Stop trying to make social networks succeed

https://ploum.net/2023-07-06-stop-trying-to-make-social-networks-succeed.html

by ZacnyLos • 3 years ago

273 215 3 years ago

derbOac• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

TheAceOfHearts2• 3 years ago

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.

wunderland• 3 years ago

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.

lapcat10• 3 years ago

Incredibly reductionist argument. Success is impossible to define therefore all social networks are failures?

Incredibly reductionist interpretation of the article.

kelnos6• 3 years ago

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.

Zambyte• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

gochi2• 3 years ago

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.

lapcat10• 3 years ago

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."

gochi2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

pxoe2• 3 years ago

internet is kind of The universal social network.

ChatGTP• 3 years ago

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.

evrimoztamur• 3 years ago

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?

Arainach• 3 years ago

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.

jrm45• 3 years ago

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.

lapcat10• 3 years ago

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.

marginalia_nu3• 3 years ago

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.

doublerabbit2• 3 years ago

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.

pier253• 3 years ago

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.

Nasrudith3• 3 years ago

You clearly don't remember the engagement involved of seeing post counts rise, or the activity of threads you start.

marcosdumay2• 3 years ago

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.

explodingwaffle• 3 years ago

“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• 3 years ago

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.

eddieroger• 3 years ago

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.

dgb23• 3 years ago

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.

izzydata• 3 years ago

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.

tourmalinetaco• 3 years ago

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.

pier253• 3 years ago

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.

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

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.

fullshark2• 3 years ago

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.

TheAceOfHearts2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

pixl974• 3 years ago

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.

Apreche• 3 years ago

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!

carlosjobim8• 3 years ago

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.

ShroudedNight• 3 years ago

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.

danjoredd7• 3 years ago

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?

akhosravian2• 3 years ago

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.

somethingreen• 3 years ago

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.

colesantiago3• 3 years ago

This is like saying stop trying to make humans communicate with each other.

lapcat10• 3 years ago

No, it's not.

"Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one."

colesantiago3• 3 years ago

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.

dahwolf3• 3 years ago

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.

paxys2• 3 years ago

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.

pxoe2• 3 years ago

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.

jrm45• 3 years ago

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.

lapcat10• 3 years ago

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.

dspillett2• 3 years ago

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).

jrm45• 3 years ago

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.

telotortium2• 3 years ago

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...

mattbuilds3• 3 years ago

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?

djbusby• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

vinyl7• 3 years ago

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.

lapcat10• 3 years ago

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

flyinghamster• 3 years ago

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.

rtkwe• 3 years ago

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.

krooj• 3 years ago

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.

0xParlay• 3 years ago

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.

sebastos• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

plagiarist• 3 years ago

I try to avoid all products with vendor lock-in specifically because it is so predictable.

esafak2• 3 years ago

You are older so this cycle is relatively brief for you. For a young person, a ten year run is like forever.

skizm• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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

sneak• 3 years ago

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.

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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...

gen2203• 3 years ago

I would agree with greed but push back on capitalism. There are many ways to be a capitalist. Greed is a common choice, but there are more humanist approaches, too.

From your example, Craigslist is itself is a capitalist institution, making >$100mm/year. Patagonia, Wikipedia, King Arthur Baking Company, Darn Tough Socks, Lodge cookware, are all capitalist too.

I think it's important for entrepreneurial-minded folks to have positive role models – it's possible to develop wealth for yourself, your customers, your employees, and your environment, and to do so with respect and dignity. In fact, a well-operated business is probably the most effective vehicle for having an outsized impact in your community, so defined.

ilrwbwrkhv• 3 years ago

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.

mattbuilds3• 3 years ago

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.

hinkley• 3 years ago

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.

xeromal7• 3 years ago

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.

EA-3167• 3 years ago

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.

emadabdulrahim• 3 years ago

The mobile gaming era pioneered the approach where game design is fundamentally driven by the game's monetization mechanics.

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

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?

epiccoleman• 3 years ago

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."

swat535• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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?

cableshaft2• 3 years ago

Just stop playing most AAA or mobile games and that should solve most of that for you. The exceptions being the God of War series, the Mario and Zelda series. I still get excited for those. And probably the next Elder Scrolls or Witcher game.

But other than that, lately I've been far more excited about the Persona series, Nier Automata, Spike Chunsoft games (especially Danganronpa), The Witness (a bit older now), The Outer Wilds, Subnautica, Slay the Spire, Inscryption, and Vampire Survivors.

Tears of the Kingdom is probably the best pure exploration game ever made, with Outer Wilds being better in some ways, as it's simulating an entier solar system in real time and has some really clever ideas in it, but it's a smaller game overall. I think I pretty much fully explored Outer Wilds (except the expansion) in 20 hours, I've aleady put in 80 hours into TOTK and I've seen maybe 40% of the content so far.

tempodox• 3 years ago

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.

nottorp4• 3 years ago

Most of HN would always assume you have to compete and capture the market, no matter what you're talking about.

mattbuilds3• 3 years ago

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.

davidguetta• 3 years ago

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

marginalia_nu3• 3 years ago

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.

gen2203• 3 years ago

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.

I think people underrate this idea, way too much.

Humans are a pretty diverse set of people. But we're similar enough that in a population with ~10^13 people, there's probably 10^4 people who are pretty much clones of you, in terms of your preference, taste, etc.

With the internet, it's never been cheaper to find them. Preconditioned on it being you or me, 10^3 of those people are probably browsing this website, for example.

I hope the fluctuations of fashion lean more towards assigning social value to smaller, more sustainable builders. The migration in that direction deserves to be bigger. I observe it happening personally, but tech media is lagging significantly behind, mainly because these people don't spend money on advertising or PR.

badtension• 3 years ago

Oh man well said, I had this uneasy feeling while reading your comment.

I think the world is fucked, especially in how it's planting incentives in our brains. For girls it's clothes, make-up, being fit. For guys it's cars, games, sex. And of course there's general consumerism that doesn't gender-discriminate anyone.

For tech people there's something else I hate with passion: creating images of great, world changing people. We aspire to be Zucks, Musks, Gateses, Holmes (yes, theranos). It's always bullshit to sell something or gain political power but the damage is done anyway. It's hard to live a simple life and enjoy simple things when everyone around expected you to look up to them and change the world. Many people believed their narration and became sociopaths that maximize gains on every opportunity. Even I was very drawn to "growth hacking" before. Now I see how crazy it all is.

konschubert2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

Guest9081239812• 3 years ago

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.

jtode• 3 years ago

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.

smcleod• 3 years ago

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.

gen2203• 3 years ago

Yeah, at some point VC became synonymous with tech. I mean here we all are, discussing this topic on a VC's forum.

The two are heavily-overlapped, for sure. But in the last 25 years, it feels like the horse (tech) has been steadily placed further and further behind the cart (VC).

jakelazaroff• 3 years ago

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.

costanzaDynasty• 3 years ago

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.

dahwolf3• 3 years ago

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.

dahwolf3• 3 years ago

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.

amadeuspagel2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Better than what?

pixl974• 3 years ago

#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.

ActualLupu• 3 years ago

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.

amadeuspagel2• 3 years ago

Stop trying.

Many people are trying ...

The problem with trying is that no one agrees.

the-printer• 3 years ago

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?”.

magic_hamster2• 3 years ago

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.

duderific• 3 years ago

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_hamster2• 3 years ago

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?

kelnos6• 3 years ago

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.

vvoyer• 3 years ago

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&...

douglee650• 3 years ago

This piece reads like an elaborate retelling of the Tower of Babel

s17n• 3 years ago

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.

rcarr5• 3 years ago

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.

pixl974• 3 years ago

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.

rcarr5• 3 years ago

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.

kelnos6• 3 years ago

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.

rcarr5• 3 years ago

You find people who see the long term benefit. Maybe they don't exist. Maybe they do.

Wikipedia is a giant global website that runs entirely on donations. I'd wager there are alternatives out there to the MBA/VC orthodoxy.

jchw• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

sentientmachin3• 3 years ago

I would like a more strict version of this article, "Stop trying to make social networks".

paxys2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

happytiger2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

happytiger2• 3 years ago

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.

mrweasel• 3 years ago

At least stop putting social networks into products where they don't belong... Looking at you Github.

callamdelaney• 3 years ago

Demise of twitter is.. not matching with my experience.

lost_tourist• 3 years ago

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.

somsak22• 3 years ago

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.

kafkaesque• 3 years ago

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.

This resonates with me. The beauty of the Web was to allow you to find your niche anywhere in the world from your own place of living. But that concept has been contaminated and taken over by your typical big corporation. It is now diluted by hostile ads, psychological warfare, and manipulation, all while, on the surface, pitching you the idea that you can "cater" your experience to whatever you like.

The Web, or any community that is online or offline, should incite togetherness through a common good, whether it's artistic in nature or for the betterment of a community. Before the Web or BBS, this was done in forms of artist communities and forums in person. Seeking to return to this format, but with the aide of the Web is probably something I would prefer, but highly unlikely because younger generations seem to only live in their phones and in a Web reality.

Stop trying to make social networks succeed

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