I believe the biggest problem with social media is that it seems to impact people that don't even use social media. I haven't had a facebook account since 2012 yet I still feel like I'm somehow wrapped up in this social media dragnet bullshit.
It was interesting watching Zuck choke and stutter when he was practically forced into answering to the EU about shadow profiles:
>I would happily pay 20 dollars a year for a social media site that > does not track or advertise if anyone is up for building it.
The problem is that your willingness to pay puts you in a tiny minority.
A smartphone survey found that 70% of users won't even pay $1 a year to avoid ads.[1] That's just 8 cents a month. Since surveys always overestimate actual money spent, one should round up that 70% to ~90%.
A general purpose social website requires most everybody to be on it. (Six degrees of separation and all that.) Therefore, any payment of even 8 cents is a huge barrier to adoption.
Yea, I feel that. My girlfriend is absolutely allergic to spending money on anything. On the other hand, you could probably get my dad on a site to keep up with his family and he wouldn't think twice about the cost. How this changes between different income levels is also a really important question.
One solution to needing people on the site would be open sharing with private links. Kind of like an unlisted video on YouTube, I could still send out my vacation photos to family without them being on the site.
> A general purpose social website requires most everybody to be on it.
Who said it has to be general purpose? Part of the attraction of a paid social media site for me would be the fact that most people aren't on it. Isn't that why we're currently discussing the matter on HN rather than FB?
That said though, I'd be much more excited about paying $20/yr for the VPS where I host my node in a (hypothetical) FOSS distributed social media app than about paying $20/yr for a login to a closed source and proprietary one.
The author did and that's the context. The blog post was talking about sharing photos etc with "friends and family" so I took it be general purpose so it is adopted by a general audience.
Yes, there are things like Mastadon instances run by volunteers that are funded by donations for topics like anime but niche social networks doesn't seem to be what the author is talking about.
>Isn't that why we're currently discussing the matter on HN rather than FB?
I think the plea was submitted to a technical site like HN instead of FB because it's trying to drum up interest from programmers who can _build_ the $20/year a general purpose replacement for Facebook/Twitter.
I wanted to point out what I believe is a typo in your about page:
> I really like piracy
I am guessing that what you intended to say is:
"I really like privacy"
;-)
By the way, I am working on a solution to the social media problem that you described. Please let me know if you would like me to contact you when I am ready to launch. Also, feel free to email me at dustfinger[@]nauci[dot]org
> I would happily pay 20 dollars a year for a social media site that
> does not track or advertise if anyone is up for building it.
It costs me $20/mo to run a Mastodon instance. Might cost me less if I spent the time to seriously optimize it. Someday I should get a Patreon up so some of the other people using my instance can kick in a few bucks and bring the cost to me down. No ads, no tracking, I just run it because I want to help actually make “social media” actually be about talking to my friends instead of being fed Popular Tweets From Celebrities.
You could also just start running your own blog. Host it yourself, use WordPress Blogger Medium Tumblr, whatever.
It feels like everyone just wants to log back into the internet of 1999. That ship has sailed though. But if you look at Web 3.0 and social networks like Peepeth, I see hope – on a site that puts everything irreversibly and forever on the blockchain and you actually need to perform, albeit micro, payments to act on this network, I expect spammers and troll farms to be unable to manage their evil operations economically. But who knows where we end up...
I like the idea of micro transactions for user interactions, I just don't love the idea of it being via a cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies convert electricity to currency, which is great for energy companies, but I would much rather use fractions of a cent than jump through the middlemen and waste to use a satoshi.
An Internet where everyone has to constantly make micro payments just to use it kinda sounds like hell to me. We don’t need to have someone making a profit off of every single interaction.
Are you comfortable with how your blockchain-based all-for-pay Web 3.0 would inherently bias any discussion in favor of whoever had the most money?
It’s definitely inspired by Twitter. For good and for ill. It has the big difference of not being something run with the intent of serving as many ads as possible; Mastodon instances are run for the hell of it, and many are paid for via Patreon.
I like to call it “the People’s Glorious Social Network”.
It was interesting watching Zuck choke and stutter when he was practically forced into answering to the EU about shadow profiles:
He is asked about it here: https://youtu.be/x66fB7CM--Q?t=1h21m36s
But he chokes and stutters here https://youtu.be/x66fB7CM--Q?t=1h22m48s
basically saying they collect data on you whether or not you have a FB account in order to "prevent bad activity".
Give me a break... this guy is so delusional it make me sick. The audacity of him to just glaze over this stuff is just some next level BS.