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Ask HN: Any social communities you pay for?
Hi, just as the title says, do you have any online memberships that you pay a monthly or annual premium to be a part of? What is it, how'd you hear about it, and does the value outweigh free alternatives powered by advertising?
- DamonHD 3y agoOne of my Mastodon accounts. (The other doesn't take money yet.) Plus a national newspaper, and a bunch of people on Patreon and elsewhere. I'm happy with the arrangements.
- PaulHoule 3y agoNot me but I know a lot of people who pay for Discord. Back when I played LoL I think the best teams both in terms of playing well and also just the fun of playing on a team used Discord to coordinate players. If I were going to play LoL again (though I probably won't) I think I would try to be "that guy"
- almatabata 3y agoDo you know which of the features specifically they wanted to pay for?
- PaulHoule 3y agoI think having their own community that they control. I suggest joining some discords and talking to the people. I somewhat dread hearing an open source project does support in Discord but sometime I’ve had it work out for me. As for gaming it was a while ago so I’m not quite able to give a breakdown feature by feature why Discord was better than the communication tools in LoL and it might have been more the social selection effect. Play unranked and you can spend forever in the queue because three people show up and they all want to play top or nobody wants to jungle (I learned how to jungle pretty quick so I could avoid that one.). Play ranked and you find a lot of people who think they can’t get ahead because they get matched with losers, starting with the jungler. Just getting a bunch of people with a P.M.A. and giving them cohesion means you will have more fun and play better. So I think it is a people problem. Imagine a social network for an extended family or a ham radio club or something that has maybe 30 people in it. No way you can get my mother-in-law to pay for it or individual cheap-ass hams but I might pay for my whole group or the club can find $30 a month out of its budget. I think of a wedding where you meet a lot of people you don’t know but what if you knew a little more about who you were going to meet and had some tools that were aimed at you developing a more permanent connection with just two of the cool people you meet. The wedding has a stupendous budget but a tiny extra spend on the right social tools could multiply the social benefit it has. That’s the way to think about it. Discord has shown you can get one person to pay for all the users of a small social network, it is the business model that impresses me more than the product itself.
- JoeyBananas 3y agoTinder is the only social media app that has ever directly extracted money from me
- Quinzel 3y agoIs it value for money?
- JoeyBananas 3y agoNo They can not sell you something they don't own
- eternityforest 3y agoWhen I was like 15 I spent maybe $15 total in Gaia Online.
- tuga 3y agoNever