[idle_zealot]

> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species

Do you have a mechanism for this in mind, incentives-wise? I can't see this making money.

[benoau]

I guess the real question is whether a website where you communicate with friends and close ones needs to be a multi-trillion dollar company in the first place... historically most of them have not been worth very much at all.

[pixl97]

The question then becomes how can you make a website with all your friend (and by association all their friends) make enough profit to run itself?

[andai]

You mean, how can my friends and I fundraise my $3 VPS? It's going to be rough, but I think we'll find a way ;)

(If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)

[pixl97]

This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there".

Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.

[andai]

Well, indulge my silliness for a moment... what if the servers on the internet could talk to each other?

I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.

[pixl97]

I mean do you remember what p2p turned into for things like downloads? "Some_popular_thing.mov.exe"

They worked great when most actors were well behaved and got abandoned pretty quickly once that changed.

[sosborn]

Early Facebook was kind of a great mix. It had enough people on it, it was making money, and the advertising was much more reasonable. At the time it really was a place to connect with IRL friends.

[aprilthird2021]

It needs enough revenue to fund its operations. And most people won't pay for such a website, so if you want one place where most people you know are, then...

[bogwog]

Come on, don't hand wave over the obvious. Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends. It would be extremely realistic to build something that's both free and sustainable with just regular ads, as was done decades before.

(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)

The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.

[aprilthird2021]

> Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends.

It would cost tons man. You don't understand the scale these apps operate on at all. Meta has their own data center footprint that rivals AWS or any other cloud company and they had that before AI, and it's not just all to run ads on. On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.

Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them

[bogwog]

> On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.

Maybe you missed my edit? I specifically said not a clone of the monopolies, but a competitor big enough to be a sustainable business. The economics of a monopolist's empire are irrelevant.

> Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them

There's so much wrong with this statement. First of all, I will never meet anywhere near a million people in my lifetime. A regular human being's real social connections won't be anywhere near that big.

But even if it is (or users want to discover/follow random people), it doesn't take a computer science genius to discover how to interoperate between social networking apps. Meta and Google would never do this, but that's because they're anti-competitive monopolists; if you're a startup trying to gain marketshare and win on your product's quality, interop with other networks is a no brainer. We probably don't even need regulation to require interop, as the market will see it as a useful thing to develop on its own.

[aprilthird2021]

> if you're a startup trying to gain marketshare and win on your product's quality, interop with other networks is a no brainer.

There are platforms that try this, like Bluesky but they are not really sustainable businesses

[hatsunearu]

I feel like discord is kind of like this used correctly, but with the recent drama and such it feels terrible

[Zigurd]

A $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU from all that fancy, creepy, and intrusive ad tech. Paying YouTube to not advertise to you makes it a 10X better experience.

[myroon5]

> $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU

Even ignoring the adverse selection of who'd subscribe, their ARPU is higher than that in North America: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...

[andai]

Well, another example comes to mind. Coordinated efforts to preserve the biosphere for all mankind are probably not going to be great for GDP.

We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?

The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.

[0x3f]

Actually that's probably really good for GDP, just not over the kind of time periods an individual human deals with or cares about.

> We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?

The continued survival of individuals or humanity as a whole? The individuals seem to survive OK, and arguably there's nothing that could convince them to prefer the survival of the amorphous group, save for some kind of brainwashing.

[andai]

Heh, that's a very good point. GDP begins to correlate with the biosphere over sufficiently long timespans.

We shouldn't be optimizing for quarterly returns, but for the next ten thousand years.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Ads were profitable before the outrage optimized flamebait internet era.

[slopinthebag]

It doesn't need to make money directly (and probably shouldn't).

The incentives would be those which have motivated people throughout history: to create something which benefits humanity.

[pixl97]

Ah yes, I too love free servers and bandwidth.

[slopinthebag]

Lol, it doesn't have to run for free and servers are really powerful these days (especially if you don't use a slow language). There are other monetisation strategies besides exploiting users for profit.

[pixl97]

It doesn't have to run for free, but if you're competing against anyone else running for free you've already lost the game as they suck the air out of the room with the network effect.

Next, text only platforms are nice, but niche on the modern internet. People seem to love multimedia which takes tons of bandwidth/cpu.

Paid for services don't mean spam free either. If it's worth people to pay for, it's worth spammers paying to get in and spam.

Then you have all the questions on what happens if you grow, how do you deal with working with all the laws around the world, how do you deal with other legal issues.

Having a site/service of any size can quickly become an expensive mess.