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> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learnin

> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species Do you have a mechanism for this in mind, incentives-wise? I can't see this making money.

slopinthebag 7mo ago
It doesn't need to make money directly (and probably shouldn't). The incentives would be those which have motivated people throughout history: to create something which benefits humanity.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  Ah yes, I too love free servers and bandwidth.
  - slopinthebag 7mo ago
    Lol, it doesn't have to run for free and servers are really powerful these days (especially if you don't use a slow language). There are other monetisation strategies besides exploiting users for profit.
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      It doesn't have to run for free, but if you're competing against anyone else running for free you've already lost the game as they suck the air out of the room with the network effect. Next, text only platforms are nice, but niche on the modern internet. People seem to love multimedia which takes tons of bandwidth/cpu. Paid for services don't mean spam free either. If it's worth people to pay for, it's worth spammers paying to get in and spam. Then you have all the questions on what happens if you grow, how do you deal with working with all the laws around the world, how do you deal with other legal issues. Having a site/service of any size can quickly become an expensive mess.
benoau 7mo ago
I guess the real question is whether a website where you communicate with friends and close ones needs to be a multi-trillion dollar company in the first place... historically most of them have not been worth very much at all.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  The question then becomes how can you make a website with all your friend (and by association all their friends) make enough profit to run itself?
  - sosborn 7mo ago
    Early Facebook was kind of a great mix. It had enough people on it, it was making money, and the advertising was much more reasonable. At the time it really was a place to connect with IRL friends.
  - andai 7mo ago
    You mean, how can my friends and I fundraise my $3 VPS? It's going to be rough, but I think we'll find a way ;) (If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there". Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.
      - andai 7mo ago
        Well, indulge my silliness for a moment... what if the servers on the internet could talk to each other? I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.
andai 7mo ago
Well, another example comes to mind. Coordinated efforts to preserve the biosphere for all mankind are probably not going to be great for GDP. We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist? The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.
- 0x3f 7mo ago
  Actually that's probably really good for GDP, just not over the kind of time periods an individual human deals with or cares about. > We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist? The continued survival of individuals or humanity as a whole? The individuals seem to survive OK, and arguably there's nothing that could convince them to prefer the survival of the amorphous group, save for some kind of brainwashing.
  - andai 7mo ago
    Heh, that's a very good point. GDP begins to correlate with the biosphere over sufficiently long timespans. We shouldn't be optimizing for quarterly returns, but for the next ten thousand years.
2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo ago
Ads were profitable before the outrage optimized flamebait internet era.
Zigurd 7mo ago
A $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU from all that fancy, creepy, and intrusive ad tech. Paying YouTube to not advertise to you makes it a 10X better experience.
- myroon5 7mo ago
  > $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU Even ignoring the adverse selection of who'd subscribe, their ARPU is higher than that in North America: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average-revenue-per-user-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...

slopinthebag 7mo ago

It doesn't need to make money directly (and probably shouldn't). The incentives would be those which have motivated people throughout history: to create something which benefits humanity.

pixl97 7mo ago
Ah yes, I too love free servers and bandwidth.
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  Lol, it doesn't have to run for free and servers are really powerful these days (especially if you don't use a slow language). There are other monetisation strategies besides exploiting users for profit.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    It doesn't have to run for free, but if you're competing against anyone else running for free you've already lost the game as they suck the air out of the room with the network effect. Next, text only platforms are nice, but niche on the modern internet. People seem to love multimedia which takes tons of bandwidth/cpu. Paid for services don't mean spam free either. If it's worth people to pay for, it's worth spammers paying to get in and spam. Then you have all the questions on what happens if you grow, how do you deal with working with all the laws around the world, how do you deal with other legal issues. Having a site/service of any size can quickly become an expensive mess.

benoau 7mo ago

I guess the real question is whether a website where you communicate with friends and close ones needs to be a multi-trillion dollar company in the first place... historically most of them have not been worth very much at all.

pixl97 7mo ago
The question then becomes how can you make a website with all your friend (and by association all their friends) make enough profit to run itself?
- sosborn 7mo ago
  Early Facebook was kind of a great mix. It had enough people on it, it was making money, and the advertising was much more reasonable. At the time it really was a place to connect with IRL friends.
- andai 7mo ago
  You mean, how can my friends and I fundraise my $3 VPS? It's going to be rough, but I think we'll find a way ;) (If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there". Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.
    - andai 7mo ago
      Well, indulge my silliness for a moment... what if the servers on the internet could talk to each other? I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.

andai 7mo ago

Well, another example comes to mind. Coordinated efforts to preserve the biosphere for all mankind are probably not going to be great for GDP. We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist? The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.

0x3f 7mo ago
Actually that's probably really good for GDP, just not over the kind of time periods an individual human deals with or cares about. > We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist? The continued survival of individuals or humanity as a whole? The individuals seem to survive OK, and arguably there's nothing that could convince them to prefer the survival of the amorphous group, save for some kind of brainwashing.
- andai 7mo ago
  Heh, that's a very good point. GDP begins to correlate with the biosphere over sufficiently long timespans. We shouldn't be optimizing for quarterly returns, but for the next ten thousand years.

2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo ago

Ads were profitable before the outrage optimized flamebait internet era.

Zigurd 7mo ago

A $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU from all that fancy, creepy, and intrusive ad tech. Paying YouTube to not advertise to you makes it a 10X better experience.

myroon5 7mo ago
> $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU Even ignoring the adverse selection of who'd subscribe, their ARPU is higher than that in North America: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average-revenue-per-user-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...