A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter
1–10 of 92 posts
Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter
#2I dislike ads so much I would stop using your service if it wasn't possible to block them. I would much rather pay for all the ad-supported (well, not by me) service I use.
Everybody should be looking for ad-free ways to support their services.
If you are not paying for something the provider has incentive to sell your data, not so much if you paid for it. Example: I'm currently on a free Dropbox account simply because I don't need much storage. I would love to pay for the option to have my files encrypted. This would mean that Dropbox can't save space, thus it's alright I should pay for that.
Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter
#3The service should be pay to publish, free to consume.
You should let people follow anything they want for free, but if they want to turn on the ability to publish content into the service, then they pay
Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter
#4Fee-based Twitter vs. Ad-Supported Twitter is a false dichotomy. This smells like a PR stunt.
How about an open-source Twitter-like service that can run on your own server and federate with others? http://www.Status.net has offered this for several years now and they have done an outstanding job of creating a free and open alternative for status-feed based communication.
Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter
#5The 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 that position. There is _no_ incentive for them to resell their user's private information.
With regards to advertising - clearly that has to do with your pain points regarding advertising. We've heard lots of feedback from people who say they don't mind the advertising on Facebook, or twitter. These people also might even watch commercial television.
For those of us who stopped watching commercial television a decade ago (before "cutting the cable" was in vogue), who run ad-block religously, and are offended by "kmart specials" appearing in our twitter stream - we clearly have already reached our pain point, and are looking for something new.
For those people - App.net will be a consistent, long term, ad free, communications infrastructure.
There may only be 10,000 or so people there, and the other 5million (50 million? 500 million?) people may be on twitter. But, unlike Facebook, where it's important that all of your high-school friends, ex-girlfriends, aunts, nieces, classmates, and party-goer-chums are on the same site - I'm quite happy to leave them all behind and follow a small core of interesting technical people without distraction.
Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter
#6Think of it like FM radio. It's free for us to listen but we have to sit through advertisements. XM and sirius said hey, let's have people pay to listen, so don't have to make them sit through ads. Basically just a different biz model. That model can work though because you don't necessarily need critical mass to have people consume your content. (Yes to a certain extent you do) But the critical mass needed for the next twitter like platform would require a huge critical mass for people to continue to pay for the service. Just my stupid opinion
Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter
#7They miss the point when they write "Who's to say that App.net will always cost $50 per year? What if, a year from now, it needs a lot more to keep the service going. App.net has incentives to figure out ways to raise the price to bring in more money."
If it turns out that the price charged is insufficient to maintain the service, I'd expect them to raise the price. The alternative is for the service to not exist, taking as an axiom an ad-free service.
Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter
#8I 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.
Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter
#9I take issue with the author's point that:
"A free-based service, supported by advertisers, has tons of incentive to keep its users just as happy as a fee-based service. Why? Because if it doesn't, people go elsewhere and the advertisers go with them."
For the average consumer internet site, happy users does not equate to happy advertisers. As Facebook shows, you can have "happy" users -- in that they don't leave -- but create a dismal product for advertisers. They cannot optimize for advertisers without compromising the user experience. App.net will never need to optimize for advertisers, so they can focus completely on the user experience, or platform experience.
Edit: Removed quote from code block. PG - Markdown parser?
Re: A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter
#10This is such muddled thinking there isn't much there there. You can't just drop a word like "ideological" into a debate as if there is one uniform definition. As near as I can tell, the only way to be ideologically pure for Mike Masnick would be for no money at all to be involved, but once you spell that out, it becomes obvious that this is hardly an uncontroversial definition on its own. It also means that "ideologically pure" is pretty much impossible by definition at any scale. I for one tend not to worry too much about the fact that someone has not reached a standard that was impossible to reach in the first place.
If I am wrong about what it would take to be ideologically pure according to Mike Masnick, well, chalk it up to the fact he never saw fit to spell it out.
I could pick further, but it's so mushy there's hardly any point.