141–150 of 215 posts
Good bye, Orkut! You didn't even give me a chance to convince me I should make the effort of installing yet another app on my phone.
The social network I'd like to try is this: * Funded by subscriptions. * Free from ads. * Since it is not ad dependent, yes, it can also provide a chronological timeline. * Two post types supported: Text and Photo. Because sometimes a photo does tell a thousand words. * Links to websites not supported in posts. Avoids viral proliferation of dumbed down politics, fake news, or stupid memes. If you want to get to the w…
> Funded by subscriptions This sounds like it might be a good idea because it seems like it would remove the incentive to monetize personal information, but in practice it creates a barrier to adoption and makes the social network kinda useless. I joined a subscription-based social network that was designed for expats [1]. It was by all-accounts well-designed, well-managed and had everything going for it. But no one…
The main thing is that you're trying to bootstrap new cultural norms. If there weren't so much inertia around free services, people would probably be fine paying a few bucks per month for certain classes of services.
I've always thought it would be a great idea to fund message boards, communities, etc., by keeping track of users' individual resource usage and making that info visible to them.
GitHub is free for most, for example, and others pay for some extra perks. But even then, the price structure comes off as pretty arbitrary.
Since Patreon became a thing, I've seen some people set up funding goals that take the form of explaining that it takes, say, ~$85 per month to cover the costs of running servers, but that doesn't really accomplish what I'm talking about, since it's still too easy to treat it as a shared commons.
A running sum is able to make the point unambiguously; it says something along the lines of, "because of the requests we had to handle to serve your use of the site, we are now on the hook for paying $2.74 so far this month". If you're a magnanimous admin, you can continue operating free services, but just "soft bill" people with a pay-what-you-want scheme (by which I mean guilt them). If you're actually trying to cover costs you do hard billing, but offer the first year free or something, which also removes one of the barriers of getting started—so long as we're operating on the assumption that we've already managed to establish it as a new cultural norm.
Resource-proportionate billing also has the nice side benefit of getting people to be more conscious of wasting time on the site—breaking the cycle of idly refreshing the home page to procrastinate.
Orkut was so popular in some parts of the world like India that I always wondered why Google thought it better to shut it down. All those orkut users moved to Facebook & made Facebook a hugely popular platform. I hope the same does not happen with Hello.
> Oh no, it looks like you're trying to access the hello app from your desktop or laptop (we're mobile only) Good bye, Orkut! You didn't even give me a chance to convince me I should make the effort of installing yet another app on my phone.
Orkut was so popular in some parts of the world like India that I always wondered why Google thought it better to shut it down. All those orkut users moved to Facebook & made Facebook a hugely popular platform. I hope the same does not happen with Hello.
I am still trying to figure out why Orkut was more popular in India.
The social network I'd like to try is this: * Funded by subscriptions. * Free from ads. * Since it is not ad dependent, yes, it can also provide a chronological timeline. * Two post types supported: Text and Photo. Because sometimes a photo does tell a thousand words. * Links to websites not supported in posts. Avoids viral proliferation of dumbed down politics, fake news, or stupid memes. If you want to get to the w…
It will never work. Nobody will pay - no users. Remember app.net?
Orkut was so popular in some parts of the world like India that I always wondered why Google thought it better to shut it down. All those orkut users moved to Facebook & made Facebook a hugely popular platform. I hope the same does not happen with Hello.
I am still trying to figure out why Orkut was more popular in India.
The social network I'd like to try is this: * Funded by subscriptions. * Free from ads. * Since it is not ad dependent, yes, it can also provide a chronological timeline. * Two post types supported: Text and Photo. Because sometimes a photo does tell a thousand words. * Links to websites not supported in posts. Avoids viral proliferation of dumbed down politics, fake news, or stupid memes. If you want to get to the w…
> Funded by subscriptions This sounds like it might be a good idea because it seems like it would remove the incentive to monetize personal information, but in practice it creates a barrier to adoption and makes the social network kinda useless. I joined a subscription-based social network that was designed for expats [1]. It was by all-accounts well-designed, well-managed and had everything going for it. But no one…
What you most likely really want for a self-sustaining social network is community funding where some self-clustering communal unit (the finding of which might be hard as here too you likely want communities to network and organically overlap together) is encouraged to grow organically as a network and raise funds together.
You can somewhat see experiments in this space in the Mastodon world where some instances try to define community boundaries, and find ways to together pay instance hosting costs.
Community funding as a topic also brings up the question of tax-funded as an option or even a necessity. Are social networks a public good? Are they maybe the true "highways" of the internet that should be governed as such?