[HN Gopher] Why is no one making a new version of old Facebook?
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Why is no one making a new version of old Facebook?
Author : louisbarclay
Score : 93 points
Date : 2024-02-20 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (12challenges.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (12challenges.substack.com)
| onychomys wrote:
| Yeah, it's an interesting question. 15 years ago every party and
| community meeting was a facebook event. Now we just do it via a
| messaging service or email or whatever. I didn't notice it
| happening, and I'm not really sure why it happened. Presumably
| it's a critical mass sort of thing, plenty of people don't use
| facebook anymore and so it's not as good of a way to get things
| set up.
| geek_at wrote:
| Oh yes and I remember a time where people who were not on
| facebook kind of stopped existing in your mind. Where "I don't
| have facebook" was feeling like an insult on the community.
|
| Times have changed now my facebook feed is only ads (from
| facebook or people in my list promoting their own thing) and
| news articles where people are writing things to each other
| that they would be ashamed for if read to their parents
| notpachet wrote:
| > Where "I don't have facebook" was feeling like an insult on
| the community
|
| Now LinkedIn is like that.
| rimeice wrote:
| The network crumbling effect
| Aurornis wrote:
| Depends entirely on the group. I still have some activities
| that organize primarily via Facebook.
|
| And honestly, it's fine. HN talks about Facebook with out of
| control hyperbole, but I have no problem logging in and finding
| what I need. I could see how it would be a problem for people
| without impulse control or with social media addictions, but
| then again HN is a well known time waster website with social
| features as well.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> 15 years ago every party and community meeting was a
| facebook event._
|
| It's still like this in Europe. Comedians, bands, bars, cafes,
| basically any kind of venue and enternatiner, organize and
| announce their events mainly on Facebook. There isn't another
| alternative that's as seamless and all encompassing as Facebook
| for this.
|
| With one facebook account I can follow all the bands, bars and
| cafes in my city without them having to build their own
| website(they don't even bother) and me having to subscribe with
| an account to each of them separately.
|
| Also, the marketplace is great for selling old crap and for
| finding plumbers, electricians and various handymen as
| Facebooks is their main free advertising avenue.
|
| SO IMHO, it's far from dead, its just not the cool new thing
| anymore that gets you hooked, like TikTok, but unlike TikTok
| it's actually more valuable.
| skrbjc wrote:
| I'll say that groups on facebook for various interests still seem
| quite active, but these are more targeted for a shared interest,
| like espresso machines, rather than a group of people that know
| each other and are interacting in a group, like XYZ High School
| Class of 2024.
| pests wrote:
| I have a bunch of the latter group types too.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Totally agree with this. I remember when I first got on Facebook
| (it was when they just started opening it up to non-college
| students), and I was so excited about an easy way to keep up with
| old friends I cared about but had lost touch with.
|
| I remember the very first update that I hated, when Facebook
| moved to much more of a "Twitter-like" interface, and the feed
| felt like much more disjointed, "stream of consciousness" stuff.
| Now it's all that on steroids - none of the social media
| platforms actually care about keeping you connected with your
| friends and family. My current FB feed is a joke, 95% of my
| friends rarely/never post anymore, it just got too exhausting.
| bluGill wrote:
| I make it a point to hit "block all from" everytime a friend
| shares something from someone else. Then after two hit blocks
| from I'd done and log off. It had made my feed better, but not
| by much. It makes my life better though because it stops me
| from endlessly scrolling in hopes that maybe the next post will
| be what my friends are doing.
|
| I encourage everyone to do the same - if enough do maybe
| facebook will notice and hopefully get back to what makes them
| valueable: what my real life friends are doing.
| blowski wrote:
| I don't check the Facebook feed at all. I have to use it to
| post and read updates in a community group, and nothing else.
| Never had Instagram or Threads. I use WhatsApp as little as
| possible.
|
| I mostly rely on email and SMS.
| optimalquiet wrote:
| I used to do the same. And I got it to a point where my feed
| was great, I could check it every few days and get updates
| from people I know and community organizations.
|
| But the issue is, it seems Facebook is now injecting
| algorithmic content into the feed, so suddenly my feed was
| full of random internet drama (that the algorithm obviously
| pushed because it was maximally controversial, leading to
| more engagement).
|
| I deactivated my account not long after, and don't miss it.
| jtbayly wrote:
| That just tells FB that you aren't there for your friends, so
| they should fill your feed with their own crap.
| munk-a wrote:
| It's sisyphean though - if your friends aren't sharing random
| crap you'll still have "sponsored content" injected to your
| feed once every... three items? Sometimes more often?
|
| Facebook refuses to give you content without an equal serving
| of advertising and it makes their value proposition so
| worthless. I want to read updates from my friends - I don't
| care about other things... if you want to throw in some
| banner ads then whatever - but in-feed pollution is at an
| insane level.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Twitter does the same damn thing now too, though I continue
| using just because they allow community notes on the placed
| ad posts, which is hilarious. Nothing like dickheads trying
| to sell alibaba trash for $25 getting shouted at by
| community notes and everyone in the replies laughing at
| them.
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| I don't know why but for the past couple of years Facebook
| will show be exactly one post from my friends followed by
| endless scroll ads.
|
| If I refresh I get a different recent post followed by
| endless scroll of ads. Many of the people on my friends
| list are frequent posters but there's no way to see their
| posts without getting lucky with my one slot or going to
| their page.
|
| I've tried turning off plug-ins/extensions and various
| browsers and nothing has fixed it.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Facebook lately has gone through phases where my feed was
| full of downright creepy sexualized content, and I'm no
| prude. There are a few communities on Facebook that don't
| exist anywhere else that I would rather not leave, but the
| next time I get put on the feed for every third picture being
| either a "sexy sport girl" or an entirely nude breastfeeding
| woman I might delete my account for good.
|
| This time after "show fewer posts like this" and several
| blocks my feed stopped being like that after a few days...
| but still. Yuck.
| altruios wrote:
| the way to fix facebook is to stop using facebook!
|
| I shed my facebook 8 years ago now (around the Cambridge
| Analytica fiasco). There was a giant relief not unlike
| drawing a fresh breath from almost drowning underwater after
| having done so. You can do it too!
|
| I do use discord, as that's significantly more efficient at
| doing what facebook has been trying do to (keep current with
| non-local friends), while at the same time not relying on
| ad's to do so. I get no targeted advertising on discord.
|
| I encourage everyone to delete their facebook, (move any data
| they want off first), and explore the open internet again.
|
| The "value" you get from facebook is often just a thin veneer
| over content designed (and timed) to stimulate your cortisol
| levels.
|
| So just don't use it: that is the answer; this is the way.
| bluGill wrote:
| The problem is - as the article says, there is value in the
| social stuff that nothing else provides.
| altruios wrote:
| discord. 100% of what facebook provided. 0% (so far) of
| any of the enshittification.
|
| comparing the two: facebook offers literally nothing
| (other than a viewable dropbox like profile for your
| pictures, which is redundant to me)...
| marssaxman wrote:
| Facebook still has all the event invitations.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Discord does not offer updates from my local city
| government, nor from the local library, nor does it have
| the equivalent of local "buy nothing" groups.
|
| Discord is more synchronous than Facebook, and without
| notifications hygiene, will feel overwhelming to people
| who are used to shouting into Facebook's void and
| checking it every once in awhile.
|
| I also dislike Facebook, but it's disingenuous to pretend
| that Discord is a slot-in replacement.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I left Facebook in 2018 and it was very nice. I worried about
| missing those friends, but I realized that the real world
| friends I see and text with regularly are more real than old
| schoolmates having a baby.
| jonfw wrote:
| You can't block everything... facebook now shows me posts
| from groups I'm not even in and features comments from people
| I'm not connected with. They're not going to run out of
| groups
| blindhippo wrote:
| Honestly, it's just easier to block/drop Facebook entirely
| and actually talk to the people I want to talk to directly.
|
| Sure I miss out on some things, but I still have friends and
| family and I still talk to them. I won't make any broad
| moralistic/judgemental statements here, but for me at least
| I've found this to be a return to a healthier relationship
| with a number of people.
| kardianos wrote:
| 100%. The original "facebook" was just that. State what classes
| you have, have an easy way to connect with others in those
| classes.
|
| The feed is horrible. Probably good for monetization. But I
| just choose to remove myself from that product.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| News feed is when it broke. It was described as "stalker mode".
| Before to see your friends you had to purposefully visit their
| page and see what had happened. you had to go to another
| friends page to see their comments on that friend. There was
| some implicit privacy in all of this.
|
| At the same time it's probably the greatest business success of
| facebook.
| popularonion wrote:
| People forget how much of an outpouring of anger from users
| there was over News Feed when it came out.
|
| The public reaction to the original News Feed in 2006 would
| be a good topic for some 20-something to research and go
| viral posting about.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| I wonder why people don't want to give their private data to yet
| another platform. Absolute mystery.
| mcphage wrote:
| I think the question is not "...give their private data to yet
| another platform" as "...give their private data to a
| different, possibly less hostile platform"
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For one thing this is the mother of all two-sided markets.
|
| I made my own content-based recommender which only needs 2000
| judgements from me to work really well. If I wanted to make a
| social network of some kind I am going to need thousands if not
| millions of users, with the exception that there is some room for
| products like discord where somebody makes a private instance
| which will not need to get that big. In the past, people who
| started social networks and communication apps of various kinds
| would use spammy tactics to get enough users to have a scene.
| Today I think it's a lot harder to do that and when companies try
| to jumpstart the process, like TikTok or Temu, they spend
| hundreds of millions or more on advertising.
| pixl97 wrote:
| "Network effects" is pretty much the default answer to the
| question in the headline.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Which begs the question, is there a way to dethrone something
| like Facebook? Because those network effects are increasingly
| strong.
|
| Perhaps if the AVP reaches the masses, Apple will layer a
| social layer there and that will become our new social
| network.
| AdrenalinMd wrote:
| Instagram and WhatsApp could have remained independent, but
| they were acquired by Facebook.
|
| This suggests that anti-monopoly laws may not be effective.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's funny.
|
| There have been narrow time and place windows where
| investors have been willing to bet on social media,
| roughly the 2005-2010 era in Silicon Valley and the
| 2017-current period in China.
|
| It's conjectured that one factor is the size of the
| cultural zone, it is easy for a site to get established
| in a big country like India and then move to a small
| country like Belgium, but to go to the other way is
| thought to be impossible.
|
| There was a time when it seemed the route for a social
| media startup was to go public, after Facebook went
| public that window seemed to close and the next business
| plan became "get bought by Facebook". On one hand, events
| like this
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/wh
| ats...
|
| seem like an orderly way for Facebook to keep ahead of
| the next big thing, bit I think if they had to do it
| every year for some new startup they'd start to feel that
| it is like extortion so I imagine Facebook has used
| whatever pull they have with VCs to suppress investment
| in this sort of company in SV. (I wish I had some
| evidence and/or specifics!) And of course Facebook can't
| keep buying competitors forever because _eventually_ the
| antitrust cops will wise up.
|
| I found this article
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-twitter-
| faceboo...
|
| but it strikes me as pretty silly. Since Twitter has
| shown some weakness the competitors we've seen move in
| are _not_ scrappy commercial startups but instead
| Facebook with Threads, Bluesky by the founder of Twitter
| and Mastodon which is whatever it is but it sure isn 't
| commercial.
| eschneider wrote:
| Going from small -> large zone WORKS, and is what
| Facebook did. (Harvard -> more colleges -> general
| availability). The thing that makes it work is a sense of
| exclusivity. Small (can) == cool. And you can capitalize
| on that a bit.
|
| It's not easy, but it's doable.
| roody15 wrote:
| My take... Reddit clones .. Facebook clones get shut down pretty
| quickly by the government as soon as they start to gain any
| traction.
| deprecative wrote:
| If it's infringing then they're not viable. However, there are
| plenty of Reddit-like sites that are out there. The issue isn't
| functionality. As always in these matters it's that they cannot
| reach a critical mass of users.
| CRCPowershroom wrote:
| You can't shut down a decentralized alternative, which already
| exists with the Fediverse.
| NoblePublius wrote:
| Old Facebook now exists in group chat
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Pretty much this.
|
| Apart from friend discovery, group chat pretty much fills that
| niche. It has the advantage that you are more likely to get
| normal social feedback (don't be a dick, or shit thats nice)
|
| Old facebook is a function of its time. Like london coffee
| houses were the ferment of social, commercial and political
| change, they were only that because of time, place and social
| conditions.
|
| New facebook will need to be mobile first, more about personal
| connections than one sided showing off.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| They did already. It's called VK. The last time I logged in it
| looked exactly like original Facebook.
| patates wrote:
| VK is much better but still has a lot of recommendation in the
| feed going on.
| noja wrote:
| This one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_(service)
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Yep. Russian facebook clone.
| simbas wrote:
| because it exists
|
| mbasic.facebook.com
| zwieback wrote:
| Sometimes I ask myself "why don't we have Windows File Manager or
| Norton Commander anymore" but then when I find an old version and
| try it out it's always "ah, right, time has moved on and
| nostalgia is tricking my brain".
|
| I think it's a mixture of three things:
|
| 1) nostalgia, it wasn't actually that great
|
| 2) someone eventually had to pay for the initially free
| infrastructure
|
| 3) many other options
| yreg wrote:
| The commanders are still good, I use one.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > but then when I find an old version and try it out it's
| always "ah, right, time has moved on and nostalgia is tricking
| my brain".
|
| Easy to forget that the software and sites we enjoyed were a
| product of their times. The novelty and excitement of something
| new can sometimes be remembered, but it can't be recreated
| because we've all moved on.
|
| Interestingly, the closest I've come to rekindling the feeling
| is having kids. Introducing them to fun things, including retro
| things, and watching the spark of excitement and novelty is far
| more fun for all of us than I ever would have guessed in my
| pre-kid years. Underrated part of parenting.
| byyoung3 wrote:
| It's called Instagram
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It's called LinkedIn
| jdnordy wrote:
| > That would explain why messaging, which is mostly based on
| phone contacts and therefore more in the user's control, would be
| the place people now trust for their social graph.
|
| This is the reason the I wouldn't be interested in an new old
| Facebook. I'd add that Messaging Apps have significantly improved
| since the time old Facebook was relevant. They allow Group Chats
| that function like a "feed" and include images, videos, memes.
| You can even search your chat history.
|
| Group chats are basically old Facebook feeds with a select part
| of the social graph. I never thought about it this way, but they
| totally are. This is actually where Messaging Apps improve upon
| the old model. A Facebook feed was your entire social graph and
| your "posts" went out to that entire graph. I don't want this. I
| never did, really. I like the scoped social graph my "posts"
| reach in a Group Chat.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think you're right. I recently came to the realization that
| Discord has functionally replaced Facebook for me and most of
| my peers. We use it to chat, coordinate events, share pictures,
| etc. And it gives us all the tools we need to organize this
| stuff how we want, with no algorithmically curated feed.
|
| Discord is essentially group chat on steroids. And because it's
| a chat app first, it is fundamentally incompatible with the
| various "features" that ultimately enshittified Facebook.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah, Discord is it.
|
| One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid
| gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we're
| going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting
| enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple
| years out I think).
|
| Everybody has taken a few loops around the merry-go-round at
| this point, we don't need to do the whole thing where we try
| to make it look grown-up and serious. The solution is
| somewhere in the ballpark of MySpace, AIM, and IRC.
| tobymather123 wrote:
| I'm really curious about Discord for social, because
| literally _no one_ I know uses it here in the UK for
| anything social. is it a US thing? Or is it people who are
| on fringes/deep into gaming, breaking out into social use?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > Or is it people who are on fringes/deep into gaming,
| breaking out into social use?
|
| This one, mostly. Discord has the "cringe" (or at least,
| silly/quaint/unprofessional, take your pick) "uwu Gamer"
| feel _because_ that was its target demographic when it
| launched and is probably still its "home base". It's
| broken into more social uses by a wide variety of social
| groups (especially younger generations who like the silly
| Discord is for Gamers theming in a weird post-ironic way,
| because it is just memes all the way down; social groups
| built around group chats of memes can laugh about the
| silly gamer memes, too).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > One other thing about Discord that I like is the stupid
| gaming branding. We all know this is silly space that we're
| going to toss out in a few years when it starts getting
| enshittified (which will happen but it is still a couple
| years out I think).
|
| Yeah, Discord weirdly seems _more_ trustworthy by seeming
| so unprofessional and silly. Part of that is "yeah, it
| will be easy to toss if it gets worse", but part of that is
| how much on the internet "unprofessional" and "silly" is
| frowned upon. ("You'll sell less ads." "You'll have fewer
| corporate users." "Complaints" like that.) That also seems
| as much a feature as a bug: Discord's branding sells less
| ads, _good_. Ads seem to be killing the "professional"
| web.
|
| I also appreciate Discord's weird monetization tools today.
| Nitro memberships are personal in a weird way that most
| social media _isn 't_. They mostly just give you more emoji
| and other memes tools. You don't have to get your whole
| social network to buy in to the membership, you can just do
| it for fun for yourself. Same with selling the silly
| animated name plates and profile cover picks, it's mostly
| harmless fun that doesn't make the experience worse for
| everyone and encourages Discord to focus on _individual
| interests_ on the platform to keep them having fun and
| buying silly things, rather than the interests of other big
| corporations or ad buyers or "professional users".
| babypuncher wrote:
| Discord's monetization also makes them come off more
| trustworthy than other social media companies. Any
| transaction where I, the user, am also the customer,
| automatically feels more trustworthy than one where the
| user is the product.
|
| Hopefully this helps then fend off enshittifying a little
| longer than most.
| mp01 wrote:
| Yeah, it's like you can create different _circles_ of friends
| to target your messages to
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Since there are probably people on this forum that are young
| enough to not actually remember Google+'s launch (or just not
| be paying attention), this was one of its headlining features
| (limiting post visibility to specific "circles" you chose).
| It was a great idea, and would have been super useful if it
| was ever used by anyone but Google fanboys.
| samatman wrote:
| Google decided that the way to launch a new social network
| was to piss off the nucleus of it, namely, the users of its
| existing social apps. By canceling Reader, and going on a
| long, obnoxious push to unify gmail and YouTube accounts,
| two things literally no one wanted.
|
| If they'd been clever enough to make Google+ an extension
| of those things, it might have gone somewhere.
| marssaxman wrote:
| They additionally alienated many potential early adopters
| with the "real names" policy...
| cesarb wrote:
| That "real names" policy is the reason I have always been
| careful to never open YouTube while logged into any
| Google account: the understanding I gathered from the
| noise back then was that, if you ever logged into YouTube
| or Google+, and then Google for some reason decided that
| your name was not your real name, you could permanently
| lose access to more important things like Google Talk or
| Gmail.
| samatman wrote:
| Ah that fiasco! I'd memory-holed it. That was the final
| mistake, killing Reader was the first. I haven't forgiven
| them for it and I never will.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Because the network effect that Facebook has isn't present and
| even if it were, it'd be like visiting your university after
| graduating: you remember it but you can never go back.
|
| Facebook's now a dead mall for the original userbase, people born
| between 1980 and 1995. It was a great place to hang out when you
| were young but now it's just kiosks of shitposting groups and old
| people walking around saying insane things. Most of the
| Millennials I know are on a combo of other social media, usually
| a mix of IG, Meetup and Discord.
|
| I guess there's no market interest for an old FB.
| Solvency wrote:
| Because it's literally not needed. If I want to see endless
| photos of your baby, I'll ask to follow your private Instagram.
| If I want to message you, I'll either text you or IG message you.
| Hell, if I want to group message I'll text or IG group message.
| If I want to share photos I have iCloud shared albums.
|
| Besides that I live my life out in the real world. I don't need
| some weird monolithic Jurassic era social network to maintain
| relationships with people.
|
| So yeah, tastes change. The basic functionality of an old
| Facebook has been atomized and woven into the fabric of my
| regular phone usage.
| seydor wrote:
| There's like 10 social network websites like this. They are
| probably greatly enjoyed by their users, but they are not as many
| as the author thinks they are
| baxtr wrote:
| Asking this question misses the point.
|
| What needs to be asked is: how would one attract users to a
| revamped version of the original Facebook?
|
| Mark Zuckerberg, despite being a nerd, excelled in the
| distribution strategy of "The Facebook".
|
| He strategically expanded it campus by campus, effectively
| mapping local social networks into a digital version.
|
| It's pretty uncertain whether this approach would succeed today
| or if anyone would invest the same effort as Zuckerberg did.
| yreg wrote:
| MySpace attracted users without zuck.
| nostromo wrote:
| Privacy preferences have shifted pretty dramatically. People now
| understand that sharing their personal information and personal
| opinions in an open platform is high risk low reward.
|
| So we now scratch our social itch with group chats and private
| groups.
| avgDev wrote:
| I disagree, maybe in tech circles. From my experience normal
| people don't care like at all.
| nostromo wrote:
| Young people care and are very aware of what they share and
| don't share. That's why Facebook is only popular with boomers
| now.
|
| Young people are in private chat groups, using alts on
| Instagram, and then only sharing the most anodyne content
| publicly under their real name.
| grumple wrote:
| If you allow people to freely post messages, it will just devolve
| into the same sort of facebook/twitter/tiktok/instagram toxicity.
| Big companies will still overwhelm you with ads on the platform.
|
| Facebook was great for a few things when it started and was
| exclusive to college students, like:
|
| 1) connecting with new friends at college - it's still pretty
| good for this as far as I know, as long as you share exactly the
| same sociopolitical beliefs as the people you befriend (no longer
| on it).
|
| 2) organizing events (usually parties, but also dorm events or
| others for school) - it stopped being great after the first 2
| years, when police across the country started using it to shut
| down parties. The culture around parties also changed. Now it's
| not great because a lot of people no longer use fb, and because
| they made changes to make it harder to actually use this feature
| effectively.
|
| 3) documenting how you met someone - they removed this feature
| around 2006 or so, there's no replacement for it on any platform
| that I'm aware of.
|
| 4) sharing photos with friends - Instagram is better for this.
| Nobody wants to look through a whole album of poorly taken photos
| anymore. Also normal people learned that having a ton of photos
| of you online could be a bad thing.
| octacat wrote:
| FB is a result of slowly AB-tested mutated app. By the way, FB is
| dead. The people I care about I want to keep away from FB. Oh, we
| have IG, which is an absolute mess right now.
|
| But really, the answer is pretty simple, just compare what people
| post now and 8 years ago... Now we need "perfect" stuff to post,
| because we got auto-curated by the algorithm.
|
| TikTok is even worse, it basically gives you a demo version of
| attention for some random post and from now on you have to work
| on each post, because there is no followers on the app (just
| random people who could maybe see your post again, if algo will
| like it).
|
| So, TLDR: very low expectations for social networks to be useful
| in any kind of form for most of people, so there is zero interest
| to invest anything into it (i.e. post coffee/cat/travel image?
| maaybe to instagram stories - these are still alive).
| nostrademons wrote:
| "Every moment in business happens only once." -- Peter Thiel
|
| The success of the old Facebook was very much rooted in a
| particular time and place. The leading edge of the Millennial
| generation (which was raised to be both more social and more
| trusting than previous generations) was in college. The Internet
| was new, and people were figuring out what it was for. The
| economy was humming along, and recovering from the dot-com bust,
| and people had few concerns that basic needs like housing and
| food would be taken care of. A website where the point was to
| throw sheep at each other was a nice idle diversion for that time
| surplus.
|
| It also helped that Facebook was started in one of the highest
| social-status dorms, in the highest social-status college, among
| the highest social-status demographic (college students), in a
| generation that was tightly socially connected. I'd remarked to a
| coworker, when Google was just starting Google+, that we were
| replicating all the technology in Facebook (and many good ideas
| _not_ in Facebook that had been pioneered by LiveJournal), but we
| were missing the particular social moment in time that Zuckerburg
| capitalized on.
|
| In short, yes, consumer preferences have changed. Consumer
| preferences are _always_ changing. The new Facebook is messaging,
| or hanging out in person, or _maybe_ TikTok. Replicating the old
| Facebook won 't give back the moment in time that lead to its
| ascendance.
| threeseed wrote:
| Also it was before many parents were on the internet.
|
| Now young people know from experience that little good comes
| from their parents and extended family being on the social
| network as them. And so they instead prefer messaging apps for
| these relationships.
|
| And then for communicating within their age group it's much
| more about trends and what is new and different as every young
| generation is enticed by.
| rednerrus wrote:
| Probably time to bring back dodgeball. What is Dennis Crowley
| up to?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!
| Dwedit wrote:
| Google + killed itself by being invite-only at the time when
| there was buzz. Once the invite-only period ended, the buzz was
| gone.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I can anecdotally confirm this to be the case. I was in
| college when G+ came out, and there was a _lot_ of interest
| in my friend groups; except that nobody could get in.
|
| There was a moment when a lot of people wanted to make G+
| accounts, and if they had been able to do so, the network
| effect of them making accounts would have spurred a number of
| others to do the same. But they couldn't, and by the time
| they could, interest had died. G+ had one really good shot,
| and missed.
| eastbound wrote:
| No, G+ was annoying. You had to classify people in circles.
| Then nothing happened.
|
| The reason why the hype died was that it was a bad product.
| That's why Youtube made it mandatory to transform your name
| into a G+ account. Talk about pathetic.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Again it's an example of what working before not working in
| the future, though. Invite-only had worked great for GMail;
| it actually intensified the buzz. It failed miserably with
| Wave and Plus, showing that the same tactics sometimes work
| and sometimes flop.
| dnissley wrote:
| While the invite-only period may have been necessary for
| scaling reasons, I have my doubts that it was necessary for
| buzz-building reasons.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> people had few concerns that basic needs like housing and
| food would be taken care of._
|
| Interesting, as the US housing market crash came two years
| after Facebook's launch, the same year it opened to the public,
| and the food commodities boom followed a year later. Farm gate
| food prices were higher back then than they are now, even in
| nominal dollars!
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I pretty strongly disagree with this. I don't think that user
| preferences have changed so much, in that I think a lot of
| people would respond well to an "old-school"-style Facebook,
| even if released right now. The issue is simply that _that_
| version of Facebook probably has people only using it 15-30
| mins a day max, but you really need to get the continual
| mindless scrolling to maximize ad rates. Facebook is just
| suffering "the tyranny of the marginal user", the topic which
| was so well-discussed on HN a couple months back.
| nostrademons wrote:
| You're welcome to try it. "Old school Facebook" took a couple
| days to implement, and it'd probably be even quicker with
| modern web frameworks.
|
| I was on FB in 2005, and it was definitely not 15-30
| mins/day. People were on there for hours, or rather they'd go
| on, scroll for 15 mins, then come back next hour for another
| 15 mins, and so on. But again, that sort of behavior was a
| product of the times, and I really doubt you would get that
| sort of engagement if you put the same product in front of
| users today.
|
| But try it! If you're familiar with a database-backed web
| framework like Django or Rails, it'd probably take a weekend
| to re-implement the original Facebook. Do it and see if you
| get any traction.
| dkasper wrote:
| The really old school Facebook didn't even have feeds. You
| spent time on there because you had to check out everyone's
| walls.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > If you're familiar with a database-backed web framework
| like Django or Rails, it'd probably take a weekend to re-
| implement the original Facebook. Do it and see if you get
| any traction.
|
| The issue is not whether it can technologically be built
| easily. While I always chuckle a little bit whenever
| developers say "It can be built in a weekend!" (in classic
| fashion...), my issue is not that it's technologically
| challenging. Of course the hard part with any app like this
| is getting the network critical mass, which is a _very_
| hard problem.
|
| But my point is really to argue against this being a
| _consumer led_ difference in preferences. This is really an
| issue where, economically, the tech powers that be have
| found that hijacking our dopamine pathways via TikTok /etc.
| algorithms is more profitable than a "come in and check on
| your friends"-app.
| randomdata wrote:
| I expect the consumer would much prefer to keep up with
| friends than some random performer. But friends don't
| want to create content anymore. It's a production
| problem. People don't want you, a casual onlooker, to
| know what is going on in their life. When they do, they
| will invite you into a private space. This is why
| Facebook moved to allow most activity to happen in
| private (chat, groups, etc.).
| jghn wrote:
| You're right about the time spent. The novelty of finding
| people you know on a site like that was still pretty
| exciting. People would spend a lot of time poking around
| new people.
|
| Facebook didn't invent it but they were the winners of that
| generation.
|
| Modern social networks don't operate that way. It is no
| longer exciting to find out that person you went to 3rd
| grade with is online. Of course they are online, everyone
| is
| deanCommie wrote:
| Yeah this is super confusing revisionist history.
|
| Even The Social Network had a scene where a young Dakota
| Johnson was telling to Sean Parker about how addicted she
| was to Facebook.
|
| Facebook was absolutely as addictive to young tech-savvy
| consumers at the time, as TikTok is today.
|
| The only difference is this was pre-mobile. So they were
| doing it from their laptops, not from their phones wherever
| they were.
|
| source: i was there, i was one of them.
| shafyy wrote:
| > _" Every moment in business happens only once." -- Peter
| Thiel_
|
| Sounds smart, but doesn't mean anything.
| starttoaster wrote:
| It sounds like what it's intending to get across is that
| there are market conditions that lead to a product taking
| off, and market conditions by nature change, which means a
| product taking off today doesn't necessarily mean that the
| same product would take off tomorrow.
|
| So I'm curious about your opinion. How does it mean nothing
| to you?
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's actually pretty profound for a certain audience, and
| that audience overlaps pretty heavily with HN. A lot of
| people expect to gain lessons about what'll work in the
| future by studying the past. They'll point to successful
| product X, and then build product Y that tries to replicate
| all the good parts of product X, and not realize that there
| are a lot of subtle interactions between a product _and the
| social & environmental conditions of its audience_ that lead
| to it taking off. If you build the same product but the
| environment is different, you get different results.
|
| Similarly, it's a lesson to pay very careful attention to
| what's going on in the environment _today_ , and index more
| on that than what has worked with the environment of the
| past. That's why good VC presentations always have a slide
| for "What has changed? Why is this a good idea now when it
| wasn't in the past?"
| swalling wrote:
| A less grandiose version of this aphorism: timing the market
| matters just as much as what product you ship.
|
| People tend to focus on product attributes and pricing
| because compared to timing, it is more in your control.
|
| An example of this that I think about a lot is Zoom. Zoom
| nailed video/audio quality more than most of other competing
| products, but otherwise they didn't offer anything that new
| compared to legions of other enterprise A/V platforms. They
| just happened to offer unlimited free meetings for <= 100
| participants right as the pandemic happened. This was all
| pretty much lucky timing and some good choices around
| freemium growth mechanics. This window of opportunity closed
| quickly for competing products as behavior changed and
| network effects took hold. The only new competitor that
| emerged mid-pandemic was Teams, because MSFT could literally
| force install it on every Windows machine.
| ajkjk wrote:
| "but we were missing the particular social moment in time that
| Zuckerburg capitalized on."
|
| That feels like a narrative that is designed to avoid taking
| responsibility for messing up. IMO it was 100% possible for
| Google at the time Google+ was made to completely win social,
| and they didn't because... what they built wasn't good, or apt,
| or visionary. Just picture Steve Jobs' Apple trying instead,
| except hypothetically imagine that their talent is in community
| design instead of hardware/UI design. They would've done it.
| Google can't, because... you know... Google is arrogant? and
| doesn't really do "visionary".
| wil421 wrote:
| Don't forget the Facebook started as an exclusive club, you had
| to have a .edu email address to sign up. In the beginning you
| even had to be in specific colleges for sign up.
|
| Yes, the Harvard dorms were a big reason it gained traction.
| bhpm wrote:
| Facebook started at Harvard, not Stanford.
| wil421 wrote:
| Edited.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| The difference being that everyone in your social circle
| could get in at the same time. Most college students want to
| socialize with students at their college.
|
| Artificially segmenting the market by a waitlist
| chronologically doesn't have the same affects. That's why a
| lot of social platforms give "invite codes" to existing
| members - invite your friends to bootstrap connections so
| your members aren't on a desert island.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Good callout with Google+
|
| Google+ was in every measurable way better than Facebook. It
| was cleaner, faster, and had features that people claimed they
| wanted (to be able to have full control over _which CIRCLES_
| they share different info with)
|
| And it completely busted because adoption of a social network
| is impossible without critical mass.
|
| At the time it was because people didn't have a strong enough
| reason to leave Facebook.
|
| Today it's because they wouldn't have a strong enough reason to
| leave TikTok/Instagram/Whatsapp/etc.
| protomolecule wrote:
| It's called vk.com if you don't mind FSB reading your private
| messages :)
| stainablesteel wrote:
| im confused by this because its basically open information now
| that social media websites have very close relationships with
| the federal government, is this not already done?
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| Because if they made a new version of old facebook, it would be
| subject to the same growth/enshittification forces they turned
| old facebook into new facebook, so better to just cut to the
| chase.
|
| It is weird how different facebook is now compared to when it
| started. In a few of the small towns I have lived in, there are
| very active Facebook groups with basically the whole town in, all
| the businesses, tradespeople, etc elected representatives, and
| the Facebook group takes the place of a local
| newspaper/classified ads or personal/business dedicated webpages.
| It's quite practical, but unfortunately how much ad and other
| drivel content gets mixed in.
|
| Meanwhile, the actual person-person "friend" stuff is almost
| completely hidden/unusable behind dark patterns.
| bonney_io wrote:
| It seems to me that Mastodon, tumblr, Wordpress, Threads, and any
| future platform's support of ActivityPub could theoretically make
| the entire internet "old Facebook".
|
| Facebook is/was two things:
|
| 1) a microblog (your personal page)
|
| 2) an interface for following other's microblog posts
|
| This sounds an awful lot like a following, say, a bunch of
| WordPress blogs in your Mastodon feed. We just need the interface
| over it all.
|
| Heck, if Threads does what they say it will, Threads very well
| may become that interface for many folks.
| echelon wrote:
| I certainly hope Threads has no future in the internet of
| tomorrow. We need to move away from centralized systems.
|
| ActivityPub is dangerous too! The protocol suffers from
| federated cabal censorship. Entire Mastodon instances will ban
| over the prettiest rationales, just like Reddit moderators and
| their little fiefdoms. It's quite fascist.
|
| I'm hoping BlueSky's protocol of distributed opt-in filtering
| and extensions wins. I don't want anyone deciding things on my
| behalf. You're free to filter me out, you're free to subscribe
| to someone who filters me out, but I get angry when the means
| of communication and those chosen to rule over it do it without
| recourse. The reasoning, despite being mostly petty, shouldn't
| even matter - it's authoritarian and awful.
| CRCPowershroom wrote:
| A facebook ActivityPub alternative already exists with
| Friendica.
|
| https://friendi.ca/
| dividefuel wrote:
| I don't think a 'new version of old Facebook' can succeed in the
| medium term, for a few reasons:
|
| 1) I don't think a platform can get enough critical mass like
| Facebook did. It's much easier to get a smallish circle of people
| (5-20 people) to align on one platform and use a group chat than
| it is to get everyone you know to align on the same platform.
|
| 2) The rise of mobile. Things like having an individual profile
| made more sense when sitting at a laptop/desktop PC and actively
| browsing someone else's content. With mobile, there's more
| friction to viewing profiles, so the feed model tends to win out.
|
| 3) I think many people are more apprehensive about posting
| content to a wide audience than they were in Facebook's prime.
| tobymather123 wrote:
| Hasn't LinkedIn kind of maintained 2 & 3, but in a work
| specific context? Which maybe feels safer, armed by the suit of
| a corporate identity...
| dividefuel wrote:
| Yes, I was thinking how LinkedIn may be the one exception.
| "Profiles" though only stick around because they're
| effectively resumes, and users hope that keeping their
| profile up to date improves their chances of landing a job.
| I'd also suspect LinkedIn has a lower percent of its traffic
| on mobile than many other social network sites do currently.
| phatboyslim wrote:
| My attempt to speculate on potential obstacles which exist today
| over the (I believe, 2009) version shown:
|
| - Eroded public trust in (all) social media
|
| - Increased regulatory scrutiny today vs 2009
|
| - More competition today (i.e. TikTok)
|
| - Changing demands from advertisers
| juancroldan wrote:
| - Huge cold start disadvantage vs conglomerates like Meta
| thih9 wrote:
| > Either: billions of people who used to find old Facebook useful
| have changed their preferences in the last few years, and no
| longer need something like that
|
| Yes. To elaborate, these people have gotten used to Facebook's
| new UI, are now relying on its new features, and are accessing it
| in different ways.
| octacat wrote:
| Reality is that facebook hit the jackpot of era of digitisation
| of social groups. Which means groups are online now, but also
| extremely radicalised (politically). Tiktok algo knows what stuff
| to show you and what stuff you will never ever see, because you
| are from a different social group (but cat videos would be shown
| to anyone).
|
| IG was showing you stuff from people you follow, but it does not
| work anymore, once people start posting controversial opinions
| (which they do, once they use TikTok long enough, because the
| algo pushes radical opinions to the top, they catch attention).
|
| Offline groups would have to be less radical for its members,
| because of fear of rejection from a group. So, the answer is
| "there is nothing to digitise, the only way to go: A. build
| offline groups - nobody wants it. B. Do the same as
| Facebook/Twitter/Reddit - but good luck competing).
|
| If the old way of Facebook worked, FB would use the old way.
| sfmz wrote:
| "Every empire carries the seeds of its own destruction"
|
| FB let you connect with friends -- but that's also its fatal flaw
| -- friendships are trending towards zero. TikTok enters the scene
| and now friendless people can have parasocial relationships with
| their tiktok subs.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Here is the fallacy that so-called "tech" company-dependent
| commenters will propagate: If no one is making it, then no one
| would use it if someone made it.
|
| It's fine for "developers" to hypothesise about other
| "developers", but making conclusions about computer users who are
| not "developers" is nonsense. Yet some HN commenters will do this
| ad nauseum.
|
| Unless and until someone makes "a new version of old Facebook"
| and forces it upon computer users to the same extent as "new
| Facebook", then no one knows which option computer users would
| choose.
|
| Removal of meaningful choice is a deliberate, anti-competitive
| tactic.
| spit2wind wrote:
| > Removal of meaningful choice is a deliberate, anti-
| competitive tactic.
|
| Other people's points about network effect and the Goldilocks
| Moment are valid and surely play a part.
|
| In reality it's more likely laws and enforcement have changed
| to skew the game in Facebook's favor. There is no "free
| market." Never has been, never will be. Markets function
| according to the environment they operate in, including but
| limited to law.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Am I the only one here who remembers when a "facebook" was made
| of paper and glue? they used to be a tool used by professors in
| at least new England and probably many other areas at the time.
| That's where the name came from.
| atemerev wrote:
| Here's your free Facebook-like open source social network server:
|
| https://github.com/FreeFeed/freefeed-server
|
| Works in production at https://freefeed.net/.
| mariusor wrote:
| They do, or rather not old Facebook, but old VK:
| https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen
|
| As a bonus it's an ActivityPub enabled application, so any
| specific instance of it requires less work to get a network
| effect going. :)
| INTPenis wrote:
| I mean there are fedi alternatives like mobilizon right?
| hateful wrote:
| Like a lot of other comments here, I agree that it's been moved
| to private chats, but I would add that what's missing is:
|
| - everyone having a "Profile" that can be passively looked at at
| any time. Having an old classmate or a friend from your friend
| group (kind of solved in group chats) that's not a direct friend,
| but you still want to be part of that community - or have a sense
| of their life without having to the whole social interaction
| part.
|
| - events
|
| - the ability to "look up" someone before actually interacting
| with them
|
| - the ability to "post on someone else's wall". This is something
| that many Facebook clones got wrong. I don't want to tag someone,
| I want to put something on their page that their friends can see
| that I put there.
| randomdata wrote:
| Nobody on the other side of the fence wants those things,
| though. In the beginning the implications of allowing others to
| take a look into your life weren't well understood, but it soon
| became creepy knowing that others are taking a look into your
| life, hence why Facebook had to change gears and focus on more
| private spaces and lean on 'professional' content creators who
| are happy to let others watch them fill the void.
| axegon_ wrote:
| For starters, there are like 100k platforms for "sharing" stuff.
| Where I live, facebook and to some degree instagram completely
| dominate the social media market: think 95% and above. People are
| creatures of habit and they get used to the platforms they use as
| they evolve. In addition, most users use a smartphone most of the
| time. And by extension, most of the time they spend on their
| smartphone is distributed among a certain number of apps(low,
| single digits). If anything new comes along, you first need to
| gain some market share by squeezing yourself into that time slot,
| which is nearly impossible. I spent most of my career at a
| company that solely developed games for smartphones and I did
| countless studies on the matter. The South Park episode about
| freemium games couldn't possibly be more accurate.
|
| So much like no one on HN wants any updates from the board
| itself, people get what they want and so long as it works, they
| will complain but keep using it unironically. I got a chance to
| speak to reddit admins a few months ago and they admitted that
| till this day, they all, till this day use old reddit, even
| though new reddit has been around for more than half a decade and
| now there's new-new reddit.
|
| Same reason no one has made a new myspace - it was great back in
| the day. By today's standards, it would have been a security
| black hole but it did it's job back in the day and if not else,
| it taught a large number of people some basic html and css
| skills. Today, no one cares about shiny profile pages with
| sparkles and music.
|
| That's kinda the first rule in monopoly: you are either first or
| you are last, along with everyone else. It doesn't matter if you
| have 100, 1000 or 10000 users - you are still at the back of the
| pack, not even getting scraps for dinner.
| nkotov wrote:
| About 10 percent of the people I follow post regularly via
| stories or less often through posts, the rest just view or post
| once or twice a year. Most people don't even use a desktop any
| more for personal computing. The online culture has shifted to
| highly specific group chats and consumption since most are afraid
| of putting themselves out there as they previously did when they
| were younger.
|
| I use Facebook nowadays only to post life events once or twice a
| year for my parents and in laws and cringe at the memory posts
| from 10+ years ago. I consume most of my friends lives through
| Instagram. For entertainment, I have TikTok and YouTube.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Creating a new version of old Facebook is easy. Getting people on
| it is hard.
|
| I think these days, the attention limit is the biggest problem,
| not just in what people see, but in being seen. A true "old
| Facebook" is going to be considered boring to today's audience.
| They don't want to post a silly video to their friends, they want
| to post it to the world and hope it gets millions of views
| because they think that will lead to monetization.
|
| It sucks, tbh. I really wish there was a good social network site
| that truly existed for the sole purpose of keeping up with
| friends. _NO_ public posts. _NO_ groups or business pages. Every
| post is available only to friends, or optionally, extended to
| friends of friends to one level.
|
| Discord is not the answer I'm looking for. Group chats aren't it,
| either. If I have something I want to share with all my friends,
| I don't want to have to post it in 5 different places, especially
| when 3 of them have overlaps in friends.
|
| I just want to see what all my friends are up to in a single
| feed.
| captainmuon wrote:
| Just do what the German Facebook clone StudiVZ did back in the
| day. Find a couple of people in every college town and make
| them multiplicators, who invite other people and spam every
| place with flyers. Spend a few hundred thousand $ if neccessary
| and hire a couple of them or pay venues for putting their
| events on your site.
|
| I think there is still a big hole in the social landscape left
| by old Facebook. One thing is it is not just about keeping up
| with close friends. That's easy, you can just message them or
| call them. It's for connecting with not-quite-friends, people
| in your extended social circle. If your class mates are going
| to that party and you don't know if you are welcome, it might
| be scary to ask directly what they're up to and face rejection,
| but it's easy to connect over some website. It's a form of
| social lubricant. I think all the chat apps haven't replicated
| that effect.
| atum47 wrote:
| I find it hard to find users. I just built an app to share memes
| with my friends. It's invitation based. I invited the first users
| and they each got 3 invites when registering. I got 7 of my
| friends to join (similar sense of humor) but that's it. They
| don't seem to be using it all the much also, and also haven't
| invited any of their friends.
| onthecanposting wrote:
| A more successful model is to launder a DoD project into a
| private company (Lifelog to Facebook, for example) and then a
| leviathan of media flaks can promote the product as the Next
| Big Thing.
| Jedd wrote:
| There's a chrome extension called Fluff Busting Purity [0] that
| seems to still be alive, but evidently struggles to respond
| quickly to the ever-increasingly user-hostile coin-chasing
| changes coming out of the mothership.
|
| It doesn't get you the 'old Facebook' (of which there are many
| variants) but does help with suppressing the 'recommended for
| you' _en masse_ along with what feels like several hundred other
| things it can tweak or suppress in the UI.
|
| Ultimately 'the feed' as generated by Facebook's algorithms
| remains monumentally janky, and it's hard to believe it matches
| any user's _actual_ preference.
|
| [0] https://www.fbpurity.com/
| yallpendantools wrote:
| I've personally considered doing something along these lines but
| one thing simply stopped me on my tracks: moderation.
|
| I feel like twenty odd years ago you can just open the gates to a
| web community and get by with little moderation; you can still
| cultivate a community from which participants derive some value.
| Nowadays, moderation would have to be no less than someone's
| full-time job. And I believe this has been the case for a good
| few years #before# generative AI came into the scene. Maybe for a
| good while you can hold down the fort with technical moderation
| solutions like fail2ban or Captcha but I bet you will run into
| problems within your first half a million users or so.
|
| Maybe projects like Mastodon have more robust solutions to this
| but, still, moderation will be a problem if and when you make it
| big, just like your server costs.
|
| Finally, don't even get me started about CP, which is a whole
| other level of low and rotten. Maybe if you restrict your
| community to niche topics it would (a) deter malicious outsiders
| and (b) be self-moderating to a degree. The thing is, a niche
| discussion forum old Facebook ain't.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| "a huge unmet demand currently exists for a social network which
| is based on the social graph, instead of the content graph, and
| which is pre-enshittification*"
|
| I would argue this hasn't disappeared, but merely moved. There's
| a number of other platforms people are using for seeking a
| certain social graph:
|
| Social networking style:
|
| - Mighty Networks ( https://mightynetworks.com ), Hylo (
| https://hylo.com ), Circle ( https://circle.so ), etc.
|
| Chat Style:
|
| - Discord, Slack, etc.
| thrusong wrote:
| I hesitate to post this here because I probably can't handle a
| rush of traffic if it gets attention, but I've been working on
| this at prezince.com.
|
| Just launched an MVP on February 1st and it is very much alpha
| software.
|
| It's a social network generator, essentially Wix or Squarespace
| for social networking.
|
| You go through a simple wizard to choose what type of feed your
| network is based around (like Facebook/Twitter/Insta, YouTube-
| like streaming, TikTok-like vertical videos, or classic chat),
| how connections work (follow/follow back, request friend/confirm
| friend, or automatic for teams), what it looks like (fonts and
| colours), what features it has (right now, like button, comments
| on posts, and trending topics), and who can access it (public or
| invite only).
|
| I very much learnt PHP and MySQL back in 2007 because of how cool
| I thought Facebook was, and I miss the early way the site
| operated.
|
| I also just see how it can be a solution to a lot of different
| problems. My family is using one as a replacement for group chat
| on Signal-- we can keep discussion centred around posts in the
| feed which only we have access to.
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