I sure am tired of hearing about "the fundamental flaw" in empowering people. What you describe is not a flaw in empowerment, it's a flaw in their business model, and it's one that can that be fixed (i.e. "innovate a better business model"). Can we stop propagating the idea that people who do not want to use their limited bandwidth and processing power to rasterize someone else's advertising are somehow "flawed"?
The only thing more insane than blaming users for having self-interest are the people who pretend that Facebook et al. are somehow owed the business model they have, painting ad-blockers as some kind of dangerous society-destabilizing technology instead of the commonsense response to shitty business practices it clearly is.
The point is that fighting Facebook on Facebook is a losing game and "innovate a better business model" has been tried, is being tried, and is not working because it is hard. A plan that does not work is indeed "flawed", no matter how noble and natural the intentions.
"Users don't care about your ad network" is not a "plan," it is a reality, and calling it "flawed" is just corporate propaganda. I'm sure you're arguing in good faith but the very foundation of this assessment is fundamentally incompatible with reality.
Well, no, today's model is "users tolerate your ad network in return for free content". Which is clearly true given that Facebook is making profits despite everyone and their mother grumbling about ads.
Yes, tolerating the ad network definitely falls under "users don't care"... until they do, and they start taking measures to counteract it, and then we're back to "something has to pay the bills," which is where I'm suggesting some R&D investment might be wise.
It's a site that they run, they are the source for those numbers.
A quick google says somewhere from 20%-40% use adblockers. 60% sounds high, but depending on the website, I can see it. For example, I bet at least 60% of visitors to gnu.org are blocking ads and/or trackers.
We all know users won’t pay enough for a subscription service to make a huge profit that makes the VC happy, makes the founder one of the ten richest people in the country, and supports a ton of offices and salaries in some of the priciest places to live and work.
But the tiny Mastodon server I run for myself, with a total user count in the low triple digits, costs about fifty bucks a month, and the users who are willing to pay cover half of that. I could probably get more of them to cover it if I was more aggressive about asking, but I prefer to keep it super low-key. I could also lower those costs if I felt like putting some work into optimizing it.
It’s not my job, it’s a thing I run on the side and put a few hours of technical work into every few months. I ain’t gonna get rich from it but it gives my friends a nice place to chat on the Internet.
Yeah but the vast majority of Facebook users don't care enough to learn how to use Mastodon. Try asking the average Social Security recipient to use IRC.
I reject the notion that "We all know users won’t pay enough for a subscription service to make a huge profit that makes the VC happy, makes the founder one of the ten richest people in the country etc" because...if you can figure out how to get Grandma to use a federated Mastodon-like service, then you would do just that.
“Hi Mom! We’ve decided to leave Facebook. Jane’s set up our own little substitute. It’s where we’ll be posting all the pictures of the kids from now on. I’ve written up the basics in this letter; if you have any questions we can talk about it when I see you next week.
I’m giving something to my friends. This makes them happy, and it makes me happy to see them happy. I’ve made a few new friends because of this, I’ve gotten to know some acquaintances better too. I am richer in my connections.
There’s a low-key buzz of occasional thanks and favors in my life that I wouldn’t get if I wasn’t doing this, either. And occasionally this connection lets one of my friends help out another who needs it, financially or emotionally, when they wouldn’t even necessarily be contact with each other, much less interested in helping out, without the shared space I’ve created.
I think this is a great experience.
(Total active user count is more like a few dozen, btw.)
I see two problems with this. First of all, the service Facebook provides isn't valuable at all unless all your friends and family are also using it and posting content. So unless you can get a critical mass of users to switch to a new platform with a different business model, it won't succeed. Secondly, we've become accustomed to not having to pay for social media, and asking to pay for a social media platform is a little like asking to pay for air. Sure, yours might not have as much pollution, but I can get something almost as good for free.
I've actually experienced the latter, as I looked for an alternative to Gmail. I just found it hard to justify paying for an email provider, where the only real value add to me is the absence of ads, and not being Gmail. And really, the price is mostly irrelevant. For me to be willing to pay _anything_, it would have to have a really compelling reason to move. The value of not seeing ads is just not that high for me. And I don't think you would say there isn't value in an email provider.
I use Fastmail for my important email because I want to be paying a company to take me seriously as a customer. They’re not going to just lock me out of my account because of some random abuse trigger elsewhere in their system. You’re probably not seeing the value because the bad thing hasn’t happened to you yet, but it might and when it does there’s not much recourse.
Perhaps if people don't find a service valuable, then we should everyone to stop using it.
If that argument sounded absurd to you, it's probably because it is. The services are valuable because people ultimately do use them — a lot of them, even. They pay for them indirectly by agreeing to look at ads.
There are loads of services we do not directly pay for, like the fire department and the public library — and yet they are immensely valuable.
The argument sounds nonsensical because it’s missing a verb.
I don’t agree that just because people will use a free thing that means it has a lot of value. Note I didn’t say that FB has no value, just that it might not be as valuable as one might think.
Considering most of their value is their messenger platform I don’t think FB is really worth much at all beyond their social graph.
> The argument sounds nonsensical because it’s missing a verb.
That's a typo on my part — it doesn't change the veracity of the argument.
> I don’t agree that just because people will use a free thing that means it has a lot of value. Note I didn’t say that FB has no value, just that it might not be as valuable as one might think.
Sure, but how do you measure the "true" value? If you can answer that question, you will probably become a billionaire.
> Considering most of their value is their messenger platform I don’t think FB is really worth much at all beyond their social graph.
What are you basing this on? You may only find the messenger platform to be valuable, but how do you know how others perceive the FB platform/product?
I’m going on what I’ve observed in FB users around the world. Their most dedicated users are people in developing countries whom they have convinced that Facebook is the internet.
Facebook is only 16 years old. The idea of social networks is only a few years older than that. Surely we can't have tried and failed at every possible alternative already?
I can buy web hosting for less than a coffee per month that can sling thousands of static HTTP requests per second. In a world where something like Mastodon/GNU Social was the norm, any hobbyist could opt to run one fraction of a grand federated social network out of the goodness of their hearts, for spare change, or for a small fee to their users.
Centralized, siloed social networks are only expensive to run because they're centralized. Things were better when the norm was to start a blog instead of using someone else's walled garden.
I'm complaining about the structure of the dialog around this issue, not casting aspersions on the parent post's argument itself. It's impossible to have a reasonable discussion when the terminology in use is strongly prejudiced against one of the key parties in the relationship.
Reality is strongly prejudiced against one of the key parties in the relationship. Users, today, tolerate ads in exchange for free content. Any reasonable discussion — where continued delivery of content is a desired end goal — needs to come up with an answer for how we pay for it. Calling out "fundamental flaws" is one such way of doing that.
Stating things nakedly, using the assumptions and perspective of the big guy, can be a powerful rhetorical style when advocating for the little guy. See any of Chomsky's political writing as an example.
> I sure am tired of hearing about "the fundamental flaw" in empowering people.
I'm all for empowering people. But adding personally controlled user agents to Facebook is a fundamentally flawed solution. There is no path for that to succeed because the primary content users will want to filter is ads, and the primary content Facebook needs people to see is ads. Thus user agents are an existential threat to Facebook and since Facebook controls all the content, they will ensure user agents are not allowed.
The core business model does not align Facebook's incentives with user's incentives. You can't fix that at the content level.
I thought it was obvious I meant from the sector in question. My mistake, I'll try again.
Do you know of a social media company (or ad company using a product to garner the data, if that helps) that uses that model with a comparable size to Facebook? If not, are there any that are making ground?
The only thing more insane than blaming users for having self-interest are the people who pretend that Facebook et al. are somehow owed the business model they have, painting ad-blockers as some kind of dangerous society-destabilizing technology instead of the commonsense response to shitty business practices it clearly is.