Demise of twitter is.. not matching with my experience.
Stop trying to make social networks succeed
181–190 of 226 posts
Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They opened it up for brands days ahead of the general public. Of course they're thinking of monetization first.
Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 stranger…
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.
I agree, but I also think it's a completely unsurprising outcome. Pre-internet, there were lots of people who wanted to be famous, and idolized movie and TV stars and the like. With these sorts of internet platforms, those types of people actually do have a shot at being well-known, if not outright famous, in a way.
Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
>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?
> we are strongly in favor of privacy and tracker blocking, but then get upset when we have to pay money
Speak for yourself; whenever I have the option to pay to remove ads on a service I get value from, I sign up nigh immediately. And on top of that, I'm always running with aggressive ad and tracker blockers running.
If given the option, I would have paid a small yearly fee to use Instagram back ~10 years ago when the platform was actually decent and didn't do icky things to push engagement up.
Of course, the problem is that most people would not have paid a yearly fee to use Instagram, so if payment were required, it would be a ghost town. And, all things being equal, advertisers would prefer that there isn't an ad-free paid option, since then the ads reach fewer people.
Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed
#185Earlier 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…
> Who here thanks HN for their service?
you see people thanking the mods like dang on here all the time. it's basically a meme. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
even if they didn't, why should they? this site is used as advertising for YC and their job ads. why should they get extra thanks for maintaining a forum for its ad space? do you also thank Facebook or Twitter for its moderation?
Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed
#186Earlier 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. 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…
> 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.
The British transport YouTubers I follow, particularly Jago Hazard, every time they mention the Great Western Railway, are careful to remind us that it has no relation to the original company of that name.
Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed
#187I 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 netwo…
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.
Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed
#188I 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.
Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 increas…
> 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 fo…
>> the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton
> Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year
With 1 billion users, $2/year gives you $2B/year, not $16B/year.
> offer some dividend
Honestly, I think we explicitly don't want this. We should go for a non-profit model, where the company is required to put most/all of its revenue toward running the business, and cannot distribute dividends. If we have shareholders and dividends and whatnot, that's just an incentive for the owners to push for greater profits so their dividends go up.
You mention utilities, and that just makes me think of my local electric/gas utility, PG&E, which is a public, for-profit corporation, listed on a stock exchange. Years ago they even used to pay a dividend. They completely suck, and have been responsible for people's deaths. This is not at all the model we should strive for when it comes to a social-network-as-utility.
Re: Stop trying to make social networks succeed
#190> 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.