Facebook Should Pay All of Us

A typical Facebook is mildly nauseating at first, and this increases the longer you look at it. The privacy sacrifice is unacceptable. I don't use it.

I do use diaspora*. No one I know IRL uses it, but that's fine for now.

If there wasn't a free search engine, wouldn't you pay to use one?

What if the model was flipped, so instead of advertisers paying Facebook to cover their operation costs, individual users covered their own operation costs, and perhaps the advertisers directly subsidized individual users at the time of publication? This would mean that people who wanted to pay could turn off advertising and just use Facebook as pay-as-they-go service.

I dunno what kind of accounting they're doing at Facebook, but with their current approach of having advertising indirectly subsidizing users, there is no price discovery mechanism. Right now there's no way to price how much a user is worth and how much they actually cost, which seems like a very strange way to run a business.

This type of accounting, where the content itself is given a cost and a value, would mean it we're finally treating what people publish as intellectual property instead of the "user being the product".

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Edit, to expand on perhaps the advertisers directly subsidized individual users at the time of publication:

Ah, I think you're assuming that I'm saying they should go to a completely paid-for-in-cash-by-users model... which I'm not! I'm just saying that if they flipped the model, and covered the operations costs directly from users, that the books would make more sense. This would make the accounting significantly more complex, so I wasn't making an argument for simplicity, rather as much detail and accuracy as possible! This information can be later analyzed and acted upon in simple ways. This doesn't mean that there can't be a free to use service on top of a model like this. It just means that advertisers are literally paying on behalf of users for hosting, distribution and other operating costs. This would mean that there wouldn't be advertisements on the read-side, in the "stream", rather on the write-side, when publishing... like with sponsored posts... Like, I personally choose to make my post sponsored by the Buffalo Bills because I love giving my money to the Buffalo Bills and the NFL (which I really do). Or maybe some low-rent ads make you watch a 20 second video before paying for you to upload 200 photos from your phone, but at least you don't have to associate yourself with them. We're smart enough to create the kinds of incentive structures that have made intellectual property function in a market economy for hundreds of years, we just need to revisit some deep fundamentals about how we buy and sell information. It'll work out better for everyone. Facebook could take a percentage of the business for having created the market that introduced the advertisers to the authors. The authors are now free to do business as they please, directly covering their own costs or choosing to have them subsidized. The advertisers can establish better relationships with the authors, essentially treating them like business partners.

Why?

Your argument would be right if it weren't of a very large straw man persuasion. Nobody is saying an individual is being sold your personal information. But when Coke comes along and wants it, Facebook is selling.

But even that's not a problem, really. Who cares if Coke knows where you were on Sunday evening? What about Allstate though? Or Humana?

One commenter noted above that our personal information isn't valuable without our attention and he's right. Don't you think that an auto insurance company would just love to know that one of their customers is a fan craft beer and was out partying with Jane Doe on Saturday and that Jane Doe has a DUI? Now they're raising rate on the guy who happened to pay passing attention to craft beer.

I concede that we don't have evidence that Facebook sells that kind of detailed information on an individual. In fact, I believe they probably don't. Right now. I guarantee you that if comes down to keeping your information private and keeping their stock price up, you might as get a For Sale sign tattoo'd to your forehead.