Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop trying to make social networks succeed

ploum.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 226 posts

Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed

#91

Post by tnecniv »

xeromal wrote: post #77
emadabdulrahim wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's mind boggling how many people enjoy that though. You're right. Clash of Clans et all really changed the gaming dynamic. Just as an example, Halo Infinite came out and it had warts, but also had a good fundamentals for gameplay. Good speed and weapons. Every single comment was about armor cores and skins. I just didn't get it.

The thing a lot of these AAA devs don’t seem to get is that what works for Clash of Clans doesn’t work for AAA games most of the time. Also, the Clash of Clans devs are liked by the player base because they take community feedback very seriously (and, as a counter point, the Clash Royale devs are despised because they don’t).

Buying a monthly pass for one of those games ends up feeling like a pretty good deal because it enables you to increase your engagement with the game by a lot for what feels like a good deal. AAA shooters that go down this rabbit hole feel like they’re spending more development effort pushing skins I don’t want while giving a half-backed game with the promise of improvement in the future that often never happens.

For the price of a monthly pass for Clash games, I’m easily getting more hours of enjoyment than dollars invested each month.

Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed

#92

Post by xeromal »

epiccoleman wrote: post #90
xeromal wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Tears of the Kingdom is a perfect example of doing it right. It respects the player and treats them well. Jedi Survivor does too.

Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed

#93

Post by mattbuilds »

nottorp wrote: post #86
mattbuilds wrote: post #19

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 ac…

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

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.

Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed

#94

Post by marginalia_nu »

doublerabbit wrote: post #68
marginalia_nu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> tl;dr: The attention span of the person is now three seconds. If you can't grab that three seconds; next.

I don't know this is true in general. Only in very noisy environments, which is like the opposite of what a forum is. The harder you clamor for attention, the harder it is to actually capture it because you're creating an environment where capturing attention for more than three seconds is impossible.

If you create a low-noise environment, you can capture attention for a long time.

Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed

#95

Post by marginalia_nu »

mattbuilds wrote: post #19

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 ac…

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.

Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed

#96

Post by marcosdumay »

evrimoztamur wrote: post #9

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?

> 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.

Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed

#97

Post by mym1990 »

wavemode wrote: post #62
lapcat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

lol it's so explicit at this point he's the world's leading expert on the enshittification cycle

The ironic thing is that he lists monetization last, but simply by uttering that sentiment he tells us that they are really thinking about monetization first, aka the end goal of the product.

Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed

#98

Post by nottorp »

tnecniv wrote: post #91
xeromal wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mind boggling how many people enjoy that though. You're right. Clash of Clans et all really changed the gaming dynamic. Just as an example, Halo Infinite came out and it had warts, but also had a good fundamentals for gameplay. Good speed and weapons. Every single comment was about armor cores and skins. I just didn't get it.

The thing a lot of these AAA devs don’t seem to get is that what works for Clash of Clans doesn’t work for AAA games most of the time. Also, the Clash of Clans devs are liked by the player base because they take community feedback very seriously (and, as a counter point, the Clash Royale devs are despised because they don’t). Buying a monthly pass for one of those games ends up feeling like a pretty good deal because…

> Buying a monthly pass for one of those games ends up feeling like a pretty good deal because it enables you to increase your engagement with the game by a lot for what feels like a good deal.

You have no idea how right you are. It increases your engagement. Not your enjoyment.

> Good speed and weapons. Every single comment was about armor cores and skins. I just didn't get it.

You have to play for something. To reach the end of the story. To grow a thing (city builders, minecraft). Or... for skins in a competitive shooter. But there are no skins unless you pay real money for the game you've already paid for. Oops?

Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed

#99

Post by nottorp »

xeromal wrote: post #79
JohnFen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I mostly play single player games these days because they've been spared. I played a Plague's tale a few weeks ago. Really strange premise but a lot of fun!

Single player games are not competitive enough for the people who believe in "the microtransactions are only cosmetic".

Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed

#100

Post by marcosdumay »

lapcat wrote: post #22
jrm4 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I would say that up to the point when they started for forcefully manipulating their content for direct payments or indirect "retention", yes, the benefit outweighed the costs.

By 2015 they were almost all incredibly harmful and mostly valueless.

Post reply on HN