Given how large ecommerce has gotten in China, it begs the question, are credit cards truly the necessary pillar? ECommerce even in the US is extremely top heavy, with Amazon having ~40% share, so while the allure of a random ecommerce site is an interesting example, thats not the pre-dominant usage pattern.
This internet kid of 90s fever dream of an internet thats free and federated is just not gona happen. All evidence we have so far suggests that the scale at which internet is at, the larges opportunities will be in solving for the "non-technical" user. In my view this non technical user now understands that if something is free then that means ads. Thus the next age of social media should be about exploring what business models can work that align themselves with user's own interests.
what about Wikipedia? Maybe it's the exception that proves the rule. But as far as I can tell, no online knowledge store has come close to the comprehensiveness and cultural cache of Wikipedia. And it's not showing ads constantly, it relies on donations entirely.
I remain hopeful that a federated social media service that offloads the hosting costs to passionate individuals (with modest ad support to keep the lights on) could survive just fine without venture capital or advertising creep. Think: WoW servers, AKA "blessed" federation.
Venture capital-driven business models will never align with my interest of keeping in touch with friends and family. The desire for profit and revenue growth (what us filthy plebeians call "greed") is simply too strong.
Here are some trends that could drive a fundamental shift in social media:
1) Trust is the scarcest element in social media today. Any social media company that is built on advertising will never have the trust of a subscription-based social media company. Companies that address scarcity tend to be successful.
2) What's no longer scarce: the underpinning technologies of social media: capturing and displaying photos and videos on multiple types of devices, recommending new social connections and posts. What was cutting-edge in 2004 is now well-known.
3) Meanwhile, users are getting increasing used to paying for subscriptions: app stores, streaming services, SaaS applications, cloud services, etc.
4) Connecting socially with others is a basic human need. This only increases as some kinds of jobs can be done from anywhere, and friends relocate far away.
5) As Facebook/Meta and others pursue the novelty-driven user experience of TikTok -- "show me what's interesting from people I don't know" -- it creates room for companies that want to get back to meeting the need for keeping in touch with friends and family, even when remote.
6) Large tech fortunes have created a donor class focused on legacy, not profit. Example: MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos. Or Craig Newmark, of Craigslist.
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Put all these together, and it seems like new social media companies could be created along the following lines:
1) Mission-focused. Focus on social connection first, not whatever drives the most revenue. In other words, don't get pulled into the latest fads, as Facebook is doing with TikTok.
2) Subscription business model. This eliminates the conflicts of interest that drives Facebook's trust-eroding privacy practices. Again -- trust is the scarcest element.
3) Subscriber-owned business. Each subscriber owns a portion of the company, and thus the company has a fiduciary, legal obligation to protect their interests. This is similar to what Vanguard does -- investors each own a portion of the company -- which forces Vanguard to act in their interests. It's the opposite of Facebook/Meta's ownership structure, where Mark Zuckerberg controls 90% of class B shares, giving him control over the company. [1]
4) To fix the cold-start problem [2] inherent in building a business with network effects, make the service free until it gets to a critical mass of subscribers. We can debate if critical mass is 10 million users, 100M, 1B, or some other measure. But be transparent about the threshold, and the subscription price once its hit. Speaking of price...
5) Keep entry level prices low to be point of being negligible for the vast majority of users. Maybe one dollar a month. Whatever it is, keep it lower than most other subscription services in order to encourage adoption, but not to shift back to the problematic ad-driven model.
6) A very low subscription price, at scale, can fund innovation. 100M users at $1/month is $1.2 billion per year. That's enough to pay cloud infrastructure and the engineers to build and run apps. Back-of-the-envelope path: suppose for argument's sake that half of that, $600M, goes towards cloud service providers. That's approaching the $1B/year that Netflix spends. The other $600M could fund 2000 engineers at $300k/year/engineer. That's enough to build a great deal of capabilities and bring them to emerging platforms (like AR glasses, cars, IoT/smart home...).
7) A business like this probably might not attract traditional venture capital funding. Even if every one of Facebook's 3 billion users all switched to this business and paid 1 USD/month, that would be $36B per year. That's well short of Facebook's $120B/year [5]. Who might fund it? A set of mission-driven investors, who wants their legacy to include a trusted, self-sustaining organization that socially connects the world. Craig Newmark could be one such investor (at least advisor), having built one such Internet institution (Craigslist) that facilitates community and commerce in an economically-sustaining manner. But there could be many other investors as well. Again, the technologic acumen and capital required aren't what's scarce; trust is.
There is 900 million farm acres of farmland in the US. Bill gates owns about 270K acres of farmland. So even though he is the largest private owner of farmland, he owns less than 0.1% of all farmland in the US.
Its such a shame US is considered a great place to live. Sure you can have a good life, but at what cost? Your government props up dictators, goes and blows up a country over imaginary WMDs etc. etc. Is this what you imagined as being an enabler of through your taxes and votes?
This is obviously a good thing from a safety standpoint, but I worry we are increasingly becoming a one strike society. Where one instance of bad behavior locks you out of significant parts of the infrastructure. Moreoever this happens in a "court" with no documented laws/appeals process.
There's a reason we have "innocent until proven guilty" and lots of interlocking checks and balances in the legal system to prevent the mob from lynching people.
Nowadays they can lynch your social life and employment options over a drunken tweet.
It has been standard advice--for almost a decade-- to watch what you say online before applying for a job. And background checks have existed for work and renters for much longer.
Typically younger working age people are a net benefit to the system. They pay taxes, but their kids dont go to schools, they dont require as much healthcare (which can be publicly funded in some countries).
Rubber stamp? Have you ever tried applying for an H1b renewal? There is constant anxiety over ever changing rules and RFEs. Not to mention the run around to get a visa stamp every 3 years.
Few thousand to get into green card line? Have you ever tried doing this? There is an elaborate over a year long process to get into this line. and even then its a broken broken system that stipulates that queues are country based, which mean a Lithuanian who enters the queue today will get a green card before an equally qualified chinese or indian person who has been in the queue for 10 years!
The H1B can be and does get renewed by 100s of thousands of people. AC21 provision allows for an H1B to be renewed in perpetuity (even beyond 6 years) until an approved green card petition is pending. The approved green card petition can stay pending for a really long time due to country based immigration queues which disadvantage people from large population countries.
We have allowed 100s of thousands of Software Engineer immigrants. Are the hiring prospects of American software engineers impacted? This should be provable with at least a couple of decades of software engineer immigrants coming in.
