11–20 of 226 posts
Incredibly reductionist argument. Success is impossible to define therefore all social networks are failures? There are clearly properties of a social network that users would like to see: ease of use, reach, quality of content and moderation while also allowing for openness and free speech. Working toward a future where something like this exists at scale is worthwhile and a workable-enough definition of success.
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?
I loved forums, but with the modern legal landscape, liability for uploaded content, DMCA requests, etc. I would never want to run/moderate one - and that was true even before the current swarm of LLM-generated spam.
1) People with no technical skills or knowledge (can't setup their own web site) want to be able to publish text, photo, and video content to the public, to a community, and/or to their direct contacts. They do not want to have to use any technology other than their phone, and they refuse to pay for this with any amount of money.
2) Since there are texts, photos, and videos being published, people want to be able to gather all the published content that interests them in one place for convenient reading.
As long as people have these needs, someone will make software that fulfills them, regardless of how they measure success.
Because people can't be serving the content directly from their phone, we have no way to do this today without some form of cloud hosting. Non-technical people can't set that up themselves. And even if they could, it would cost them money. The only solution we have right now is for some organization to create and manage a centralized-ish platform.
Even if that organization were a benevolent non-profit, it needs to pay the bills for hosting and labor. You could maybe ride on donations, but good luck with that. Therefore, the organization needs to somehow extract some value from the non-paying users. This inevitably leads to advertising, selling user data, locking users into a walled garden, and all the other mechanisms we have seen that harm the platform in order to get the resources to keep it alive.
And this is the key to making a successful social network that will last. How can you meet those two needs, and pay the bandwidth and storage bills, without doing any of the things that make the platform suck? Nobody's figured it out yet!
Big "winners" in this space can be dangerous, but they can also be an important tool/unfortunate necessity when it comes to national or global "news."
Which is to say, yes, I want a good replacement for Twitter because social media more-or-less succeeded where "the Rodney King story" failed.
> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate. This is something I didn't really understand when I was younger. In every online community that has had some amount of hype surrounding it, there are prominent figures either hyping it up further or spreading doom and gloom when the metrics don't match their expectations. What I didn'…
I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers doing it.
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?
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.
> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate. This is something I didn't really understand when I was younger. In every online community that has had some amount of hype surrounding it, there are prominent figures either hyping it up further or spreading doom and gloom when the metrics don't match their expectations. What I didn'…
Unless someone generates a social network based on a paywall and exclusivity that somehow delights the business model just doesn't work for the user.
Things can just be what they are, grow naturally and then die naturally. I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to achieve an unnatural growth is probably not good for both the quality of the product and the long term stability of it.
I would love to see more niche things grow organically and fill a role for some people, at some time and not try to be everything for everyone. Because when that's the case, does anyone really enjoy it?
> But, to this day, there are more people in the world without an account on Facebook than people with one.
So that's an upper bound of what, four billion people? I think basically anyone watching would consider that a success!
When people are wondering which social network will "succeed", they're not watching the different apps duke it out like a sports tournament. They just want to find a space in which they can communicate with most of the people they care about.