judgmentality 5y ago
And that's why we have Netflix today. If Netflix started pushing commercials I'd leave immediately, and I think a lot of other people would too. Meanwhile Netflix is printing money like crazy.
- oehpr 5y ago
  Netflix did start pushing commercials. They started testing pre-rolls in 2017. They faced huge backlash over it, but they still want to.
  - pgayed 5y ago
    Despite 429 points (ATOW), this article is no longer visible from the hn main page.
  - boredwithlife 5y ago
    The push now is to have ai-generated items in the show to be used for advertising. That can on the table: it may be coke for you but Pepsi for your friend. The background radio ads in the show, maybe direct advertising. More subtle, still print
- cwkoss 5y ago
  They've really gone right up to the line with autoplaying trailers from the browse screen though...
  - nogbit 5y ago
    You can disable that in the settings menu

bertil 5y ago

> sell that "premium" user data for more Facebook doesn’t sell user data. They also happen to be the only company with a process in place to fight against other company doing it.