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The root issue seems to lie, in large part, in the normalization of “free”. It is very, very good to established big social, but it breaks how the market is sup
by strogonoff 5y ago
The root issue seems to lie, in large part, in the normalization of “free”. It is very, very good to established big social, but it breaks how the market is supposed to work.
It’s a two-hit knockout:
1. Because users aren’t the ones paying, their interests and well-being fundamentally don’t matter. Paying customers are investors & advertisers, and the only thing that matters to them is that users don’t leave.
2. Because it’s impossible to justify switching (and convincing all friends & family to switch) away from a free solution, and because no honest business can compete with free, users won’t leave.
The vast resources big social accumulates from elsewhere, it can throw at optimizing the GUI and algorithms to keep eyeballs glued—suggest posts that are likely to trigger this individual, make them engage in another pointless argument or mindlessly like and reshare. Behold the eternal enemy of the market—information asymmetry—taken to a whole new level.
When a product with millions of users is inevitably user-hostile due to the fundamentals of parent company’s business model, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it society-hostile.
Bringing the market back into the industry, turning users into paying customers and allowing them to vote with their money, could be the solution.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago>no honest business can compete with free The resources required to provide the world with the valuable parts of these services are small enough to be funded through non-profits or benefit corporations. I'd gladly donate my time and money to a 501c3 facebook killer.
- freen 5y agoMastodon
- wintermutestwin 5y agoA self-hosted federated twitter replacement will never fly with the vast majority of potential users. It is also in desperate need of a name change. The first search result is to an awesome metal band.
- strogonoff 5y agoI also think self-hosted solutions can’t compete. Luckily, if hosted platforms (either non-profit or with true paying users) offer open API, there would be no issue interoperating with Mastodon et al.
- freen 5y ago1: doesn’t have to be self hosted. 2: doesn’t have to be just twitter, it’s a federated protocol. Anything can go down the pipes. 3: doesn’t have to be called mastodon. How many forum users know the name of the software that runs their forum?
- austincheney 5y agoFree could be part of the problem but it’s not enough to qualify a cause compared to other online companies. I would say the greater problem is centralization. If user content did not go through Facebook servers, for example if Facebook were only a client application, this problems and concerns would not exist regardless of profit motive or free access.
- scotty79 5y agoYou can argument like that against open source. The problem is not that things are free. The problem is that advertisement is almost completely unregulated. I think whole advertisement industry should be nationalized and ran not-profit in strictly controlled manner in a way that more money doesn't translate to more eyeballs.
- strogonoff 5y agoNot saying we should make it illegal to give things away for others to build with. Open source code itself is not a product accessible by an end user, much less a service that connects many users and acts as a middleman in a two-sided market on which side of which are advertisers. I should clarify that I mean specifically the normalization of “free” in current context of big social. I see we’re attacking it from different angles. I believe forcing big social to become paid by requiring it to open up is a better way, achievable with more narrowly focused, less far-reaching regulation.
- scotty79 5y agoI see making some service paid as more of a bandaid, and we'll get surprised by the next nasty thing fueled by advertisements that have all the incentive to enrage us and turn our brains into jello to opimize selling things. Making Facebook paid doesn't help all that much because paid stuff also can have advertisements in them and they do. Also if somebody is selling something, they still want to play the same chords to keep us engaged and paying. Paying for something doesn't automatically make the seller work in your interest.
- strogonoff 5y agoThere is a psychological aspect to this, I believe. Switching between cheap and expensive is less of an effort than switching between free and cheap. Similarly, competition-wise, competing with however low number is easier than competing with zero. I really think FB’s domination hinges on “free”. However, changing business model like that cannot be directly required. What can be required is openness.
- pjc50 5y ago> Bringing the market back into the industry, turning users into paying customers and allowing them to vote with their money, could be the solution How exactly? Ban free content?
- strogonoff 5y agoMandating big social to provide interoperability seems like one way to go about it. Open APIs covering all functionality. Once proper cross-platform third-party clients can appear in which FB et al. can’t show ads, they will start bleeding users and perhaps be forced to change.