That's interesting. Many factors to consider. Have to give it some thought.
We have @Grisham
The idea of the free service model never made sense to me to begin with. I mean I get all this content for free and the provider doesn't make money off the actual service but instead relies on ad revenue and outrage bait bs to keep people scrolling?If the product is free, you are the product. If social media charges you, you are the customer. That changes the relationship and shifts focus from getting your time and attention towards giving you something that feels worth paying for. That would likely solve a good number of the ills of social media, though it won't fix the fundamental that communities of humans don't scale - you run into problems of one size fits all culture, spam, trolls flooding shite, etc.
The idea of the free service model never made sense to me to begin with. I mean I get all this content for free and the provider doesn't make money off the actual service but instead relies on ad revenue and outrage bait bs to keep people scrolling?
I kinda agree. If we pull out all the funding from the CIA / shadow orgs / ECG / etc then the only social media companies that would matter -- and exist, for that matter -- would be the profitable ones, and the only way for these to be profitable is to charge customers.
The phony dream of companies advertising and data-peddling their way to fortune is dead. Thankfully I think social media in its current form will decline. The normies who flooded the internet are slowly realizing how precious anonymity is.
Most of these sites I wonder how much longer they'll even be around. I think the traditional forums will outlast them by a long shot due to lower costs but a instant messaging platform like discord seems like something that'll just implode eventually. Its baffling a site as bad as reddit is even up.The idea was that ads would pay for it - greater eyeball retention meant more ad impressions, etc. Problem is that model was never particularly sustainable since the effectiveness of those ads is limited, and of course people get better at blocking them both in their browsers and in their brains (btw browsing the internet without an ad blocker is a horrible horrible experience).
As such these companies got a lot of free money due to venture capitalists having nowhere to put all that cash the government was handing out cheaply (thanks low interest rates) - this led to a bubble of assets as we all know, including insanely inflated share prices for companies that were at best prospects rather than certainties. This kept cash pouring in one way or another, meaning they didn't need to make a profit. As money supplies tighten the social media companies get screwed, to the benefit of Western society.
Back to ads for a moment - at a time like this when the economy is tanking everywhere, nobody has money to spend on ads that likely won't work, especially as now all the small to medium businesses that might have used it have collapsed and all that's left is a few huge companies that are already so well known they don't need to advertise. The greedy bastards killed the geese that were laying their golden eggs.
Most of these sites I wonder how much longer they'll even be around. I think the traditional forums will outlast them by a long shot due to lower costs but a instant messaging platform like discord seems like something that'll just implode eventually. Its baffling a site as bad as reddit is even up.
For mass platforms like Twitter? Yeah, I think I agree in principle.
We have @Grisham
You know, I used to be worried about AI taking over, but if that's true I'm okay with it. At least the Matrix will be full of choice T&A.
Could use more catgirls though.
Thats kinda what I meant regarding forums they just seem to stay up longer. As for the population size I agree these platforms are way to big and downsizing the population size of the app would help. I'd also say that maybe we all should start requiring some knowledge on this stuff in schools would help quite a bit. If people could maintain their own small platform it would benefit quite a few people.Forums don't make money, but usually they're passion projects and the loss is small enough to be manageable for that. Communities should never have become tens of thousands of people, let alone the millions on social media. Smaller communities are definitely preferable, allowing groups to figure out their own ways of working and getting along, rather than one set of rules to rule all (another reason I'm in favour of people running their own gaming servers rather than the current typical public server approach).