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"Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable featu

"Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.

maelito 2y ago
> there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free. Well that's of course OK with me : Bluesky should make their users pay. 10 % of users paying 1€/month, 1 % paying 10 €/month, for instance. That's ok, we're paying a service. But the API access and federation should remain free.
- x-complexity 2y ago
  > But the API access and federation should remain free. ...no. APIs are not free cost-wise: They require server compute to serve requests, at minimum. IMO: Require API users to put down $2 to obtain access, and offer higher tiers for higher limits. I.E What Twitter's API already does.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  This is an extremely unpopular take in today’s world where 99% of what you use is expected to be “free” and subsidized by those with interests thoroughly misaligned with yours. Nevertheless, it is my strong opinion that offering paid service is the only way to a healthy ecosystem, healthy competition, products that actually benefit the user, and the market that works as the market is supposed to (and that Big Social innovating[0] the subversion of this model is a tradegy with net negative effects on society). Not offering paid[1] service to customers means ultimately either 1) dying or 2) making someone else your paying customer (e.g., the advertisers being offered the users as the product).[2] That “someone else”, by being the source of revenue, will dictate how the service evolves, and their interests will not be aligned with the users’ except by sheer accident. In case of services like Bluesky, I doubt API access can be excluded from the equation, since it costs money, and when inevitably abused a lot of it, sadly. Federation overhead could in theory be subsidized by paying customers, or there could be smart controls such as letting certain servers federate for free if it benefits paying users while charging others an honest fee[3]. Finally, let’s not forget the good old “charge for the app”. Sure, being open means someone can build another, cheaper app, and someone will use it, but believe it or not—that’s normal competition; make your app better, respect your users, turn profit. Bluesky’s accepting large investment is a signal of not going in this direction, and is therefore worrying. [0] It could be said that some companies (e.g., Adobe and Microsoft) did something like that earlier, subverting the market via offering a product for free by not seriously chasing pirates. When someone’s choice is between two paid products—instead of free awesome product everyone pirates vs. some mediocre paid product—the competition works much better. However, their core offers were still paid, and crucially those were not social media services that prey on our attention and anxiety. [1] Before someone mentions the disadvantaged: offering subsidized options to those who need it is not mutually exclusive with a straightforward commercial model. [2] There’s also 3) becoming another Wikipedia, which happens every so often… Let’s be realistic. [3] A lot of courage would be required, as I can already hear the “walled garden” outcries.
  - ianopolous 2y ago
    Very well said. This is the approach we're taking with peergos, paid accounts unless you self host. I wrote some of our thoughts on this here: https://peergos.org/posts/the-social-dilemma https://peergos.org/posts/the-social-dilemma
    - strogonoff 2y ago
      1. I am not sure it is possible to compete with a free product. By definition it will have more users. That’s the tragedy, competition is not possible. 2. My approach is not “one more product will be the answer”, more like “fixing the incentives and making the market work will enable many products”.
      - ianopolous 2y ago
        1. It depends on the time scale. The question is if you can outlive their VC funding. 2. How do you fix the incentives short of fixing capitalism to remove software VCs?
        strogonoff 2y ago
        1. They are supported by paying customers (the advertisers), not just VC money. 2. You don’t need to get rid of VCs, it’s orthogonal. Just make interoperation/complete API coverage required by law to be available to any user if you have more users than certain amount. It would neuter the lock-in when anyone can make a third-party GUI that has no ads and interoperates with any other social platform (meaning no “all my friends are there” effect).
        ianopolous 2y ago
        Yes, legally requiring open APIs and interop beyond X users is the best way forward. There is some tension with allowing product changes and deprecating old APIs though. Maybe something like mandate versioned APIs, and keep old versions around for at least 2 years after newer version is released.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Why is ability to post a service but ability to see what everyone posts not a service? I would think its the other way around, users are providing value, let them do it for free, you find the content valuable and want a firehouse to see what everyone is saying, you should pay.
- cglong 2y ago
  I keep seeing people say BlueSky should be a paid service, but X gets mocked ruthlessly for this.
  - rswail 2y ago
    What X gets mocked for is that the feature of being "verified" by Twitter was worth paying for. But X turned the "blue tick" into "this person has paid" which totally removed any value for the blue tick. It was yet another self-own, along with things like getting promoted on the feed. X could have made money by selling features (eg tweetdeck) and other useful things, but they didnt. Of course, then politcally it became a "this person is a MAGA person" so Musk had to start handing out "free" blue ticks to big accounts to avoid that appearance. To the point that people were putting in their name "didn't pay for blue"
    - exodust 2y ago
      > "...other useful things, but they didnt" But they did. Nobody pays for X premium just to get a blue tick. Being verified I guess is part of it, but they're paying to get other things including less ads, Grok access, longer posts & videos, communities, media studio, monetization, and other things.
      - int_19h 2y ago
        I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are playing for the blue tick solely because it makes their posts rank higher in the feed.
        exodust 2y ago
        The blue tick doesn't cause the reply boost. The paid plan level does, from small to large boost. Blue tick means you supplied a valid phone and credit card - a strong indicator of a genuine account. I'm trying it to check out Grok, which is impressive now that it can handle current events and return posts and web links. On the negatives, they claim "download videos" as a feature of paid plans. This is false advertising. Many videos cannot be downloaded. The uploader must specifically set the video as downloadable, and many do not. X is deliberately misleading about this. It was a key reason I paid. Screenshot of page comparing tiers and features: https://imgur.com/a/AMEppji https://imgur.com/a/AMEppji
- Zambyte 2y ago
  It's interesting to me that you consider servicing API requests to not be a service.
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    Of course they're a service, but a lot of people started calling Musk evil when he started charging for them, so now we (who love bluesky) have to pretend like they're not an online service but have somehow become a moral obligation.
aSanchezStern 2y ago
You're assuming that every for profit business is entirely devoid of morality. This was not true under the Keynesian compromise of the 20th century, and is not true of every business today. Just because people are sometimes selfish doesn't mean they never have any principles.
- kmlx 2y ago
  agree with what you wrote but the problem becomes more complicated when API access becomes expensive to provide. basically it’s easy to provide something for free when no one is using it and no one is making any money. but when things start picking up then the real problems arise.
- motorest 2y ago
  > You're assuming that every for profit business is entirely devoid of morality. The only person making any kind of assumption is actually you, by imagining that something is not possible or plausible because you project your personal expectations based on a personal notion of morality onto everyone. If you take a step back and look at the scenario, you'll understand that nothing binds any third party to comply with your personal expectations, or follow your particular argument based on morality. Therefore your expectations are completely unfounded. If you take a look at reality you'll find plenty of examples where projects which were previously open were afterwards closed and monetized. This is nothing new. Just take a look at, say, Reddit. Or even Twitter. Countless examples.
  - GJR 2y ago
    If you take a step back and look at your comment, you might realise that you are making the same point: businesses don't have to take any particular path...
- lupusreal 2y ago
  The people who work at companies are usually not devoid of morality. Even the people who own the companies, the people on the board, the people who are the executives, are not usually devoid of morality. But insofar as the company is an organization of people rather than a person itself, it is devoid of morality. Organizations of people are not people, they are meta-organisms that have different ways of "thinking" and operating than the individual humans they are comprised of. Don't anthropomorphize these things, they aren't capable of morality in the same way that a bear isn't. If ever it behaves in a way that seems moral, that's not because it actually is. The more people who are involved in the decision making apparatus of an organization, not just at the top but throughout the entire net, the less human you know it is. If the entire company consists of a single person, it is a person and not an organization. But if a company consists merely of one owner/operator with one employee below them that tells the other things and is told things, the product of those two becomes less than human and may make decisions that neither of the two humans would approve of if they had the complete picture of what was going on. The larger the organization grows, the worse this problem becomes. This isn't only true of companies, but any group of people. Groups of people are not themselves people.

"Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.

maelito 2y ago

> there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free. Well that's of course OK with me : Bluesky should make their users pay. 10 % of users paying 1€/month, 1 % paying 10 €/month, for instance. That's ok, we're paying a service. But the API access and federation should remain free.

x-complexity 2y ago
> But the API access and federation should remain free. ...no. APIs are not free cost-wise: They require server compute to serve requests, at minimum. IMO: Require API users to put down $2 to obtain access, and offer higher tiers for higher limits. I.E What Twitter's API already does.
strogonoff 2y ago
This is an extremely unpopular take in today’s world where 99% of what you use is expected to be “free” and subsidized by those with interests thoroughly misaligned with yours. Nevertheless, it is my strong opinion that offering paid service is the only way to a healthy ecosystem, healthy competition, products that actually benefit the user, and the market that works as the market is supposed to (and that Big Social innovating[0] the subversion of this model is a tradegy with net negative effects on society). Not offering paid[1] service to customers means ultimately either 1) dying or 2) making someone else your paying customer (e.g., the advertisers being offered the users as the product).[2] That “someone else”, by being the source of revenue, will dictate how the service evolves, and their interests will not be aligned with the users’ except by sheer accident. In case of services like Bluesky, I doubt API access can be excluded from the equation, since it costs money, and when inevitably abused a lot of it, sadly. Federation overhead could in theory be subsidized by paying customers, or there could be smart controls such as letting certain servers federate for free if it benefits paying users while charging others an honest fee[3]. Finally, let’s not forget the good old “charge for the app”. Sure, being open means someone can build another, cheaper app, and someone will use it, but believe it or not—that’s normal competition; make your app better, respect your users, turn profit. Bluesky’s accepting large investment is a signal of not going in this direction, and is therefore worrying. [0] It could be said that some companies (e.g., Adobe and Microsoft) did something like that earlier, subverting the market via offering a product for free by not seriously chasing pirates. When someone’s choice is between two paid products—instead of free awesome product everyone pirates vs. some mediocre paid product—the competition works much better. However, their core offers were still paid, and crucially those were not social media services that prey on our attention and anxiety. [1] Before someone mentions the disadvantaged: offering subsidized options to those who need it is not mutually exclusive with a straightforward commercial model. [2] There’s also 3) becoming another Wikipedia, which happens every so often… Let’s be realistic. [3] A lot of courage would be required, as I can already hear the “walled garden” outcries.
- ianopolous 2y ago
  Very well said. This is the approach we're taking with peergos, paid accounts unless you self host. I wrote some of our thoughts on this here: https://peergos.org/posts/the-social-dilemma https://peergos.org/posts/the-social-dilemma
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    1. I am not sure it is possible to compete with a free product. By definition it will have more users. That’s the tragedy, competition is not possible. 2. My approach is not “one more product will be the answer”, more like “fixing the incentives and making the market work will enable many products”.
    - ianopolous 2y ago
      1. It depends on the time scale. The question is if you can outlive their VC funding. 2. How do you fix the incentives short of fixing capitalism to remove software VCs?
      - strogonoff 2y ago
        1. They are supported by paying customers (the advertisers), not just VC money. 2. You don’t need to get rid of VCs, it’s orthogonal. Just make interoperation/complete API coverage required by law to be available to any user if you have more users than certain amount. It would neuter the lock-in when anyone can make a third-party GUI that has no ads and interoperates with any other social platform (meaning no “all my friends are there” effect).
        ianopolous 2y ago
        Yes, legally requiring open APIs and interop beyond X users is the best way forward. There is some tension with allowing product changes and deprecating old APIs though. Maybe something like mandate versioned APIs, and keep old versions around for at least 2 years after newer version is released.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
Why is ability to post a service but ability to see what everyone posts not a service? I would think its the other way around, users are providing value, let them do it for free, you find the content valuable and want a firehouse to see what everyone is saying, you should pay.
cglong 2y ago
I keep seeing people say BlueSky should be a paid service, but X gets mocked ruthlessly for this.
- rswail 2y ago
  What X gets mocked for is that the feature of being "verified" by Twitter was worth paying for. But X turned the "blue tick" into "this person has paid" which totally removed any value for the blue tick. It was yet another self-own, along with things like getting promoted on the feed. X could have made money by selling features (eg tweetdeck) and other useful things, but they didnt. Of course, then politcally it became a "this person is a MAGA person" so Musk had to start handing out "free" blue ticks to big accounts to avoid that appearance. To the point that people were putting in their name "didn't pay for blue"
  - exodust 2y ago
    > "...other useful things, but they didnt" But they did. Nobody pays for X premium just to get a blue tick. Being verified I guess is part of it, but they're paying to get other things including less ads, Grok access, longer posts & videos, communities, media studio, monetization, and other things.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are playing for the blue tick solely because it makes their posts rank higher in the feed.
      - exodust 2y ago
        The blue tick doesn't cause the reply boost. The paid plan level does, from small to large boost. Blue tick means you supplied a valid phone and credit card - a strong indicator of a genuine account. I'm trying it to check out Grok, which is impressive now that it can handle current events and return posts and web links. On the negatives, they claim "download videos" as a feature of paid plans. This is false advertising. Many videos cannot be downloaded. The uploader must specifically set the video as downloadable, and many do not. X is deliberately misleading about this. It was a key reason I paid. Screenshot of page comparing tiers and features: https://imgur.com/a/AMEppji https://imgur.com/a/AMEppji
Zambyte 2y ago
It's interesting to me that you consider servicing API requests to not be a service.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  Of course they're a service, but a lot of people started calling Musk evil when he started charging for them, so now we (who love bluesky) have to pretend like they're not an online service but have somehow become a moral obligation.

aSanchezStern 2y ago

You're assuming that every for profit business is entirely devoid of morality. This was not true under the Keynesian compromise of the 20th century, and is not true of every business today. Just because people are sometimes selfish doesn't mean they never have any principles.

kmlx 2y ago
agree with what you wrote but the problem becomes more complicated when API access becomes expensive to provide. basically it’s easy to provide something for free when no one is using it and no one is making any money. but when things start picking up then the real problems arise.
motorest 2y ago
> You're assuming that every for profit business is entirely devoid of morality. The only person making any kind of assumption is actually you, by imagining that something is not possible or plausible because you project your personal expectations based on a personal notion of morality onto everyone. If you take a step back and look at the scenario, you'll understand that nothing binds any third party to comply with your personal expectations, or follow your particular argument based on morality. Therefore your expectations are completely unfounded. If you take a look at reality you'll find plenty of examples where projects which were previously open were afterwards closed and monetized. This is nothing new. Just take a look at, say, Reddit. Or even Twitter. Countless examples.
- GJR 2y ago
  If you take a step back and look at your comment, you might realise that you are making the same point: businesses don't have to take any particular path...
lupusreal 2y ago
The people who work at companies are usually not devoid of morality. Even the people who own the companies, the people on the board, the people who are the executives, are not usually devoid of morality. But insofar as the company is an organization of people rather than a person itself, it is devoid of morality. Organizations of people are not people, they are meta-organisms that have different ways of "thinking" and operating than the individual humans they are comprised of. Don't anthropomorphize these things, they aren't capable of morality in the same way that a bear isn't. If ever it behaves in a way that seems moral, that's not because it actually is. The more people who are involved in the decision making apparatus of an organization, not just at the top but throughout the entire net, the less human you know it is. If the entire company consists of a single person, it is a person and not an organization. But if a company consists merely of one owner/operator with one employee below them that tells the other things and is told things, the product of those two becomes less than human and may make decisions that neither of the two humans would approve of if they had the complete picture of what was going on. The larger the organization grows, the worse this problem becomes. This isn't only true of companies, but any group of people. Groups of people are not themselves people.