741 points by cpeterso 2298 days ago | 566 comments on HN
| Mild positive
Contested
Editorial · v3.7· 2026-02-28 13:57:39 0
Summary Expression & Information Quality Acknowledges
The article reports on Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's launch of WT:Social, a subscription-based social network designed to address misinformation and discourse quality problems in ad-supported platforms. The reporting acknowledges the platform's community-moderation and content-quality approaches as responses to expression and association challenges, while maintaining neutral tone toward uncertain user adoption.
I would prefer a decentralized social network based on boxes you plug into your router with content shared in a way that fellow users bear the weight of shared content like torrents.
You could rent the box or buy outright with money to develop paid for by a premium on the box or by the rent wherein even a modest rent would outstrip the cost of buying like a cable box.
Just my guess, but I bet that from this point on, few people (in the developed world) will race to sign up for a new social network. Why? Given the societal and personal costs (and benefits) that we've seen with previous social networks, a lot of lay people are re-evaluating the utility that such services provide them. In many cases, the answer is to keep your current social network, but increasingly disengage from it. Sometimes people find that they actually prefer to be less frequently "connected" to people in their lives, whether family/friends or casual acquaintances, especially given some of the caustic personality traits often displayed on social networks.
Also, many of today's recent non-FB social network successes (Whatsapp, etc) were launched before the general perception of social networking, and internet services in general, became increasingly skeptical. Outside of tech, or people with very narrow interest verticals not served by mainstream social networks, I don't know anyone who is looking for yet another generic social network.
Curiously, if true, this plays both the the detriment and benefit of established social networks: their primary, most profitable users are not likely to flee, but they are also likely to be less engaged.
I checked it out by creating an account. It detected my country as India, and showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Contrast this to (using current conversion rates from INR to USD):
* Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that account sharing among a few people is quite common.
* Amazon Prime (with two day shipping plus Prime Video and Prime Music) costs about $14 a year.
* A print newspaper subscription of any major national newspaper would cost about $2.8 or even a lot lesser per month.
* An Audible subscription (one free credit a month) costs $2.8 a month, with lower prices on audiobooks and discounts on them.
* Some premium news publications cost about $30-$45 a year.
I'm not saying that this is similar to Netflix or Amazon or a national newspaper, but it's more about how the more popular as well as niche/premium services have priced themselves and how people perceive value. Comparatively, this $12.99/month or $100/year social network focused on news seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants. It could've probably done better with a currency adjusted or purchasing power parity specific rate. For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US).
Having talked about the pricing, the UI doesn't look great either. I saw a list of groups to choose from and the page looked like it was built more than a decade ago. It ought to look like a modern website (with more bells and whistles) if it wants to command more than premium rates. Even Facebook's site, which I think looks outdated, cluttered and ugly, looks better in comparison.
I love what Jimmy contributed to the world with Wikipedia. This, however, is DOA. The site barely communicates a value-proposition, doesn't give me a sense of what's behind the curtain unless I pay $13/month. C'mon the best practices for building product are WIDELY available now.
He also less quietly launched a Social Media strike only 4 months ago, which now has a whole new perspective given this.
My thoughts at the time, which I said "EDIT ADD Had a quick look for `related` interests and see that he is CIO of Everipedia, which is decentralizing encyclopedia writing from an article in March: https://www.wired.com/story/larry-sanger-declaration-of-digi.... But I'd not cry foul even if they did produce their own decentralised social media platform; Kinda hope they do actually. Competition does have its upsides."
I've had a hunch lately that someone would try to create a paid social network, but I never thought the idea would work for the reasons that social media became so popular to begin with.
Facebook is popular because it is free, it is easy, it is convenient. Old people, kids, a large proportion of the population has no understanding of how they get all this for free. And most of them don't care. They interact with ads just like it's any other content in their feed. They are happy they get something with so many features without having to pay for it.
Social networks that advertise privacy or no ads have limited appeal because the only group that really cares about this is (maybe) teenagers, and younger adults who are in touch with privacy politics.
It's a nice idea but my social life doesn't revolve around news, it revolves around things I like to do and my friends and family, so this doesn't interest me.
I also think social + news will just lead to you getting stuck in a bubble of news content your social group agrees with.
I love the idea of an alternate social network, and I'm fine with the idea of charging users. But in an era where free alternatives are bountiful (even if most of them are "free as in puppy"), where a full paid blog hosting service like Micro.blog -- which includes a social network timeline built on IndieWeb principles -- is only $5 a month, where "subscription fatigue" is entering the lexicon... this is just a bonkers amount of money to ask.
If I were serious about building some kind of social network at this point and thought it would need a revenue stream to be sustainable, I'd try to:
- find not just a niche but functionality that differentiates it from existing services in some way (if your service can be described as "Facebook for X," you've already lost, because the Facebook for all values of X already exists and is called "Facebook")
- build on open protocols, IndieWeb style (including ActivityPub, although the first point suggests the service better not be "Mastodon for X," either)
- if it makes sense, have a free tier that gives people some clue what they're signing up for, although not so much that it discourages them from actually, you know, signing up
- charge a low enough rate that signing up doesn't feel like a huge commitment: say, $2 a month or $16 a year
I'm surprised nobody has tried the low-cost route yet. Yes, I get it, those rates aren't going to be bringing you VC money and bazillion-dollar unicorn growth, but a relatively small number of paying users could create a sustainable, even profitable, small business for a few employees.
I always shake my head when Jimmy Wales is given so much credit for founding Wikipedia, while what he did was supply the money for it from the profit he made off his soft-core porn business, while Larry Sanger (who deserves most of the credit, including coming up with the name Wikipedia, with Wikipedia's most distinctive feature -- the so-called Neutral Point of View, and with managing the site itself) is virtually forgotten.
Since the article apparently lacks a link to the actual social network site: https://wt.social
The article says that it's not free and there's membership fee. I'm not against that, but it doesn't say that anywhere on the front page. Presumably they tell you that after you've submitted the form containing your personal information. Kind of shady.
I usually donate to Wikimedia every year, and I was a donator for WikiTribune and followed it closely as it rolled out. I personally think that Wikipedia is one of the most valuable resources on the internet.
Watching WikiTribune flounder in its early days left me feeling disillusioned. It quickly began to seem like a project lacking clear product vision (or else a team that could execute on such a vision). I eventually gave up waiting for the service to become useful as a daily news source and wrote it off.
Glancing at WikiTribune now, it seems like wt.social is a pivot for the service (https://www.wikitribune.com/wt/news/article/101868/). I hope it turns out well, because I strongly believe that the service Jimmy Wales initially described as WikiTribune is a good idea and something the internet needs. But, I think I'll wait on the sidelines this time around before getting too invested in the idea.
Previously someone mentioned the idea of a $1/mo. social network.
I think if someone were to make facebook in it's first ~2 years and keep it very basic it we would be good to go. The only features you need are: a profile picture, a wall, chat, and events.
In other words - a photo of yourself, a way of publicly messaging, a way of privately messaging, and a way to coordinate social events.
What else do you need for a 'social network?'
I would pay $1/mo for that. The simpler the better.
>We will foster an environment where bad actors are removed because it is right, not because it suddenly affects our bottom-line.
Who will determine what a bad actor is and what criteria will be used. We have already seen the effect of people banned from sites for political and religious views, so do we really need another site that will just do the same?
What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).
This will simply never takeoff. The Goldilocks conditions that allowed Facebook to spread like wildfire will never exist again. You would have to find a large group desiring to use the platform (college kids) who help grow the user base, with few/any functional alternatives (Facebook already exists, so it cannot supplant itself), along with a newly booming internet thanks to university/household broadband access, etc... At this point, all the initial users of Facebook have children and grandparents that use Facebook... and it is multi-national. The idea that a spunky-yet-well-funded startup is going to even contend with them is silly. Not that I do not wish it would happen, and we can all think of reasons why it should happen, but once the reality of contending with 2+ billion active users kicks in, you realize the petite crowd of HN users that would go for this “Facebook rival” are utterly irrelevant. MySpace was a known brand that spent millions on rebranding after cleaning up its landing pages in 2012 and they went... nowhere. Justin Timberlake could not even save them.
"Prestige" and quality of a social network that you have no connections within, don't matter one iota. The product is the website and infrastructure of the network, married with the users and their connections within. See: Google Plus. They (stupidly or naively) thought that using the cachet of exclusivity and invite emails would work in its benefit just as it did with Gmail, fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the product and the entire marketplace they were trying to succeed in.
I created an account, log in, and just see a page with a bunch of "subwikis" on completely random topics ("Woodworking", "Mountain Biking", and "Icelandic Horses" are the top 3) with no subwiki having more than 9 members, most only having 1 or 2.
Now I will log out and probably never think to log back in again.
(I know this might sound like I'm shallowly dismissing it, but this is just my honest experience as a random casual internet person. I hope they can make this more appealing and succeed, especially since I support any attempt at toppling proprietary monopolies).
Sounds good in theory, but that is so far removed from what 99% of social media users do.
Nobody wants to rent/buy boxes, handle routers, etc. ; most users are on mobile, on the go.
That’s essentially what a Mastadon instance is. If it’s hosted at home or on someone’s cloud account - the difference is only in connectivity speed. I’m extremely hopefully, perhaps naively, that a new internet isn’t going to be based on blockchain or owning data or any foundational change - it will be based on the ability for people to host their own server-side software again. The App Stores democratized client side apps, but they forced a huge centralization into platforms.
What we need is a cloud platform that allows people to deploy code to computers on their home network, or any cloud, or any data center... one that encourages and assists with cloud native design and aims to reduce load rather than hope you architect incorrectly and happily charge for the waste.
Perhaps I’m being naive, but it feels like a tooling problem, not a social or political or economic one. Anyways, I’ve quit my job at Stripe and just finished YCS19 with the goal of closing the gap between Facebook/Mastadon, Medium/yourBlog, Minecraft.com and a docker image...
And you’re totally correct about renting home server “boxes” too - except most house holds already have plenty of compute and connectivity - it’s just that installing / managing server software is completely out of reach to most people (and some developers!). It doesn’t need to be grandmas running router software - just the family nerd able to create on the internet again - and reliable enough software you’d actually invite grandma to signup!
I agree that people aren't looking for new social networks, but I do wonder about your view of disengaging from Facebook. I keep reading about it on HN but I'm not seeing it myself. I wonder if it's a US-centric view.
I have a fairly large network of friends that existed before FB really had wide adoption. The platform they were on eventually died in favor of facebook.
At this point, I'd like to preserve that network of friends independent of facebook and most of those folks feel similarly. In that sense, there is at least some demand for a social network that isn't evil.
The way other social media platforms have solved this problem is by targeting younger demographics first, those that are making social media accounts for the first time.
For these "greenfield" users, there is no need to convince their friends to leave their existing social media platform, because there is none.
Every day, middle schoolers get smartphones for the first time, and the majority of them probably aren't going to make Facebook accounts, but rather Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok, etc.
At least on my FB feed (which is indeed becoming less full over time), at least once a week someone will raise the question of 'is there anywhere to go after Facebook?' So at least some people are looking.
$13/month does feel like an odd price point to me. I imagine people would compare to what they pay for Netflix, HULU, etc, and wonder why this is so high.
> I would prefer a decentralized social network based on boxes you plug into your router with content shared in a way that fellow users bear the weight of shared content like torrents.
This is something that the SoLiD (Social Linked Data) initiative, based on web and linked-data standards, is expressly built to support; your "box" would implement what the initiative calls a Personal Online Datastore, or POD. Though "federated" third-party hosting of such datastores is also allowed for, of course.
This is why the ad model works better. Local advertisers can bid on his data to show 5 cent ads where someone in northamerica may be worth 5 dollars. Trying to price this as a monthly service removes the ability to offer different prices per region without getting into fairness or causing people to get around the rules by signing up in different regions but watching from another.
> I don't know anyone who is looking for yet another generic social network.
Right — people don't go actively seeking a generic alternative to something they already have. They do although, hear about new services that do something different. Similar to TikTok, or Instagram, it will hit on a niche interest and expand from there. The current market leaders will ignore it long enough (opportunity not big enough) that by the time they see it as a threat, it's too late.
Part of Prime is getting you to give them $120 membership fee so you feel youre getting some kind of bonus buying from them ("free shipping") which reduces comparison shopping. I'm probably not going to buy $100/year memberships to costco, walmart, amazon, and target, even though im half way there and really tempted to pull the trigger on another.
The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me from going into the store and impulse buying something on a shelf once a month.
As far as Amazon Prime, I have to believe the price of shipping is built into the products, and the membership is for other psychological and behavior control reasons.
Is part of this social network price the same thing. A cost to make it exclusive, acts as a bit of a spam filter. Then after having sunk money into it, you feel the need to make it worthwhile. I never think "ive been watching too much prime I better get my value out of netflix this month" but a communication tool might be different.
I'm not necessarily if translates into online social media, but at least in meatspace there's no shortage of social clubs where the high price tag is a feature not a bug. They're called country clubs.
For this to succeed, I think you'd need a company that provided boxes as a service. Instead of having to order anything and plug it in, you just sign up online, the same as today's social networks.
Here's the twist: the company (presumably a non-profit or social purpose corp) would also offer the ability to buy your box, at which point they mail it to you; when you plug it in, your existing data is copied to it and you begin to self-host instead.
This makes it easy to sign up for and try out, while also offering a path toward self-hosting, once you decide you like it and don't want to keep paying the monthly fee.
>showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month
That's the cost to jump the waitlist, not the ongoing price for what will be (he hopes) the majority of users. Back when Facebook was Ivy-league only, there were TONS of students I knew who would have paid to get access. As it gets less exclusive the price will come down or become free
History is written by the victors, and unfortunately Sanger decided to instead focus on Nupedia, which was more focused on "experts" writing the articles. Ultimately it seems that Sanger didn't truly believe in the core underlying idea of Wikipedia, which is that allowing anyone to write/edit without any reputation or credentials (or even an account!) eventually leads to a good outcome. It's counter-intuitive to some degree that the noise of allowing the "unwashed masses" to contribute is outweighed by the ease of attracting new contributors combined with the decentralized, crowd-sourced corrections of the community.
There's a reason why Wikipedia is one of the largest and most useful websites on the internet meanwhile Citizendium barely lasted, and that reason had little to do with ideas being stolen or porn profits being redirected. Jimmy is just a good businessman and made something people want / need with the proper marketing and leadership. It's as simple as that.
These arguments about who's more important than who are usually pretty pointless. You should begin with a measure of importance and then use it in an unbiased way to evaluate people. It should give results you agree with no matter who you apply it to. Is funding something more important than founding it? Is doing unpaid work more important than paying for work? Who knows without any criteria, but coming up with a name surely ranks pretty low by anyone's standard.
> I personally think that Wikipedia is one of the most valuable resources on the internet.
I would say it's the most important resource on the internet, beyond actual infrastructure like DNS.
> Watching WikiTribune flounder in its early days left me feeling disillusioned. It quickly began to seem like a project lacking clear product vision (or else a team that could execute on such a vision). I eventually gave up waiting for the service to become useful as a daily news source and wrote it off.
Me too - I donated in total about £200 since WikiTribune launched, and hoped with Jimmy Wales behind it that it could really take off. I like this pivot though, and believe the whole community-sourced content idea is better suited to a social media type site rather than a heavily hacked WordPress blog.
Which one is actually free? You're paying by sharing your life with them to sell for other purposes. Your purchases, search history, private conversations, even bedroom talk are all ongoing amortized payments for that puppy.
Article directly reports WT:Social as platform designed to combat misinformation and improve discourse quality. Wales's quoted critique of advertising models promoting low-quality content explicitly engages with Article 19's right to seek and receive quality information.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article describes WT:Social members as 'intrigued by the idea of a social network that combats fake news.'
Wales quoted: 'The business model of social-media companies, of pure advertising, is problematic. It turns out the huge winner is low-quality content.'
Article states the platform 'would rely on a community of users to enforce standards' with 'all content on the platform can be edited or deleted by other users.'
Inferences
The article frames misinformation-combating and quality-improvement mechanisms as positive solutions to deficiencies in existing platforms.
Wales's critique of advertising-based incentive structures positions community-moderated platforms as protecting expression quality against engagement-maximizing distortion.
The reporting advocates for distributed moderation as protecting discourse integrity.
Article positively frames WT:Social's rejection of ad-funded models. Implicit engagement with privacy concerns inherent to targeted advertising.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article states WT:Social 'goes against the ad-funded models normalized by Google, Facebook, and Twitter, instead asking users to pay a subscription fee.'
Inferences
Critique of ad-based models implicitly references privacy harms from user tracking and profiling for targeted advertising.
Wales quoted: 'The business model of social-media companies, of pure advertising, is problematic. It turns out the huge winner is low-quality content.' Attributes multi-causal content-quality problems to single mechanism (advertising).