Comment by idle_zealot
1 month ago
> 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.
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.
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?
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!)
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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.
It needs enough revenue to fund its operations. And most people won't pay for such a website, so if you want one place where most people you know are, then...
Come on, don't hand wave over the obvious. Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends. It would be extremely realistic to build something that's both free and sustainable with just regular ads, as was done decades before.
(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)
The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.
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I feel like discord is kind of like this used correctly, but with the recent drama and such it feels terrible
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.
> $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...
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.
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.
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.
Ads were profitable before the outrage optimized flamebait internet era.
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.
Ah yes, I too love free servers and bandwidth.
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.
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