5 ms·

If everybody on social media was an actual paying customer of social platforms, like we pay mobile providers (I originally wrote “water providers”, which was in

If everybody on social media was an actual paying customer of social platforms, like we pay mobile providers (I originally wrote “water providers”, which was in fact a somewhat unfit analogy), we could demand better service and switch away to a competitor who offers it. Unfortunately, we are robbed of our ability to pay with our wallets.

HPsquared 11mo ago
You don't generally get to choose who pipes the water to your house.
- dahart 11mo ago
  Would it help if you could? Hasn’t the bottled water industry demonstrated lower standards and more scams and marketing FUD than the EPA?
  - malfist 11mo ago
    Water in the pipes is higher standards precisely because we don't accept that the water utility can pump sewage to us 10% of the time.
    - strogonoff 11mo ago
      The problem with this analogy as I see it is that water supply is heavily regulated and uncompetitive due to exactly the fact of it being impossible to switch. For this to work for the likes of Meta, it would mean elevating Meta’s services to some sort of country-wide public utility, which I’m sure would create probably an even stronger moat than network effects, hindering any competiton. However, is there such a constraint in case of social media? There are mechanisms and open standards that could allow interoperability between providers who implement them. It seems that it should be possible to leave it up to market forces and competition, but for that we have to have competition and be able to vote with our wallets.
- strogonoff 11mo ago
  That is true and it makes my analogy not so fit. Oh well.
kelvinjps10 11mo ago
We can pay with our attention, if we stopped using social media that takes advantage of us and use others that don't. They will change the way, they act.
the_snooze 11mo ago
"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services, IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  They aren't double dipping, they are subsidizing the cost with ads.
  - malfist 11mo ago
    When ford deployed LexusNexus tracking to my F150, they didn't refund any of my purchase price. Samsung isn't refunding any of their $3k fridges that now have mandatory ads
    - 9rx 11mo ago
      They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates while standing starry-eyed at the impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.
      - noir_lord 11mo ago
        This is the most HN of HN takes. Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future. The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time, you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".
        9rx 11mo ago
        > the price for the product at that time Exactly. The necessary hardware to enable the tracking was installed at the time of purchase. It is not like 10 years later someone dreamed up the idea and decided to stealthy in the night start bolting on new components to every vehicle they could find. It was a feature that was there at the time of purchase and the sale was priced accordingly.
Workaccount2 11mo ago
We weren't robbed, we voluntarily gave it up. Nebula is youtube that works for you. But the conversion rate from youtube-ad-viewer to nebula-subscription-payer is <1%.
- strogonoff 11mo ago
  I have heard of Nebula and Floatplane. Is Nebula good? My issue is that in presence of one large player who does it for free competition is already impossible: $2 is twice as much more than $1, but $1 is infinity/NaN times more than $0. It’s one of the many problems with the fact that it is legally allowed.
  - mrguyorama 11mo ago
    >Is Nebula good? Nebula is good in that it properly allows me to pay the people who's content and reporting and art I like and support them without giving the toxic sludge of Youtube a dime. It also allows them to focus on doing their job: Making the good videos I want and that they want to make, rather than play some absurd algorithm games. Floatplane is similarly better aligned with what artists and creators want to do. The guy from DankPods is much happier on that platform than something like Twitch which gave him constant problems. The GunTubers and "Current military events but from former soldiers who act like they know what they are talking about in reference to geopolitics" have created their own platform and I hope that succeeds too. I do not agree with a lot of the politics from some of these people (and believe some others are liars) but diversity is good. Armchair Historian also created their own platform. That might not have panned out though, they had financial troubles that led to them abandoning another project. IMO, the best platform is Patreon linking to a bunch of MP4s on S3 (or whatever cheaper medium exists). Nebula started out just using a "Youtube copycat" whitelabling service.
- immibis 11mo ago
  Nebula is missing discovery, also comments, also the network effect of course. I can open YouTube at any time, and probably see something interesting within a few scrolls of the homepage. Nebula would be as good if I consistently wanted to watch a particular creator - say, if I consistently listened to LegalEagle on my train ride to work - but I don't. And the channels that are good enough to consistently watch do not upload regularly enough to be spotted on a chronological feed and I'm sure that's no accident. Nor, I suspect, do they upload regularly enough to be eligible for a partnership with Nebula. I have a subscription to Nebula because I want to support them and the idea and their future competitors other than YouTube, but I don't actually use it.
swiftcoder 11mo ago
I don't know very many people who have a choice of water providers. Generally you are stuck with whoever owns the pipes to your home. And since you don't have a lot of choice, the government tends to regulate the shit out of water providers - and I don't see we have any other real choice when it comes to too-big-to-fail social media providers either.
- vladms 11mo ago
  I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc. I do not use much social media platforms, while I try to stay social, like posting one picture a month and sending a message here and there, watching a cat video sometimes, etc. I think social networks are much more similar to drugs - you can try to regulate to prevent people hurting themselves, but people will find a way if they can't refrain themselves. Scams existed before social networks, and maybe is a bit easier using them, but I do not feel it is a fundamental shift. Along the ages people were taught/encouraged "to believe (without checking)" into a multitude of subjects (state, church, horoscope, etc.), now seems a bit hypocritical to be amazed that they do just that.
  - swiftcoder 11mo ago
    > I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc. I don't think that's actually true for WhatsApp in a lot of countries - it's the default communication for many, to the point I'm not sure I could get parcel deliveries reliably here in Spain if I didn't have WhatsApp. Ditto for communicating with the entire generations who moved onto Facebook after we all abandoned it. I could delete Facebook entirely, but then I'd spend every family gathering hearing the chorus "why aren't you on Facebook? Your cousins are all on Facebook. They all know the family drama" (instead I keep Facebook off the homescreen of my phone, and check it about once a month).
energy123 11mo ago
We could demand it either way. There's no iron law of the universe that says otherwise. The application of the law is supposed to be objective but the contents are just made up by those with the power to do it.
- strogonoff 11mo ago
  Not enough people would demand it for it to be actionable, and not having to pay is part of the reason. Why would we spend effort on actively demanding things when we are spending not a cent on this in the first place, and can instead passively-aggressively deploy adblockers while waiting for the next iteration of this arms race (which something makes me think might involve LLMs)?
monknomo 11mo ago
I pay good money for phone calls and I get so much spam I don't like to answer the phone. The paying relationship is not sufficient for these technologies that are required
xp84 11mo ago
And don’t forget it was the EU regulators who threw away the opportunity to try to establish social media as a paid service as a thing, when they slapped Meta for trying to even offer it as an option. And yes, I realize they rejected it when it was raised as the alternative to data collection, preferring the regulators’ plan of making it still universally $0 and funding the whole operation on rainbows and wishes.

HPsquared 11mo ago

You don't generally get to choose who pipes the water to your house.

dahart 11mo ago
Would it help if you could? Hasn’t the bottled water industry demonstrated lower standards and more scams and marketing FUD than the EPA?
- malfist 11mo ago
  Water in the pipes is higher standards precisely because we don't accept that the water utility can pump sewage to us 10% of the time.
  - strogonoff 11mo ago
    The problem with this analogy as I see it is that water supply is heavily regulated and uncompetitive due to exactly the fact of it being impossible to switch. For this to work for the likes of Meta, it would mean elevating Meta’s services to some sort of country-wide public utility, which I’m sure would create probably an even stronger moat than network effects, hindering any competiton. However, is there such a constraint in case of social media? There are mechanisms and open standards that could allow interoperability between providers who implement them. It seems that it should be possible to leave it up to market forces and competition, but for that we have to have competition and be able to vote with our wallets.
strogonoff 11mo ago
That is true and it makes my analogy not so fit. Oh well.

kelvinjps10 11mo ago

We can pay with our attention, if we stopped using social media that takes advantage of us and use others that don't. They will change the way, they act.

the_snooze 11mo ago

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's an outdated way of looking at tech. Many classes of paid products (e.g., cars, streaming services, IoT, operating systems) double-dip into tracking and advertisement. Why would a business actually want to do the hard work of serving user needs when they can hedge their bets with ad revenue? Line must go up.

Workaccount2 11mo ago
They aren't double dipping, they are subsidizing the cost with ads.
- malfist 11mo ago
  When ford deployed LexusNexus tracking to my F150, they didn't refund any of my purchase price. Samsung isn't refunding any of their $3k fridges that now have mandatory ads
  - 9rx 11mo ago
    They didn't need to offer a refund. It was already priced in. You maybe forgot to ask what was coming in future software updates while standing starry-eyed at the impossibly low price it was being offered at, but they knew it was coming. After all, appropriately specced hardware to be able to do it was already onboard.
    - noir_lord 11mo ago
      This is the most HN of HN takes. Saying it's your (the consumers) fault because you didn't read the crystal ball for what was coming in the future. The price a product is offered at is the price for the product at that time, you don't get to say well I sold it for $10 but it's worth $20 so I'll just sell your data until I recoup that $10 I "lost".
      - 9rx 11mo ago
        > the price for the product at that time Exactly. The necessary hardware to enable the tracking was installed at the time of purchase. It is not like 10 years later someone dreamed up the idea and decided to stealthy in the night start bolting on new components to every vehicle they could find. It was a feature that was there at the time of purchase and the sale was priced accordingly.

Workaccount2 11mo ago

We weren't robbed, we voluntarily gave it up. Nebula is youtube that works for you. But the conversion rate from youtube-ad-viewer to nebula-subscription-payer is <1%.

strogonoff 11mo ago
I have heard of Nebula and Floatplane. Is Nebula good? My issue is that in presence of one large player who does it for free competition is already impossible: $2 is twice as much more than $1, but $1 is infinity/NaN times more than $0. It’s one of the many problems with the fact that it is legally allowed.
- mrguyorama 11mo ago
  >Is Nebula good? Nebula is good in that it properly allows me to pay the people who's content and reporting and art I like and support them without giving the toxic sludge of Youtube a dime. It also allows them to focus on doing their job: Making the good videos I want and that they want to make, rather than play some absurd algorithm games. Floatplane is similarly better aligned with what artists and creators want to do. The guy from DankPods is much happier on that platform than something like Twitch which gave him constant problems. The GunTubers and "Current military events but from former soldiers who act like they know what they are talking about in reference to geopolitics" have created their own platform and I hope that succeeds too. I do not agree with a lot of the politics from some of these people (and believe some others are liars) but diversity is good. Armchair Historian also created their own platform. That might not have panned out though, they had financial troubles that led to them abandoning another project. IMO, the best platform is Patreon linking to a bunch of MP4s on S3 (or whatever cheaper medium exists). Nebula started out just using a "Youtube copycat" whitelabling service.
immibis 11mo ago
Nebula is missing discovery, also comments, also the network effect of course. I can open YouTube at any time, and probably see something interesting within a few scrolls of the homepage. Nebula would be as good if I consistently wanted to watch a particular creator - say, if I consistently listened to LegalEagle on my train ride to work - but I don't. And the channels that are good enough to consistently watch do not upload regularly enough to be spotted on a chronological feed and I'm sure that's no accident. Nor, I suspect, do they upload regularly enough to be eligible for a partnership with Nebula. I have a subscription to Nebula because I want to support them and the idea and their future competitors other than YouTube, but I don't actually use it.

swiftcoder 11mo ago

I don't know very many people who have a choice of water providers. Generally you are stuck with whoever owns the pipes to your home. And since you don't have a lot of choice, the government tends to regulate the shit out of water providers - and I don't see we have any other real choice when it comes to too-big-to-fail social media providers either.

vladms 11mo ago
I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc. I do not use much social media platforms, while I try to stay social, like posting one picture a month and sending a message here and there, watching a cat video sometimes, etc. I think social networks are much more similar to drugs - you can try to regulate to prevent people hurting themselves, but people will find a way if they can't refrain themselves. Scams existed before social networks, and maybe is a bit easier using them, but I do not feel it is a fundamental shift. Along the ages people were taught/encouraged "to believe (without checking)" into a multitude of subjects (state, church, horoscope, etc.), now seems a bit hypocritical to be amazed that they do just that.
- swiftcoder 11mo ago
  > I can choose not to use a social medial platform, it is kind of hard to choose not to drink water/wash/etc. I don't think that's actually true for WhatsApp in a lot of countries - it's the default communication for many, to the point I'm not sure I could get parcel deliveries reliably here in Spain if I didn't have WhatsApp. Ditto for communicating with the entire generations who moved onto Facebook after we all abandoned it. I could delete Facebook entirely, but then I'd spend every family gathering hearing the chorus "why aren't you on Facebook? Your cousins are all on Facebook. They all know the family drama" (instead I keep Facebook off the homescreen of my phone, and check it about once a month).

energy123 11mo ago

We could demand it either way. There's no iron law of the universe that says otherwise. The application of the law is supposed to be objective but the contents are just made up by those with the power to do it.

strogonoff 11mo ago
Not enough people would demand it for it to be actionable, and not having to pay is part of the reason. Why would we spend effort on actively demanding things when we are spending not a cent on this in the first place, and can instead passively-aggressively deploy adblockers while waiting for the next iteration of this arms race (which something makes me think might involve LLMs)?

monknomo 11mo ago

I pay good money for phone calls and I get so much spam I don't like to answer the phone. The paying relationship is not sufficient for these technologies that are required

xp84 11mo ago

And don’t forget it was the EU regulators who threw away the opportunity to try to establish social media as a paid service as a thing, when they slapped Meta for trying to even offer it as an option. And yes, I realize they rejected it when it was raised as the alternative to data collection, preferring the regulators’ plan of making it still universally $0 and funding the whole operation on rainbows and wishes.