Paying one’s way

[tobyaw]

I like paying for services that I use. I like being a customer who, hopefully, is valued by a company whose product I enjoy. That is a healthy, honest relationship.

I also like using free services. I truly appreciate people putting time and effort into developing free software, into making free-to-use web sites, and all other forms of volunteering. Their actions make this world a better place.

What I hate, however, is software, services, and media that is funded by advertising. There is an unpleasantness in a company seeing the users of its products as assets to be sold to advertisers. Where I am a user, but somebody else is the customer, there is inevitably going to be a conflict of interest. And if one follows the money, the conflict will always disadvantage those who aren’t paying.

I have been happy to pay for online services; with paid accounts on (amongst others) LiveJournal, Flickr, Github, Spotify, and more recently, App.net, I am happy to deal with companies that (to one extent or another) treat me as a customer.

I am much less happy with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Google — companies with desirable products, but that give me no opportunity to be a customer. These companies gather vast amounts of data on their users, and develop closed systems that fail to play fairly with others, because it benefits their real customers — advertisers.

Facebook gives us a convoluted privacy system that encourages over-sharing, and introduces user-hostile features like sponsored posts and Facebook email addresses. Twitter gives us sponsored tweets and buggers about with third-party client software. Google are just evil.

These companies should offer a premium product. They should accept a few pounds a month from users who want to turn off advertising, who want decent API support for client software, who never want to see sponsored content, and who want to be treated like a valued customer.

In the mean time, I’m happy to be a customer of LiveJournal (through all its ups and downs) — that is why I keep blogging here — and am happy to be trying out App.net for microblogging. I like app.net’s attitude, and their up-front desire to take money in return for providing a service.

https://alpha.app.net/tobyaw

Comments

[tobyaw]

And yes, I think I approve of the cheapskates-have-adverts-and-customers-have-more-features business model. It works for LJ, it works for Spotify, and Flickr.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

I guess LJ, Spotify and Flickr (I have a subscription to the latter, but not the other two) have done their sums and decided this model works for them, and that Facebook have decided otherwise. It's their call, and we can (and should) grumble, but they're not democratic organisations and we don't get a vote.

[tobyaw]

No, of course I don’t expect companies to be democratic organisations. But the choice we make as individuals is whether or not to use a service. There is no reason why one needs to use Facebook or Twitter, and it is perfectly reasonable to use competitors to Google’s services.

If users voted with their clicks, and stopped using advertising-funded services (or otherwise managed to bypass advertising online) then it would lead to a realignment of priorities in Facebook and Twitter.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

If users voted with their clicks ... then it would lead to a realignment of priorities in Facebook and Twitter.
This is pretty much the central fallacy of most of the market forces rhetoric we hear from all the main political parties. Competition is good, we're told, because businesses will have to improve their game in order to prevent consumers from going somewhere else.

But there are a number of ways in which it either fails to work, or is deliberately undermined by people or organisations with vested interests. In particular, for someone to vote with their feet and switch to a competitor, it has to be worth the bother and there has to be a valid competitor available.

With Facebook, Google and Twitter, the inconveniences haven't reached that threshold for me (not least because I have an advert blocking plugin installed). But there aren't really any viable competitors for Facebook or Twitter.

And let's say I did swear off Facebook - what then? Mark Zuckerberg will neither notice nor give even a minuscule fragment of a damn, nor will any of his shareholders. Meanwhile, it suddenly becomes more difficult for me to keep in touch with a whole bunch of geographically disparate friends I don't see very often. Similarly, suppose I stop using Twitter. I can either just give up on that whole microblogging and brief conversation thing entirely - which I'm not that keen to do right now. Or I can switch to... what? Google Buzz? Menshn?

[tobyaw]

I see MySpace as the example that Facebook should aspire to — one can hope that a future of dwindling income and irrelevance awaits.

When one adds one’s data to a web site like Facebook, one’s past use of the site becomes an increasing commitment to the site. They see the importance of this, with the increased emphasis they place on the past in the new timeline. However, most people’s use of Facebook is in the here and now; like Twitter, it is about an immediate conversation, and so I think their users are very open to possible transition to another service.

Businesses have to change, improve, and serve their customers, or else they will follow Comet into insolvency. I hope that the significant ownership changes in Facebook in the past year will lead to changes in the way that they interact with their users. Or that a competitor arrives in a blinding flash and without warning everyone changes their affiliation. One can dream.

In the meantime, App.net seems like an interesting alternative to Twitter, with a growing username.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

I see MySpace as the example that Facebook should aspire to — one can hope that a future of dwindling income and irrelevance awaits.
Yes, clearly MySpace misjudged something badly. I don't know what it was, possibly they failed to adequately prioritise the interests of their users relative to those of the advertisers, perhaps they just failed to be quite as innovative as Facebook, maybe their new owners (News Corporation - now there's a truly evil company for you) just didn't properly understand how people wanted to use the internet. Probably a mixture of all three. It's not definite that Facebook, Twitter or Google will go the same way in the near future.

Businesses have to change, improve, and serve their customers, or else they will follow Comet into insolvency.
Yes, this is true. In the past decade or so we've seen the demise of lots of companies who failed to adapt to recent advances in technology or the changing needs of their customer base. There's no evidence that Facebook is in danger of this right now. Yes, they regularly do things that mildly annoy the users, but so far never enough to cause a mass exodus (they currently have a billion active users, growing at around 2%/month), and anyway the users are not the customers, they're the product they sell to the advertisers who are the real customers.

In the meantime, App.net seems like an interesting alternative to Twitter, with a growing [userbase].
One to watch, certainly, but if they want to take over from Twitter as one of the main social networking sites then they'll have to figure out how to get ordinary people to switch over. I use Twitter because lots of people I know use it, not because I'm impressed by their ethical stance, business model or technical expertise.