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A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

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Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

#81

Post by runako »

jlarocco wrote: post #58
mibbitier wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when amazon suggests that you might want to buy a certain bike helmet based on the fact you're buying a bike, you find that information utterly useless?

I do find it utterly useless. If I'm buying a bike then I either already have a helmet, or already know I need to buy one. So what value is the ad providing? I'm not going to blindly purchase something without doing at least a little research (to check prices, at the very least), so the ad is just getting in the way and wasting bandwidth.

In that case, congratulations! You are the perfectly-informed consumer, aware of every relevant product category (and product). You use the Internet for price checking only. You don't need to be made aware of a new product in any category, because you are on all industry listservs. You are the only one of your kind.

Every other homo sapiens sapiens finds it difficult to stay abreast of all the submarkets he/she participates in. They spend their mental energies on other things, or simply don't care to research products costing under some threshold.

For example, I consider myself very savvy at computer purchases. However, I really can use guidance in purchasing power tools as I'm not a frequent user. In fact, I really wouldn't be surprised to learn that of the existence of entire categories of power tools. Just because I'm not seeking them out doesn't mean I couldn't use them around the house. Oh, and I don't really want to spend a lot of time researching them because I actually do have better things to do. Also, I freely admit that I have never researched tape; the benefits of one vs. the other are a topic of which I am wholly ignorant at the moment. (Obviously you are not possessed of such an ignorance.)

For the homo sapiens sapiens other than you, sometimes a little nudge is actually mutually beneficial. An ad might make us aware of a product category, or an upgrade to an existing category that makes it more useful to us. All of these might make us do more research, or simply go buy something.

Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

#82

Post by briandear »

aggronn wrote: post #22
badclient wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have app.net people clarified if they would be okay if the service only had 10,000 users at its stabilization point? I know you'd be okay with it but so far, we don't have much from them stating the same. The default of course is that a service that peeks at 10,000 users is headed to dead pool. This is a bit different with 10K paid users but that is still not much in terms of providing financial security to the compa…

> if two years from now your service has 10,000 paid subscribers AND you know that that is the peak, will you be content running the company? This is entirely dependent on opportunity cost--ie, whats their take-home pay, and whats the real commitment?

I'd they are just in it for the ideology, then I fully expect then to run the company as a non profit. Oh, they aren't are they? They want to make money too? And they're trying to convince people that they're in it for openness and all that? If they made App.net into a Wikipedia style foundation, I would have gladly jumped on board. But instead they're just trying to create an angle to justify a twitter clone. I can build my own twitter clone. I don't need to pay App.net for that. I have yet to see anything original about this idea. They're just trying to profit on a rather limited crowd of tech people. If it was such a great idea, then the VCs would be throwing money at them. And no, they didn't turn it down-- it isn't there because their business model won't scale. There's only a limited amount of social network inbreeding that can happen before a niche paid network runs out of cousins.

Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

#83

Post by guscost »

mibbitier wrote: post #27
eykanal wrote: post #14

Following the model from the article: In the fee-based model, the needs of the following must be met: (1) the company, (2) the users. In the ads-based model, the needs of the following must be met: (1) the company, (2) the advertisers, (3) the users. By removing the advertisers from the equation, a lot of resources are freed up to address the needs of the other two parties. It's kind of strange to say that "the compa…

You're assuming that advertisers never meet users needs. If I'm selling you a bike, and I also tell you about a good deal on bike insurance you can get, then I'm advertising at you. Maybe I get a cut of the insurance premium. BUT, I'm also adding value for the customer. It's a mutually beneficial transaction. I know it's blasphemy to claim that advertising is sometimes pretty damn useful around these parts, but the f…

Begone, marketing department! The developers are having a scrum.

Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

#84

Post by aniro »

"Ideologically Pure"? Link-bait much?

Apparently the author finds the notion of a fair-value exchange impossible to understand.

"First off, App.net's interests are not economically aligned with its users. It wants money from those users, and all things being equal, those users want to keep their money. So their goals are actually diametrically opposed."

I would bother with an introduction to the fundamentals of how economic exchange work.. but I honestly believe this was written with so much foaming froth on the lips of the author that he cannot possibly see sense enough to understand reason.

I hope he got the jacked up page view count he was hoping for.

Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

#85

Post by notlisted »

Money talks. Don't bite the hand that feeds ya. If users pay and there are no advertisers, the users are investors. If advertisers pay (or pay a heck of a lot more than the user) they're the investors.

Look at HBO, because they're not beholden to some lowest common denominator PC/right-wing/hypocrite relifreak agenda they produce awesome content. It's not a coincidence.

Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

#86

Post by thezilch »

laconian wrote: post #8

I don't know why this is so hard or requires such significant investment up front. How is making a decentralized Twitter service more of a challenge than, say, IRC or Jabber? I know that the problems aren't exactly the same, but I would hazard to guess that they are on the same order of magnitude in terms of implementation difficulty.

So they have a runway before their maximum 10K paying users is only enough to keep a part-time operations team and servers up.

I have to agree with you though. This may be more than we always hear about, but not _much_ more. I'd imagined the product would be mostly built already.

Maybe they wanted an injection of cash before getting a handful of servers, and we should see everything up and running within the week.

Maybe they think they need to be Twitter-sized day one, which would be a mistake on their judgement.

Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

#87

Post by kmavm »

SCdF wrote: post #54
ghshephard wrote: post #5

The element that techdirt overlooks, and that I think they did their community (and themselves) a disservice by not mentioning, is the privacy element. Because selling your personal details is a (relatively) invisible intrusion (unless the provider really screws up, ala Beacon) - there is a significant cost to the user (that cares about privacy) that is not visible to them. App.net is aligned only with the users from…

So I was thinking about this recently: do companies actually "sell" your personal details to advertisers? A practical example: let's say I run a cooking website, where users log in and share recipes, vote and comment on them etc. I (the site owner) store your votes, and comments, as well as track what recipes you view. From this I (still the site owner) can learn things about you. If you're always viewing lots of chi…

When people say that Facebook "sells your data," they're (charitably) engaging in hyperbole to strengthen their rhetorical point, or (less charitably) lying. Facebook shows ads to the users they're targeted to, without sharing the users' details or identities with advertisers.

Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

#88

Post by grippi »

jfb wrote: post #25

This is a nonsensical article. Ideology doesn't enter into it; say rather, a firm that sells directly to the user is open to market pressure from those users in a way that a firm that sells their users to a third party simply isn't.

Agreed. Instilling a price tag for users legitimizes its utility (to a certain degree).

However, what bothers me most about this article is that it's so black-and-white, alluding to the existence of only two pricing models out there: Ads or money up-front. No where does this article mention the possibility for a VRM-based (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page) revenue model, attribution-licensing model, etc.

[sad panda]

Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

#89

Post by lloeki »

> those users want to keep their money.

Well, no. Those users want a service. Nobody coerces anyone into giving App.Net money, so those paying users actually don't want to keep this amount of money, in exchange for the service.

> A free-based service, supported by advertisers, has tons of incentive to keep its users just as happy as a fee-based service.

But for that it has to show ads, and the business is then to show ads in the most efficient way possible, which has a number of consequences we can readily witness today.

Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter

#90

Post by wpietri »

briandear wrote: post #78
olliesaunders wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was what advertising was about in the 30s maybe. Since then its gotten sophisticated, employing tricks that prey on our comparatively unsophisticated psychology making you want things that you otherwise wouldn’t. Besides, if advertising didn’t exist or was illegal or something, couldn’t we just create a webapp to let people exchange information about interesting products and services and that would be the end of…

You don't have to buy everything you see just like you don't have to hit on every pretty girl that you see. We still have the power to say no, regardless of the messages. We could say that pretty girls everywhere leads to impure thoughts right? Advertising is just like a pretty girl -- you are under no obligation to act on your 'unsophisticated psychology.' if you disagree with me, then the terrorists have won.

The obvious difference is that advertising is a whole profit-driven industry consciously designed to manipulate people's thoughts and behavior, whereas pretty girls are just going about their business.

You talk about one's psychology as if it's something separate that you can choose to act upon or not. That's a false split; one's psychology is the mechanism that does the choosing. That is what is getting manipulated for profit.

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