

Ask HN: Should there be a not-for-profit social network? - TrevorJ

A platform where users can control their own data completely and will never be subject to data mining or targeted advertisement.<p>Facebook and the like will always be around and they have their place, but many people don't want to be at the mercy of a for-profit organization when it comes to what happens to their personal info. The specter of targeted ads and data mining just don't appeal to a lot of people.<p>If the model was more open-source and not-for-profit, then you don't have to try to balance user privacy vs. company profit.
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pclark
for what benefit?

why isn't there simply a decentralized _for profit_ social network, where your
data is stored on your _personal_ web hosting

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TrevorJ
I agree with the comment re: defraying costs, but Open source software has
been able to find a way to survive and THRIVE with a not-for-profit model, so
there must be a way to do it.

Decentralized and for-profit is an interesting idea, but my main concern is
that a for-profit model gives the organization a reason to mine the data and
monetize it, which could be done even if the hosting isn't centralized.

The reason I like the not-for-profit model is because it tends to (partially)
preclude some of the shady privacy intrusion that the for-profit model could
push a business towards.

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brand
Open source does not thrive on the fuel of non-profit alone. Red Hat and Sun
are for-profit, but they're major contributors to open-source projects.

Open source is successful with not-for-profit models because people like
hacking on open source. I don't think that's necessarily impossible for a
social network, because people like to waste a lot of their lives on social
networks, but are open-source hackers going to be interested in working on a
project they aren't interested in using? I'm assuming that the primary appeal
of social networks has long moved past the techie demographic.

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tokenadult
Foundations might fund online networks that help people contribute more to
society. One example is Cogito.org,

<http://www.cogito.org/default.aspx>

which has full membership for young people who pass a screening process, but
good resources for lurkers too.

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Allocator2008
Who would pay the hosting costs in such a scenario? Costs have to be offset
some way or other. Unless users want to do "donations" or something like that,
as what wikipedia recently did.

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TrevorJ
Agreed, you do need money from someplace. Open-source projects manage to make
it work so I think there must be a way.

Or let users decide how they want their data to be used. Whats say you have
the option to opt-in for anonymous data mining but you get a share of the
profit? The main point being that each user has absolute control of the
personal data.

