I pay for data. I pay for my phone line. I pay for my mobile phone contract. I pay for stamps on letters. I pay for parcel delivery. If I want to stay connected in the real world I pay a small amount for the privilege. Social media is comms infrastructure. If we don’t pay, it’ll always be dogshit. - ThreadSky

gralefrit.bsky.social • 69 days ago

I pay for data. I pay for my phone line. I pay for my mobile phone contract. I pay for stamps on letters. I pay for parcel delivery.

If I want to stay connected in the real world I pay a small amount for the privilege.

Social media is comms infrastructure. If we don’t pay, it’ll always be dogshit.

Comments

pollik.bsky.social•69 days ago

Decentralised SM is a step towards mitigating that.

slothpotatomash.bsky.social•69 days ago

Ok, but I’m not paying Space Karen or the lizard guy a single brass farthing.

sinisterbulb.bsky.social•69 days ago

I agree with the thrust of your argument, however one could argue we pay increasing amounts for the examples you cite and I don’t think the quality has improved. Possibly the opposite. However (for example) I can think of no reason whatsoever the BBC shouldn’t operate a social media service…

pobx.bsky.social•69 days ago

Bring back Demon Internet and paying for your email address!!

pcollirigger.bsky.social•69 days ago

Agreed. But while you and I remain informed, the low-info folks will continue to absorb bogus and manipulative "free news" on other platforms. How do we inform them?

happytoast.bsky.social•69 days ago

We pay to watch TV, that money funds the things that people watch on TV. Why doesn't the far greater money we spend on internet connection go straight to the authors of the pictures, articles and games we use it for?

petercmoore.bsky.social•69 days ago

But the money you pay to a TV manufacturer doesn't get spent on content.

happytoast.bsky.social•69 days ago

I'm obviously not talking about hardware, TVs OR modems

petercmoore.bsky.social•69 days ago

Sure, but that's my point. Why should the money you pay to (eg) Virgin for your Internet connection go to someone who has chosen to put their content on the Internet? If something in the US looks at Bulgarian content (or vice versa), how are payments cleared?

gralefrit.bsky.social•69 days ago

The TV licence was designed for exactly this purpose. The hardware wouldn’t sell without content, so owning the hardware was contingent on funding something to watch on the damn thing.

tonyjohansson75.bsky.social•69 days ago

Exactly. In Sweden a similar change was made about five years ago. After that, bit by bit, the public aspect of public broadcasting went away.

gralefrit.bsky.social•69 days ago

YouTube and TikTok are filled with stuff I wrote, consumed in way greater quantities than on terrestrial or streamed broadcast, with ads for huge corporations either side, but the money goes to the distributor, or the uploader, not to fund making more of it.

petercmoore.bsky.social•69 days ago

Yeah, and that's an issue with those content distributors not being vigilant about rights and fair payment, and not the responsibility of the myriad different companies that probably access to the Internet (which was Toast's point, that I was answering)

gralefrit.bsky.social•69 days ago

People saying “well, if we make people pay, nobody will use it.”

That’s not true of anything else. We pay for connection.

pcollirigger.bsky.social•68 days ago

gralefrit.bsky.social•69 days ago

And also a) if invasive paid advertising and algorithmic manipulation make social media unusable, nobody will use it. And b) if there’s no paid-for-usage monetisation model to fund servers, moderation etc, a platform will collapse, and we’re back at the start.

pcollirigger.bsky.social•69 days ago

Propagandists (political pacs , parties and nations) pay for placement of information. And free news will always have a leg up on paywall news.

gralefrit.bsky.social•69 days ago

It’s the same as everything else in a commercial field. The free or cheap option is often not that good for you, or made in poor conditions for its suppliers. When I used to buy a newspaper it was because it was better than the free ad sheet that came through the letterbox, or gossip.

gralefrit.bsky.social•69 days ago

We’ve forgotten that if we’re not funding something properly, its quality will drop. I’m not sure anyone’s come up with a neat fix for that.

pcollirigger.bsky.social•69 days ago

There is a fix if you don't care about objective quality. Joe Rogan and Alex Jones figured it out. Tantalizing, enraging, affirming narratives blending current events with opinions draws a steady audience that can be monetized. You and I will never fall for it, but many will. Darkness spreads.

gralefrit.bsky.social•69 days ago

But we were told there was a dodge. There isn’t one.

gralefrit.bsky.social•69 days ago

As we all increasingly need some sort of social network in order to get, sustain, sell ourselves as workers, it’s basically the phone network, or the postal system. It needs a better framework than “hijacking eyeballs and hoping”, if users all hate that, and eventually leave.

jonathankey.bsky.social•69 days ago

If subscription to a social network were rolled up into my monthly phone plan, I’d wave it through without question. But I don’t know how we get there from here.

angusmain.bsky.social•69 days ago

People seem to have become very relaxed about the whole ‘if you’re not paying for a product, you *are* the product’ thing. But it’s not a model for communication. You’ll never have control over what you can say/read if it’s someone else’s product.

thombeckett.com•69 days ago

I agree. The main issue that companies have with paid models is that they (and you) still want loads of users, and not all will pay. Advertising is what they use to fill that gap, and encourage people to pay. But the people who pay are the ones the advertisers want.

adamdrummond.bsky.social•69 days ago

While I'm increasingly coming round to this view as well, I think the key difference is that for those other things there isn't a shitty free "paid for by your attention" version to compete. For news media, for example, most people still choose the free version

gralefrit.bsky.social•69 days ago

And they’ll get rickets. Brain rickets.

gralefrit.bsky.social•69 days ago

“I don’t know why we need to buy posh paid-for food when there’s crumbs and scrunched up paper in bins for free.”

noteom.bsky.social•69 days ago

ppl pay for twitter and it's dogshit

broomwagon.bsky.social•69 days ago

I think you’re right. My understanding was the reason we don’t have to pay is that the users are the product that is then being sold to advertisers. I would be prepared to pay to use this site if it means I don’t get inundated with adverts. I pay for some substacks and podcasts for the same reason

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