Comment by xp84
7 months ago
> if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly.
Agree completely
> without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.
Disagree: without ads, moving the needle from “quite enjoyable” to “utterly addicting” doesn’t make your site twice as profitable. With ads it does. So the need that all social media has today, to promote ragebait and drive them to obsession is far, far less if you weren’t on an ad-based monetization.
> pressure to moderate content
We didn’t have censors in every living room in America before FB making sure you don’t say anything doubleplus ungood and yet political discourse is horrifying now compared to before. I question the need for “moderators” to combat wrongthink by deleting it.
That has nothing to do with ads, that has to do with monetization. Every site needs to be monetized somehow. Ads scale with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Any monetization scheme that scales with engagement will have this issue.
So, a flat-rate subscription would not have that issue.
Something Awful was ahead of the curve by charging $10 for access.
Yes. Nobody has figured out how to get people to pay for social networks though, at scale. The free ones destroy the competition.
The problem is not ads per se, it's that in order to be effective, ads need to be intrusive. And as a site becomes more successful, it attracts more advertiser competition, which in turn forces ads to become more intrusive to cut through the noise. And that's the start of the enshitification we all know and love. :)