* Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that account sharing among a few people is quite common.

* Amazon Prime (with two day shipping plus Prime Video and Prime Music) costs about $14 a year.

* A print newspaper subscription of any major national newspaper would cost about $2.8 or even a lot lesser per month.

* An Audible subscription (one free credit a month) costs $2.8 a month, with lower prices on audiobooks and discounts on them.

* Some premium news publications cost about $30-$45 a year.

I'm not saying that this is similar to Netflix or Amazon or a national newspaper, but it's more about how the more popular as well as niche/premium services have priced themselves and how people perceive value. Comparatively, this $12.99/month or $100/year social network focused on news seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants. It could've probably done better with a currency adjusted or purchasing power parity specific rate. For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US).

Having talked about the pricing, the UI doesn't look great either. I saw a list of groups to choose from and the page looked like it was built more than a decade ago. It ought to look like a modern website (with more bells and whistles) if it wants to command more than premium rates. Even Facebook's site, which I think looks outdated, cluttered and ugly, looks better in comparison.

I think if someone were to make facebook in it's first ~2 years and keep it very basic it we would be good to go. The only features you need are: a profile picture, a wall, chat, and events.

In other words - a photo of yourself, a way of publicly messaging, a way of privately messaging, and a way to coordinate social events.

What else do you need for a 'social network?'

I would pay $1/mo for that. The simpler the better.

Also, many of today's recent non-FB social network successes (Whatsapp, etc) were launched before the general perception of social networking, and internet services in general, became increasingly skeptical. Outside of tech, or people with very narrow interest verticals not served by mainstream social networks, I don't know anyone who is looking for yet another generic social network.

Curiously, if true, this plays both the the detriment and benefit of established social networks: their primary, most profitable users are not likely to flee, but they are also likely to be less engaged.

There is zero chance this policy survives having a million+ users intact.

Watching WikiTribune flounder in its early days left me feeling disillusioned. It quickly began to seem like a project lacking clear product vision (or else a team that could execute on such a vision). I eventually gave up waiting for the service to become useful as a daily news source and wrote it off.

Glancing at WikiTribune now, it seems like wt.social is a pivot for the service (https://www.wikitribune.com/wt/news/article/101868/). I hope it turns out well, because I strongly believe that the service Jimmy Wales initially described as WikiTribune is a good idea and something the internet needs. But, I think I'll wait on the sidelines this time around before getting too invested in the idea.

I also think social + news will just lead to you getting stuck in a bubble of news content your social group agrees with.

If I were serious about building some kind of social network at this point and thought it would need a revenue stream to be sustainable, I'd try to:

- find not just a niche but functionality that differentiates it from existing services in some way (if your service can be described as "Facebook for X," you've already lost, because the Facebook for all values of X already exists and is called "Facebook")

- build on open protocols, IndieWeb style (including ActivityPub, although the first point suggests the service better not be "Mastodon for X," either)

- if it makes sense, have a free tier that gives people some clue what they're signing up for, although not so much that it discourages them from actually, you know, signing up

- charge a low enough rate that signing up doesn't feel like a huge commitment: say, $2 a month or $16 a year

I'm surprised nobody has tried the low-cost route yet. Yes, I get it, those rates aren't going to be bringing you VC money and bazillion-dollar unicorn growth, but a relatively small number of paying users could create a sustainable, even profitable, small business for a few employees.

You could rent the box or buy outright with money to develop paid for by a premium on the box or by the rent wherein even a modest rent would outstrip the cost of buying like a cable box.

My thoughts at the time, which I said "EDIT ADD Had a quick look for `related` interests and see that he is CIO of Everipedia, which is decentralizing encyclopedia writing from an article in March: https://www.wired.com/story/larry-sanger-declaration-of-digi.... But I'd not cry foul even if they did produce their own decentralised social media platform; Kinda hope they do actually. Competition does have its upsides."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318590

The article says that it's not free and there's membership fee. I'm not against that, but it doesn't say that anywhere on the front page. Presumably they tell you that after you've submitted the form containing your personal information. Kind of shady.

Facebook is popular because it is free, it is easy, it is convenient. Old people, kids, a large proportion of the population has no understanding of how they get all this for free. And most of them don't care. They interact with ads just like it's any other content in their feed. They are happy they get something with so many features without having to pay for it.

Social networks that advertise privacy or no ads have limited appeal because the only group that really cares about this is (maybe) teenagers, and younger adults who are in touch with privacy politics.

Who will determine what a bad actor is and what criteria will be used. We have already seen the effect of people banned from sites for political and religious views, so do we really need another site that will just do the same?

> We will foster an environment where bad actors are removed because it is right, not because it suddenly affects our bottom-line.

But what constitutes a bad actor?

Now I will log out and probably never think to log back in again.

(I know this might sound like I'm shallowly dismissing it, but this is just my honest experience as a random casual internet person. I hope they can make this more appealing and succeed, especially since I support any attempt at toppling proprietary monopolies).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Fo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/S...

I have serious doubts of this particular endeavor's success with statements like these:

"The business model of social-media companies, of pure advertising, is problematic," Wales told the publication.

"It turns out the huge winner is low-quality content," he added.

Merit or not, the whole "if it's free you're the product" thinking hasn't really sunk in with people outside of heavy tech.

So while this might make sense to you and me, I can see 13USD being a tough sell for the average user. Which is a deathblow to something that inherently requires critical momentum.

I can/want to host my own data.

> We will empower you to make your own choices about what content you are served

I decide myself what sites I visit. Although in recent years I mostly use HN for discovery.

There is only one problem though: Web authorization/id. When I publish family photos I don't want the whole world to see, only our relatives. I've setup basic HTTP auth and sent out username+password to all relatives.

That however doesn't scale! And it's impractical. What we need is a public/private key that is generated by the browser, and which can be shared between many devices. You can have many keys, one for work, one for personal business, another one for gaming or what not, as many identities/keys as you want.

When you visit a web page that wants to know your identity, like any websites that right now asks for a username/password. You get a dialog asking if you want to identify on that website, and what meta-data the website request and what you info you want to give it. Kinda like installing an app on Android or iPhone where you need to confirm the app permissions. Upon accepting the identify request, you pick an appropriate ID, then your browser sends the public key to the web server, and answers a challenge to make sure you are the owner of that ID. No more username/passwords to remember.

As for me who is a content hoster, I simply chose from a GUI, depending on what server/app i'm using, which group or individual id/public key I want to give access. If an unknown id/key authenticates, depending on what server/app I'm using, I get a notification, asking me to add that ID/key to contacts or what not. Kinda like with social messenger apps.

At this day and age, we need something better then usernames and passwords!

Join the subwiki called "Riffing" if you're into MST3K or Rifftrax. :)

So you are right, if Reddit is so central to our lives, why do we have such a hard time taking it down? Is it because we are so used to having it there that it's just not something we can imagine not having?

No. I know a lot of us want to take it down. But the good thing about reddit is that it can be taken down. That's why it is one of the most interesting internet communities. It doesn't really have a "community" in the true sense of the word. But in reality, it has communities. And it doesn't matter how big or small those communities are; that's how the site functions. Reddit can be taken down and Reddit will be back with a new identity and a new identity will be created. We don't have to worry about it.

So we have a choice.

[20] - tpo.com

[10] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Operator

I feel that one way to solve both the ownership over data problems and minimize server costs is to use some sort of P2P system where all posts, images, videos, etc are hosted locally. This could be through a browser extension when on a computer, within local storage on mobile apps, etc.

When a user pulls up their feed, it would be directly pulling posts from the locally hosted accounts of those they follow, similar to torrenting. With the bulk of data center costs offloaded to P2P, the remaining server costs could run on donations, similar to how Wikipedia does now.

I'm not sure if a social network like this currently exists, or if I'm missing some potential problems with the concept. Thoughts?

1. Obviously almost nobody is going to be prepared to pay that, and

2. He wouldn't be talking about it not making a profit and having bare-bones staff if every one of a predicted 50-500 million users was going to paying that amount, just to run a social network, because he'd need an army of staff just shoveling money of the window to avoid making a profit on those figures.

So it must be that it's donation based, but then again how does a monthly donation to jump a waiting list work? Do you go outside and rejoin the queue if you stop donating?

The article is all very confused, and obviously the site itself doesn't help matters.

It's not always fair, and certainly does not always bring the best content to light, but it's a lot better than a purely level playing field of equals, where a fool's opinion is weighted exactly against that of a great philosopher.

Charging for access is problematic, however. People have been trained to expect free stuff, and unfortunately it's not clear the value proposition of Wales' offering. To avoid seeing ads? To have vastly better content? To be a superior UX? He has a pretty tough row to hoe.

Maybe not as high as Netflix, because there would be no need for such heavy bandwidth use, but definitely yearly/monthly subscriptions.

I don't use social media myself but I hear from family members and friends how fun it is to connect with far away relatives and of course organize and attend various social groups.

But I'm skeptical as to whether wt.social will work with the big players still out there serving a majority of users.

"As long as there will be men there will be those that are wicked. As long as the good man restrains his behavior he will always lose to the wicked man. "... this is not an exact quote. Just paraphrasing.

This is why all these strategies will fail in regards to Facebook.

They just flat out play dirty... VERY dirty.

The reason why bought Whatsapp is that they were paying users directly to spy on their phones and found that Whatsapp had a massive user adoption.

Unless you're prepared to go evil there's no way to win against this.

This... from the Wikipedia guy? Oh boy, I'm not convinced.

First I've heard of this, and there's no pricing (or really any) information on the website. Anyone have experience?

> He doesn't expect the social network to be profitable

I'd expect it to be more profitable than facebook at this price

[1]https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-fac...

But maybe I should sign up anyway, just to help it along...

If I want to share news, I do it via group chat. I think this is common.

For those who want social news in their particular ideological bubble, there's reddit. For those who want a news reader, there are many news apps. And for those who want to interact with strangers, there's Twitter.

I'd love to support this, but I just can't think of a use-case for my life.

Why would I want to use this?

I would much rather pay for online services like email, news and content than to sell info about myself through ads to private companies.

Useful services: Email Protonmail,fastmail

Online video Peertube

Paying for social media.

Paying for newspapers online, this is so they do not have to sell their platform and independence to ads.

> https://createsub/?url=/wt/emacs/&failed=This%20SubWiki%20al....

At scale, nowhere near $12.99 / month is needed.

https://wt.social/recentchanges

Mostly nothing interesting, people testing the system out. The whole site feels like a post-dotcom-boom experience... a slightly styled Craigslist.

The endless unresearched opinion on Facebook drives me mad. But unless you only want to have friends who are rich enough to agree with you, this is dead in the water.

The people who enjoy fake news won't sign up for this. They'll stick with a network where they have "freedom of speech". They won't vanish, and they won't get any better educated. It's not as if you can make the urge to spread fake news vanish. Your racist cousin still exists, and he's still eagerly seeking out and re-posting obviously fake stories from outside what he dubs the "mainstream media" -- he won't suddenly come to his senses, and he certainly won't pay for the privilege.

I think a better approach, if you want to use social media at all, is to tell people "I won't be friends with people who believe hateful BS." That's the only thing that might help: force them to choose between their friends and their desire to reinforce their group identity. Going to a different site might achieve that, but you don't need to spend money and you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Just use the existing tools.

> Since all content on the platform can be edited or deleted by other users, he believes there's a good incentive for good behavior by users.

Minimum salary where I live is about 400usd/mo, and it's asking me for 12usd/mo. I predict not that many people from my country will join any time soon.

Yeah, not for me. Maybe journalists or news professionals can be interested, but it better has to bring value.

I don't know anyone who says: I want a social media company to help combat the fake news I see.

Having more flexibility on who sees what, more privacy in group conversations, ways to 'downvote' things not just 'like/love' (lop sided incentives), etc... those are things I've wanted from FB/Twitter/Instagram and I've heard other people want.

It seems he is solving a problem no one wants a solution for. For all the media hype, I'm personally not convinced social media companies should be the arbitrators of what is fake news or not. I'll give Jimmy the benefit of doubt that his version of censorship will be the best, he has proven it with wikipedia. But I'm not sure censorship, even good ones, are what we need.

For those who aren't anti-censorship, then you get the disagreement on what type of censorship we should focus on. In the US, it seems one side favors censoring the far left (as has happened historically with things like communism) and others choose censoring the far right as the priority (a more modern approach). I dislike both sides (extremes tend to be unhealthy) but as a free speech advocate, I want them to have their platform, as twisted and unhealthy as it is. The strength of good ideas should be such that they don't fear bad ones.

How much does facebook make per user per month?

Why would I pay $13/month for news I can get for free without useless "social" features and data collection?

What I won't pay for is multiple subscriptions to several prominent newspapers I'm interested in, that are linked everywhere, especially here. If WT:Social can provide content from all the biggest mastheads with one convenient subscription, I'm in.

What he’s trying to do is admirable but doesn’t make a lot of sense.

(And yes, I realize that it’s partly the censorship here that steers people away from politics and keeps it social, but I don’t think that’s all of it)

I don’t see why a social network should also build in first class features for sharing and commenting on news. What’s the old adage about discussing politics and religion? Why should it even be POSSIBLE for me to argue with some nazi I don’t know in the comments section of an article my grandma shared with my uncle? Seriously, wtf?

If you want a site purpose-built for discussing news as it goes viral, Reddit is fine for that.

Interesting things about Wechat’s feed:

- It’s not what you see when you open the app. Instead, the app opens to your messages. This is huge.

- It’s strictly chronological. Yep.

- Each time I open it, the 5th post is always an ad, and it’s labeled as such.

- It’s trivially easy to restrict most people from seeing only the last week, or month, or six months of your posts. People you’re not friends with can’t see your posts BY DEFAULT.

- When your friends post, you can only see comments and likes from your own friends. (it's easier to notice unexpected connections, which could be an upside or a downside depending on your situation)

- If you want to re-share something, there’s no button for that: you have to open the page, copy the link, and post it again. This is obviously intended to make the censors’ jobs easier, but adding friction also cuts down on low effort sharing.

How it’s otherwise different from Facebook:

- There’s no such thing as viral posts. Sure, the same link might get shared in thousands of private groups, but the discussion isn’t shared. I think this is a feature, not a bug. Again, there are plenty of websites specifically for discussing news with strangers as it goes viral.

- It’s mobile-first (basically, mobile only). You can’t see the feed on PC, so if you want to write an angry tirade about f-ing Yankees fans on your friend’s post, you’re gonna get sore thumbs. Again, adding friction means less trash makes it on the network.

- Everyone has it hooked up to payment, so splitting the bill at the end of dinner is trivial. There’s even a feature for sending a bill to a group with N people that splits it N ways and shows who has and hasn’t paid.

- (Probably some other stuff, but I basically stopped using Facebook 7 years ago when I moved to China, partly because my parents and old friends are on there sharing news stories I'd rather not know their stance on)

Even aside from the censorship, Wechat isn’t perfect — its interface hasn’t changed in the 7 years I’ve been using it, so stupid stuff like pinning contacts or putting groups in a separate tab or even goddamn EVENTS aren’t things you can do in the app.

But as a social network, it’s got most of the value while being way less problematic than Facebook.

Is anybody worrying how much Wikipedia pages are hiding researchers results ?

Oh, please. I would rather use good ol' VK before these CIA books

I could go on forever but the point is it doesn't even get the basics right. If you're interested in how one builds a successful social network check Nikita's tweets (sold TBH to Facebook 2 years ago for $100M) https://twitter.com/nikitabier