"What about this time around we build products whose primary focus is actually the stated mission? Share with friends and family and the world, to bring it together (not divide it)! Instead of something unrelated, like making lots of ad revenue! What a concept!"
I really liked the article but am perplexed by the naive ending.
Friends/family and the world are two very distinct use cases. Most people, young people included, are taking the friends/family part private, in chat apps. Then they may or may not engage in a "public square" social network, but probably with a burner account.
The public square part has failed in epic ways. The idea that you can just "build" something that unites people whilst dodging a laundry list of threats and toxic behavior seems optimistic, to say the least.
And yeah, let's not run ads. Ok, fine. But how will you monetize instead? These seem pretty important questions to me.
Some radicals might point out where the expectation, and need, for "monetization" is itself the root of the problem, and wonder if an extractive capitalist mindset could ever solve the problems which itself has created.
Even if you need at least some money to keep the lights on and power the servers you can make the pricing plain and simple (not "free but with ads and 3rd party data sharing").
Free service with 1GB of storage for family photos and movies and 3$/10GB yearly fee if going above that limit. Storage is very cheap if profit is not your main consideration. You don't even need software employees and just make it open source.
Capitalism or not, you need to monetize. Supporting a platform with billions of users requires a huge amount of resources. Resources are not free in any system.
I really liked the article but am perplexed by the naive ending.
Friends/family and the world are two very distinct use cases. Most people, young people included, are taking the friends/family part private, in chat apps. Then they may or may not engage in a "public square" social network, but probably with a burner account.
The public square part has failed in epic ways. The idea that you can just "build" something that unites people whilst dodging a laundry list of threats and toxic behavior seems optimistic, to say the least.
And yeah, let's not run ads. Ok, fine. But how will you monetize instead? These seem pretty important questions to me.