Even on the margin, anything that costs Facebook users also makes it less valuable for its remaining users—it’s a negative feedback loop. The same goes for any other site where users create value for other users, like Twitter or Craigslist or Yelp or Wikipedia. (It’s not an accident that these are some of the most stagnant popular websites!)
If I look at Wikipedia I don’t buy that Wikipedia’s stagnation is due to lack of money. The problem is more that the Wikimedia Foundation is that constant war with the community and doesn’t spend it’s money wisely.
The WMF would also have no problem with being a membership organization that charges members money. It would however mean that it would become democratically accountable which the WMF abhors.
I agree. While WMF only receives the minutest fraction of the value it creates (or I should say, Wikipedia editors because they’re the ones who do the actual work), that’s not the limiting factor. Like education in America—throwing even more money at the people & systems you believe have failed is not the answer.
Even back in 2009 or so when I was warning the WMF about the editor retention crisis, an existential crisis, the WMF did not actually lack money, and it ramped up its fundraising greatly afterwards. What it lacked was any sense of priorities: it spent its time on prestige projects like sending DVDs to Africa instead of actually keeping the wiki community itself healthy and investing in things like a WYSIWYG editor. It’s possible that if you gave WMF enough billions of dollars, it would, by sheer chance, fund the things it needs to fund; but given that it showed it couldn’t spend effectively the money it did get, I am not optimistic about the counterfactual here.
Oops this was super unclear, sorry—the thing that ties together all of these crappy websites isn’t money issues, just that they’re the winner in a network-effect-based business, thus have no plausible competitors and no incentive to become more useful / less crappy.
While Wikipedia didn’t have an existential threat from a competitor, they did have the existential threat of the editor retention crisis as gwern describes.
Why do you think such a threat provides no incentive to become less crappy but an external competitior would?
If I look at Wikipedia I don’t buy that Wikipedia’s stagnation is due to lack of money. The problem is more that the Wikimedia Foundation is that constant war with the community and doesn’t spend it’s money wisely.
The WMF would also have no problem with being a membership organization that charges members money. It would however mean that it would become democratically accountable which the WMF abhors.
I agree. While WMF only receives the minutest fraction of the value it creates (or I should say, Wikipedia editors because they’re the ones who do the actual work), that’s not the limiting factor. Like education in America—throwing even more money at the people & systems you believe have failed is not the answer.
Even back in 2009 or so when I was warning the WMF about the editor retention crisis, an existential crisis, the WMF did not actually lack money, and it ramped up its fundraising greatly afterwards. What it lacked was any sense of priorities: it spent its time on prestige projects like sending DVDs to Africa instead of actually keeping the wiki community itself healthy and investing in things like a WYSIWYG editor. It’s possible that if you gave WMF enough billions of dollars, it would, by sheer chance, fund the things it needs to fund; but given that it showed it couldn’t spend effectively the money it did get, I am not optimistic about the counterfactual here.
Oops this was super unclear, sorry—the thing that ties together all of these crappy websites isn’t money issues, just that they’re the winner in a network-effect-based business, thus have no plausible competitors and no incentive to become more useful / less crappy.
While Wikipedia didn’t have an existential threat from a competitor, they did have the existential threat of the editor retention crisis as gwern describes.
Why do you think such a threat provides no incentive to become less crappy but an external competitior would?