[wccrawford]

People subscribe to Netflix (and its competition) because there's no legal way to get that service for free, and it doesn't matter if their friends are also using that same service.

People won't subscribe to a non-free Facebook competitor because Facebook is free and none of their friends are on the non-free competitor... And most of their friends never will be.

[civilized]

I get the idea, but I feel FB sucks so badly that eventually a much better product will figure out a way through the gauntlet. There's a lot of money sloshing around out there with nothing to do.

Most likely the product will be free for a while and switch to paid. It kind of sucks but for a really good product it could work.

[yellowapple]

That, or it remains free to use, but offers optional paid features. Seems to work well enough for free-to-play video games; Fortnite is presumably a decent enough money maker for Epic Games, for example.

This is almost Reddit's model (with Reddit Gold, and now the various other comment/post awards added recently), except Reddit also sells ads; it'd be interesting to see if the awards alone are enough to keep the lights on absent a need to appease investors.