[HN Gopher] Stop trying to make social networks succeed
___________________________________________________________________
Stop trying to make social networks succeed
Author : ZacnyLos
Score : 231 points
Date : 2023-07-06 12:30 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ploum.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (ploum.net)
| the-printer wrote:
| > Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a
| universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help
| them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to
| achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an
| imaginary universal one. It will make you happier.
|
| I appreciate the realist point of view in this paragraph and the
| two that precede it.
|
| I'd like to go a step further and propose that we should
| deemphasize the explicit desire to develop communities online for
| what feels like the sake of having an online community. Online
| communities should be derivatives of offline identities, roles,
| interests etc, more often than not. But as more people seem to
| find "themselves" in a digital landscape that isn't inherently
| social as much as it is social under certain contexts, the lines
| are being blurred, or disregarded entirely.
|
| I used to be indifferent to federated networks, but I now
| understand the appeal of them when it comes down to being able to
| engage with predefined communities.
|
| There is a lot to be said about the number one issue that
| newcomers confront being "which instance do I join?".
| s17n wrote:
| It's true that there are a couple different models of a social
| networking application - Facebook, Twitter, Wechat, and Telegram
| all of meaningfully distinctions. But basically, there's a lot
| more similarity than difference, and probably no good reason for
| more than a handful of these things to exist. The idea of a
| custom network for your community is silly - your community
| probably doesn't have any unique needs.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I think social media is a large feed stock for training AI and
| for selling advertisements. People will throw money endlessly at
| it for this reason.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| The author mixes services such as Whatsapp and telegram which are
| mostly messaging apps with "social network" features, and full
| blown social networks that revolve more around posts, followers
| and content.
|
| Meta launched a new platform today and got 10M people to sign up
| in the first 7 hours.
|
| I am lost for words. Not sure how anyone still wants anything to
| do with Meta. How can you possibly want _more_ social platforms
| by Meta. Meta couldn 't die fast enough in my opinion.
|
| And yet, millions of people signed up. I guess social networks
| can still succeed.
| kelnos wrote:
| First, understand that not everyone is like you. Many people
| are vastly different, and have attitudes and things they care
| about that do not match your preferences.
|
| Some people seem to be totally fine with the idea of a platform
| that sells data about them to third parties, and tries to track
| them all over the internet. Because they believe they get value
| out of the platform, but are unable or unwilling to pay for it
| with their own money.
|
| I'm not like these people, but I understand that they exist,
| and more or less understand why they want what they want.
| duderific wrote:
| I guess people want something similar to Twitter that is not
| Twitter, since Twitter has become a roaring dumpster fire.
|
| I've never much understood the appeal of Twitter, because the
| discussions devolve and it seems like the signal to noise ratio
| is extremely low. Also the UI makes it hard to follow threads;
| I much prefer a nested layout a la HN to whatever Twitter is.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| I am also not a regular Twitter user, but even if I were,
| under no circumstances will I join another platform by Meta.
| Haven't we learned the lesson by now?
| mrweasel wrote:
| At least stop putting social networks into products where they
| don't belong... Looking at you Github.
| colesantiago wrote:
| This is like saying stop trying to make humans communicate with
| each other.
| lapcat wrote:
| No, it's not.
|
| "Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing
| an imaginary universal one."
| paxys wrote:
| Why is a universal success "imaginary"? Very few people are
| on Twitter for neighborhood gossip. They want to hear and
| discuss celebrity news and political developments and tech
| releases and sports scores. The more people join the network
| from different countries/industries/walks of life, the higher
| these signals get.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Which is silly. The reason we have giant social networks is
| because quantity is a quality in its own right. It increases
| the likelihood that your friends/family are there as well the
| various interest one might have.
| lapcat wrote:
| > It increases the likelihood that your friends/family are
| there
|
| This is silly. You don't need social media to keep in touch
| with your friends and family. Pick up the phone, or at
| least write an email.
| esafak wrote:
| That is less convenient, which means you will do it less,
| and reserve your energy for only the closest friends. I
| don't send personal emails to anyone and I don't receive
| any either. Email is all transactional. Calling is even
| more limiting because you have to take into consideration
| the other person's hours. On the other hand performing
| these costly signals builds ties so you have a point too.
| I have been trying to schedule a physical meeting with a
| friend for a while and something always comes up.
| colesantiago wrote:
| We know in this world that isn't possible anymore unless
| you're, you know, actually their friends.
|
| Again, today's social networks want to grow in users, so it
| is not up to the author to say that we should stop making
| social networks succeed.
| lapcat wrote:
| "We know in this world that isn't possible anymore unless
| you're, you know, actually their friends."
|
| "We" don't know any such thing.
| colesantiago wrote:
| 3BN Instagram users disagree with you.
| lapcat wrote:
| [flagged]
| colesantiago wrote:
| [flagged]
| lapcat wrote:
| [flagged]
| feintruled wrote:
| For me, he's saying you don't need to TRY to make them
| succeed - they will succeed or not on their own merits, and
| for their own niches.
| pxoe wrote:
| a bigger, widely accessible success can directly translate
| into people having small and local successes with it/on it.
| people have their smaller groups, local stuff, their own
| success, which may be smaller in scale, within bigger
| communication platforms.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| Demise of twitter is.. not matching with my experience.
| jchw wrote:
| > There's no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They
| simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to
| communicate.
|
| Trying to get social media users out of "big number go up"
| mindset is really, really hard. Twitter has something like 450
| million active users, and a lot of them are miserable with it,
| especially the heavier users. But if you try to suggest maybe
| just not using it, it seems like it is a "foregone conclusion"
| that it is the only way to go, as if there's no possible way to
| just do something else. Why go somewhere where you can get 100
| meaningless "like" button clicks when you can go on twitter and
| get tens of thousands of meaningless "like" button clicks?
|
| The worse part is that this mindset is a self-fulfilling
| prophecy, because users that think this way don't think it's
| worth bothering with anything that has less than a hundred
| million users. Naturally, this helps ensure that most of the
| growth will continue to go to just a handful of highly popular
| networks, since they're the only ones worth bothering with. While
| counts of users are meaningless, there are some knock-on effects
| to having most people believe alternatives are worthless. For
| people who produce art or videos or other forms of content, it
| means that you pretty much have to use the mainstream platforms,
| because a large amount of people are unwilling to use anything
| else even to follow people they're interested in, which also
| depresses your ability to grow and succeed. While monetary
| success and internet fame should absolutely never be the goal of
| social media or the internet, the fact remains that if you are an
| artist on the Internet, you are not going to get as many
| commissions or as much business opportunity if you're not on huge
| platforms like Twitter, and that means that the financial
| sustainability of a lot of internet creative works depends on a
| few tech companies.
|
| But that's kind of the thing. That's basically WHY federated
| networks are good and we _should_ want them to succeed. Indeed,
| it is true that there is no meaningful success metric for a
| social network. However, the "success" of the Fediverse is a bit
| different: I think it "succeeds" when it becomes viable to
| publish on ActivityPub as a complete alternative to needing to
| use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But of course, that's not
| a constant value. It's not some constant amount of users. It
| depends on many factors. However, it will be pretty obvious when
| you see it, because it will come in the form of seeing people do
| healthy business over just ActivityPub.
|
| I empathize if this sounds arbitrary or pointless, but I think a
| lot of people don't grasp the impact of this. For all of its
| flaws, this would effectively mean that you could go back to
| running your own damn sites, because they can participate in
| ActivityPub just the same as anyone else.
|
| ActivityPub could fill the void left by the downturn in
| popularity of RSS, and then some.
| charles_f wrote:
| > Some communities will find a new home on Mastodon or on Lemmy.
| Some will go elsewhere
|
| I wish protocols like mastodon or nostr would allow to federate
| all of these.
|
| I am not part of any "social network community" that I know of
| (apart from maybe HN) but I still occasionally use twitter,
| mainly as a substitute for blogs of the people I'd like to hear
| from, and get some comedy. They are from diverse communities and
| I certainly won't join everything and check everything.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| I am from a generation which grew up with phpBB forums of various
| kinds, and I loved the format.
|
| I still struggle with understanding why we can't remain within
| decentralised forums. Was it such a hassle to check like four
| URLs a day to see what was happening in the threads you
| participated in? Are centralised feeds such a core necessity to
| us?
| explodingwaffle wrote:
| > "feeds"
|
| People keep using this word when talking about what's been
| happening with the internet recently- but they don't realise
| how close it is to the actual answer. RSS has been around
| forever and it's exactly what is needed. A feed reader can
| check thousands of blogs, comment sections, youtube channels,
| newsletters (imagine never being asked for your email randomly
| ever again), podcasts, whatever.
|
| The real issue is (and should be) discovery. Make feeds more
| obvious (say, it was integrated into modern browsers. Some sort
| of first class "feed detected" icon) and then all you need is
| search, which has also been solved forever (hopefully it stays
| that way...).
| atestu wrote:
| > Make feeds more obvious (say, it was integrated into modern
| browsers. Some sort of first class "feed detected" icon)
|
| Firefox and Safari used to have this during the web 2.0
| years, back when RSS was at its peak:
| https://blog.markheadrick.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/12/fir...
| https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
| content/uploads/archive/image...
|
| The browsers themselves were RSS readers.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Not to us, but there are other folks out there.
|
| As I've implied elsewhere, I like little geek communities too,
| but the big easy networks can and have fulfilled an important
| purpose of essentially being a better world "town square" than,
| e.g. network news.
|
| They're incredibly far from perfect, but they've done a LOT of
| good, and are likely to continue to be necessary.
| lapcat wrote:
| > they've done a LOT of good
|
| And a LOT of bad.
|
| Overall, do the costs of global social networks outweigh the
| benefits? I'm skeptical.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I would say that up to the point when they started for
| forcefully manipulating their content for direct payments
| or indirect "retention", yes, the benefit outweighed the
| costs.
|
| By 2015 they were almost all incredibly harmful and mostly
| valueless.
| jrm4 wrote:
| As a Black person in America, I'm not in the _slightest._
| Documented and spread proof that "we're not crazy, look at
| this stuff that actually does happen."
| Arainach wrote:
| All of social media suffers from a paradox: you need enough
| users contributing valuable content to make it worth showing
| up, but not so many that it degrades to memes. The key benefit
| to centralized social networks is solving this by having a huge
| user base but letting you curate the content you engage with
| (subscribing to users, joining subreddits, etc.). Small forums
| have a huge discovery problem.
|
| I loved forums, but with the modern legal landscape, liability
| for uploaded content, DMCA requests, etc. I would never want to
| run/moderate one - and that was true even before the current
| swarm of LLM-generated spam.
| pier25 wrote:
| I think it's more that forums weren't really made for boosting
| engagement. It's like email, just a tool to do something not to
| keep people addicted. GenZ look at forums and they go eeewww.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't think the problem is user retention so much as upkeep.
| That the web is an _extremely_ adversarial environment.
|
| Popular forums are high value targets as they both tend to be
| central in the PageRank graph (so link spam has historically
| paid off very well as black hat SEO); while also sitting on
| large user databases with associated emails.
|
| So there are non-stop intrusion attempts and ceaseless bot
| spam. Operating a forum is a lot of thankless maintenance. It's
| not made better by the fact that a lot of the older forum
| software had nightmarish upgrade procedures.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| tl;dr: Anecdotally, the attention span of the person is now
| three seconds. If you can't grab that three seconds; next.
|
| > Operating a forum is a lot of thankless maintenance.
|
| If you are to run any sort of site, you just kind of got to
| expect it. Who here thanks HN for their service?
|
| Their favorite IRC server SysOP, Discord server owner?
|
| Forum's were slow on delivering content.
|
| The world is now driven by media and that was a PITA to host.
| If the webmaster didn't allow image uploads and even when so,
| you couldn't normally link elsewhere; were forced to register
| an account. Wait for a verification email, wait for an
| administrator to approve your account and then gain 10 posts.
| Text is time consuming to read and too write, like this
| comment.
|
| They were more a leisure activity rather than what the
| internet has become now. Adaptability never happened and with
| the failure of evolving with real-time with the next
| generation who were starting out with internet enabled phones
| and gadgets caused their downfall.
|
| They may of suited the generation, however they were not a
| fit for the upcoming younger generations. And if you can't
| target and gain their attention; expect to go extinct.
|
| Code bases were too lumpy and such a mess; to make any
| modifications, to adapt it to anything else took a fair chunk
| of time and skill.
|
| Proboards, Zetaboards, Invasion tried. Services where you
| could spawn an instantaneous forum for you and communities.
| It had momentum and than fell apart as did the death of
| AngelFire, GeoCities.
|
| My two-cents.
| somsak2 wrote:
| > Who here thanks HN for their service?
|
| you see people thanking the mods like dang on here all the
| time. it's basically a meme. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRa
| nge=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
|
| even if they didn't, why should they? this site is used as
| advertising for YC and their job ads. why should they get
| extra thanks for maintaining a forum for its ad space? do
| you also thank Facebook or Twitter for its moderation?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > tl;dr: The attention span of the person is now three
| seconds. If you can't grab that three seconds; next.
|
| I don't know this is true in general. Only in very noisy
| environments, which is like the opposite of what a forum
| is. The harder you clamor for attention, the harder it is
| to actually capture it because you're creating an
| environment where capturing attention for more than three
| seconds is impossible.
|
| If you create a low-noise environment, you can capture
| attention for a long time.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Maybe so after reading your comment. I've updated my post
| to reflect anecdotally.
|
| If I'm browsing for music, and if the introduction
| doesn't catch me, I'll randomly skip to somewhere in the
| middle and if then normally pass.
|
| It's known if a comment is wall of text, like this one
| it's ignored.
|
| I don't own any social accounts apart from HN, Reddit and
| Discord. Never owned any yet how the internet drives out
| content I feel it effects all.
|
| As far as sites go, I look at very few. And if there's
| slow flow of information I tend to get frustrated.
|
| We are all hunting for that dopamine hit.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Was it such a hassle to check like four URLs a day
|
| People decided to check more than 4. It's inevitable, you find
| a forum and start checking it, then find another, then another,
| and soon you have dozens of low volume forums, all adding to a
| small amount of messages.
|
| RSS would have solved this problem, if the sites that published
| feeds actually made the feeds work. There's no need of
| centralization of the creation, but you must be able to
| centralize them someway.
|
| And also, sharing a login between all of them is a very nice
| feature. Managing accounts is always a bother.
| eddieroger wrote:
| It's cynical, but because McDonald's only has so many humans to
| do social media, and they can't be everywhere all the time, so
| it's in their better interest to hype the fast horse and back
| it. We wouldn't want them infiltrating our forums, but they
| want our attention, and it's more cost effective to get it from
| Twitter and Threads than a million decentralized forums.
| happytiger wrote:
| It's my belief that the continued attempt to dominate the social
| networking space is related to predicted upcoming societal
| changes.
|
| They are the hot glue underneath a AML/KYC-based identity
| verification systems at scale and the sticky requirement for
| anyone looking to build such a system at scale. There is no
| better verification than social context for identity, and at core
| these are giant graph databases that have personal histories
| which can be leveraged for social credit and reputation
| applications.
|
| Watching these oligarchs jockey to try to concentrate people into
| social platforms is clearly more than a casual priority, so
| that's why I suspect multiple motives that exceed the intrinsic
| social value of the platforms. It's been my learning that the
| really massive companies in Silicon Valley a often have a back
| door leverage-style data platform to try to build a monopolistic
| position at some future inflection point in addition to their
| "front and center" business.
|
| I further suspect is a land grab to try to build the "WeChat of
| the West," which explains quite clearly the relatively sky-high
| Twitter purchase (at least vs revenues) price as simply attaching
| a financial valuation to a portion of the initial userbase more
| than makes up for the purchase price.
|
| People are very focused on the front side applications (the
| social network hook) but the true value of these businesses is in
| building the next generations of FICO.
|
| When I read comments like, " _Our communities are worth a lot
| more than the underlying tool used at some point in time._ ", and
| " _We are selling them, we are transforming them into a simple
| commercial asset for the makers of the tool we are using, the
| tool which exploits us._ " I do wonder if people think as I do
| that it's far more extensive than simple social networking
| companies. The approach to global finance is incredibly clear:
| social credit is the new core and communities are the oil of
| social credit.
|
| In the end it's all about financial inclusion, as is laid out in
| this WEF article that explains just why social credit
| applications are so important to financial inclusion and global
| growth:
|
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/this-new-approach-to-...
|
| So, consider that niche social networks do not serve this purpose
| very well, and so there is little incentive to "build small" at
| this stage. I'd love to see more social network applications that
| are focused on quality connections myself, and for a while that
| was Reddit. But Reddit'a value was really just the aggregation of
| all the independent communities that used to exist in forums and
| similar into one website.
| mypastself wrote:
| While there are definitely those in positions of power
| attempting to exert control over populaces, you could also
| consider that not everything is necessarily the result of a
| perfectly coordinated conspiracy, and that Musk paid a
| particular price because he thought it would be hilarious if
| the number was a weed reference.
| happytiger wrote:
| I don't see how conspiracy theory enters any of this
| whatsoever.
|
| These are the declared plans from the man himself:
|
| https://me.mashable.com/tech/27088/twitter-20-undergoes-a-
| ma...
|
| That isn't exactly hidden.
|
| Perhaps the true intentions of Meta/Zuck/Facebook are
| underdisclosed, but after their KYC fiasco with crypto it's
| clear they want to go there and just haven't been able to
| cement the regulatory relationships yet or simply got on the
| wrong side of the regulatory compliance community and aren't
| yet reingratiated into their good graces. But you will see
| another attempt at direct financial instrumentation on their
| properties as it's the most valuable application of their
| data.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/28/faceboo.
| ..
|
| And as to coordination, to deny attempts to concentrate power
| through coordinating the military industrial complex would be
| a foolhardy argument at this point, though there are clearly
| competing groups and philosophies.
|
| I'm suggesting it's more like a classic SV land grab...
| because that's what it really is. And people's connection and
| resultant financial enablement data is the prize underneath
| social networks, because it clearly is. And the person doing
| it is talking openly about what they are doing, so calling it
| a "conspiracy theory" is patently incorrect as a conspiracy
| would require some kind of secretive collusion to exist and
| _all of this_ is discussed and public information shared by
| the architects themselves.
|
| We should be concerned about how concentrated data collection
| and management is as the power is profound when combined with
| mature AI, not accusing one another of "conspiracies" at this
| point. I've long advocated for something like a "Privacy Bill
| of Rights," but I fear the genie is too far out of the bottle
| now that the ruling classes have become aware of the profound
| technological potential of the data expressed through social
| finance.
|
| After all, as they say, to control a city, control the water.
| A country? Food. The world? Finance.
|
| I also don't think it particularly matters what price was
| paid or whether it's in the SEXY theme or 420 reference, as
| it's common to see these kinds of number games among
| purchases by the super rich in my personal experience. It's
| the general degree of size category of valuation that
| matters, not the numeric humor Elon injects into his numbers.
|
| How many houses have I seen go for 1,234,567 or 2,345,678 in
| the offer paperwork? Same for cars and watch prices. I'll
| say: more than a few. It's all a game of points, leverage and
| reputation at the highest personal wealth levels. The self
| declared bon vivants consider themselves reincarnated Pharos
| destined to inherit the earth and love to play financial
| games with numbers on purchases and sales. That doesn't make
| them any less of a business decision.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Couldn't _disagree_ more.
|
| Big "winners" in this space can be dangerous, but they can also
| be an important tool/unfortunate necessity when it comes to
| national or global "news."
|
| Which is to say, yes, I want a good replacement for Twitter
| because social media more-or-less succeeded where "the Rodney
| King story" failed.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I want a good replacement for Twitter because social media
| more-or-less succeeded where "the Rodney King story" failed.
|
| Could you please explain this? I know what the Rodney King
| story is, but I don't understand the relevance here.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Right -- I'm a little older than many, but to explain:
|
| When the Rodney King thing happened, black folks like myself
| were like "Finally, the world will see how horrible the cops
| can be. We will have a trial and get justice."
|
| That didn't remotely happen. It's not until social media that
| we got e.g. BLM and even the concept of a "Karen." IMHO, it's
| been absolutely instrumental.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I'm a little older than many
|
| This has nothing to do with age. I wouldn't recommend
| assuming that you're older than me.
|
| > "Finally, the world will see how horrible the cops can
| be. We will have a trial and get justice."
|
| > That didn't remotely happen.
|
| How has that changed? The George Floyd verdict for example
| is an extreme rarity. Cops are almost always acquitted.
|
| > It's not until social media that we got e.g. BLM and even
| the concept of a "Karen." IMHO, it's been absolutely
| instrumental.
|
| How does social media affect the verdict of trials? And
| what does "Karen" have to do with this?
|
| As you'll recall, the Rodney King verdict resulted in
| massive multi-day riots in Los Angeles, without any help
| from social media, which didn't exist yet. The world was
| paying attention.
| dspillett wrote:
| I read that as "the Rodney King story" being the story in the
| traditional news or later documentary format. Without the
| social media explosion, the situation might not have got the
| attention it needed meaning the story fizzled out (or, more
| cynically, the police would have been able to control the
| narrative long enough for the general public not to pay
| attention because something else was happened elsewhere to
| take over the news coverage).
| lapcat wrote:
| I don't understand this comment either, because the Rodney
| King beating was in 1991, long before "the social media
| explosion".
| telotortium wrote:
| Rodney King was before my time, but the main Rodney King
| riots happened after the cops involved were acquitted,
| right? The main difference does have a little to do with
| social media, in that the George Floyd death video could be
| reshared in real time. The main reasons BLM took off in
| 2020 is that it had already taken off in 2014 and,
| importantly, most people were in COVID lockdown for 2
| months by that point and had become a little stir-crazy.
| telotortium wrote:
| I think the George Floyd/BLM movement has already largely
| failed, despite all the attention it got in 2020 and the amount
| of donations given to BLM and related causes - at least $10
| billion.[0] Besides Juneteenth, what are the actual long-term
| effects of the movement in terms of material benefits for BIPOC
| people? DEI and ESG got a lot more popular, but that was always
| for the benefit of the consciousnesses of (largely white) PMC
| progressives, along with the relatively small number of
| minority employees hired as a result. Even those are getting
| rolled back in the face of economic headwinds, conservative
| counterattacks, and the Supreme Court striking down affirmative
| action, with an opinion whose logic can easily extend to
| affirmative action by private employers.
|
| [0] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/white-journalists-
| are-t...
| vvoyer wrote:
| This is well written. It reminds me of a 10+ years old article on
| ploum.net, only in French but here's a translation:
| https://ploum-net.translate.goog/ploum-en-j2ee/?_x_tr_sl=fr&...
| sentientmachin3 wrote:
| I would like a more strict version of this article, "Stop trying
| to make social networks".
| dgb23 wrote:
| > There's no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They
| simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to
| communicate.
|
| This is something I didn't really understand when I was younger.
|
| In every online community that has had some amount of hype
| surrounding it, there are prominent figures either hyping it up
| further or spreading doom and gloom when the metrics don't match
| their expectations.
|
| What I didn't get when I was younger was that this doesn't need
| to affect me at all. Unlike the people mentioned above, my
| financial or reputational interests don't align with the size of
| the online communities I participate in. For me it comes down to
| "do I enjoy participating".
|
| If you aren't an advertiser, streamer, content creator or
| anything of the sort, you don't really benefit from hype, growth
| or any of those things. So don't let these things affect your
| enjoyment of talking to people online or playing video games with
| them etc.
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...
|
| >Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three
| Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
|
| ...
|
| >Prodigy was upset that people were, by and large, using the
| free communication service they tossed on there just to have
| more content and not their weird Random Garbage You Don't Need
| Storefront. And in many ways, that complaint has only gotten
| louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start
| buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying
| us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and
| start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and
| start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.
| izzydata wrote:
| Even a lot of regular people these days are caught up in the
| addiction of getting the maximum amount of engagement out of
| everything they post online. They don't want to talk to people.
| They want thousands of strangers to praise them. So the bigger
| the network the more likely they can accomplish this.
|
| I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be
| worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers
| doing it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > They want thousands of strangers to praise them.
|
| And the irony is that the people who think this way tend to
| be less likely to have anything worthwhile to offer.
| pier25 wrote:
| The human brain wasn't made for this.
|
| Seeing the effects of social interactions with millions of
| people (albeit virtual) does something weird to the brain.
| kelnos wrote:
| I agree, but I also think it's a completely unsurprising
| outcome. Pre-internet, there were lots of people who wanted
| to be famous, and idolized movie and TV stars and the like.
| With these sorts of internet platforms, those types of
| people actually do have a shot at being well-known, if not
| outright famous, in a way.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| > I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be
| worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers
| doing it.
|
| "Prank" channels come to my mind at this. Like the one that
| got shot semi-recently for messing with people, who then said
| it was "worth it".
|
| It's a shame how hard people can hyperfocus on fake Internet
| points and even let it hurt their actual relationships. I had
| a friend who was intensely upset over a comment suggesting a
| new camera angle because it "made their channel look bad" to
| be constructively criticized.
| fullshark wrote:
| Yeah I've gone back to traditional bulletin boards just because
| the conversation quality is much higher and therefore
| enjoyable. When people are racing to go viral or get "upvotes"
| you get lowest common denominator junk food, which is the life
| blood of these social networks which are about stealing your
| time and showing you ads.
|
| Unless someone generates a social network based on a paywall
| and exclusivity that somehow delights the business model just
| doesn't work for the user.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I'm of two minds on certain kinds of complaints. A lot of
| content creators talk about getting throttled or having their
| reach restricted.
|
| While I do think content creators should be treated fairly by
| platforms to make the game fair... This doesn't really affect
| me and it often feels like that's all certain content creators
| will fixate upon, rather than making quality content.
|
| I think it's sometimes a strategy of deception, to make it seem
| like the speaker is so much more important or dangerous that
| they need to be suppressed by the powerful.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > A lot of
|
| Isn't that the issue? How is "a lot", and is that number
| representative for everyone who publishes text, video,
| pictures,... on the Internet or, more limited, the Web, or,
| even more limited, a handful of online platforms?
|
| > making quality content
|
| I'd argue that quality is in the eye of the beholder. Online,
| both trash and treasure co-exist. Moreover, one man's trash
| is another's treasure as quality is, always, subjective value
| attribution.
|
| The big challenge has always been discovery. The so-called
| "big" social networks got big because the introduction of a
| "wall" or a "feed" changed how we, denizens of the internet,
| interact with the Web: from "pull" to "push". The vast
| majority of internet users don't collect and curate links:
| they just consume a feed that pushes updates from their
| "network". Or "subreddits", or "channels".
|
| Incidentally, how's consuming feeds of pushed content all
| that different from flipping television channels? Chomsky's
| Manufacturing Consent does echo eerily in this digital
| future.
| costanzaDynasty wrote:
| Social media is over if you think trading Musk for Zuckerberg is
| progress.
|
| On a side note though, Meta just changed their whole narrative in
| one day after being dragged for the last year over the Metaverse.
| If I were an investor I'd be very bullish on Meta. What was
| considered a colossal failure in over hiring helped result in a
| chance to add a new growing platform.
| dahwolf wrote:
| There's definitely a growing social media fatigue, a feeling of
| saturation or boredom. That feeling will only accelerate as
| social media further fractures. The increasingly attractive
| option is not to switch, instead to quit.
|
| The type of social media figures that are broadcasters will
| face a particularly challenging situation. I recently heard a
| Chrome Devrel person complain about it. They used to just post
| announcements on Twitter and take some feedback there as well.
| Now they have to go and try to reach this audience across
| Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Discord, Bluesky, Threads...a
| growing list. And there's no network effect where you get a
| mass following for free, you have to painstakingly build it up
| on each network independently.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Unsure what the point of this article is. I've never seen any
| person or even VC company make the claim that they're on to the
| one and only 100% coverage network. I'm quite sure everybody is
| aware that social networks come and go and that at any point in
| time there will be multiple of them.
| douglee650 wrote:
| This piece reads like an elaborate retelling of the Tower of
| Babel
| rcarr wrote:
| I really want someone to make BoringBook - it's free until a
| billion people have signed up and then after that it costs $1 a
| year. It gives you a page you can post to and customise like
| myspace, an encrypted messaging client, local group pages and
| business pages. There are no ads, other than whatever businesses
| post on their pages. There are three feeds: your immediate
| network (which is the default), your local network (things from
| other people and businesses in your town) and the global feed.
| All of the feeds are capped at 100 posts to prevent infinite
| scrolling with the feeds refreshed every hour. Nothing else. It
| will never make more than 8 billion dollars a year (which is what
| would happen if everyone on the planet signed up). BoringBook -
| the social media utility company.
| kelnos wrote:
| How do you pay for infrastructure and employees before getting
| to that 1-billion-user mark? If you take on VC funding, they're
| going to expect you to shoot for the moon; $1/user/year is not
| going to cut it for them.
|
| So where else will you get the money? Do you really think you
| can get a loan for that? Sell bonds? I doubt it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is
| going to cost you an epic fuckton. So, to actually pay for that
| you're going to either ask for VC money or show ads.
|
| But then it turns out that money you got from the above will be
| far and beyond more than you'll ever earn by having people pay
| for the service. Your VCs and ad networks will want more
| engagement so you'll start down the dark path of increasing
| that all while showering yourself in money and not giving a
| single shit about the average person.
| rcarr wrote:
| > first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is
| going to cost you an epic fuckton
|
| I highly doubt that the actual essential infrastructure
| required to run it is going to cost more than 8 billion
| dollars/year. Twitter costs about $5 billion a year. Let's
| charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in
| $16 billion a year, enough to cover the costs, offer some
| dividend, and put some money aside for a rainy day. We're not
| fucking about with R&D because we're BoringBook, we're making
| a boring product that doesn't need to do anything fancy. It's
| a utility company. Pension funds can invest in it safe in the
| knowledge that they will get a small but reliable dividend
| year after a year. The silly VC money can go towards
| innovative tech like AR or growing meat in petridishes or
| medical research or something. We don't need it fucking
| around and messing with the social structure of society
| anymore.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Your numbers just don't make sense. First, if you had a
| bare bones social media site, it could be ran for $1b a
| year. Lets use that number.
|
| Ok, so who are you getting that money from? I mean from me
| that $1 is some inconsiderable fraction of my income, it's
| nothing. But there lies the problem with income inequality
| in the world. For a huge portion of people you're asking
| for a pretty damned considerable payment for something they
| can get for 'free' from somewhere else. That other ad ran
| company is paying off influencers and 'cool kids' to be
| solely on their product with their ad and VC money while
| charging nothing. It will grow quickly while your site
| founders.
|
| The problem here is you want to develop a 'rational' and
| 'reasonable' product. This would be useful if humans in
| mass were either of those things. The world would be a much
| better place if people were not dumb, including myself. But
| here we are.
| rcarr wrote:
| Well if we was doing it properly, then it would be pegged
| to an hour of minimum wage or half an hour in whatever
| country you was operating in.
|
| > That other ad ran company is paying off influencers and
| 'cool kids' to be solely on their product with their ad
| and VC money while charging nothing. It will grow quickly
| while your site founders.
|
| Maybe. But what if it was a cool kid celebrity who made
| the site in the first place? There's a bunch of them out
| there, and quite a few who want to make the world a
| better place. Maybe if the vision was explained to them
| they'd get on board for free.
|
| And the counterpoint is that there's been plenty of
| social networks that have had cool kids jump on board
| that have turned out to be duds. Everyone was raving
| about that audio chat room one during the pandemic and I
| can't even remember the name of it now.
| kelnos wrote:
| >> _the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is
| going to cost you an epic fuckton_
|
| > _Let 's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now
| raking in $16 billion a year_
|
| With 1 billion users, $2/year gives you $2B/year, not
| $16B/year.
|
| > _offer some dividend_
|
| Honestly, I think we explicitly don't want this. We should
| go for a non-profit model, where the company is required to
| put most/all of its revenue toward running the business,
| and cannot distribute dividends. If we have shareholders
| and dividends and whatnot, that's just an incentive for the
| owners to push for greater profits so their dividends go
| up.
|
| You mention utilities, and that just makes me think of my
| local electric/gas utility, PG&E, which is a public, for-
| profit corporation, listed on a stock exchange. Years ago
| they even used to pay a dividend. They completely suck, and
| have been responsible for people's deaths. This is not at
| all the model we should strive for when it comes to a
| social-network-as-utility.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Stop trying.
|
| Stop trying to make anything better.
|
| Stop trying to create any kind of social space.
|
| Just read my blog. Subscribe to my newsletter.
|
| That's all you need.
| jfax wrote:
| Better than what?
| pixl97 wrote:
| #5 Hey stop talking and start buying things. Internet not
| supposed to make only some money. Internet supposed to make
| all money. It's the rules.
|
| https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-
| other...
|
| Better than #4 of the garbagetown list of social media
| trajectory.
| Apreche wrote:
| Social networks wouldn't have any users if they didn't solve a
| problem and/or fulfill a need that people have. What problem is
| it that they solve? IMO they solve exactly two problems.
|
| 1) People with no technical skills or knowledge (can't setup
| their own web site) want to be able to publish text, photo, and
| video content to the public, to a community, and/or to their
| direct contacts. They do not want to have to use any technology
| other than their phone, and they refuse to pay for this with any
| amount of money.
|
| 2) Since there are texts, photos, and videos being published,
| people want to be able to gather all the published content that
| interests them in one place for convenient reading.
|
| As long as people have these needs, someone will make software
| that fulfills them, regardless of how they measure success.
|
| Because people can't be serving the content directly from their
| phone, we have no way to do this today without some form of cloud
| hosting. Non-technical people can't set that up themselves. And
| even if they could, it would cost them money. The only solution
| we have right now is for some organization to create and manage a
| centralized-ish platform.
|
| Even if that organization were a benevolent non-profit, it needs
| to pay the bills for hosting and labor. You could maybe ride on
| donations, but good luck with that. Therefore, the organization
| needs to somehow extract some value from the non-paying users.
| This inevitably leads to advertising, selling user data, locking
| users into a walled garden, and all the other mechanisms we have
| seen that harm the platform in order to get the resources to keep
| it alive.
|
| And this is the key to making a successful social network that
| will last. How can you meet those two needs, and pay the
| bandwidth and storage bills, without doing any of the things that
| make the platform suck? Nobody's figured it out yet!
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The cost per user to maintain these kinds of platforms is
| extremely low. That's why advertising supported models work. So
| that means if you charged for a platform, you wouldn't need to
| charge each user very much on a monthly or yearly basis. Such a
| platform could still be one that require no technical skills or
| knowledge from the users, who just want to publish their stuff.
|
| Many people (especially tech people) have an almost psychotic
| adversity against any kind of paid online services. But do we
| always have to cater to those people, who'd refuse to pay $10
| per year for an ad-free social network? I even suspect that a
| paid social network would be of higher quality, since the
| payment is an effective barrier against bots and some low-
| quality users.
| [deleted]
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| > Many people (especially tech people) have an almost
| psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services.
|
| > who'd refuse to pay $10 per year
|
| I've not actually seen many services that charge $10 per
| year. Most instead charge $5 per month / $50 per year. The
| few services I know of that do charge in the range of what
| you specify are near universally regarded as really good
| value.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Yes, $10 per year was just a number, but maybe not too far
| from the truth. I've seen estimates of $5 to $30 to $300
| per user and year for sites like Instagram.
|
| Something for $10 per year is usually a promotion, and
| maybe a good place to get started. Since the social media
| giants have been giving it for free for a decade...
| akhosravian wrote:
| Modern platforms are for most folks tools of compulsive
| consumption more than they are tools for meaningful
| communication. More users = more content = more consumption.
| More consumption means more chances to serve ads for a
| business built on that model.
| danjoredd wrote:
| >Many people (especially tech people) have an almost
| psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services.
|
| That is what confuses me...we are strongly in favor of
| privacy and tracker blocking, but then get upset when we have
| to pay money to join a social media. Are there any third
| options to support platforms that don't require payments, or
| advertisement viewing?
| kelnos wrote:
| > _we are strongly in favor of privacy and tracker
| blocking, but then get upset when we have to pay money_
|
| Speak for yourself; whenever I have the option to pay to
| remove ads on a service I get value from, I sign up nigh
| immediately. And on top of that, I'm always running with
| aggressive ad and tracker blockers running.
|
| If given the option, I would have paid a small yearly fee
| to use Instagram back ~10 years ago when the platform was
| actually decent and didn't do icky things to push
| engagement up.
|
| Of course, the problem is that most people would not have
| paid a yearly fee to use Instagram, so if payment were
| required, it would be a ghost town. And, all things being
| equal, advertisers would prefer that there isn't an ad-free
| paid option, since then the ads reach fewer people.
| somethingreen wrote:
| > The cost per user to maintain these kinds of platforms is
| extremely low
|
| > Many people (especially tech people) have an almost
| psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services.
|
| I'd guess it is exactly because we know how cheap running
| base social network is, how little value is in all the
| feature and fidelity overhead and realize that ultimately we
| aren't invited to pay for the service, but for the whole
| bullshit business built on top of it.
| ActualLupu wrote:
| My strongly held belief is still that Messenger apps and SMS are
| still the dominant social media apps and are the only ones worth
| investing in the success of. At the end of the day, no one can or
| wants to manage a gigantic social media presence outside of
| commercial applications. Most people are really only invested in
| social media so they can make better connections off of social
| media.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| Not everyone is looking for a small self-hosted space for their
| friends and family and local community. Heck why do I even need
| an online social network for that when I can just go out and talk
| to them? The vast majority of users on networks like Twitter are
| looking to connect with a wider world. And "success" in those
| terms simply means having a critical mass to make such a network
| sustainable and interesting (and maybe profitable). Zuck himself
| has stated multiple times since yesterday that his idea of
| success for Threads is 1 billion users. That is a lot fewer than
| 8 billion, but it is success nonetheless.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Mental illness. A big chunk of people on Twitter are not well
| up top. Normal people go to the bar to watch baseball or play
| boardgames or something.
|
| It's not normal to be a Krassenstein or a BrooklynDadDefiant or
| whatever - those people are nuts.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| It is important to point out that people like the
| krassenstein brothers or brooklynDadDefiant are not real
| people in the same sense as any Joe off the street is with an
| opinion. They are front-men for SuperPACs and they get paid
| by orgs like ActBlue. None of their ideas are ever their own,
| and they closely follow the daily order of battle from the
| DNC. Their engagement is also less-than-organic. Krassenstein
| were originally banned for paying for engagement from east
| asia and using custom software and fake accounts to
| artificially inflate their reach. The point is never to
| influence anyone. Their game is manufactured consent.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| I stopped reading after he declared reddit and twitter dead.
| That's ludicrous. They may have taken some body blows lately, but
| dead? Okay I guess.
| mattbuilds wrote:
| I think the VC world's obsession with growth has tainted how we
| (me included) view things, especially stuff like social media.
| There is a fixation with growing and doing it rapidly that I
| believe is harmful. I don't know when this switch flipped, but
| I've felt it gradually building up over time.
|
| Things can just be what they are, grow naturally and then die
| naturally. I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to
| achieve an unnatural growth is probably not good for both the
| quality of the product and the long term stability of it.
|
| I would love to see more niche things grow organically and fill a
| role for some people, at some time and not try to be everything
| for everyone. Because when that's the case, does anyone really
| enjoy it?
| Guest9081239812 wrote:
| I understand growing rapidly, especially for a social network,
| where you need to quickly reach a certain amount of user
| content per day to provide value. If you can't get to that
| point fast enough, then you'll crash and burn.
|
| I think the bigger issue is equating success with active user
| count. Social networks love to brag about their number of
| active users. It's all they care about. It doesn't matter if
| they're making the world a worse place, ruining lives, making
| people depressed, turning everyone into swiping zombies, taking
| information that was previously accessible and moving it inside
| a walled garden. That doesn't matter. If they have more active
| users, they're more successful.
|
| However, look at HN as a counter example. It's a decent
| community and I think the reason for that is not setting growth
| as the metric of success. HN has enough content to keep people
| interested. What's the purpose of more users after that point?
| Yes, they'll create additional revenue, but if they can't
| provide equally engaging content or comments, they're just
| going to drag the quality of the community down (a trade that
| most businesses gladly accept).
|
| This is the world we live in though. Everyone is focused on
| numbers. All people care about is followers, likes, or
| subscribers, and they'll happily sell their soul if they can
| grow those numbers. Companies don't care, they'll promote
| whatever garbage gets the most clicks and keeps those active
| users up. Advertisers don't care, they'll sponsor whoever has
| the highest number of views. It's a sad state of affairs.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| It has really made me pessimistic about tech and products in
| general. There's the free and great stage, then the market is
| captured, then enshittification, then death.
|
| I don't get excited about new products or new tech because I
| know the cycle. Hype then bust. _New thing_ comes out and I 'm
| just meh about it, because it'll bust soon enough so it's not
| worth getting invested in it. Or _new version_ will come out
| next year and break what I was used to, or it 'll be an
| implicit subscription of having to buy new thing every year.
| But it's not really going to fix itself because it seems like
| everyone else loves the dopamine rush from the hype cycle, and
| they don't really seem to care about how ephemeral everything
| is.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > then death
|
| ...or a perpetual zombie state as a "brand" that has
| absolutely nothing to do with its original owner. Trusted
| names from my youth (GE, Westinghouse, Frigidaire, Maytag,
| Zenith, etc.) mean nothing these days. Packard Bell has been
| resurrected twice now.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| The British transport YouTubers I follow, particularly Jago
| Hazard, every time they mention the Great Western Railway,
| are careful to remind us that it has no relation to the
| original company of that name.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I count that as being the same as death. The name may live
| on, but the company is long gone and the name is
| meaningless.
| [deleted]
| krooj wrote:
| The way you get around this type of crap is by diving deep,
| and when you think you've gotten deep enough, go further.
| Academia, for all it's faults, is a fantastic way around the
| bullshit you get with industry hype, by mere virtue of open
| peer scrutiny. You want to understand whether the current
| "AI" hype will last? Research and understand the theory and
| academics behind it - therein lies your truth, and if it
| doesn't align with what you see in industry, you know it's
| grift. Hint: it's usually grift.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Once you've identified the grift you can rest easy knowing
| that eventually it will collapse and the grifters will be
| left with nothing but society-warping amounts of money.
| fullshark wrote:
| And you get to grind away until death but rest easy
| knowing that you're virtuous based on your own
| internalized definition of virtuous.
| plagiarist wrote:
| I try to avoid all products with vendor lock-in specifically
| because it is so predictable.
| 0xParlay wrote:
| It's hard to overlook the role of institutional capital in
| shaping the landscape of nearly everything.
|
| As a teen I grinded for a few months building a b2b SaaS. A
| competitor launched a better version for free. The founder
| had a Harvard MBA and used VC funds to build this marketing
| tool.
|
| Growing a product organically puts you at a disadvantage to
| companies that can ignore market fundamentals for years at a
| time. And if you do manage to grow, acquisitions that amount
| to life changing generational wealth is hard to ignore - and
| it's not like the future of your product is guaranteed.
|
| Wall street needs returns. Tech is just the first to adapt to
| the loot-box economy but it'll spread. Anything that can be
| turned into a subscription model will be. Air-bags to air
| conditioning. We will own nothing and like it.
| konschubert wrote:
| I think the way to do it is by growing inside a niche that
| is sufficiently narrow that it isn't interesting for a big
| competitor.
| tarsinge wrote:
| I have a small agency and a product in a niche market and
| even there big consulting and IT services companies are
| starting spin offs to address these niches, and even
| bidding at a loss (especially when you take into account
| pre sales investments) to displace remaining niche actors
| like us.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| A lot of people reject political ideas (i.e., regulations)
| because they have an idealized love for our free markets.
| Meanwhile small _profitable_ companies are going out of
| business to larger _unprofitable_ companies.
|
| It begs the question, how did the larger unprofitable
| company become large in the first place? It wasn't by
| delivering goods and services at a fair price, it was by
| currying favor with those already in power. The romantic
| view that to succeed in a free market you sell goods and
| services at a fair price doesn't hold.
| [deleted]
| pawelmurias wrote:
| Loot-box is gambling not subscriptions.
| leereeves wrote:
| I've come to believe this is just the latest version of a
| very old (and illegal) tactic: predatory pricing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
| rtkwe wrote:
| The big wrinkle is they're mainly free while they're burning
| VC money on user acquisition trying to 'win' some niche they
| can exploit to justify a crazy evaluation. The free money
| fueling that early golden age directly requires the eventual
| enshittification in the current model because the VC doesn't
| want a stable profitable enterprise they're all swinging for
| the unicorn fences.
| sebastos wrote:
| I get exactly what you mean, and I've felt the same thing:
| this pervasive stormcloud over my head as I wonder "is
| EVERYthing doomed to an eternal september?!"
|
| However, I think this depressing outlook is an artifact of
| how much technology is fixated on social capture in a digital
| space. In that medium, yes, it's all just ebbs and flows. The
| article put it beautifully: we kept thinking that usenet or
| AOL or myspace or facebook were going to win, but it has
| taken a few decades for us to realize that in actuality they
| are just fashion trends that happen to require some very
| technical people to knit.
|
| However, that doesn't mean that _technology_ is this way. And
| in fact, this speaks to the odd word mangling we've all
| adopted in which "tech" has started to mean "social web
| oriented silicon valley startups or juggernauts". Technology
| is so much bigger than that, and true innovation stands on
| its own and persists through time. An actual _invention_
| doesn't need to win hearts and minds, and it doesn't need to
| set trends. A wheelbarrow is a wheelbarrow, and once somebody
| conceives it, it will always be useful whenever you need
| wheelbarrow-like functionality. Its utility will be obvious
| and non-controversial. It is still possible to use our
| intellects to think of pure pareto improvement arrangements
| of atoms and bits that do a useful job. I think the
| engineering profession and the world has gotten a bit
| distracted from that truth. Uncharitably, you could blame it
| on a greedy obsession with taking over the world, which comes
| at the expense of doing well-defined and prosaically useful
| things for the world.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > It has really made me pessimistic about tech and products
| in general. There's the free and great stage, then the market
| is captured, then enshittification, then death.
|
| This is an accurate summary. And it's completely normal to
| not be excited about this. I love tech, but this isn't tech.
| The tech is just bait to achieve market dominance. The new
| age vultures do everything in their power to eliminate
| competition, the very fuel that makes markets work. So it's
| not even business in the traditional sense either, it's more
| similar to political power games.
| esafak wrote:
| You are older so this cycle is relatively brief for you. For
| a young person, a ten year run is like forever.
| lapcat wrote:
| > It has really made me pessimistic about tech and products
| in general. There's the free and great stage, then the market
| is captured, then enshittification, then death.
|
| Mark Zuckerberg an hour ago: "Our approach will be the same
| as all our other products: make the product work well first,
| then see if we can get it on a clear path to 1 billion
| people, and only then think about monetization at that
| point." https://www.threads.net/t/CuW5-eWL34x
| starbugs wrote:
| "We will figure out the business model later"
|
| Meaning: Once we have hooked enough users, we'll make them
| the product.
|
| Free lip piercing...
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Corollary:
|
| "We have a business model, its built on bullshit and blue
| skies."
|
| Quote from my wise father about being careful when being
| recruited by a startup that sounds too good to be true.
| starbugs wrote:
| "We have been featured at TechCrunch. There's basically
| no risk anymore."
|
| Your father could have saved me...
| flangola7 wrote:
| It is so foreign to me, to choose greed as your personal
| identity. These individuals will gleefully stride onto a
| stage with a microphone and boast about ideas and actions
| that 1/100th of would fill my mind with such incalculable
| guilt and embarrassment that I would never sleep or show my
| face in public again.
| Given_47 wrote:
| Love this. And it's very disheartening how society
| fetishizes how much personal wealth one accrues, so much
| so that it's natural for the youth to grow up idolizing
| that and not once step back and consider the larger
| effect it has on the _community_.
|
| An interesting thought is how many people are
| inadvertently bad, simply as a byproduct of what I
| touched on above
| wavemode wrote:
| lol it's so explicit
|
| at this point he's the world's leading expert on the
| enshittification cycle
| yummypaint wrote:
| Framing things this way suggests that the reason the
| metaverse is failing so hard is because facebook insists
| on jumping straight to enshitification without spending
| time on the stages users actually enjoy.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I think you've actually got it a bit backwards.
|
| Meta did not spend _enough_ time thinking about
| monetization in the long term, realized they were in a
| really rocky position due to Apple and Google owning the
| platforms Facebook ran on, and then desperately had to
| come up with a _new_ platform they _could_ monetize.
|
| They've pushed it so hard now because they didn't think
| about monetization early.
| mym1990 wrote:
| The ironic thing is that he lists monetization last, but
| simply by uttering that sentiment he tells us that they
| are really thinking about monetization first, aka the end
| goal of the product.
| akhosravian wrote:
| I don't think he's ever suggested Facebook is anything
| but a for profit enterprise, but I think it is an
| extremely cynical take that "build a product a billion
| people would use before thinking about monetization"
| actually means "think about monetization first".
| username135 wrote:
| The literal only goal of a public company is to make
| money for its shareholders; shareholder wealth
| maximization.
|
| I think your altruism is misplaced because they most
| certainly are thinking of $$$ first and foremost.
| tarsinge wrote:
| > The literal only goal of a public company is to make
| money for its shareholders; shareholder wealth
| maximization.
|
| No it's only a theory that emerged in the 70's
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine).
| praisewhitey wrote:
| They opened it up for brands days ahead of the general
| public. Of course they're thinking of monetization first.
| hobo_in_library wrote:
| I mean, did you think he was pouring money into this out
| of the goodness of his heart?
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| rchaud wrote:
| It will always be a fascinating piece of historical
| trivia that Zuckerberg was represented as an iconoclastic
| hacker in The Social Network, when he had already turned
| into a turgid adtech executive by the time the movie came
| out.
| konschubert wrote:
| Many companies fail because they take on investment and then
| have to grow into their valuation. The fast growth creates
| enormous inefficiencies inside the company, because management
| and tech cannot keep up. This often mans that the company
| eventually has to shut down.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| On more than one occasion I've worked in places where we were
| asked to be at our tidied up desks because VCs were about to
| be paraded through the office.
|
| Every time there were more of us. Basically, "look at how we
| are burning through your money by hiring all these people.
| Growth!"
|
| Now, the actual growth, daily active users and all, that is
| an area of rampant fraud, but VCs seem to be OK with it until
| the company runs out of runway. THEN it's a total scandal,
| even though all they need to do is pop the hood for 5 minutes
| to see how the numbers are arrived at.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think it's a problem outside of the VC-adjacent space too.
|
| There's a sense that if you can't solve a huge societal problem
| (ideally several), it's not worth doing anything. It's really
| disempowering mindset because most of those problems are really
| hard to solve.
|
| It's like all the focus is on what effect the thing you're
| building will have on the world, rather than just building
| something because you think it would be kinda neat if it
| existed.
|
| The latter type of projects are the only sorts of projects I've
| had any success with. It's really liberating to not have to
| play some five dimensional chess game guessing what will make
| other people behave in certain ways and just using your own
| judgement to build what you like.
| smcleod wrote:
| I feel like I'm talking about how harmful the insatiable desire
| for growth is on an almost daily now. I couldn't agree with you
| more.
| skizm wrote:
| > I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to achieve an
| unnatural growth is probably not good for both the quality of
| the product and the long term stability of it.
|
| Right, but that's not the point. VCs (and most founders /
| anyone holding equity) just want to get our before the hockey-
| stick graph starts turning into an S-graph. The product itself
| is mostly irrelevant (to everyone except the users that is).
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| > but that's not the point. VCs (and most founders / anyone
| holding equity) just want to get our before the hockey-stick
| graph starts turning into an S-graph.
|
| Most efficient system in the world, ladies and gentlemen
| nottorp wrote:
| Most of HN would always assume you have to compete and capture
| the market, no matter what you're talking about.
| mattbuilds wrote:
| If you are taking hundred of millions in funding, sure you
| need to capture the market of "all the people". If you build
| something that's just for a certain group of people, you can
| compete by just having a better product that specifically
| addresses those users needs.
|
| Look at HN, I know, run by a VC and it's not without some
| issues, but it is still better than most forums and social
| media to me specifically because of what it doesn't try to
| do. It has a specific goal and doesn't feel the need to try
| and extend beyond it.
|
| My ideal is that in the future we will more communities like
| this, where it's built to address a group of users needs and
| not try and expand beyond it. Where the content and
| information is shaped in a form to meet the specific needs of
| the group using it and not generalized into the lowest common
| denominator so ad sales can go up. It feels unlikely at this
| point, but I still have hope.
| hinkley wrote:
| > There is a fixation with growing and doing it rapidly that I
| believe is harmful. I don't know when this switch flipped.
|
| Gradually? I happened around 1995 and it's only ever slowed
| down for recessions.
|
| It's not a trend of companies it's a trend of funding sources
| and strategies. If you take fifty million in funding, those
| guys want it back. And they want it back 10x. So when your
| favorite little company takes a funding round that is five
| times more money than they've ever seen total, let alone at
| once, your favorite little company is about to change into
| something ugly.
| xeromal wrote:
| This is a huge tangent, but I've started harboring similar
| feelings for video games. Go read comments for the latest game
| and 90% of the comments will be about item drops, skins, loot
| drops, whatever. It's absolutely mind boggling because all
| those things IMO suck the fun out of the game which it to kill
| something, kill someone, or explore some world.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I winced hard at the $70 price tag on Tears of the Kingdom -
| but damned if I didn't get more than my money's worth. One of
| the things that makes that game so fun is that the whole
| thing is just there in front of you and you are largely
| allowed to approach the game however you want. One of the
| best games ever in terms of respecting the player's
| intelligence and creativity - just gives you a set of tools
| and says "fuck around and find out."
| xeromal wrote:
| Tears of the Kingdom is a perfect example of doing it
| right. It respects the player and treats them well. Jedi
| Survivor does too.
| pimeys wrote:
| Nintendo is sometimes very good at what they do. Another
| example is the Pikmin series. Miyamoto's favorite. It's
| never been a real seller, but they do another version every
| ten years and it gets better every time. One day we'll look
| at these games and realize how much they invented.
|
| I was first a bit torn about Tears of the Kingdom, it was
| hard to get back to the world of Breath of the Wild. Then I
| found this cave, and then it was 2am, and four hours
| disappeared somewhere. Now I can't let it out of my
| hands...
| EA-3167 wrote:
| The key is to just pass on those sorts of games, because
| there are still plenty of others that don't play with the
| customer that way.
| xeromal wrote:
| I'm actually arguing against the gamer in this case. For
| the most part, I enjoy those games because I don't work
| myself up over loot drops, skins, etc.
| emadabdulrahim wrote:
| The mobile gaming era pioneered the approach where game
| design is fundamentally driven by the game's monetization
| mechanics.
| xeromal wrote:
| It's mind boggling how many people enjoy that though.
| You're right. Clash of Clans et all really changed the
| gaming dynamic.
|
| Just as an example, Halo Infinite came out and it had
| warts, but also had a good fundamentals for gameplay. Good
| speed and weapons. Every single comment was about armor
| cores and skins. I just didn't get it.
| tnecniv wrote:
| The thing a lot of these AAA devs don't seem to get is
| that what works for Clash of Clans doesn't work for AAA
| games most of the time. Also, the Clash of Clans devs are
| liked by the player base because they take community
| feedback very seriously (and, as a counter point, the
| Clash Royale devs are despised because they don't).
|
| Buying a monthly pass for one of those games ends up
| feeling like a pretty good deal because it enables you to
| increase your engagement with the game by a lot for what
| feels like a good deal. AAA shooters that go down this
| rabbit hole feel like they're spending more development
| effort pushing skins I don't want while giving a half-
| backed game with the promise of improvement in the future
| that often never happens.
|
| For the price of a monthly pass for Clash games, I'm
| easily getting more hours of enjoyment than dollars
| invested each month.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Buying a monthly pass for one of those games ends up
| feeling like a pretty good deal because it enables you to
| increase your engagement with the game by a lot for what
| feels like a good deal.
|
| You have no idea how right you are. It increases your
| engagement. Not your enjoyment.
|
| > Good speed and weapons. Every single comment was about
| armor cores and skins. I just didn't get it.
|
| You have to play for something. To reach the end of the
| story. To grow a thing (city builders, minecraft). Or...
| for skins in a competitive shooter. But there are no
| skins unless you pay real money for the game you've
| already paid for. Oops?
| pnielsen2 wrote:
| This exact thing made me stop wanting to use reddit
| Loughla wrote:
| I would like to add completion mechanics and badges to
| this list of things as well. Reddit is obsessed with 100%
| completion. It stops being a game and starts being work
| at some point.
|
| I don't know when it happened, but at some point in the
| past it stopped being about playing games for fun, and
| turned into playing these things for something else -
| status maybe? I don't know how to describe what I'm
| thinking.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yeah, I had to remove myself from gaming subs.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| The surprising thing is how captive we our to the
| chemical responses of our brains. These companies measure
| out dopamine like a drug and use their games to drip-feed
| it methodically to maximize your cash spend.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is one of the major reasons why I stopped playing most
| games entirely. When the fun has been monetized out of them,
| what's the point?
| xeromal wrote:
| I mostly play single player games these days because
| they've been spared. I played a Plague's tale a few weeks
| ago. Really strange premise but a lot of fun!
| nottorp wrote:
| Single player games are not competitive enough for the
| people who believe in "the microtransactions are only
| cosmetic".
| xeromal wrote:
| That's generally true, but I'd point out the Souls games
| which can be very rewarding for competitive people.
| nottorp wrote:
| Who are you competing with, speed runners? I've played
| all of them but I never thought i should look online and
| find some other player to compete with in kill time or
| something.
|
| Edit: oh funny. I forgot they had pvp in them. Because
| I've always ignored it and in Elden ring you can't get
| invaded unless you ask for it, so I never was.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I only play single-player games anymore because I won't
| play any game that requires a connection to a server
| somewhere. So it's not a stance against multiplayer games
| (I still play old multiplayer games with my friends. They
| just don't require connecting with a third-party server)
| but a stance against phoning home.
|
| That means there are quite a few single player games that
| are off the table for me as well.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Game publishers must fear the day when a FOSS game engine
| will be interfaced with a FOSS AI capable of creating
| credible worlds and interacting NPCs.
| afterburner wrote:
| More recycled garbage that I can ignore
| prussia wrote:
| [dead]
| swat535 wrote:
| I've basically given up on AAA titles and don't bother
| anymore. The only games I can tolerate now are indie and
| story driven games like "The Quarry"[0]. I think studios such
| as Ubisoft are the biggest offenders in this space, if you
| look at all their latest release , it is all free to play,
| looter shooter "live service" games. On second thought,
| everything related to tech is becoming junk in general: from
| Social Media to Games to Subscription based Note apps to
| Mobile apps.
|
| [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1577120/The_Quarry/
| Myles65 wrote:
| Yes, it's a disaster. A lot of industries are out to maximize
| profits, even if it means destroying their own product. What
| economic forces would drive you to ruin their product? Are
| these corporations looking ahead economically and concluding
| it's best to destroy their product and just accept the money?
| tempodox wrote:
| > I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to achieve an
| unnatural growth is probably not good for both the quality of
| the product and the long term stability of it.
|
| The people getting rich with these methods don't care about
| quality or stability.
| sneak wrote:
| Public social media is one to many publishing.
|
| Mass publishing is more useful and valuable the more people you
| can publish to at once.
|
| It has nothing to do with VC. "Don't pick fights with people
| who buy ink by the barrel" long predates vulture capitalists.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Mass publishing is more useful and valuable the more people
| you can publish to at once.
|
| Absolutely, but that was happening long before the likes of
| Facebook, Twitter, etc., came around to monetize it and
| convince people that they are the only ways to do it. They're
| cultural parasites.
| lancesells wrote:
| I believe it's really the outcome of capitalism and greed
| taking something that was organic (forums and chat) and
| monetizing it to death. Facebook monetized your family and
| friends, Instagram monetized your vanity / creativity, etc.
|
| You can see this incorporation of the internet with the classic
| Craiglist image: - https://scalecuts.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/04/Craigslist-... -
| https://mediacloud.theweek.com/image/private/s--X-WVjvBW--/f...
| djbusby wrote:
| For me, I think the big mind-shift was the dot.com
| explosion/implosion.
|
| VC driven growth at all costs ("GaaC"), monetize later. That's
| when I first saw it.
|
| Prior to that what I remember was mostly building a small
| business.
|
| On one you grow and grow fast, needing multiple rounds, to
| exit.
|
| The other was build a business with one or two rounds, then
| have a product that generates profit.
|
| The GaaC method also means spreading the company into all kinds
| of things - maybe away from the core - which I think causes
| loss in the original value prop.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's funny because having lived through that, we all thought
| the implosion of .com companies that worked this way, during
| the .com crash, was a repudiation of this strategy. But it
| came back within 10 years, and stronger.
|
| I also remember clearly that at the beginning of things with
| Facebook there was a strong sense from the press of "how the
| hell will this thing ever make money?" and big questions like
| that around the IPO. Hell, there was that going on for Google
| around their IPO, too.
|
| There was a brief period from about 2001 to 2007 or 2008 or
| so when there was perhaps more responsibility to try to start
| on a more even revenue-earning foundation with sounder
| business plans. But that all blew up in the 2010s.
|
| It's possible this was all tied into the massive cuts in
| interest rates, and QE etc after 2008 that made debt really
| cheap.
| jtode wrote:
| At this point there needs to be a very big and popular anti-
| capitalist push before anything good comes back.
|
| I'm all about the human rights as my first concern so any
| fellow SJWs reading can rest assured they don't need to
| interrogate me about whether I know about this or that type of
| oppression. BUT, can I just for a moment talk about how
| literally tasteless life has become?
|
| Here in Canada, we have for my whole life had a different
| Special K than USans. Closest I could describe it is it was
| like flat rice krispies with a different kinda flavor, sort of
| like the American one but not completely.
|
| The private equity that owns the Kelloggs brand now shut down
| the Canadian factory, which is the only place that made that
| Special K. Now we have "Original" on our shelves, in an extra
| bit of gaslighting.
|
| I like candy, always have. I took the notion the other day to
| go find some Kraft Chocolate Flavor Caramels. Lately they're
| called Fudgies. Most lately they're discontinued.
|
| Nothing small or niche that doesn't produce a specific profit
| margin is safe.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| While this is true and I think most VCs are idiots, there is a
| natural phenomenon of the internet which allows for exponential
| growth and which means that startup = growth is a very real
| thing. What VCs and a lot of startups try and do is fake the
| actual utility of a product through forced marketing and
| Glamour.
| mattbuilds wrote:
| Yea I actually think it's similar to something that happens
| with my 2 year-old. He thinks putting shoes on means we go
| outside. So when he wants to go outside, rather than saying
| "outside", he goes and gets his shoes.
|
| The internet' scale allows great products to grow
| exponentially. A bunch of great software, sites, and tools
| took off and grew at a rapid rate. But we took the wrong
| lesson from this and thought "rapid growth=great product". So
| VCs have put growth above everything else, and are hoping
| they can figure out a product after, like a 2 year-old
| thinking that putting on his shoes will mean he gets to go
| outside.
| davidguetta wrote:
| > Things can just be what they are, grow naturally and then die
| naturally. I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to
| achieve an unnatural growth is probably not good for both the
| quality of the product and the long term stability of it.
|
| Maybe this actually IS, the natural way to grow and die for a
| global social network
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| This sentence made me chuckle:
|
| _> But, to this day, there are more people in the world without
| an account on Facebook than people with one._
|
| So that's an upper bound of what, _four billion people_? I think
| basically anyone watching would consider that a success!
|
| When people are wondering which social network will "succeed",
| they're not watching the different apps duke it out like a sports
| tournament. They just want to find a space in which they can
| communicate with most of the people they care about.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Stop trying.
|
| Many people are trying ...
|
| The problem with trying is that no one agrees.
| wunderland wrote:
| Incredibly reductionist argument. Success is impossible to define
| therefore all social networks are failures?
|
| There are clearly properties of a social network that users would
| like to see: ease of use, reach, quality of content and
| moderation while also allowing for openness and free speech.
| Working toward a future where something like this exists at scale
| is worthwhile and a workable-enough definition of success.
| kelnos wrote:
| That's not what the article is saying at all. The author is
| saying that any social network can be a success as long as it
| meets whatever metrics they care about.
|
| A tiny private forum that only serves two people is successful
| if those two people only care about talking with each other.
|
| Zuck will consider Threads a success if it gets to 1 billion
| users; that's still "only" an eighth of the world population,
| but that doesn't matter because the people running it get to
| define what success means to them.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Incredibly reductionist argument. Success is impossible to
| define therefore all social networks are failures?
|
| Incredibly reductionist interpretation of the article.
| [deleted]
| somsak2 wrote:
| > The lesson here is simple: you are living in a small niche. We
| all do. Your experience is not representative of anything but
| your own.
|
| hmm, really disagree here. if you look at history the
| consolidation of "networks" is insane. we used to be way more
| fragmented, now if you pick the top 10 social networks worldwide
| you probably cover 90%+ of the internet connected population.
| hell, Facebook alone has 40% MAUs of all living humans!
|
| a few hundred years ago what eg newspapers had that kind of
| reach? nothing even remotely in the same league.
| derbOac wrote:
| I agree that the fates of social networks can develop and evolve
| intrinsically over time, and that there's maybe too much effort
| placed on advocating for their use with an immediate horizon as
| the goal.
|
| However, it's pretty clear that network effects matter in social
| networks and other forms of IT. In some sense this is precisely
| why some people feel burned at the moment, in part.
|
| In that regard, I don't really blame people for selling a social
| network or manipulating uptake, even if I don't like the network
| itself. It's how these things proceed in part.
|
| I also agree with the author that it's ok if a community is
| small. I've come to the opinion that sometimes having a smaller
| community can be a good thing.
|
| On the other hand, some platforms -- the web, email -- _are_
| pretty dominant, and we 've lacked an open social network
| platform that solves the problem of putting content distribution
| directly in the hands of content producers. Part of what
| Mastodon, Bluesky, and Lemmy are trying to do is be that
| platform.
|
| I also think it's normal for developers to want to make as many
| users of their products happy. So to the extent they make lots of
| users happy, they're happier?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > we've lacked an open social network platform that solves the
| problem of putting content distribution directly in the hands
| of content producers
|
| I don't know about "open", but YouTube does this pretty well
| IMO. Search results aren't based on your profile, and it all
| seems pretty un-"managed", in a Twitter Files sense. I know it
| does do demonetization if people complain, but while it's not
| perfect, it's not unreasonable.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| YouTube prioritizes "authoritative sources" when searching
| for certain topics, which means channels of legacy media
| outlets.
|
| Are we sure that your profile doesn't affect search results?
| I'd expect the opposite, considering it's Google and one of
| the things they're known for is changing search results based
| on your profile.
| danjoredd wrote:
| I think it does. I remember that some of my more common
| search results changed to include children's content after
| I went on a lazytown binge out of nostalgia
| CppPro wrote:
| [flagged]
| Zambyte wrote:
| > Like every human endeavour, every social network is there for a
| limited duration and will be useful to a limited niche of people
|
| On a grand enough scale, sure. If we expand the scope of "social
| network" very slightly to consider things like the web and email,
| this fact becomes less clear. I am fairly young, and I suspect at
| least email will be used for the rest of my life. The difference
| between the modern landscape for new protocols and the landscape
| when the early internet protocols were made is that there was
| little struggle for power. People made things they wanted, and
| they took off if other people wanted the same thing.
|
| Now we have a bunch of competition for what is essentially the
| same experience. Does that mean there will never be one dominant
| protocol (or _shudders_ , one application) for social media? I
| wouldn't bet on that claim. I think it will just take longer to
| reach somewhere that we land on as a common denominator.
|
| It seems to be that a protocol must be flexible enough to support
| the division of communities and migration of users, like the
| article says is human nature. Protocols can support that though -
| email is one such protocol that does. ActivityPub is another,
| seems to be the route that we are headed towards right now.
| mikece wrote:
| If more emphasis was placed on social _groups_ than networks I
| think it would be better all around. Hands-down the best online
| group of which I 'm a member is a Mastodon group who are fans of
| the same podcast. There are similar groups of fans of this
| podcast on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere but their Mastodon
| server is orders of magnitude more active because we're there for
| the same reason.
| gochi wrote:
| I agree with most of what was said except one tiny piece, I don't
| think we should give up on a universal social network. We have
| some of the pieces, but the puzzle still isn't solved and I like
| seeing people challenge that.
|
| The rest is definitely true though, all social networks are
| doomed for the same result: disappear into the void or become
| riddled with ads and so many additional services that the core
| network moves on. We'll keep repeating this cycle until the
| universal social network is actually achieved. I'm ok with that,
| having made several transitions already it's nothing new.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I agree with most of what was said except one tiny piece, I
| don't think we should give up on a universal social network.
|
| That wasn't one tiny piece. The central thesis of the article
| was against the idea of a universal social network. Literally:
| "stop dreaming of a universal network."
| gochi wrote:
| A tiny piece can be integral. But I would disagree with the
| idea that it's the central thesis. The rest can operate
| without it just fine. I would even go as far as to quote you
| on your interpretation about the article being stop dreaming
| of a universal network: "Incredibly reductionist
| interpretation of the article."
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| We blame ads and bad decisions by the ownership, but also the
| users are responsible for turning each social network into its
| own eternal September and I don't know if human nature can be
| solved.
|
| Can't we enjoy the Twitter replacements being smaller
| communities and leave it at that, enjoy it while we can? Since
| it's a long understood pattern that a community will degrade as
| it gets larger, even without Musk type shittery.
| pxoe wrote:
| internet is kind of The universal social network.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-06 23:02 UTC)