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I think you've missed the point of the parent comment. The point is that the entire model only exists in symbiosis with what you call "enshitification enforcers

I think you've missed the point of the parent comment. The point is that the entire model only exists in symbiosis with what you call "enshitification enforcers". There is no mass market social media without the "evil cabal... of the advertising and marketing industry". There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint. The closest to an alternative model that works here is wikipedia. They achieve it by having a different default for user generated content - that it doesn't remain unless it is strictly on topic (you can't just write your random thoughts and shitposts in an article) - and by having a social mission that attracts donations. (They also run incredibly lean, which other mass market sites could definitely learn from.) Another alternative model being pursued is the federated approach. I like this approach in principle but I don't think it will ever reach the mass market hundreds of millions of active users position of the mainstream social media products. Its solution to the problem is that some subset of power users will self-host and absorb the costs, either via individual altruism or something, or by developing some other model. I think this will end up centralizing, with a small number of nodes hosting most of the usage, and probably eventually falling back to advertising to cover costs. But I dunno, we'll see, maybe this will work. Another more successful model is to just not be mass market at all, like HN and other various message boards. This reduces costs both for hosting and moderation and can then be justified by some non-financial benefit (like tacit advertisement for YC in the case of HN, or by tight community camaraderie for niche message boards). Then another model that works is subscriptions. This drops the active user count massively and generally makes it harder to get traction, but I think it works the best of any of these when the stars align. I'd rather be Netflix or the NYT than Twitter or Reddit.

pmoriarty 3y ago
"There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint." The government can. These companies could be nationalized, or the government could make their own competing sites if they were interested in doing so. But they're just not. It takes more than just the means. It takes a will to do it.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  The government can afford to do this. In every single other way, this is a terrible idea.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Why? At least in the case of democratic governmwnts, there is more control and oversight than there is in case of Meta, Twitter or Google.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Just went into more detail on this in a different comment. Basically I think this would suck in the same ways that public meetings inevitably suck, but times a million.
- dynamorando 3y ago
  I blogged about this yesterday after seeing a similar post on HN https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/ https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/ Though I am not sure the political will exists.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Government funding of generic user generated content hosting is a terrible idea, IMO. But I do quite like your proposal for how it could be accomplished technically through federation. It at least sidesteps the problem of the government building it through their fundamentally broken technology "procurement" processes.
- DrScientist 3y ago
  Sure that's an option. In essence that's a user ( indirectly through taxes ) supported model. In the UK, the BBC follows that model ( the license fee is in effect a tax in all but name ) - and it's model is constantly under attack from certain quarters. Indeed the BBC has being doing pilots in the social space - with SOLID and data pods. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/together-pod https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/together-pod The key question here is any of this stuff actually important enough for centralized funded. Let's not forget, there is also the spectre of government control - you know the government security services will have full access.
DrScientist 3y ago
Exactly. Well put. The model that isn't sustainable is a permanently investor funded one. Often when these products launch - they have zero advertising, zero features to make money - they are totally aimed at growing market share - totally focused on the user. Then it's inevitably downhill from there - whether it's people not being prepared to pay ( eg Blue ticks ) or complaining about advertising or scrapping of data. One of the damaging effects of the large amount of investor funded products is that it makes it very difficult for the user supported ( paid ) ones to thrive. Perhaps the current state is because we are not at equilibrium - and as regulation, and the market matures it will become a bit more sane.
dynamorando 3y ago
I’m curious - do you see a path forward for “public” social media? I had half an idea yesterday on this from HN: https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/ https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/
- indigochill 3y ago
  One of the questions I don't see answered here (and is, IMO, the greatest obstacle, and the reason I've backed out of discussions to set up a similar geographically-oriented node) is who moderates, say, your city's ActivityPub node? If a corporation, we're right back to corporations moderating public speech. But even having governments moderating speech in a public forum feels weird to me since it provides an easy lever to bend the discourse to the interests of the incumbents. Or maybe to protect against that, there's a strict moderation governance document for that to the effect of "If it's not illegal, it flies". That could still get rough since there's lots of non-illegal content you could put on there which people wouldn't want to see. Independently hosted nodes still feel like the way to go to me. No hard authority, just people talking with people and moderating to set the tone they want for their community. If the moderators are jerks, moving to a different node should be easy (thus putting the power into the hands of the users to abide by the governance they find most agreeable) and not cause you to exile yourself from your civic community.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    This gets at why I think this is fundamentally a terrible idea. I think it would be a legal and social minefield the likes of which I'm not sure the world has ever seen. You know how community meetings and town halls are awful and fruitless because they're filled to the brim with the noisiest cranks and they can't be kicked out because they're still members of the public after all, and nobody else participates because it's maddening to be around all those noisy cranks? Like that, but web scale. I'm sure the noisy cranks would love this, but I'm not interested in it.
    - dynamorando 3y ago
      I want to acknowledge that feedback, because it’s useful. As a follow question: is this a solvable problem between host moderation and user self moderation? In other words: Let’s pretend NPR hosts a Reddit-like site whose primary objective is to facilitate discussion on topics shared by NPR. NPR doesn’t outright ban everything unless it violates some terrible things. Could user moderation NPR Reddit also expand on this? So long as they fall under the same guidelines? I ask this question because it seems to me that there does exist some useful moderation: there are well moderated Reddits and for the most part Wikipedia is also pretty well moderated.
indigochill 3y ago
I expect that if federated social media takes off, nobody (among the mass market) will know that it's federated, just like email. It'll just be, like you say, a couple of big sites that happen to enable people to communicate with people on other sites (and also a handful of wizards who self-host). I think the killer feature of federation in general (particularly in the context of social media) is that it decouples user account administration (and by extension, data collection) from the network effect. I run my own node that just has my account on it, but I can still benefit from the network by federating with other nodes.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I agree that this is what it will look like if it takes off. But then those "couple of big sites" will have all the same incentives / problems as the current mass market sites, and will themselves be enshittified eventually. The model needs to somehow result in distributing the user load and thus the costs across many hosts such that it is a bearable cost for each individual host without requiring any deep pocketed support. But you and I are in agreement that that doesn't seem like the likely outcome.

pmoriarty 3y ago

"There is no other model that can pay the bills for a site with hundreds of millions of active users posting their own content with mostly no restraint." The government can. These companies could be nationalized, or the government could make their own competing sites if they were interested in doing so. But they're just not. It takes more than just the means. It takes a will to do it.

sanderjd 3y ago
The government can afford to do this. In every single other way, this is a terrible idea.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Why? At least in the case of democratic governmwnts, there is more control and oversight than there is in case of Meta, Twitter or Google.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Just went into more detail on this in a different comment. Basically I think this would suck in the same ways that public meetings inevitably suck, but times a million.
dynamorando 3y ago
I blogged about this yesterday after seeing a similar post on HN https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/ https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/ Though I am not sure the political will exists.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Government funding of generic user generated content hosting is a terrible idea, IMO. But I do quite like your proposal for how it could be accomplished technically through federation. It at least sidesteps the problem of the government building it through their fundamentally broken technology "procurement" processes.
DrScientist 3y ago
Sure that's an option. In essence that's a user ( indirectly through taxes ) supported model. In the UK, the BBC follows that model ( the license fee is in effect a tax in all but name ) - and it's model is constantly under attack from certain quarters. Indeed the BBC has being doing pilots in the social space - with SOLID and data pods. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/together-pod https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/together-pod The key question here is any of this stuff actually important enough for centralized funded. Let's not forget, there is also the spectre of government control - you know the government security services will have full access.

DrScientist 3y ago

Exactly. Well put. The model that isn't sustainable is a permanently investor funded one. Often when these products launch - they have zero advertising, zero features to make money - they are totally aimed at growing market share - totally focused on the user. Then it's inevitably downhill from there - whether it's people not being prepared to pay ( eg Blue ticks ) or complaining about advertising or scrapping of data. One of the damaging effects of the large amount of investor funded products is that it makes it very difficult for the user supported ( paid ) ones to thrive. Perhaps the current state is because we are not at equilibrium - and as regulation, and the market matures it will become a bit more sane.

dynamorando 3y ago

I’m curious - do you see a path forward for “public” social media? I had half an idea yesterday on this from HN: https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/ https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/

indigochill 3y ago
One of the questions I don't see answered here (and is, IMO, the greatest obstacle, and the reason I've backed out of discussions to set up a similar geographically-oriented node) is who moderates, say, your city's ActivityPub node? If a corporation, we're right back to corporations moderating public speech. But even having governments moderating speech in a public forum feels weird to me since it provides an easy lever to bend the discourse to the interests of the incumbents. Or maybe to protect against that, there's a strict moderation governance document for that to the effect of "If it's not illegal, it flies". That could still get rough since there's lots of non-illegal content you could put on there which people wouldn't want to see. Independently hosted nodes still feel like the way to go to me. No hard authority, just people talking with people and moderating to set the tone they want for their community. If the moderators are jerks, moving to a different node should be easy (thus putting the power into the hands of the users to abide by the governance they find most agreeable) and not cause you to exile yourself from your civic community.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  This gets at why I think this is fundamentally a terrible idea. I think it would be a legal and social minefield the likes of which I'm not sure the world has ever seen. You know how community meetings and town halls are awful and fruitless because they're filled to the brim with the noisiest cranks and they can't be kicked out because they're still members of the public after all, and nobody else participates because it's maddening to be around all those noisy cranks? Like that, but web scale. I'm sure the noisy cranks would love this, but I'm not interested in it.
  - dynamorando 3y ago
    I want to acknowledge that feedback, because it’s useful. As a follow question: is this a solvable problem between host moderation and user self moderation? In other words: Let’s pretend NPR hosts a Reddit-like site whose primary objective is to facilitate discussion on topics shared by NPR. NPR doesn’t outright ban everything unless it violates some terrible things. Could user moderation NPR Reddit also expand on this? So long as they fall under the same guidelines? I ask this question because it seems to me that there does exist some useful moderation: there are well moderated Reddits and for the most part Wikipedia is also pretty well moderated.

indigochill 3y ago

I expect that if federated social media takes off, nobody (among the mass market) will know that it's federated, just like email. It'll just be, like you say, a couple of big sites that happen to enable people to communicate with people on other sites (and also a handful of wizards who self-host). I think the killer feature of federation in general (particularly in the context of social media) is that it decouples user account administration (and by extension, data collection) from the network effect. I run my own node that just has my account on it, but I can still benefit from the network by federating with other nodes.

sanderjd 3y ago
I agree that this is what it will look like if it takes off. But then those "couple of big sites" will have all the same incentives / problems as the current mass market sites, and will themselves be enshittified eventually. The model needs to somehow result in distributing the user load and thus the costs across many hosts such that it is a bearable cost for each individual host without requiring any deep pocketed support. But you and I are in agreement that that doesn't seem like the likely outcome.