Meta doesn’t really have a social media business, they have an ad business that’s driven by a massive dumping operation in social media.

That framing is silly. “NBC doesn’t have a television business, they have an ad business”. “Google doesn’t have a search business, they have an ad business.” “Amazon doesn’t have a retail business, they have an ad business.”

It doesn’t provide any value to reframe it this way, unless you think it’s some big secret that ads are the main source of revenue for these businesses.

I'd contrast this with Flickr. Flickr was the original social network. They have a modest loss leader, a reasonable free tier, but nothing like the permanent money bonfire that the big tech firms operate.

They were kinda the first real Web 2.0 social media site, with a social graph, privacy controls, a developer API, tagging, RSS feeds.

I feel that they never really got to their full potential exactly because these big VC-backed dumping operations in social media (like Facebook) were able to kill them in the crib.

If we're going to accept that social media is a natural monopoly: great. Regulate them strictly, as you should with any monopoly.

Flickr failed because they sold to Yahoo which was bad place to end up. But a successful Flickr would look a lot like Instagram

Del.icio.us is the same story. Good product ahead of its time, bought by Yahoo and died. Could have been Pinterest.

Fair point, there's a good chance we'd be living in a techno utopia right now if someone was able to go back in time and prevent Yahoo from murdering so many promising startups. Conversely, if Yahoo had just spent the relative pocket change that Google was asking for back in the day perhaps we'd be living under the oppressive thumb of a trillion dollar market cap Alta Vista.

> VC-backed dumping operations

Which is very reassuring considering some of them are fairly obviously on the wrong side of history with very naive viewpoints https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7852246

NBC produces their own content, Facebook and Instagram meanwhile are the equivalent of public access TV with ads. There is no unique "brand" that Facebook has, anything posted on there is also posted everywhere else.

It’s crowded out craiglists and events boards.

Restaurants don't have a food business, they have a charging people money through bills business.

They're in the food micro delivery business. They deliver food from the expo to your table. Short hop logistics specialists.

> “NBC doesn’t have a television business, they have an ad business”.

They do broadcast TV, the purpose of which is to display ads. That does make sense.

> “Google doesn’t have a search business, they have an ad business.”

When Google started out, in the "don't be evil", simple home page days, they were a search company. It is hardly true any more, ads are now the centre of their business.

> “Amazon doesn’t have a retail business, they have an ad business.”

Well, duh! Quite obvious these days. That is where they get the lion's share of the revenue, outside AWS.

I am impressed, you hit the nail on the head!

What is the difference between the two? What kind of social media business is there other than selling ads?

I know we're so defeated as consumers that we can hardly imagine it, but you could just...charge for the customers' access to social media network. Kinda like every other service that charges money.

It would have the side effect of making the whole business less ghoulish and manipulative, since the operators wouldn't be incentivized to maximize eyeball hours.

It's impossible to imagine this because government regulation is so completely corrupted that a decades-long anticompetitive dumping scheme is allowed to occur without the slightest pushback.

Unlike most business, social media relies on having a high market saturation to provide value. So having a subscription model doesn’t work very well.

Of course perhaps it’s a bit different now since most people consume content from a small set of sources, making social media largely the same as traditional media. But then traditional media also has trouble with being supported by subscriptions.

App.net was a wonderful experience with great developer buy in. It is also my understanding that it was operating at break even when it was mothballed. The VC backing it wanted Facebook returns. It was an amazing experience because it didn’t depend on advertisers. I have no idea how it would have fared through Covid and election dramas but it remains my platonic ideal for a social network.

It's basically Mastodon. The infrastructure is paid by its owner and often relies on donations from their users.

Is Mastodon a business?

Seems like Mastadon is just the Kitchen Aid of socials. Anyone can have their product(s), but not everyone can use them the same way. Those that use them better stand out from the rest to the point others might just stop using and the product just takes up space

I hate the ad business model as much as the next person, but this is a pipe dream. Meta had ~$50b in revenue on ads last quarter, and 3.54b “daily active people” whatever that means. That’s in the order of $1/“dap”/week, and there is just absolutely no way any meaningful proportion of their userbase would be paying that much for these apps.

$4/mo isn't crazy in many places, though it is in others.

The bigger problem is the monopoly. They would charge $4/mo. Then add ads on top. Then up it to $5/mo. Then..

Mastodon is not ad funded. Dreamwidth has been about for fifteen years now and is entirely user funded.

Scaling is harder. But you can have a niche which works fine.

Perhaps not, but you can bet that they were told the opposite when Zuckerberg was recruiting them. Indeed, ring fencing the lab does suggest some real attempt to do it.