I really just think that this would mean people don't use the service. The internet has shown again and again that people will do practically anything to avoid paying for digital goods.
I don't know, I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that if we want to avoid the mess we're in now, we've got to start paying for things.
Once you've hit 1 billion users, at that point you've pretty much become an institution. You've never marketed it as being free forever so everyone knows the score so they're more prepared. Sure some people will leave but I think the majority would stay unless there was some seriously good competition. I think most minimum wage workers will see one hour of work out of an entire year as reasonable, it's a lot less than most other tech subscriptions. And to anyone earning above minimum wage it's begins to become practically nothing. There would be moaning for sure, but compared to other utilities it's an absolute bargain.
I think social media needs to start being seen as a boring utility which it really is rather than the never ending frothy hype machine of myspace/facebook/instagram/snapchat/tiktok/future platform which only really serves the VCs and investors who earn money. I think there's a lot of people out there who don't want to have to keep on learning new platforms endlessly, they just want something that everyone they know is on, that works well, is simple, and that doesn't track them or bombard them with ads. I think this is part of the reason why LinkedIn has been so successful in that it is quite boring and doesn't change much.
In a way there should be the frothy hype machine apps for the youth and then the one boring adult platform for when you grow up and stop being an idiot and don't mind hanging out with your parents again. Facebook kind of was this platform, but then most people abandoned it other than the elderly (e.g the completely tech illiterate) because of how manipulative it got.
The other alternative, which I think a lot of people would hate but might actually solve the problem, would be for Apple to finally give it a shot and release something. They're already a heavily moderated walled garden and verification could easily be proven through Apple Wallet. They could easily plug things into the existing apps, e.g an instagram photo feed in the photos app, facebook style groups in the messages app, profile page integration into the contacts app etc. Maybe one new standalone "Community" app which has two tabs: an "everything" feed from all your contacts and then a Discover tab for popular posts nearby in your town. A focus on your actual family, friends and community rather than videos of randos dancing a million miles away that add nothing to your life. I think they may end up with some regulatory heat on them if they succeeded though; they would end up being extraordinarily powerful.
> I don't know, I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that if we want to avoid the mess we're in now, we've got to start paying for things.
I've spent the majority of my working life so far on the minimum wage and I only relatively recently escaped. I would have been open to paying for a service back then if it was only one hour's wage a year. If it's one hour's wage every month like Musk is proposing then no: I wouldn't have been.
In my experience, poor people are not adverse to paying things, they are just being priced out by poor salaries and greedy shareholders. These services don't need to grow and change. Every company does not have to be a trillion dollar rocket ship of growth. Hacker News has been the same for years. Just offer me a basic, functioning service and a small fee for the upkeep. Anything else only serves shareholders rather than actual users.
