Some notes towards a social network cooperative

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+# Notes towards a Co-Op Social Network
+
+## Premises
+
+* Money, and paid labor generally, are a prerequisite to a polished, usable technical system that is accessible to more than just the technical core of its contributors.
+
+    * A social network is a technical system.
+
+* Existing social network systems have _users_ - people who socialize through the network - and _customers_ - people who provide revenue in return for obtaining something of value. Those two groups have incompatible desires, and the ones with the money win.
+
+    * _Users_ want a way to connect, communicate, plan, and organize with people they know.
+
+    * _Customers_ want to maximize the return on their dollars.
+
+    * Social network customers tend to be advertisers, whose goals are maximizing the visibility of their messages and maximizing the information extracted about the relationships and demographics of the users being advertised to.
+
+        * Secondary customers: law enforcement.
+
+* Revenue from customers and investor dollars are the only sources of money for a privately-owned, incorporated social network.
+
+* The conflicting incentives between social networks' stated goals, which would benefit the users, and social networks' actual goals, which benefit the customers, is at the root of major, high-visibility dysfunctions in social networks:
+
+    * The rise in news-like advertising on Facebook (it's what metrics provided by Facebook show Facebook users will respond to, after all)
+
+    * Limited or consciously-ineffective tools for managing conflict. (If you block someone, you can't see ads they might propagate or share!)
+
+    * Emphasis on metrics-gathering and privacy-puncturing tools even for users (automatic location posting, closed services, infinite data retention as the default).
+
+    * Features widely requested by users generally disregarded in favour of "pet" features, features requested by customers, and doing nothing.
+
+    * The "Nobody at Twitter uses Twitter" problem
+
+* Social media users are poorly-served by existing social networks, as a result of these mismatched incentives.
+
+* Accepted wisdom is that nobody will pay to use a social network, and that social networks which need money therefore must find money somewhere else.
+
+* We can do better.
+
+## Proposal
+
+* Organize a social media venture as a cooperative, so that the company's own incentives line up with things that benefit the users.
+
+    * What kind of co-op? Member-owned? Employee-owned? The incentives are different.
+
+* Fund the cooperative through a combination of membership dues, user fees, public and private _grants_, and other non-transactional income sources.
+
+* Direct the construction, modification, and maintenance of the network with direct involvement of the network's users.
+
+    * How?
+
+* Prioritize the welfare of users and the sustainability of the enterprise, rather than maximizing revenue or assets.