| ▲ | prisenco 16 hours ago |
| All I want is nice, non-toxic, non-addictive place to share photos and birthdays and life events with my family and close friends. I understand that's not going to net hundreds of billions in revenue, but surely a site like that could keep the lights on and the engineers paid at scale. |
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| ▲ | egypturnash 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| All those photos and videos cost bandwidth, and that ain't free. But the number of people willing to pay for their accounts on this stuff is vanishingly small. So either you run this as a side project and accept that it's losing money, or you start running ads. And the moment you start running ads is the moment your most profitable choice becomes slowly turning your site more and more addictive, so that people spend more and more time on it and see more and more ads. (Or you can keep the place small and constrained to people who have a high chance of being able to kick some money in for the bills, I'm only paying about half my Mastodon instance's fees because of making this choice.) Or you can create a huge societal shift where we decide that having non-profit social sites is a good thing, and that they should be funded by the state, even if many of the views on them contradict the views of the giant bags of money pretending to be humans who are currently in control of the country. Ideally this societal shift would make it much harder for these giant bags of money to exist, as well. Oh also getting people to stick around on a site that's not built to be addictive is surprisingly hard. |
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| ▲ | 542354234235 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Wikipedia runs on donations. Most of FB is a massively bloated interface to maximize engagement, shove as much “content” as they can anywhere and everywhere, track everything you do, and add more “features” to find the next mechanism to get people more addicted. For over a decade, I used Facebook lite messenger app which was built for countries with spotty, slow internet. It was less than a tenth of the size of the US messenger (of course it was unavailable in the app store and had to be installed via apk), was fast and easy to use (no stories, feeds, money sharing, animations), and was much better at doing the one thing it was supposed to be for, messaging people. It finally stopped working a couple of years ago and the regular app is a bloated mess where chats are an afterthought. And why? Ads. You need more engagement so you can show people more ads. You need more content, so you have more things to attach ads to. You to autoplay videos to get people to watch more and see more ads. You have to run trackers so you can better target your ads. It’s the ads, not the functions, that make the modern internet too expensive to be funded by individuals. 2000s Facebook was able to run just fine on 2000s internet and storage. It would take a trivial amount of modern data and a fraction of modern storage to run now. | |
| ▲ | prisenco 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As positive social networking disappears, the market demand for one you can pay for with no ads increases. Pricing would be difficult but every year the average consumer learns more and more about how much "free" costs. I agree a non-profit approach might be the only option to avoid the same long term problems we've seen time and again. | | |
| ▲ | aprilthird2021 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | > the market demand for one you can pay for with no ads increases Didn't Meta try to offer this in the EU and they said no you have to let people use the free one without targeting any ads to them | | |
| ▲ | Timon3 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You're technically correct - you can't force people to give consent for targeted advertising (since it would no longer be consent). But you're absolutely allowed to show people ads if they don't want to pay for ad-free. | |
| ▲ | prisenco 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Generally, trying to directly convert a free service to a subscription service can be much harder than starting out as a subscription service. Just look at all the resentful conspiracies about Facebook planning to charge money that would go viral back in the day. Users don't like a contract radically changing from under them, and shifting from free to paid is breaking a contract in an immediately understandable way. | | |
| ▲ | aprilthird2021 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | No one was forced to buy the plan nor was the free Facebook going to go away. You just would have had the option to pay to not have targeted ads. And that was vetoed by the EU, the very thing many here claim they'd like to do. | | |
| ▲ | prisenco 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I misunderstood your comment. That case was about forcing users to choose between personalized ads or a paid subscription. I can understand why the EU would reject that. A case like that is outside of the scope of my argument. My proposal is a site that offers subscriptions with no free ad supported option at all, which the EU wouldn't have an issue with. |
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| ▲ | oblio 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > All those photos and videos cost bandwidth, and that ain't free. Facebook made $160bn last year, and profits were about $70bn, an almost 50% profit margin, and that's considering they're investing in a lot of crap. There should be a middle ground between "minting gold coins" (Facebook) and "no money to pay the image hosting bills" somewhere in there. |
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| ▲ | mFixman 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm still using Facebook for this, which works for the very few of my friends who are on it. It's actually nice if you aggressively report and unfollow everything you don't want to see. Does anybody here know of an alternative that works like 2010 Facebook? |
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| ▲ | bcrosby95 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It can. The problem is getting users there, and it being built by someone who isn't interested in swallowing the world. |
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| ▲ | ironmagma 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| At this point, why would you trust anything? I certainly don't. Any platform that exists could get bought up by another company that just uses all the content to train AI. |
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| ▲ | prisenco 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | There are structures that are more immune to this such as non-profits or cooperatives, but otherwise that distrust is warranted given the way it's all gone. |
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