Why Tribes is needed

I’m old. My first experience with the Internet was going to the website for JNCO Jeans. Back then, the internet was an open space where people found other people and bonded over shared interests. No matter what you were into, there was a forum, website, or bulletin board that catered to it.

I remember at one point, there was concern that the Internet would be turned into cable, with different ISPs creating exclusive deals with popular sites. So, if you connect to the Internet via Comcast you may not be able to access Google because Google hasn’t made a deal with Comcast.

But that never happened. What did happen is advertising became the main business model for the Internet. And that has stifled how we, as people, communicate.

The problem with advertising

The easiest model to make money on the Internet is showing ads next to user-generated videos, text, and pictures. All of the social media sites — Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, etc — are built off this business model. Now, what this means is that the person posting on the platform is the product. Their eyeballs and attention are worth money and the platform is working very hard to get their client’s products/services in front of those eyeballs.

The side effect of having an advertising-based social media platform is three-fold:

• The platforms need to be large to justify the price they charge advertisers. Because of this, you will be one voice of millions and you will be at the mercy of the platform’s algorithm to widely share your ideas. Basically, you get lost in the sauce.
• Advertisers want “brand-safety”. That means that the platform needs to be very careful and proactive about what people say on their platform. This leads to people using these platforms censoring themselves because they don’t want to draw the ire of advertisers, i.e. you can’t say the word “dead” on Tiktok; its unalive.
• The platform needs to save gigantic amounts of data about people using their platform. The most popular ones track what you are doing even when you are off their platform. They spy on you. They read your emails, your text messages, scan your photos, just so that they can give advertisers a complete profile of you. But since advertising isn’t giving enough of a return for shareholder, these platforms are now just gonna spy on you and hand that over to the government.

How to solve it

You break this up, you need to remove the advertisers. Just sell software. It feels like a novel idea, but I do believe that people are tired of subscriptions and the like. Just sell software. After the customer buys it, it is theirs. Very radical, I know.

When you can’t rely on the advertisers, that is when you will have to provide some value to the people that come to your Tribes server. Maybe everyone on the server lives in New York and are fans of the Knicks. Every so often, you all pool your money together and buy a luxury suite at MSG. Maybe everyone on the server loves sew and everyone not only gives out advice, but also buys items from each other’s Etsy store. You can create these small pockets of community that won’t grow too large where people can’t even remember who is on the server. Everyone will have a connection with each other.

And when you don’t need to rely on advertisers, then you don’t have to amass hordes of data. This makes it so that people don’t need to pay for large databases and storage. This means that although it won’t be free to participate on Tribes, the cost will be kept very, very low.

I think after the past 12 years, we can say that when the product/service is free, the price is way more than anyone understands.