A Social Network That Costs 10¢ to Post
As an American kid born along with the digital epoch of the 90s, I&#x27;m a bit of an oddity because the only social media I&#x27;ve ever used (&amp; still use) is LinkedIn, which feels like sharing a room with a vipor. I have it set up with a dedicated email address and I only interact w&#x2F;it in a sandboxed browser on VPN with a dedicated email address. (I guess you could add HN, StackExchange and GitHub to the list since there are pretty social aspects to all three, but I don&#x27;t know if they count.)<p>Because I am this weirdo, I can&#x27;t help being astounded at the level of comfortability people have in ecosystems like the ones Facebook and Google have cultivated. These are really creepy and dystopian models at their core. And they are not helping your damn social life! Believe me, people don&#x27;t mind being in touch and coordinating through more direct means, in fact most people respond more genuinely to it.<p>So this is awesome right? Here&#x27;s something proposing a fresh new model. Except nothing in this article&#x2F;pitch addresses my concerns&#x2F;issues with current social media. Like, as a paying member, are they aggregating &quot;marketing&quot; data on me? Are they going to try to follow me around the web and ID me with tracking scripts and under the table data trades with other players? Will they organize my data and sell it on as an &quot;anonymized&quot; individual profile (&quot;Emperor {username}, we bring you new clothes. This is a magical anonymization cloak, making you invisible to any unsavory entities we sell your data to&quot;).<p>In fact, now I have even more questions&#x2F;concerns! For example:<p>1) can toxic or just plain wrong information simply be brute-forced to the top with money (or digital tulips or whatever)?<p>2) how is this not just buying popularity and influence in a contrived environment?<p>3) do they cap the value of a post &#x2F; vote or is this susceptible to weird bubbles?<p>4) if you do break the rules, do you pay to get out of trouble?<p>This whole thing sounds like someone&#x27;s been spending a long time getting investors on board and now can&#x27;t seem to remember what the pitch to the consumers originally was.