[Pxtl]

What blows my mind is how much money Facebook gets from ads. I've never clicked a Facebook ad except by accident. And yet they get paid more for my presence than I'd ever be willing to pay for a social network.

That's the real rub for me. I mean, we imagine the ideal "decentrialized but user-friendly web". Like, there's an online open architecture of servers where you have a cryptographically-controlled "account" for your family and you can easily buy plug-ins to add features to this account. Like an app store but for webapps all linked to your private migrateable data store. And you can sync that data down to some kind of ubiquitous home box appliance as a local back-up/cache, or move it over to another host because it's an open architecture.

Presumably, if you wanted to enroll your family into a social network that's not based on selling you, you'd have to pay for it. So how much is a social network worth? I sure wouldn't pay $50/year for that program for my family.

[DrPhish]

That's potentially the loophole that could work: The end user gets paid the ad money, and has direct access to the datastore that the advertisers are using in order to edit out bad or undesirable data.