Jimmy Wales Solicits Donations for His Ad-Free Social Network 54
"I need your help," reads an email that Jimmy Wales just sent to financial supporters of his ad-free social network, WikiTribune Social (which currently has 494,296 members):
All the problems in the world that I've set out to try to solve with WikiTribune Social are as bad as ever... WikiTribune has a different model. A strange model, to be sure, but it's one that I believe in. We don't want our platform to grow by focussing on having as many pageviews as possible by maximizing addiction and outrage. We want to build something that people like you care enough about to support voluntarily, financially. It's a "pay if you want" model. I've joked many times — it may not be a great business model to give things away and hope people will voluntarily support them — but this is how I've built my career so far!
We are severely short on funds
There's no simple way to avoid saying it. I've chosen not to raise venture capital money because I want to maintain full creative control to build the vision that I have in mind. Over the past two years, I've been personally the major funder of the project — but it's straining my personal resources.
Over the past several months, we've gone back to the codebase and completely re-architected it from scratch pulling from everything that we've learned so far. We've got a great small community and the new software will have new ways to support and reward people for making quality posts (instead of how all other social networks reward people for making viral addictive fluff). Finishing this redesign will have a huge impact. I'm excited about it!
But to finish, I need your support. I have to pay for the development work to finish the new version of the site, and I need to do some PR and marketing to get the word out. I need to really start pushing this forward as a relaunch. If each of you can afford to give even a little, I think we have a real shot at making something revolutionary and new. We won't know unless we keep trying.
This is our chance to break the back of toxic social media by offering a better alternative... so please donate today.
Jimmy Wales
We are severely short on funds
There's no simple way to avoid saying it. I've chosen not to raise venture capital money because I want to maintain full creative control to build the vision that I have in mind. Over the past two years, I've been personally the major funder of the project — but it's straining my personal resources.
Over the past several months, we've gone back to the codebase and completely re-architected it from scratch pulling from everything that we've learned so far. We've got a great small community and the new software will have new ways to support and reward people for making quality posts (instead of how all other social networks reward people for making viral addictive fluff). Finishing this redesign will have a huge impact. I'm excited about it!
But to finish, I need your support. I have to pay for the development work to finish the new version of the site, and I need to do some PR and marketing to get the word out. I need to really start pushing this forward as a relaunch. If each of you can afford to give even a little, I think we have a real shot at making something revolutionary and new. We won't know unless we keep trying.
This is our chance to break the back of toxic social media by offering a better alternative... so please donate today.
Jimmy Wales
Reality Strikes Again (Score:4, Interesting)
Good luck to this initiative. Also a good moment to reflect on how the world works. Your good intentions are not enough to run a viable enterprise in a competitive market.
Re: Reality Strikes Again (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
As someone with my own share of dreams crushed by reality, and malicious people, I subscribe to ideology of fast interventions. Same reason why a surgeon doesn't waste time with gangrene. Recovery starts much sooner.
Not that I didn't wish luck. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
Because feedback, when delivered the correct way to the target personality, offers a path for someone to improve. I mean, look at the life of kids who got raised constantly being told everything they did was awesome even when they screwed things up. The inverse is also bad btw.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Reality Strikes Again (Score:5, Insightful)
We're conditioned to think of "succeed" in terms of *competing* successfully, but that's not the only possible model for success. Look at Wikipedia. They don't try to lure eyeballs away from "competitors", they just do their own thing. Information isn't always like, say, a car. If you and I are both selling cars we're in a zero sum game; every car you sell eliminates a possible sale for me.
Wikipedia doesn't need to maximize engagement time because it's not competing to sell your eyeballs. If you look at some other site than Wikipedia, it doesn't affect their bottom line. On an ad-supported site any time you're not using that site they aren't making money. Likewise Facebook (and Google) are intelligence agencies for sellers; even if you're not consciously engaged with their product they still need you to have them installed.
Re: (Score:1)
Are you in academia? Because in the rest of the world the goal of a business is to generate profits. That's what makes it successful. Otherwise, it's dead.
Cool Wiki article though.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm a retired small business owner. But I also spent some of my career in the non-profit sector. I know how the world works, even the non-profit and government sectors need revenue. But they don't necessarily have to compete.
Re: (Score:2)
Wikipedia's success is better measured by the quality of its content. The quality is surprisingly good, but could still be better. The main problem is that people don't want to edit it any more, because it's become an MMORPG and the long time players always win.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty nice FP, but it isn't clear if reality is striking WTS yet. Seems to be going on pretty much as it always has, though there was an uptick in new members as a result of the recent Twitter fiasco.
However I definitely think that WTS needs a better financial model. Right now it's basically small donors and the theory is that the marginal costs can be kept low enough to allow for some free riding, too. But I think the basic problem is that small donors aren't going to donate much and they have too many op
Re: (Score:1)
Good luck to this initiative. Also a good moment to reflect on how the world works. Your good intentions are not enough to run a viable enterprise in a competitive market.
It is also re-inventing the wheel. GNU has a great/usable product offering and they sure have same sense of freedom as Jimmy Wales.
https://www.gnu.org/software/s... [gnu.org]
There is kinda popular Mastodon https://mastodon.social/about [mastodon.social]
Of course, even when you invade another country and the entire planet boycotts you, you still try to keep up with Facebook&Instagram. I mean that is what Russians do. Installing VPN/Tor etc. Heard the penguins rejecting cheaper fish?
I can't see clearly now (Score:5, Insightful)
How do I take a look around WikiTribune to see if it's something I might be interested in without having to sign up? People like me who don't know what the site offers (beyond the marketing on the front page) are unlikely to donate.
Re:I can't see clearly now (Score:4, Informative)
I created a temp account if you want to use it:
l: e.l.ian.c.h.a.n.g4.78@gmail.com
p: E.l.ian.c.h.a.n!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
How do you give money to Black Lives Matter? I'm asking for a friend.
web3 ftw (Score:3, Interesting)
With the right technology it wouldn't take so much money. Just go peer2peer and get the users to host their own content, leaving a daemon running all the time (tray application for the windows users), and mirroring each others' friends' posts, for redundancy. Of course it should fit into the fediverse too. That's the way to build a social network these days. But he's going for the old centralized model, so he needs money again. Boo hoo.
But I'm on it, FWIW, just to see how it develops.
Re: (Score:2)
With the right technology it wouldn't take so much money. Just go peer2peer and get the users to host their own content,
I agree, and fundamentally am not interested in another centralized system. I have no need for that. We have plenty of them already.
Re: web3 ftw (Score:2)
The problem with the model you espouse (and I have previously suggested such a model in general, not just for social media) is that it would almost certainly require a huge up front investment by users in expensive kit just to host and save up their content. The latency would be terrible and data loss in such a decentralised system would be an ongoing problem.
Why would users prefer that to having ads spend to them?
Re: (Score:3)
You should look at the Diaspora project, though I blame Kickstarter for effectively killing it.
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah I might have an account on diaspora somewhere, I forgot. Not crazy about the architecture: most of the "decentralized" ones are not really, they are just federated, made for small servers hosting a number of users, rather than everybody running their own. So in practice, your account lives somewhere else, unless you are going to put in the time to be an admin of your own server, lemme guess you have to manage postgresql or mysql too? All that is avoidable now. But for that kind of network, maybe ma
Re: (Score:2)
Near as I can tell none of them have a sustainable economic model. I don't necessarily mean profits. I just mean a reliable flow of money that will cover the costs into the future.
My basic idea for the CSB is that donors pay for what they want to use. As regards simply using features that other people have already paid for, there's no problem with free riding. (Well, a small problem because of long-term support, especially for security, but that should be part of an ongoing-support project.) If a function h
This still exists? (Score:3)
I signed up for it around the time it started and never heard anything about it until now. Never seen a post on it, heck I tried googling it just now to see what kind of things people are saying on it and basically got a zero on that. Nothing interesting, nothing provocative, nothing informative.
Jimmy Wales is no longer trustworthy (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It's a community-edited site. What exactly do you think can actually be done about people disagreeing on content?
Re:Jimmy Wales is no longer trustworthy (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a community-edited site. What exactly do you think can actually be done about people disagreeing on content?
You use some of the millions of dollars that you are sitting on to pay moderators, rather than spending it on expensive office buildings and dozens of bullshit projects.
In 2021 the Wikimedia Foundation had $163 Million in revenue and $130 Million in "expenses".
How could they possibly have $130 million in "expenses"? Well, in addition to office space in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the U.S., the Wikipedia Foundation has a payroll of 550 employees, of which ZERO do any work maintaining Wikipedia -- that is all done by unpaid volunteers.
Re:Jimmy Wales is no longer trustworthy (Score:4, Informative)
Over the same time period, their Endowment increased by another $40 million or so, for an overall surplus of about $90 million in a single year [wikipedia.org].
They're swimming in money. Even with this vast surplus they actually spent half a billion dollars in the last five years [wikipedia.org], far more than in the first fourteen years of their existence put together. And all this time they make people believe they are short of money to keep Wikipedia up and running.
Re: (Score:2)
You apparently don't have any idea of the scale of the problem. Wikipedia has over a quarter million *active* editors.
Literally the first time I've heard of this. (Score:2)
"WikiTribune Social?" Are they purposely trying to unknown? I've never heard those three words in the same sentence, even.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry (Score:2)
Lemme guess, moderator cartel? (Score:4, Interesting)
If it's anything like the Wikipedia editor cartel, it can fuck off, burst into flames and die an ignominious death.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Misinformation.
*Cue Inigo Montoya image.*
The network effect (Score:3)
You simply cannot dislodge the incumbents. Many have tried and failed. However look at the few success stories; Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch Focus on a niche (e.g. game streaming, short music videos) AND the young crowd.
72% of social media traffic was Myspace (Score:3)
In December 2007, MySpace.com received 72.32% of US visits among the social networking category. Facebook.com received 16.03% of visits and Bebo.com received 1.09% of visits.
It's not easy to displace the giant, whether the giant is Myspace, Yahoo, Toys R Us, Sears or Intel.
Tried to donate (Score:3)
Wikipedia sits on piles of money (Score:2)
Help me understand how this is a new model in any way? I just donâ(TM)t see it.
WTF kinda name is that? (Score:2)
Do we need more antisocial media? (Score:2)
I would pay him NOT to launch the site (half joking)
It seems like social media is a breeding ground for mind trash and it's turning people into sociopaths.
You need MY help??? (Score:2)
Do you know who also needs my help? Dora the explorer.