3 ms·

Yeah. UI is unrefined in a way that is kind of fun in a Craigslisty way but doesn’t totally land for me. The core ideas of a social wiki never seemed to reveal

by pfraze 4y ago

Yeah. UI is unrefined in a way that is kind of fun in a Craigslisty way but doesn’t totally land for me. The core ideas of a social wiki never seemed to reveal themselves to me in a super interesting way

busymom0 4y ago
What are a few things you would change? What do you look for in a social media?
- rglullis 4y ago
  All I'd want from social media (actually, from all of the internet) is to remove the existing ad-based business model. When content publishers are paid by advertisers, their interests are no longer aligned with the interests of the consumers. Unfortunately, I think that people simply don't want to pay for anything. Two years ago I launched a (paid) service for social media and messaging (Mastodon/Matrix/XMPP) and I got barely a handful of paying users. People got so used to receiving things for free and apathetic about how their privacy is violated by Big Tech, it seems they can't even think of a different alternative anymore. People here love to shit on Brave because of crypto, but one of the reasons that I am so supportive of it is because I think that it is the first time where it flips the business model in order to get the users paid, who then get to choose who they can reward as their favorite creators and service providers. This, to me, is a model that creates a healthy market competition, and enables users to "vote with their wallets". Alas, turns out that most Brave users are doing just to be able to collect meager $3-8/month as "rewards", or to speculate on the price of the token. I thought that with 50+ million users and 8+ million users receiving the token rewards, I could get at least a tiny percentage of the users to be interested in paying for the service with the token... but no, you go to the BAT's subreddit and all you see is people involved in the pettiness of their rewards or trying to pump the token. I'm pivoting my service to host for companies. At least they understand the concept of a paid SaaS.
  - koreanguy 4y ago
  - al_borland 4y ago
    I signed up for App.net when it first launched. It was a paid social media service that promised to put the customer (the user) first. It started out with what was basically a Twitter clone, but they said the foundation of the service allowed nearly anything to be built on top of it, so it would evolve over time. Ultimately, it didn't take off and shut down some time later. YouTube offers both models to users. I'm curious how that works out. What percentage opt to pay to avoid ads? And how does the revenue break down for ads vs Premium on a per/user basis? The big issue with paid social media is that it's hard to get any traction to gain critical mass. A social media site that no one else is on is effectively useless. With something like a streaming service, which people pay for, a single user can get value on their own without needing to talk all their friends into also signing up.
  - akho 4y ago
    > Mastodon/Matrix/XMPP All available for free in low-friction ways (and still only geek-popular), and easy to self-host if you care about privacy and ownership. It’s a really strange spot for a personal use focused SaaS. Focusing on companies may indeed work better.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Yeah, you are absolutely right. In my defense, these were just the start. The longer roadmap included Pixelfed and Peertube (for photo and video sharing), and SIP + the possibility of buying DIDs (phone numbers), effectively allowing users to ditch their mobile voice plans. I was also hoping there would be some middle-ground between self-hosters and the free instances. The free instances from Mastodon are still very fickle with their moderation, self-hosting requires dealing with the cost of hosting, domain names, administration time, etc. I thought that there would be more people willing to pay $10-15 year to have a worry-free solution. The idea started when I was working at Deutsche Telekom on their attempt at building their own messaging platform + MVNO (called immmr) and they killed it after spending two years and 30€ million working on it. I was convinced at the time that the reason they failed was because they wanted to do everything in space at once, and their main criteria for success was "we need to be #1 or #2 in our secondary markets within the first quarter of launching this". Obviously the launch kept being delayed, the feature list kept getting slashed and their client was full of bugs on critical features. Their stated goal at the time was more about having an alternative to stop the tech companies from eating their margins with OTT services. I was convinced (still am honestly) that if they just focused on providing the basic services (messaging and audio/video calls) via Matrix and if they committed to help with the development of the open source client, they could get a more interesting offering, more time to grow organically and eventually still reach the stated goal. I even wrote a "Ask HN" post back then [0] because I wanted to find a way to validate the hypothesis, but there was no response. When immmr folded, I decided to try with the MVP, and this is where we are now. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12553221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12553221

by pfraze 4y ago

busymom0 4y ago

What are a few things you would change? What do you look for in a social media?

rglullis 4y ago
All I'd want from social media (actually, from all of the internet) is to remove the existing ad-based business model. When content publishers are paid by advertisers, their interests are no longer aligned with the interests of the consumers. Unfortunately, I think that people simply don't want to pay for anything. Two years ago I launched a (paid) service for social media and messaging (Mastodon/Matrix/XMPP) and I got barely a handful of paying users. People got so used to receiving things for free and apathetic about how their privacy is violated by Big Tech, it seems they can't even think of a different alternative anymore. People here love to shit on Brave because of crypto, but one of the reasons that I am so supportive of it is because I think that it is the first time where it flips the business model in order to get the users paid, who then get to choose who they can reward as their favorite creators and service providers. This, to me, is a model that creates a healthy market competition, and enables users to "vote with their wallets". Alas, turns out that most Brave users are doing just to be able to collect meager $3-8/month as "rewards", or to speculate on the price of the token. I thought that with 50+ million users and 8+ million users receiving the token rewards, I could get at least a tiny percentage of the users to be interested in paying for the service with the token... but no, you go to the BAT's subreddit and all you see is people involved in the pettiness of their rewards or trying to pump the token. I'm pivoting my service to host for companies. At least they understand the concept of a paid SaaS.
- koreanguy 4y ago
- al_borland 4y ago
  I signed up for App.net when it first launched. It was a paid social media service that promised to put the customer (the user) first. It started out with what was basically a Twitter clone, but they said the foundation of the service allowed nearly anything to be built on top of it, so it would evolve over time. Ultimately, it didn't take off and shut down some time later. YouTube offers both models to users. I'm curious how that works out. What percentage opt to pay to avoid ads? And how does the revenue break down for ads vs Premium on a per/user basis? The big issue with paid social media is that it's hard to get any traction to gain critical mass. A social media site that no one else is on is effectively useless. With something like a streaming service, which people pay for, a single user can get value on their own without needing to talk all their friends into also signing up.
- akho 4y ago
  > Mastodon/Matrix/XMPP All available for free in low-friction ways (and still only geek-popular), and easy to self-host if you care about privacy and ownership. It’s a really strange spot for a personal use focused SaaS. Focusing on companies may indeed work better.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Yeah, you are absolutely right. In my defense, these were just the start. The longer roadmap included Pixelfed and Peertube (for photo and video sharing), and SIP + the possibility of buying DIDs (phone numbers), effectively allowing users to ditch their mobile voice plans. I was also hoping there would be some middle-ground between self-hosters and the free instances. The free instances from Mastodon are still very fickle with their moderation, self-hosting requires dealing with the cost of hosting, domain names, administration time, etc. I thought that there would be more people willing to pay $10-15 year to have a worry-free solution. The idea started when I was working at Deutsche Telekom on their attempt at building their own messaging platform + MVNO (called immmr) and they killed it after spending two years and 30€ million working on it. I was convinced at the time that the reason they failed was because they wanted to do everything in space at once, and their main criteria for success was "we need to be #1 or #2 in our secondary markets within the first quarter of launching this". Obviously the launch kept being delayed, the feature list kept getting slashed and their client was full of bugs on critical features. Their stated goal at the time was more about having an alternative to stop the tech companies from eating their margins with OTT services. I was convinced (still am honestly) that if they just focused on providing the basic services (messaging and audio/video calls) via Matrix and if they committed to help with the development of the open source client, they could get a more interesting offering, more time to grow organically and eventually still reach the stated goal. I even wrote a "Ask HN" post back then [0] because I wanted to find a way to validate the hypothesis, but there was no response. When immmr folded, I decided to try with the MVP, and this is where we are now. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12553221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12553221