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Comment by jliptzin | Hacker News Reader

For Facebook to truly die someone needs to come up with a bare bones social network that has all the basics - friends lists, photos, address book, messaging, groups. Charge $1 a month. No sleazy tracking you everywhere on the internet, no ads, no newsfeed filled with garbage clickbait ads and conspiracy theories. This would be insanely profitable assuming it reaches some critical mass.

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> friends lists, photos, address book, messaging, groups.

Sound astonishingly similar to my phone.

As I keep saying, your phone's notification center is what eventually kills Facebook News Feed and potentially Facebook itself.

Messaging over SMS is outdated, it's just not possible for a lot of cases, including international messaging. Unless Android and iOS solve this, you will need a separate app or social network to accomplish this.

Except it probably won't ever happen. Charging anything turns off the vast majority of users.

There may be enough people out there now who wouldn’t mind paying for a social network with the assurance that their personal data isn’t going to be mined and sold to the highest bidder. Definitely wouldn’t happen 15 years ago though, but a lot has changed. These people are probably more valuable to advertisers and if they disappear from Facebook it might cause advertising revenue to seriously dry up.

Definitely. People are reluctant to buy $1 or $2 mobile apps that would be really useful, even though they would never notice the money was gone. Just because most apps are free. Also, most people lose more than they gain by deleting their facebook or anything else. Tech people tend to care about privacy because of all of the terrible implications and possibilities that come with all your personal info being freely bought and sold, but the vast majority of people will never (at least consciously) suffer any ill effects of government tracking or targeted ads.

I remember reading this a few years back a feeling a little guilty while having such a good laugh: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps

WhatsApp is free for the first year then a small amount each year to continue. Maybe that works.

I believe this is no longer the case and WhatsApp is free to use now.

Regardless, the free trial -> paid version is a popular model, even if 1 year is a long "trial"

I'm curious how the "first year for free" business model works out. I'm guessing smaller companies couldn't survive on that as it's too long to wait until you start getting revenue?

I paid a few dollars for WhatsApp once or twice to keep it working after the first year. It was such a small amount I didn't care. I remember some of my friends freaking out about it though, like they were being tricked.

Could set it up as a foundation, like Wikipedia. Might be able to run on donations only.

I'm not sure that model would work for a social network, the costs are an order of magnitude higher. People expect to be able to upload photos and videos with no practical limit, and you need a ton of full-time moderation staff when you get to Facebook's scale.

It may be possible to get users to use it by doing what WhatsApp did: make a very long free period, then charge them a low yearly rate.

I agree for the most part though. Some uses just flat out refuse to pay money for apps, even $1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

I’m hopeful that this will push more interest into decentralised and open services. Sure not everybody will want to host their own data, but for those who have the know how, why should I trust someone else to hold on to my data?

The idea is that everyone is on it, that's what makes it a viable platform. An all encompassing social network requires an all encompassing social network.

Your idea would be similar to healthy meals that take 4 minutes to prepare to combat fast food chains: a big reason why McDonald's is as large as it is, is because of the speed of it.

And of course to the last point: anything would be insanely profitable if a billion people pay a dollar per month for it.

Big friggin whoop. Systems that already meet the "everyone is on it" requirement better than Facebook include:

Plain old phone calls

SMS

I don't know what you are trying to say. They're not social media in the Facebook sense; they're communication methods. But you are correct in that everyone is on it.

Name a use case I can accomplish with FB I cannot accomplish otherwise then.

Critical mass?

I haven't had an FB account in over 8 years, but I rue to this day the fact that 'most' people 'mostly' rely upon it for their communication. Doesn't matter what i believe or what I use, it matters what everyone else 'mostly' uses.

I don't understand. I asked for a use case. You gave me a glittering generality. What concrete task that i might desire to achieve in life can be done with Facebook but not the other tools?

Pretty much everyone who has a facebook has a phone, so I can communicate just fine with Facebook users

None, but evidently the point I was trying to make was a bit too elusive — it is the userbase and concentration of information it forms that is itself the use case or desirable feature. FB's walled garden IS the tool.

I don't myself agree with it - I'm in your camp, thinking there're far better existant tools out there. I just know from my own experience I'm 'missing out' on stuff shared or put in there by people locked into a domain I do not myself have access to.

The problem with email, calls and SMS is one of discovery. How do you find your high school friend's email or phone number?

People like(d) FB because it was trivial to look up and stalk old friends. The "what are they doing now" effect is powerful as it the "look at me now" effect.

Simple, you don't. Most people are perfectly fine leaving the past behind. If I'm no longer in touch with someone there is typically a good reason for it.

Exactly! I think when FB came out, the newness of being able to reconnect with a high school acquaintance you were never that close to to begin with, with such low effort, got people excited. A few years later the novelty has worn off and we are realizing it's not that valuable anyway.

Like, if you really wanted to, you could reconnect through mutual acquaintances. I mean you went to the same high school, right? All FB does is make it so low effort that you can therefore "reconnect" (does mutual Facebook wall stalking really count as human connection though?) with people yoy previously could have found if you really wanted to, but were not worth the effort

Well, there's Sublevel owned and developed from scratch by me. But it doesn't have all those features for privacy reasons.

>> friends lists, photos, address book, messaging, groups.

What you're listing sounds very similar to... email or one of the many instant messaging platforms.

True

Email lacks an inherent Follow dynamic. Blog + RSS / Atom will give that.

You can use mailing lists, though those impose a bit of additional friction in several dynamics.

There's also the matter of format conventions and client rendering, which can be quite significant particularly across various schools / application models: Usenet / Unix style top quoting, ccmail, LotusMail, or Exchange quote & reply styles.

Let's do this in a distributed way. No company should host our life events/photos/thoughts.

This already exists, it was a big story back in the day (for the time a highly backed Kickstarter campaign):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

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