The only offering that possibly might have been compelling enough to charge for was Messenger if it existed in a vacuum, but there were already numerous services offering much the same for free (e.g. MSN, ICQ, AIM), and when others realized that is what the people actually wanted, many more immediately threw their hat in the ring (e.g. iMessage). There would have been no practical hope of it making it as a paid service.
assuming they were able to acquire customers and dominate the world with that business model, would that have prevented them from doing algorithmic feeds and promoting clickbait and poisoning politics and the rest?
sure, people would have been able to cancel their monthly facebook subscriptions if they didn't like that stuff. but we can effectively do that now just by not using it.
> Just 15 years ago the outlook of social media was much more optimistic.
Those who forget Usenet are doomed to repeat it, I suppose.
> It was all bullshit of course
Or, more likely, what was dreamed of ended up being incorrect. Like we learn every time we try social media, people don't actually want to be social online. That takes work and the vast majority of people don't want to spend their free time doing work. They want to sit back, relax, and be entertained by the professionals.
As before, businesses can only survive if they give others exactly what they want, which doesn't necessarily overlap with what is good for them. A fast food burger isn't good for you, but it is a good business to be in because it is something many people want. Arguably small communities like HN with exceptionally motivated people can make it work to some extent, but that is not something that captures the masses.
It's not coincidence that those who tried to make a go of social media ~15 years ago have all turned into what are little more than TV channels with a small mix of newspaper instead. That is where the want is actually found at the moment. Social media didn't work in the 1980s, the 2010s, and it won't work in the 2080s either. It's is not something that appeals to humans (generally speaking).
Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good that also required any >1% kind of sacrifice or risk on their part?
My impression is their moto was win at any cost and ask forgiveness later (not because we mean that either but because it will reduce the legal penalties and make us look like normal humans.) In some ways watching Mark reminds me of the infamous cigarette cartel testifying.
> Can you provide an example of where facebook tried to do what most people would consider good
They gave the social media thing an honest try for a short period of time. And it even came with a lot of fanfare initially as people used it as the "internet's telephone book" to catch up with those they lost touch with.
But once initial pleasantries were exchanged, people soon realized why they lost touch in the first place, and most everyone started to see that continually posting pictures of their cat is a stupid use of time. And so, Facebook and the like recognized that nobody truly wanted social media, gave up on the idea, and quickly pivoted into something else entirely.
Social media is a great idea in some kind of theoretical way — I can see why you bought into the idea — but you can't run a business on great theoretical ideas. You can't even run a distributed public service without profit motive on great theoretical ideas, as demonstrated by Usenet. You have to actually serve what people actually want, which isn't necessarily (perhaps not even often) what is good for them.
> Like we learn every time we try social media, people don't actually want to be social online. That takes work and the vast majority of people don't want to spend their free time doing work. They want to sit back, relax, and be entertained by the professionals.
That's not it at all. Facebook shifted because they wanted you to spend more time on their website and serve you more ads. And once you've seen all your posts from your friends you'd be done and close facebook.
Which is why the posts from the friends are now completely gone, replaced by… stuff.
> Facebook shifted because they wanted you to spend more time on their website and serve you more ads.
Right. A service that isn't used is pointless. Usenet didn't serve ads or even try to make money, but also didn't get used, and was also deemed unworthy of attention. I mean technically it is still running out there in some corner of the internet, but when was the last time you used it? I bet 90% of HN users have never used it even once, and that's a technical crowd who are the most likely to use it. Your school crossing guard will have never heard of it.
> Which is why the posts from the friends are now completely gone
That's not exactly true. There is a secondary newsfeed that is limited to just your friends' posts, under the "Friends" tab. But let's be honest: Nobody (other than a few, let say odd, characters) post anything, so it's always empty. This is no doubt why you claim that it doesn't even exist. You're not wrong in practice, even though it is technically there.
This is the problem with social media. They learned pretty quickly that it doesn't work — the same hard lesson Usenet learned decades prior — which is why they had to pivot away from it. If you don't give people exactly what they want, you're not going to go anywhere. Plain and simple.
This is the same logic that has parents buying games like GTA for their prepubescent children and being dumbfounded that the kids are exposed to violent images.
While we can definitely point the blame at tech companies that manipulate algorithms, engage in dark patterns, etc, it's ultimately up to the consumer to consume judiciously and moderate their own well being. Nobody ever asked Apple or Google to "deliver what's best" for society. What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
America has an entire political party who runs a party line that unregulated businesses will naturally do what's "best" because of "free market mumble mumble". They even sometimes outright insist that "best" in that context means "best for humans and society", and that any attempt to constrain that will be Communism and cause all of society to collapse.
>What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
That same party insists that you should be able to choose to enroll your child in a school that does nothing but teach weird christian doctrines, and outright lies like "Evolution is controversial" or "Continental drift is not proven" or "The USA is a Christian country". They demonstrably want to be able to direct my tax dollars to these institutions, based on their choice.
Everyone should spend time checking out what the tens of millions of self reported fundamentalist "Christian" americans pay money for. There is an entire alternative media economy and it is horrifying. It exists to reinforce tons of outright false and delusional narratives, like an imagined persecution complex against christians.
If you think those tens of millions of Americans don't have power or sway in this country, they are literally the reason why visa and mastercard keep shutting down porn businesses (the higher fraud claim is just false and probably a lie, ask me how I know!) and the current House majority leader is their guy, as well as Trump's previous VP, as well as maybe technically JD Vance, as well as like Joe Rogan, who insists that AI is the second coming of christ because it doesn't have a mother, just like christ. Not joking, that is a real thing that Joe Rogan has made millions of dollars saying to over 20 million people. Oh, and at least one Supreme Court Justice.
Our business is one of the most straightforward ways to turn a stolen credit card into usable money for a fraudster. I know what our fraud rates are. At no point has any payment processor cared at all about a payment flow with high fraud. At most, they will charge us a tiny bit more money to service those transactions.
Credit Card companies do not care about chargebacks, as long as you don't substantially hurt consumer goodwill. They get their money back from the merchant, and every successful chargeback is a reminder to consumers of how credit cards will protect you. A false chargeback would also be unlikely to harm consumer confidence in that protection, since the consumer knows they weren't defrauded.
We know Ashley Madison had millions of paying subscribers. The idea that porn websites have "Higher fraud rates" entirely comes from the unstated assumption that porn consumers will chargeback their payment, and this claim is not justified. Consumers do not make a habit of making false chargeback claims, it just isn't substantiated in the data. We also have substantial evidence that lots of people want to genuinely pay for porn, and will pay significant amounts.
If 1 out of every 5 people who paid for pornhub tried to do a chargeback, that would not be a payment stream the credit card processor would be bothered by.
Meanwhile, the facts on the ground are that there is a fundamentalist religious organization formerly known as Media Matters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl... who have been working since at least the Nixon administration to ban things like sex toys from sale, to ban sex education, to stop same sex marriage legalization, to prevent the decriminalization of sex work. They were part of LBJ's commission on obscenity and pornography. They asked Reagan to ban pornography in 1983. They are significantly responsible for the large media blitz in 2020 that demonstrated that pornhub had a genuine problem with things like revenge porn and underage porn that lead to pornhub deleting 90% of their content, which frankly is a good thing, but they are demonstrably and openly not out to help sex workers or keep porn safe, but rather to kill it. Their official stance is that porn is a public health crisis. They were one of the principle supporters behind FOSTA, a bill that most sex workers insisted would make their jobs less safe.
Why is there a popular, trite, completely unsubstantiated narrative that is super popular on places like reddit for how porn companies lost the ability to take payments despite open and direct and admitted actions by an organization that has openly worked for decades to ban porn who helped sue porn companies? Gee, I wonder why.
Meanwhile, two months ago, the stepson of the chairman of that very organization was charged for child porn, so you know, the standard religious right style of "We have to protect the children" while literally abusing children.
Notably, the recent spat with getting some really, uh, """Niche""" adult oriented games off steam was not (at least, publicly, but this is not an accusation) done by them, but an unaffiliated Australian organization that has a better track record of doing what they claim. Steam also is still selling lots of porn games.
