While I agree with the overall sentiment of the article, the hypothetical monetization numbers in the last paragraph are just ridiculous. Getting 20% of a free userbase to pay anything is extremely high. ~0.2% to 2% sounds like a more likely number, based on my admittedly cursory knowledge of monetization of apps. $5 a month also sounds a bit high for essentially a photo-sharing service, a yearly charge of ~$20 sounds more likely. However, for users that have passed the "willing to pay anything" barrier, the actual cost might not as big a deal.
This also completely ignores the viral nature of these types of services; people are more likely to use Instagram when their friends are using it. Without being free, it's not clear whether it would have taken off enough to gain 2 million users (or whether it could keep 2 million after the remaining 98 million left).
That said, I'm all for paying for services, and much prefer that model to ads. But just because some of us would prefer that doesn't mean it would have been the right choice for Instagram. It's easy to look back and say "they should have charged users," but we can't be sure we'd be in a place to analyze them if they had.
I completely agree. But it would sure be nice if there was an option that said "Terms of Service A is free; Terms of Service B is $X/month". Then I could make the decision about whether the service/privacy/cost tradeoff is important enough for me to shell out either cash or privacy. This is especially true at points like this, when a service is trying to "go to the next level" in terms of revenue.
Use the free stuff to get people hooked, then let people decide how to pay for their habit. If you can make $25/year off of me through my private info, let me decide if I want to pay $25/year for your service (which is, quite literally, pocket change). As it is, I'll just stop using your service (like I'm going to stop using Instagram).
I think this is actually an argument for open protocols. If Google put this clause in the terms of service for Gmail, you could switch to Yahoo! Mail, or you could switch to Fastmail.fm, or whatever else. But when it's a proprietary social network, you can't switch (in practice), because all your friends and followees are on Instagram - not the other thing that you switch to.
When services interoperate using open, decentralized protocols, competitive pressure helps keep a lot of the ugly stuff out of their Terms of Service. We all win. But with Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook, one company has a complete monopoly on a particular combination of (functionality + approximation of social graph). Competition is locked out, and only regulation can prevent the company from doing whatever they want.
I think you mean control of your data, rather than open protocols. For example, you can still access your Gmail via IMAP.
It would be great if users could have a decentralized store of the private data, and merely gave websites or applications access to the data. Unfortunately this is a privacy geek's pipe dream, as data hosting costs and complexity would result in low adoption rates (e.g. setting up your own OAuth server).
On a side note, this is a another area where Google+ falls behind Facebook. Facebook is a platform for other apps. Sometimes this results in stuff like Zynga spam, but there are good use cases such as allowing Twitter / Instagram apps to post in more than one location. Vic Gundotra has stated in interviews that Google wants a single conversation thread rather than have it fractured across different platforms, but that strategy is an all or nothing approach and they're late to the social networking game.
> ...users could have a decentralized store of the private data, and merely gave websites or applications access to the data.
I have to ask, are you familiar with Tent? (https://tent.io) You just described exactly what they are setting out to do (and on a basic, somewhat limited level, already do).
I agree the effort faces serious challenges, but as I hoped to illustrate with my email analogy, it doesn't require every user to set up their own server to benefit. You could choose between keeping your data with a hypothetical GTent, or Yahoo! Tent, or Fasttent.fm, whichever one had the best policies, ad-supported or, if you prefer, paid.
The issue with a distributed social network is that it doesn't scale well, and there's no amount of tricky coding that can change that.
Imagine I have a thousand friends on a distributed Facebook-clone. I post a photo, and that instantly gets pushed to anywhere up to one thousand different servers. Every server has to store a copy and index it. If that was a 1MB image, I just pushed a solid gigabyte of data out. Pushing an album of 50 photos pushes that to 50GB, or 5% of my dedicated servers allocated bandwidth for one users photo album.
There's no way an individual or group is going to be able to host their own servers. The whole system just dissolves down to a single large provider serving the vast majority of people, and we're back to Facebook again.
It's a great idea when you sketch it out on paper, but it becomes impractical very rapidly.
Tent handles photos as "attachments" and doesn't push them out automatically. What it pushes out is a photo post containing the URL from which the actual photo can be retrieved. So your server's bandwidth only gets consumed when someone actually views the photo. It's about the same from a bandwidth perspective as hosting a WordPress photo blog and providing an RSS feed.
Now when you get into the millions of followers, like Lady GaGa has, your complaint is a valid one for textual posts (which are pushed in full). But at that scale, privacy clearly isn't an issue, right? I don't see much use for saying "these 3 million people can see my post, but hide it from everyone else". And if the posts are public, you can use a model like PubSubHubbub's to ease load on the origin server. Tent doesn't have that kind of feature yet, but I imagine they'll cross that bridge when they come to it.
I also disagree with this reasoning:
> There's no way an individual or group is going to be able to host their own servers. The whole system just dissolves down to a single large provider serving the vast majority of people, and we're back to Facebook again.
The first sentence is, in most cases, true, just like most of us don't host our own email servers. There's a substantial economy of scale with email. But can you name me one example of a "single large provider" that monopolizes hosting an open protocol? I can't think of one. With email, we have three large providers (Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail together serve ~80% of US users), and we also have a number of small providers. That means you have a choice.
However e-mail providers seem to manage quite nicely.
There's also no need to push it "everywhere": There's no reason why a decentralized solution can not have actors that act as hubs either for end users, or for smaller hubs, and get their margins either by reducing the fan-out or by being able to get sufficient size to benefit from peering arrangements to bring costs down.
Even a system that somehow mandated such an arrangement and where it was impossible to be part of the "inner circle" without a very substantial number of users in order to keep the message fan-out in check would still be a vast improvement over having "just Facebook".
The most important aspect from a user point of view is to have the option of moving elsewhere, not whether or not it is cost effective for a user to host everything themselves.
(And there's no need to instantly push out every image and have all the servers store each image - push links, and have the clients cache and/or archive based on criteria they care about).
That's an argument for custom domains: if your email address is [yourname]@[yourdomain].com, it's easy to switch from Google Apps to a different provider.
Finding a way to make that a viable option for non-techies is, sadly, an exercise left for the reader.
Just to play devil's advocate, open protocols, standards etc are hard to arrive at when there are competing business interests [1][2].
Also centralized systems make for less complexity. For example, despite having a standard for almost all major programming languages like C,C++ et al, if you want to compile your program using multiple compilers you have to put in some hours.
I'm not going for emotional reaction at all. Compared to a dictatorship, a democracy is more complex, harder to bring about, and yet has real benefits for the public, which, to some, justifies the effort. And all of that is also true of open protocols, compared to monopolies. Whatever your feelings, the analogy holds.
My point was that dismissing centralized services by equating with dictatorship was useless. In a true dictatorship, the dictator rules over by means of force, and has no commitment to subjects other than to keep the fear going. Equating that with a capitalist centralized service such as Facebook, twitter etc is not accurate since for them the product is the attention of their users and it is in their best interests to keep the users happy.
Now that is naively optimistic and considering that the people running these organizations are rational. I for one will happily switch to a decentralized version for a service as personal as Facebook ( so long as my friends are on it ). My intention was to balance the argument since it is very easy to take your comment and interpret it as de-centralized is the "total awesomeness".
Clearly, you have strong feelings about this, as you are working on tent. So my question is, have you asked yourself if there are cases where centralization is better ?
All open protocols do is a create a race to create the cheapest product for service providers. If they were beneficial in any way for business, we would see far more of them.
This make a wildly naive assumption that paying for a product somehow makes it less likely that they will monetize your likeness. The truth is large companies with any swath of investors are expected to grow, thats how money is made. This means that there will need to be constant new revenue streams added on.
TLDR: Paying for any app just delays the inevitable monetization of content as the company is forced to expand and create more revenue.
People could prefer services that have some sort of contractual agreement for perpetuity to never do anything creepy with your stuff. Those services would by definition have to have some sort of paid angle or make due with dumb ads. Now most people don't care but it's possible someone could, in DDG fashion, try and leverage the "don't be creepy" angle.
The Atlantic is being deliberately misleading here. Pay for Software? I think they should have said, "Why You Should Pay for Internet Service."
That is, unless there's a way for you to download Instagram's entire service as a package and install it on your own infrastructure (not likely), you aren't ever going to pay them for "software." If you pay them, it will be a subscription to their service.
I think the real culprit here is actually Google, who can (and do!) release all kinds of useful free services. They then actively support the misconception that all online services should be free – this helps them because consumers then make the error of assuming that this is reasonable; meanwhile, Google benefits as consumers turn a blind eye to their data mining, advertising, etc.
I suppose it would be fair to blame all the large cloud providers competing in the same space (Microsoft and Yahoo for example). However, Google was the first to try this and arguably the most successful.
Google was not even close to being the first to give away services. Hotmail and Yahoo mail were around before Google even existed. And that's just the first two that came to mind.
That's not what I said, of course. Google doesn't just "give away services:"
They release all kinds of useful free services. They then actively support the misconception that all online services should be free – this helps them because consumers then make the error of assuming that this is reasonable; meanwhile, Google benefits as consumers turn a blind eye to their data mining, advertising, etc.
In other words, Google was the first to really push what could be done in free services. Sure, HTTP was a "free service" before Google ever existed – but that's not my point. Search engines existed before, but Google took a first step by placing the search results first – instead of the flashing banner ads.
I remember the 90s before Google existed. There were search engines without ads. Search engines added ads after gaining an audience, just like Google did. Text ads were invented by Overture, another search company, before Google existed.
I'll bet instagram never thought of that! If only they had these guys coming in to tell them that they could charge for software. "Guys, if you charge just $5 a month - you'll have $300m a quarter!" Genius!
Great reporting Atlantic, I'm normally a fan, but this is quite poor.
This article's claim (even stated in the title) is not that Instagram should have charged, but that users should demand to pay. The article is not written for Instagram: it is written for users.
> Truly, the only way to get around the privacy problems inherent in advertising-supported social networks is to pay for services that we value. It's amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold.
People have a hard time paying for parking space, yet some claim those same people should demand paying for the ability to upload a small file to the internet. I don't think anybody outside of the tech bubble treats such advice seriously.
... so because the attempt is futile, you are saying we should pretend he didn't say it, and interpret the rest of his article in that light?
FWIW, I have a friend in the planning division of the city I live in, and just a few days ago we were having a discussion about the issues with parking.
I was curious if somebody will bring this title to the table as I've found this book some time ago on Goodreads, but frankly, 800p about this subject is a TLDR for me.
My point was, while I think people should be comfortable paying for services, claiming they should demand to pay instead of getting it free is a bit absurd. It's not like there are no paid more feature-rich alternatives for uploading photos, or that web users just don't pay for online; it's just that Instagram, Twitter & co wouldn't grow to those numbers if they were a paid service. Prove me wrong, but I also got the feeling Pinboard users are there for the statement, not because they believe bookmarking links is worth $10.
<- ...were users to like paying for such things or even demand to do so (which they aren't, hence why this article was written at all, but this is a cool universe in which we could live: imagine it!)...
"X has Y millions of users, if they charged $5..." yeah, right. I am willing to pay for online services, but sharing phone pictures of coffee mugs or posting status messages isn't one of them. I bet most people feel the same.
>It's amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold.
Since when did customer have any power what so ever in regard to products and services? DRM'infested products, streaming services that throw anti-piracy ads down consumers throat, and other similar things.
Paying for a product or service don't mean that a company will suddenly start acting ethical.
This is basically like assigning a copyright to all your creative work for free to FB/Instagram to use for Marketing Purposes. Seems Non-trivia, if it is true.
This also completely ignores the viral nature of these types of services; people are more likely to use Instagram when their friends are using it. Without being free, it's not clear whether it would have taken off enough to gain 2 million users (or whether it could keep 2 million after the remaining 98 million left).
That said, I'm all for paying for services, and much prefer that model to ads. But just because some of us would prefer that doesn't mean it would have been the right choice for Instagram. It's easy to look back and say "they should have charged users," but we can't be sure we'd be in a place to analyze them if they had.