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Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

zdnet.com

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Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#211

Post by burtonator »

wtmt wrote: post #62

I 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 a…

I'm dealing with this now with my app Polar. We're a cognitive platform for managing knowledge, education, and reading.

You MUST have localized pricing for these types of apps. We're going to cut our pricing for India, and basically all developing nations.

Students too... if you have a university email we'll give you a discount on top of your normal region-specific discounts.

It's a fools errand otherwise. These users will just NOT convert.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#212

Post by CodeCube »

danielecook wrote: post #210

Previously someone mentioned the idea of a $1/mo. social network. I think if someone were to make facebook in it's first ~2 years and keep it very basic it we would be good to go. The only features you need are: a profile picture, a wall, chat, and events. In other words - a photo of yourself, a way of publicly messaging, a way of privately messaging, and a way to coordinate social events. What else do you need for a…

Anyone remember app.net?

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#213

Post by sridharpoduri »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #161
ryanmercer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta be smart, I think Amazon technically paid me to have prime one year and this year I've negatived a good chunk of it. Any time they have the 1$ digital credit for delay shipping I select it which then subsidizes a good chunk of my eBook purchases. I think I've had 4$ in credit just this week and have another 1$ I'll get whenever the 5$ shoehorn I ordered yesterday ships.

This post shows how smart Amazon's Prime strategy is. We have someone probably spending thousands of dollars with Amazon (and Amazon taking a good chunk of that in commission) bragging about getting some free ebooks.

And those are e-books that the buyer does not own for ever. Amazon can remove the e-books from its catalog anytime without prior notice.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#214

Post by ryanmercer »

sridharpoduri wrote: post #213
hombre_fatal wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post shows how smart Amazon's Prime strategy is. We have someone probably spending thousands of dollars with Amazon (and Amazon taking a good chunk of that in commission) bragging about getting some free ebooks.

And those are e-books that the buyer does not own for ever. Amazon can remove the e-books from its catalog anytime without prior notice.

Oh, I own them forever. You can strip DRM with Calibre via plugins or worst case you can print to PDF from inside Calibre with your Kindle connected.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

Besides, I don't think I've ever re-read an eBook. If I think I'll refer to something again I buy it in print.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#216

Post by burtonator »

I'm paraphrasing Machiavelli here but he nailed it in regards to wicked men.

"As long as there will be men there will be those that are wicked. As long as the good man restrains his behavior he will always lose to the wicked man. "... this is not an exact quote. Just paraphrasing.

This is why all these strategies will fail in regards to Facebook.

They just flat out play dirty... VERY dirty.

The reason why bought Whatsapp is that they were paying users directly to spy on their phones and found that Whatsapp had a massive user adoption.

Unless you're prepared to go evil there's no way to win against this.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#217

Post by timdavila »

danielecook wrote: post #210

Previously someone mentioned the idea of a $1/mo. social network. I think if someone were to make facebook in it's first ~2 years and keep it very basic it we would be good to go. The only features you need are: a profile picture, a wall, chat, and events. In other words - a photo of yourself, a way of publicly messaging, a way of privately messaging, and a way to coordinate social events. What else do you need for a…

I would say you also need Groups. But I love the idea.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#218

Post by imglorp »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #126

I love the idea of an alternate social network, and I'm fine with the idea of charging users. But in an era where free alternatives are bountiful (even if most of them are "free as in puppy"), where a full paid blog hosting service like Micro.blog -- which includes a social network timeline built on IndieWeb principles -- is only $5 a month, where "subscription fatigue" is entering the lexicon... this is just a bonke…

> free as in puppy

Which one is actually free? You're paying by sharing your life with them to sell for other purposes. Your purchases, search history, private conversations, even bedroom talk are all ongoing amortized payments for that puppy.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#219

Post by icebraining »

danans wrote: post #135
halbritt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For your use case, what part of your need isn't provided by a phone/address-book? I suspect it's the receipt of broadcast messages from your friend network? If so, then yes, you need a social network with features like FB. Personally, I'd rather not receive those kind of messages - I only want to receive messages that someone specifically thought to send to me. Doing so dramatically reduces noise. The only exception…

Well, HN is a social network with broadcasting features, and it's what allowed halbritt to reply to you.

(This isn't intended to be a "gotcha", just to stimulate reflection on why it's different)

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#220

Post by sridharpoduri »

billfruit wrote: post #130
basch wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of Prime is getting you to give them $120 membership fee so you feel youre getting some kind of bonus buying from them ("free shipping") which reduces comparison shopping. I'm probably not going to buy $100/year memberships to costco, walmart, amazon, and target, even though im half way there and really tempted to pull the trigger on another. The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me fr…

100$s? Amazon prime membership is 1000rs per year, which is less than 14$ a year.

Newspaper prices are offset by advertising costs. It costs a bomb to advertise in newspapers and those are the primary revenue drivers for the newspaper publisher. In the case of Amazon, they are interested in you. You are the primary customer providing them will data points to feed their advertising business. Again, subsidize the cost of Prime membership but get folks to give up data in return. Prime no longer is about hassle free shipping. Prime serves as a vehicle to gobble up all kinds of data to serve their ad business. This is how i look at Amazon and Prime.

Netflix is in the content delivery business, for now. Hence they have to charge full price. If, and when their business model changes to become advertisement driven, you will see changes in the prices charged to end users.

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