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by snisarenko 1064 days ago
Hey man.

I don't mean to rain on your parade. But nothing you've written above actually matters.

The tech for a social network is a solved problem

The HARD unsolved problem is how to keep the social network running and monitized without going down the VC Funded death spiral.

You are literally making this post on a social network (hackernews) that is as old as reddit. They both roughly do the same thing.

Yet reddit is self desctructing. But hackernews is still running just fine, and still has a great community and high quality content and comments.

Have you stopped and asked yourself why this is so?

The first is a VC funded company that is expected to generate 100x return or die trying

The latter is subsidized by YCombinator to generate a funnel for their accelerator.

If you can't answer the question of how your social network is gonna stick around like hackerenws, and not self destruct like reddit in 10 years, then your social network is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

1 comments

Hey, thanks for checking out the platform.

As I mentioned in the attached article, we actually do have a monetization strategy in place outside of relying on advertisements and VC funding.

We take a cut of each transaction that occurs on the platform to help fund the development. Some examples of such transactions include:

1. Giving communities the ability to offer tiered monthly membership plans. Users will also be able to purchase memberships for other users similar to the system on Twitch. Communities can also chose to gate entire communities behind a membership.

2. We are also adding the ability for users to pay to bump posts and buy comment awards which the revenue is all shared with the community owner.

3. Adding a platform wide subscription fee that would give users some additional benefits however we haven't fully fleshed this out yet.

See this section of the attached article for more on that:

https://sociables.substack.com/i/134540416/monetization-mode...

I think stating explicitly that you will NOT take VC funding at any point in the future is important. Otherwise there is no confidence that your product will stick around
It's certainly our intention to make the platform work with relying on outside funding as little as possible. Ideally we will be able to get the platform to being profitable without needing much. The economics of our platform start to play out at scale, so it does take some money for us to get there. Ideally if we can land a few larger content creators with communities active in supporting them we will be able to fund a lot of that early development through that
I wish you luck. But I don't think this strategy is predictable.
Appreciate the discussion!