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> I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it? In 2022,
by abdullahkhalids 1y ago
> I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it?
In 2022, mastodon.social was provisioned at a cost of 0.6EUR/year/user for 191k users [1]. This price is payable even by many people in poor countries. People would pay for something like this same as they pay for other stuff, assuming it was well designed and gave users power to do stuff.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385
- Gigachad 1y agoThe server costs would be tiny compared to moderation, legal, and R&D.
- timeon 1y agoSeems like only solution for social media is to make it as open-source, tax-funded public service. No-engagement/gamification, no-ads, no-spyware.
- abdullahkhalids 1y ago0.6 EUR/year/person was the entire cost including moderation and R&D. I don't think any legal costs were incurred. If you built a federated social media where individual instances are responsible for their own moderation, then the software maker doesn't have to incur those costs.