Governments around the world should demand Facebook either place a permanent ad banner promoting WT:Social front and center on their website for everyone from that country, or they can pay $x00 million in fines per month. If Facebook chooses to pay the fine, half the fine should then be donated to WT:Social to keep their site running and the rest can be distributed back to the taxpayers. :-)
Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
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Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
#62I checked it out by creating an account. It detected my country as India, and showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Contrast this to (using current conversion rates from INR to USD):
* Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that account sharing among a few people is quite common.
* Amazon Prime (with two day shipping plus Prime Video and Prime Music) costs about $14 a year.
* A print newspaper subscription of any major national newspaper would cost about $2.8 or even a lot lesser per month.
* An Audible subscription (one free credit a month) costs $2.8 a month, with lower prices on audiobooks and discounts on them.
* Some premium news publications cost about $30-$45 a year.
I'm not saying that this is similar to Netflix or Amazon or a national newspaper, but it's more about how the more popular as well as niche/premium services have priced themselves and how people perceive value. Comparatively, this $12.99/month or $100/year social network focused on news seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants. It could've probably done better with a currency adjusted or purchasing power parity specific rate. For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US).
Having talked about the pricing, the UI doesn't look great either. I saw a list of groups to choose from and the page looked like it was built more than a decade ago. It ought to look like a modern website (with more bells and whistles) if it wants to command more than premium rates. Even Facebook's site, which I think looks outdated, cluttered and ugly, looks better in comparison.
Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
#63Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
#64I love what Jimmy contributed to the world with Wikipedia. This, however, is DOA. The site barely communicates a value-proposition, doesn't give me a sense of what's behind the curtain unless I pay $13/month. C'mon the best practices for building product are WIDELY available now.
Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
#65"Rival" is a strong word. Nothing Jimmy Wales touches ever amounts to anything.
yeah that wiki thing never amounted to anything more than being the ninth most popular website.
I think it is way more than the "ninth most popular website." I'm quite sure the Web would be a very different place if it hadn't existed. In fact, I would rank Wikipedia alongside the Web and perhaps the Internet. Not only did it establish that information about nearly everything would be available free and without commercial motivations (obviously, with tremendous caveats, but still far closer to those ideals than any of its contemporaries), it also provides an incredible corpus that is the basis of many machine learning approaches. With the excuses people make on a daily basis, there's no assurance something like Wikipedia would have happened the same way. And it continues to develop important projects. Separately, Wales doesn't deserve all the credit, but I just can't leave that the summary of "Wikipedia" is it's "almost as popular as Facebook."
Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
#66Silly question but on facebook/twitter, most of the fake news I'm getting isn't from ads but from random people I've added over the years that are sharing a bunch of crap. The fact that they'd be paying to access that social network wouldn't change what they're sharing on it.. or would it?
Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
#67Ouch. Think he's missing the mark quite severely there.
Merit or not, the whole "if it's free you're the product" thinking hasn't really sunk in with people outside of heavy tech.
So while this might make sense to you and me, I can see 13USD being a tough sell for the average user. Which is a deathblow to something that inherently requires critical momentum.
Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
#68Facebook is "free," this is $100/year. Even if Facebook weren't already the giant it is, that fact alone would determine the outcome in the social space.
Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
#69Just my guess, but I bet that from this point on, few people (in the developed world) will race to sign up for a new social network. Why? Given the societal and personal costs (and benefits) that we've seen with previous social networks, a lot of lay people are re-evaluating the utility that such services provide them. In many cases, the answer is to keep your current social network, but increasingly disengage from i…
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Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
#70Just my guess, but I bet that from this point on, few people (in the developed world) will race to sign up for a new social network. Why? Given the societal and personal costs (and benefits) that we've seen with previous social networks, a lot of lay people are re-evaluating the utility that such services provide them. In many cases, the answer is to keep your current social network, but increasingly disengage from i…
I have a fairly large network of friends that existed before FB really had wide adoption. The platform they were on eventually died in favor of facebook. At this point, I'd like to preserve that network of friends independent of facebook and most of those folks feel similarly. In that sense, there is at least some demand for a social network that isn't evil.
Why wouldn't you go to a open alternative like Mastodon instead to yet another silo?