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Is this the end of social networking?

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Re: Is this the end of social networking?

#61

Post by forgotmypw17 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #33
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #9

I think it is only the beginning of a new age of maturity and de-dinosauring of social networks. Just like the dinosaurs, today's most used social networks kept growing larger and larger until they were too big to sustain themselves. And just like the dinosaurs, they will go extinct and be replaced by smaller, more nimble and competitive social networks, with accessible maintainers, consensual relationships with thei…

Sounds great, but no one is willing to pay for it. And as long as it has to be ad funded, there will always be pressure to track, monetize, and increase engagement.

Once the software exists, I think it can be easily paid out of pocket by the subscribers. If one focuses on hosting a few hundred or thousand users, it does not have to cost that much.

I agree that it has to be self-funded, not reliant on "monetizing". But if your goal is a stable utility service, not growing to make a profit, I think it is realistic.

Re: Is this the end of social networking?

#62

Post by thrown_22 »

moreira wrote: post #27
dont__panic wrote: post #17

> [TikTok]'s addiction-based advertising machine is probably close to the theoretical maximum of how many advertisements one can pour down somebody’s throat. Well put. It's interesting that we pivoted in my adult lifetime from: 1. Myspace's emphasis on sharing things on your own webpage, essentially a hosted blog 2. Facebook's evolution from "hosted blog" to "friend update aggregator" to "chat client" to "friend upda…

I think it might just be that that’s not needed anymore. The social networks of the past were useful as a way to keep in touch with people. MySpace, early Facebook, and the countless others from back then. Now everyone’s online 24/7, and accessible on multiple services all at the same time, all the time. You don’t need social networks to keep in touch with anyone anymore, their original raison d'être is gone. What’s…

>What’s sought after now is meeting -other-, new, like-minded people and content. For that we have twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and whatnot.

None of those sites are good for that any more. All the interesting people on reddit have been banned. No one sane uses twitter. And finding people to talk to on tiktok is plain impossible.

Re: Is this the end of social networking?

#63

Post by krapp »

shevis wrote: post #42
beebmam wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People want their bubbles. We’re all here on HN for that exact purpose. 100% disagree. I'm here to find ideas I disagree with and tell people how they're wrong. I'm not looking for an agreeable experience here. I'm also here to learn about new tech.

I 100% disagree with your idea that you, or anyone for that matter, is just here to disagree with other people’s ideas. Nobody disagrees with stuff just for the sake of disagreement. Who would do such a thing? Don’t bother answering that question though because you’d be wrong.

> I 100% disagree with your idea that you, or anyone for that matter, is just here to disagree with other people’s ideas. Nobody disagrees with stuff just for the sake of disagreement. Who would do such a thing?

You must be new here.

Re: Is this the end of social networking?

#64

Post by fleddr »

"What about this time around we build products whose primary focus is actually the stated mission? Share with friends and family and the world, to bring it together (not divide it)! Instead of something unrelated, like making lots of ad revenue! What a concept!"

I really liked the article but am perplexed by the naive ending.

Friends/family and the world are two very distinct use cases. Most people, young people included, are taking the friends/family part private, in chat apps. Then they may or may not engage in a "public square" social network, but probably with a burner account.

The public square part has failed in epic ways. The idea that you can just "build" something that unites people whilst dodging a laundry list of threats and toxic behavior seems optimistic, to say the least.

And yeah, let's not run ads. Ok, fine. But how will you monetize instead? These seem pretty important questions to me.

Re: Is this the end of social networking?

#65

Post by EGreg »

No kidding. Facebook had so much potential, when it was deployed in universities. But then it became a social network about everything. Zuck had a lot of potential when he was thinking about P2P file sharing site Wirehog, but Sean Parker "put a bullet in that thing" and VCs like Peter "competition is for losers, build a monopoly" Thiel shaped it into a money making machine that's less about being social and more about "eyeballs" and mindless cat meme videos. In the endgame, their algorithm selected for clickbait outrage that put peopl[e into echo chambers and tore our society apart.

Imagine what social networking could be!! The best days of social networking are still ahead. Now that the pretenders are leaving, we can actually start solving the problem. Social networking is dead. Long live what will emerge from the ashes. It might not be called social networking, but it will be, just better.

It'll be called "Community". I don't have to imagine. We've been building the Community Operating System for 10 years. And it's available now. No, it's not Mastodon. It's Qbix :)

https://qbix.com/platform

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

Yes, it's open source and you can use it now. It's basically a Wordpress for Web 2.0 ... keep in mind that Wordpress powers 40% of the Web 1.0 web. We want to power 40% of the Web 2.0 social web.

Back in 2014 my cofounder and I met with Tim Berners-Lee and his SOLID team. There was a movement underway to decentralize the web. Today, Jack Dorsey is trying to build "Web5" along the same lines but with Microsoft ION / Sidetree protocol, rather than SPARQL (@timbl's obsession) semantic data and JSON-LD.

It's coming along. It's always been coming along. But it's open source so many people don't hear about it, until they do. MySQL took 8 years, NGiNX tooks 10 years but eventually they took over. Open source always does.

Watch the video and feel free to spend some time on the weekend playing with it. https://qbix.com/platform/guide :)

Re: Is this the end of social networking?

#66

Post by tmaly »

mulmen wrote: post #34
beebmam wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People want their bubbles. We’re all here on HN for that exact purpose. 100% disagree. I'm here to find ideas I disagree with and tell people how they're wrong. I'm not looking for an agreeable experience here. I'm also here to learn about new tech.

Bubbles don't need to be harmful. HN is a bubble. There are ideas that are not allowed here. There are other ideas that are explicitly promoted. This is the value proposition of HN. You are free to go elsewhere to get other perspectives or interactions. This is as it should be.

I try to shake that up from time to time. It is nice to see the other side of the discussion. Groupthink is not something to strive for.

Re: Is this the end of social networking?

#67

Post by ribosometronome »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #50
jokoon wrote: post #13

I think that the only domain where social networks can be relevant is in the geoloc domain. Dating apps are quite an obvious example where it works very well, but dating is a very limited scope. So of course, the single problem of anything geoloc is safety and privacy, which is not the strong aspect of any social network right now. Tinder and others work hard to make their users safe, and it's difficult because users…

My experience is that Neighbour apps are exactly as miserable as Facebook and equally populated only by people my parents age.

I have not found the humans on Nextdoor to be particularly terrible of late in my portion of the South Bay. There are occasional bad takes, for sure, but fewer than I would have expected. Mostly just been discussion of neighborhood cats, garbage days, people not picking up dog poop, etc.

Re: Is this the end of social networking?

#68

Post by dhosek »

theshrike79 wrote: post #36
saidinesh5 wrote: post #3

I think the "social" part of social networks just moved to group chats. All my friends share updates of their family events, kids' stuff etc.. over Whatsapp and Telegram. Strangers gather over topics that interest them and want to talk about it seem to have moved to discord, slack etc. The whole "broadcast yourself to the world" part of social networks just moved to Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram etc.. I think.

Some people are moving back to anonymous communication with limited audiences. Twitter is anonymous, but 100% public. There is no way to limit your audience to a smaller group. FB is not anonymous and mostly public. Private groups do exist, but you still mostly need to have an actual name on your account. TikTok & Snapchat are mostly for people who show their faces, not anonymous. WhatsApp shows everyone everyone's p…

Aside from locking your account so that only followers can see your tweets, I’ve been offered the option to restrict the audience of tweets on twitter (although I’m not sure if that was a transient experiment or if I’ve blocked my noticing the offer of the option or if I’ve asked it to stop asking).

Re: Is this the end of social networking?

#69

Post by [deleted] »

shevis wrote: post #42
beebmam wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People want their bubbles. We’re all here on HN for that exact purpose. 100% disagree. I'm here to find ideas I disagree with and tell people how they're wrong. I'm not looking for an agreeable experience here. I'm also here to learn about new tech.

I 100% disagree with your idea that you, or anyone for that matter, is just here to disagree with other people’s ideas. Nobody disagrees with stuff just for the sake of disagreement. Who would do such a thing? Don’t bother answering that question though because you’d be wrong.

[deleted]

Re: Is this the end of social networking?

#70

Post by rsweeney21 »

If your stated company mission is not the thing that produces revenue then it will eventually be sacrificed for the mission that does produce revenue.

Examples of mission statements that don't produce revenue: Google, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, most news organizations.

Microsoft's missions in 1980 was "A computer on every desk and in every home". Their mission produced revenue. There are lots of examples of mission/revenue alignment.

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