Comment by thewebguyd
5 hours ago
> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".
Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.
Then the correct action is to either create a competitor, or point money/ad views at a competitor.
But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this. You won't make a competitor that is a charity, and the internet at large won't point dollars and ad-views at a nascent start-up in the space.
Did you know that Facebook got started by scraping MySpace using people's real accounts they provided the passwords for, and Reddit got started by anonymously copying popular posts from Slashdot and Digg? Were these correct actions?
the issue is consistently network effects.
large social media companies arent there because theyre good or that there are no competitors, its that switching cost is high.
you should be pointing at the government to enforce interoperability standards such that logins and so on are not locked to one place.
None of that has to do with blocking the content behind a login wall. X can still serve ads just fine to non-logged in users. I'm against the site running ads, at all, I'm against mandatory account creation. The internet ran ad supported without mandatory accounts for years.
You can rest assured, 100%, that account walls are also there for money.
I'd be tickled if you argue that corporations create friction for any other reason than money.
The login wall provides one more avenue for profit: selling the data of logged-in users. A profile with a history of likes, read-times, etc is more valuable then a pair of eyeballs that are glazed-over and not clicking on an ad...
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True, and Britain ruled the waves with wooden warships for a long time. But if they went back to wooden warships they would not rule the waves. The world has changed. Adblock, archive.is, third party mirrors all exist today.
> But like I said, the internet is largely unwilling to do this
Sorry, what? The internet is unwilling to create twitter clones?
Bluesky, mastodon, pleroma, misskey, diaspora, threads, fucking truth social… there is no shortage of twitter alternatives.
None of which has more the 1-2% of twitters MAU.
If any of those were highly profitable, they would be able to grow. But more profit for them, means less profit for users, means they are stuck fighting over crumbs from Twitter.
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