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The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

economist.com

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Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#121

Post by adventured »

wybiral wrote: post #108
nolok wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated The worst part is that Yahoo innovated a lot ... In incubators, side projects, etc ... But they failed to bring their innovations to their main products, or to turn their side things into full blown products. They had no plan, neither overall or per product. Take emails for exemple, for the longest time (and still now, although not as dominating) THE key to user identity…

> The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with Blogger. That's a good point. But to be fair everything "social" that Google has touched has died with the exception of YouTube. In fact Google really hasn't done a great job holding onto many other arenas than their main ones. Blogger has been blasted by Medium. Knol was outlasted by Quora. Google Code was beat by Github. Their "shopping" attemp…

> Knol was outlasted by Quora.

Knol wasn't a competitor to Quora. It was meant to go after Wikipedia, Answers.com, and the various how to sites. Quora wasn't founded until June 2009. Knol's traffic had peaked in early 2009 and already fallen off a cliff by June 2009. By the time Quora got up to scale, knol had been long dead. By Google's own admission, they were shocked by the success of Wikipedia, which spurred their attempt with knol.

https://techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/googles-knol-the-monetizab...

https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/poor-google-knol-has-gone-...

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#122

Post by colordrops »

ForHackernews wrote: post #43
celrod wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this article fascinating: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130... The jist is, people are extremely bad at basic logic. Unless it's really in their best interest within the context of the story (ie, catching someone cheating you) to be good at them. It makes the difference between 90%. Presumably, everyone wants to get these logic puzzles correct. It just so happens that we're convenie…

One theory is that the brain has evolved specific "modules" that are specialized to certain tasks (i.e. detecting cheaters in social scenarios) and we perform much better when we can rely on these brain-ASICs than when we have to use our general-purpose higher reasoning faculties. As far as I know, there's no conclusive evidence for reasoning modules, but there do seem to be analogous modules in our visual processing…

I thought it was pretty well established that humans are wired to recognize faces. I don't have a reference though.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#123

Post by sodosopa »

pier25 wrote: post #114
dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated Their most popular property ended up being Flickr, and they let it rot when smartphones and apps started being popular 10 years ago. Instead pro users fled to 500px and other communities, and social users wen to Instagram.

Yahoo! didn't build Flickr.

Flickr came from Game Neverending. It was an in-game feature and it did so well, the game was never released. That came from Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield's team and their innovative work at Ludicorp. It was purchased and then became a squandered opportunity by Yahoo!

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#124

Post by GarvielLoken »

iMark wrote: post #9

Yahoo failed, in part, because its competitors were better. Being better than Facebook doesn't mean just replicating its technology, it means having a better social graph. That's a hard problem to solve.

Sort of. Facebook has left a market wide open, their original one. At the start when people started to use Facebook it was mostly young people sharing more intimate pictures and stories with their friends and people of similar age and mindset.

Now facebook is your public profile, where your aunt, parents and employer can see everything you do and judge every post you make. That's why we have nice pictures of cityscapes, nature, holidays and of food on our profiles. Because anything intimate or controversial would be exposed to a too big audience for comfort.

So the market for smaller circles of "parent free zones" is wide open. I personally believe that's one of the reason Instagram got traction, your parents and employer weren't there in the start but your friends were. Just look at Tumbler.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#125

Post by nefitty »

celrod wrote: post #25
colordrops wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like bank errors, which always seem to be in favor of the bank...

I found this article fascinating: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130... The jist is, people are extremely bad at basic logic. Unless it's really in their best interest within the context of the story (ie, catching someone cheating you) to be good at them. It makes the difference between 90%. Presumably, everyone wants to get these logic puzzles correct. It just so happens that we're convenie…

You can try this logic game here: https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/wason/Default.aspx

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#126

Post by danso »

pier25 wrote: post #118
King-Aaron wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's around 2.23 billion active users you might want to pass that message on to.

Yeah, but it's really a matter of time. Facebook has become the social network for grandmas and aunties. Facebook has expanded to new countries in the last decade which has brought these millions of users, but younger generations in countries that have had Facebook for a long time are not using it anymore. In the US most Facebook users are between 25-34. There are barely any teenagers. https://www.statista.com/statis…

Most developed countries have populations that continue to skew older: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/cent...

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#127

Post by agumonkey »

myspy wrote: post #63
agumonkey wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is one vision of ~modern life. Social networks are massively overrated in term of human value IMO. I think whatsapp is probably closer to what would be useful and not toxic. I don't believe people need profiles and graphs and whatever.

Absolutely agree to your assessment.

I just came back from an island, we barely used computers. Never been so happy. People use whatsapp a lot, but it's just a modern reincarnation of phones. Send a little text, a little voice message, a little video. Nothing more. There it seems it's just right fulfilling the need to chat. The rest was a fantasy.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#128

Post by danso »

MagnaEterna wrote: post #18
King-Aaron wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's around 2.23 billion active users you might want to pass that message on to.

They are all old. Facebook will probably still be functioning for the next 40 years until it's users finally die and then it's over.

So, basically Facebook still has a lifetime at least an eon long in tech years? The World Wide Web is not even 40 years old yet.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#129

Post by dpcx »

sodosopa wrote: post #123
pier25 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated Their most popular property ended up being Flickr, and they let it rot when smartphones and apps started being popular 10 years ago. Instead pro users fled to 500px and other communities, and social users wen to Instagram.

Yahoo! didn't build Flickr. Flickr came from Game Neverending. It was an in-game feature and it did so well, the game was never released. That came from Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield's team and their innovative work at Ludicorp. It was purchased and then became a squandered opportunity by Yahoo!

I don't think GP was suggesting that Yahoo built Flickr. They said it was Yahoo's most popular property. Which, outside of Mail, is probably a completely true statement.

And they absolutely let it stagnate. The apps that were available for phones (once there were apps) were often pretty terrible, from my recollection.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#130

Post by danso »

hrktb wrote: post #49
sytelus wrote: post #40

In all likelyhood this is a “submarine” article crafted by a PR firm like Definers for a hit job on Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511963 There are plenty of short sellers who would benefit from FB’s plummeting stock. In reality, FB’s DAU/MAU are largely unchanged. The stories that young people “deleted Facebook” were downright falsehood. There is simply no viable competition for Facebook in market…

> There is simply no viable competition for Facebook in market right now like what Yahoo had in terms of Google. I don’t know if it’s your argument for the decline of facebook being false, but it doesn’t have to come from competition or viable alternatives. People stopping doing something happens all the time, companies going down because of decreasing interest in their service is a normal thing.

Which companies of Facebook's size and dominance have gone out because people simply stopped using them? The demises of Sears and Toys R Us were huge news, despite the obvious fact that they had long been beaten by competitors.
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