It's an interesting and scary world that we live in. There are so many cool, free things on the web but the reality is that it is paid for by our privacy. We join social media platforms at no financial cost, but behind the scenes we are being tracked and our data is being sold in ways that we did not expect. The customer has become the product! Some of the practices have been really creepy, but that is the world we live in.
But does it need to be this way? If Facebook, Google, TikTok and others charged money to use their services, would people still come?
What if we changed the model so that the website worked like real estate? You pay a fee to own property on a social media platform, one that you use because it offers features that you like and has a community that you enjoy being part of. You use it because you like it, but you paid for it because you believe in the value and, like with real estate, can later sell it and potentially earn a profit.
With such a model, it no longer is about tracking people and selling their data. Because monetisation happens when digital property changes hands, there is no need to sell user data and no need to track everything they are doing. Instead of an economic model dependent upon surveillance advertising, it allows for a privacy-respecting social media platform.
Buy a Slice of Pi™ is an attempt to see if this business model is viable. I wrote this website to try to make it a fun, social media platform with advanced features including passwordless, rich text editing, comments from anyone (regardless of whether they are a page owner), blogs, and much more. The product is young, but I have much more planned for it. Best of all, anyone who has an email address can login and leave comments on people's web pages, subject to their approval.
But does it need to be this way? If Facebook, Google, TikTok and others charged money to use their services, would people still come?
What if we changed the model so that the website worked like real estate? You pay a fee to own property on a social media platform, one that you use because it offers features that you like and has a community that you enjoy being part of. You use it because you like it, but you paid for it because you believe in the value and, like with real estate, can later sell it and potentially earn a profit.
With such a model, it no longer is about tracking people and selling their data. Because monetisation happens when digital property changes hands, there is no need to sell user data and no need to track everything they are doing. Instead of an economic model dependent upon surveillance advertising, it allows for a privacy-respecting social media platform.
Buy a Slice of Pi™ is an attempt to see if this business model is viable. I wrote this website to try to make it a fun, social media platform with advanced features including passwordless, rich text editing, comments from anyone (regardless of whether they are a page owner), blogs, and much more. The product is young, but I have much more planned for it. Best of all, anyone who has an email address can login and leave comments on people's web pages, subject to their approval.
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