I really want someone to make BoringBook - it's free until a billion people have signed up and then after that it costs $1 a year. It gives you a page you can post to and customise like myspace, an encrypted messaging client, local group pages and business pages. There are no ads, other than whatever businesses post on their pages. There are three feeds: your immediate network (which is the default), your local network (things from other people and businesses in your town) and the global feed. All of the feeds are capped at 100 posts to prevent infinite scrolling with the feeds refreshed every hour. Nothing else. It will never make more than 8 billion dollars a year (which is what would happen if everyone on the planet signed up). BoringBook - the social media utility company.
Eh, first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton. So, to actually pay for that you're going to either ask for VC money or show ads.
But then it turns out that money you got from the above will be far and beyond more than you'll ever earn by having people pay for the service. Your VCs and ad networks will want more engagement so you'll start down the dark path of increasing that all while showering yourself in money and not giving a single shit about the average person.
> first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton
I highly doubt that the actual essential infrastructure required to run it is going to cost more than 8 billion dollars/year. Twitter costs about $5 billion a year.
Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year, enough to cover the costs, offer some dividend, and put some money aside for a rainy day. We're not fucking about with R&D because we're BoringBook, we're making a boring product that doesn't need to do anything fancy. It's a utility company. Pension funds can invest in it safe in the knowledge that they will get a small but reliable dividend year after a year. The silly VC money can go towards innovative tech like AR or growing meat in petridishes or medical research or something. We don't need it fucking around and messing with the social structure of society anymore.
>> the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton
> Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year
With 1 billion users, $2/year gives you $2B/year, not $16B/year.
> offer some dividend
Honestly, I think we explicitly don't want this. We should go for a non-profit model, where the company is required to put most/all of its revenue toward running the business, and cannot distribute dividends. If we have shareholders and dividends and whatnot, that's just an incentive for the owners to push for greater profits so their dividends go up.
You mention utilities, and that just makes me think of my local electric/gas utility, PG&E, which is a public, for-profit corporation, listed on a stock exchange. Years ago they even used to pay a dividend. They completely suck, and have been responsible for people's deaths. This is not at all the model we should strive for when it comes to a social-network-as-utility.
> With 1 billion users, $2/year gives you $2B/year, not $16B/year.
I was doing the max theoretical if we had all 8 billion humans signed up. The better approach would be to do something pegged to the minimum wage in the country but it's pointless trying to create completely theoretical finances for an imaginary company in a forum thread. The general idea I'm trying to get across is we could charge a vastly lower price for these things if there weren't such greedy and power hungry motivations underlying their financial and corporate structures.
> This is not at all the model we should strive for when it comes to a social-network-as-utility.
I agree it does seem like something that it would probably be better served via a non-profit but it's probably a tough sell. Maybe something like a cooperative might be a nice compromise.
Your numbers just don't make sense. First, if you had a bare bones social media site, it could be ran for $1b a year. Lets use that number.
Ok, so who are you getting that money from? I mean from me that $1 is some inconsiderable fraction of my income, it's nothing. But there lies the problem with income inequality in the world. For a huge portion of people you're asking for a pretty damned considerable payment for something they can get for 'free' from somewhere else. That other ad ran company is paying off influencers and 'cool kids' to be solely on their product with their ad and VC money while charging nothing. It will grow quickly while your site founders.
The problem here is you want to develop a 'rational' and 'reasonable' product. This would be useful if humans in mass were either of those things. The world would be a much better place if people were not dumb, including myself. But here we are.
Well if we was doing it properly, then it would be pegged to an hour of minimum wage or half an hour in whatever country you was operating in.
> That other ad ran company is paying off influencers and 'cool kids' to be solely on their product with their ad and VC money while charging nothing. It will grow quickly while your site founders.
Maybe. But what if it was a cool kid celebrity who made the site in the first place? There's a bunch of them out there, and quite a few who want to make the world a better place. Maybe if the vision was explained to them they'd get on board for free.
And the counterpoint is that there's been plenty of social networks that have had cool kids jump on board that have turned out to be duds. Everyone was raving about that audio chat room one during the pandemic and I can't even remember the name of it now.
How do you pay for infrastructure and employees before getting to that 1-billion-user mark? If you take on VC funding, they're going to expect you to shoot for the moon; $1/user/year is not going to cut it for them.
So where else will you get the money? Do you really think you can get a loan for that? Sell bonds? I doubt it.
