Ask HN: Do you think there will be full replacement to Facebook?

Facebook's weakness is China and Russia.

Sorry guys, but it's true.

Facebook aligned itself too much with one particular nation state and not that there is anything wrong with that ( hell it may even be "morally right" ), it is just that it doesn't work for business.

Businesses right now can be truly global phenomena, much like harking back to the imperial days or Spanish or British companies ( like Swire's and P&O ) companies that had broad interests all around the world.

The most important trait of a global venture ?

Work with everybody.

When companies align themselves politically, they fail to truly engage a global marketplace.

Companies actual political aspect is to be like a reconciling diplomat between disputing parties, it does not behoove them to engage the same disputes as nation states and politics do, they can do a great benefit to themselves, to nations and to people by simply being truly global, rather than narrowly nation state.

Oh, and in 50 - 100 years, it's all going to be "giant corporations" anyway. The period now is just a period of transition, as government's projection of power is shifting toward being executed by corporations.

Companies that hold fast to the past -- nations and borders and such, and refuse to work with everybody for political reasons, are not going to make out. Dying breed.

Of course the insane fake lefty moralists will pretend moral righteousness and champion google's to block itself in China. "So righteous" -- yet really, the best way to serve human rights is to actually serve the people, wherever they are. Had Google been less political and more open to working with the Chinese they could have been a force there.

Same for FB. China is never going to go, "Come in come in, your intelligence agencies are welcome to the comings and goings of our citizens, we therefore embrace your FB"

The Chinese are practical. FB could have worked with them, had it been less political. So could have Google.

Now they missed their chances, swapping results for the fake payoff of a misguided sense of righteousness.

Well ... dying breed. That's what dying breeds do...make choices that don't work, and lead to their extinction.

The best way to create a global harmony is to create global companies.

Of course the fake lefties will pretend no one is allowed to do that, and pretend that they're right by saying others are wrong. Yet this just leads to morally bad outcomes that belie the very causes the fake lefties pretend to support, a contradiction that cuts to the core of the fake left paradox.

If you want more info about the fake left, go read Zizek's piece on the morally corrupt fake left championing of Islamist criminal apologism.

Companies are unavoidably political. It's just that it works for them, and for their customers, and for governments, when they choose to exercise that politics in a way that "works with everybody."

I think they have enough users that they don't have to worry too much about a replacement. Instagram is pretty close conceptually to Facebook, but most people don't use it as a direct substitute. One thing way in the future I could see hurting them is when my generation --the first generation of users that used Facebook regularly start dying. If I'm an old man and I'm on Facebook seeing daily updates on people I used to know dying, I will probably stop using Facebook altogether to avoid terminal depression, but might just be me. However, if they can keep on-boarding the younger generations, they could probably survive that, assuming their isn't a hipper substitute by then offering users immortality.

Wot! You mean we'll get bored of looking at screens all day and night?

I think there will come a time when Facebook is replaced. I don't, however, think it's going to come as an obvious social networking site.

Let's back up a bit to what Facebook was in its nascent days: a place to go and see what others were doing. The quality of the content was high relative to what the users wanted. Someone else here on HN posted within the last week or so a link to Reed's Law (Reed's homepage: http://www.reed.com/dpr/) which basically outlines how social networking groups become more useful. So, the question that someone is going to have to answer to beat Facebook is, 'How can I create something that is providing a large number of people with higher quality content than Facebook?'

Personally, I think it's going to be a Trojan Horse (in the historical sense, not the malicious program sense) that does this. Something that allows users to join (probably using their Facebook account to log in and register), and then facilitates sharing high quality information with others. The first iteration may not be an obvious threat to Facebook, but it's coming. I honestly believe it's going to come from the healthcare space, and probably in about 10 years. Full disclosure: I applied to the YC Fellowship with an idea of how to do this from healthcare, although it's not as obvious from the application, that's the end goal.