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Comment by faissaloo | Hacker News Reader

If people valued the existing sites enough to pay for them they'd already be doing that, it would simply be a more reliable stream of income.

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There is no option to pay instead of getting ads. I'd happily pay for Google's search sans ads/tracking and their focus on the dumbest user possible, but I can't because they don't offer the option.

I do agree that most people won't prefer paying with money instead of attention, but that doesn't mean they won't prefer paying with money over not having the service.

There have been countless services who've attempted this model, none of them suceeded, in fact I can't even remember their names off the top of my head because no one bothered.

That's while they are competing with free. It's hard to compete with free. It's much easier to compete with non-existant.

Sure, but free is the defect state in the Prisoner's Dilemma. If Google provides a paid option, they'll still be competing with their free option. If they switch entirely to paid, Bing immediately starts advertising as "the free search engine".

This dynamic is even more powerful for network-effects-driven platforms like Twitter or fb

Sure, but the premise was that it would go away if you took away ads as a funding model. I doubt that FB would simply fold and say "oh well" if, by some miraculous law, ads were no longer an option for funding. And Youtube (which is counted as social media here) already has Youtube Premium/Red, where people (at least in some countries) can pay to get an ad-free experience and some extra content.

When people perceive a value, they'll pay an appropriate price in some way (be it by spending money or watching ads), that's all I'm saying. And they appear to value social media or they wouldn't spend that much time on it. So if you remove "just watch some ads" as a payment form, I'm pretty sure that at least some will switch to handing over money.

Ah I see, by "remove" you mean remove at an industry-wide level, eg through regulation. Sure that's a classic solution to Prisoner's Dilemmas

I pay for YouTube premium to turn off the ads. It's worth every penny.

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