3 ms·

Doesn't that sound like stratifying society a bit? I don't have a lot of faith in interopability mixing well with profit incentives. I'll hear rumor about wha

Doesn't that sound like stratifying society a bit? I don't have a lot of faith in interopability mixing well with profit incentives. I'll hear rumor about what the other social classes say, in that scenario. A lot of socializing has moved to giant private group chats, I don't particularly want to segregate by income more. Vc funding eating the entire market before being left to wonder how to sustain itself is a seperate problem from the ad-driven model itself imo.

strogonoff 3y ago
> Doesn't that sound like stratifying society a bit Do you see being able to afford a different mobile/Internet plan or own a different car as unnecessarily stratifying society? Would you rather everyone had the same government-mandated thing? It doesn’t mean everyone will choose something for their income bracket, either. Maybe you can afford Meta’s $10/mo, but still go for the $1 sub because you don’t think the extra fluff is worth $9. > I don't have a lot of faith in interopability mixing well with profit incentives Network effects only work when you have a free product, and free product means being sponsored by another side of the double-sided market (e.g., advertisers) or by the government. When you don’t have a free product, network effects are out of the equation and there’s no “all my friends are there so I will be too”. You have services competing for users. To retain users, you would have to implement features they want. Users will obviously demand interoperability, on their terms, or leave to the next competitor who will offer it. > A lot of socializing has moved to giant private group chats, I don't particularly want to segregate by income more. Exactly. Facebook, Discord group chats. Now if we follow the money, they have an incentive to lock users & data in precisely because of the above. Free products, sponsored by something external (advertisers, investor money), that created a habit and entitlement in people that they don’t need to pay for a service. Someone always pays, and if it’s not you then you should probably be concerned who pays for you and why. (There is a separate problem, in that interesting conversations might happen in more exclusive groups due to commercial LLMs crawling the web and ignoring copyright robbing people of the usual incentives for open information exchange—street cred, fame—but that’s a different conversation.) > Vc funding eating the entire market before being left to wonder how to sustain itself is a seperate problem from the ad-driven model itself imo. It’s an adjacent problem. The reason free products were possible in the first place is investors letting them burn money to attract users with a free offer, and then bait-and-switch them into becoming a product. This is subverting how the market is supposed to work. A paid service is, ideally, the opposite of that.

strogonoff 3y ago

> Doesn't that sound like stratifying society a bit Do you see being able to afford a different mobile/Internet plan or own a different car as unnecessarily stratifying society? Would you rather everyone had the same government-mandated thing? It doesn’t mean everyone will choose something for their income bracket, either. Maybe you can afford Meta’s $10/mo, but still go for the $1 sub because you don’t think the extra fluff is worth $9. > I don't have a lot of faith in interopability mixing well with profit incentives Network effects only work when you have a free product, and free product means being sponsored by another side of the double-sided market (e.g., advertisers) or by the government. When you don’t have a free product, network effects are out of the equation and there’s no “all my friends are there so I will be too”. You have services competing for users. To retain users, you would have to implement features they want. Users will obviously demand interoperability, on their terms, or leave to the next competitor who will offer it. > A lot of socializing has moved to giant private group chats, I don't particularly want to segregate by income more. Exactly. Facebook, Discord group chats. Now if we follow the money, they have an incentive to lock users & data in precisely because of the above. Free products, sponsored by something external (advertisers, investor money), that created a habit and entitlement in people that they don’t need to pay for a service. Someone always pays, and if it’s not you then you should probably be concerned who pays for you and why. (There is a separate problem, in that interesting conversations might happen in more exclusive groups due to commercial LLMs crawling the web and ignoring copyright robbing people of the usual incentives for open information exchange—street cred, fame—but that’s a different conversation.) > Vc funding eating the entire market before being left to wonder how to sustain itself is a seperate problem from the ad-driven model itself imo. It’s an adjacent problem. The reason free products were possible in the first place is investors letting them burn money to attract users with a free offer, and then bait-and-switch them into becoming a product. This is subverting how the market is supposed to work. A paid service is, ideally, the opposite of that.