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Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#111

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

marcoseliziario wrote: post #52
organsnyder wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google+ only had that many users because many other Google properties (YouTube being the biggest) were lumped in together. I bet the majority of Google+ "users" weren't even aware that the platform existed.

Yeah. If you had a google account was more or less impossible not to be on Google+. The thing is that engagement was pathetically low. We used to joke that the best password manager would be to post all your secrets in a google+ posting, because nobody would ever see your post.

But that right there is why as a fairly strict free market type, I see the need for government intervention in some tech antitrust situations.

If Google+ failed with google immediately signing anyone with a gmail account up for it and pushing it fairly hard with all their channels - how extremely unlikely is it for someone to organically take Facebook’s market share away?

Oh no problem, you’ll only need someone with more resources than Google!

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#112

Post by tomaszs »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #97
emptybottle wrote: post #70

To all the people poking fun at "thousands"... You have to start somewhere, and I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to see thousands of new users signing up for your app...

If I was the co-founder of one of the top websites in the world that had to pivot from my shitty news organization into what looks like a shitty version of Diaspora, I’m not so sure I’d be thrilled with “thousands.” You need network effects for social network rivals to take off. That isn’t to say there won’t be a Facebook successor (there almost certainly will be one — the big challenge for Facebook is if it has a pi…

A lots of this is true. I can only debate what networks need to have. Facebook became popular not because social effect but because it used "on behalf" emails to spam friends of users with optout error by design and because of automated scraping emails from an email account when user got lured to give login and password. Than it was new, now these things have special words to describe it.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#113

Post by farisjarrah »

zamalek wrote: post #41
jermaustin1 wrote: post #14

I can't see this as a Facebook rival. From my understanding, this is a social news site with fact checking. I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family, and get updates on my nieces and nephews since I moved from Houston, TX to NYC 5 years ago. Until someone replaces that aspect in a way that works while still enabling my family to do their memes and quizzes, and all that crap I avoid, there will be…

> I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family I use Facebook as a perpetually correct address book. People change address, phone number and sometimes email, but never their Facebook account. That single property of Facebook (which is something my generation attributed to Facebook, instead of it being directly coded as a feature) is why I could basically never leave. I've tried to get my family off o…

Are there any popular main-stream non-facebook or non-google owned chat properties? I've been looking for a family friendly alternative.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#114

Post by supjeff »

CrankyBear wrote: post #103

Jimmy Wales or Mark Zuckerman... this is not exactly a situation where's one clearly more trust worthy than the other.

Aside from the fact that wales' software is supposed to be free and open source and thus will not require its users to trust the founder as much as they are forced to with fb, how is Wales not more trustworthy than Zuck? One guy has a string of abuses and apologies spanning almost two decades as the founder, CEO and majority shareholder of a company that helped the Russian gov't steal the 2016 election and helped bring back eradicated diseases, and the other created a non-profit encyclopedia and gave away the source code?

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#115

Post by gnode »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #14

I can't see this as a Facebook rival. From my understanding, this is a social news site with fact checking. I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family, and get updates on my nieces and nephews since I moved from Houston, TX to NYC 5 years ago. Until someone replaces that aspect in a way that works while still enabling my family to do their memes and quizzes, and all that crap I avoid, there will be…

My experience is that if you don't participate in social media, people call / message you personally, or meet in person. I don't think communicating with family or friends by broadcasting into an abyss and fighting for their attention is an improvement on one-to-one dialogue.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#116

Post by nanomonkey »

freehunter wrote: post #26
nanomonkey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience on Scuttlebutt and other decentralized/alternative social medias, thousands will try something out just to kick the tires; it's staying, contributing and utilizing the tool for things it wasn't intended for that really matters.

And convincing people to use a service named “scuttle butt”.

That being said, the protocol is called scuttlebutt (which means gossip, or water cooler) and all the clients have more palatable names like Manyverse, Patchwork, Patchfoo, etc.

Fortunately, the protocol name is almost a filtering function that removes anyone so immature as to be put off by the name. The rest embrace the name, who doesn't like a good butt?

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#117

Post by capableweb »

metalliqaz wrote: post #83
capableweb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many users do you think HN has? No matter how many, I think I would call HN mostly a success (currently/temporary?). Seems that to have a good social network, it's less about quantity of content and more about quality. Most of Twitter is shit, but it contains some average content too, and a small amount of gold nuggets. HN feels to have much better signal/noise ratio and judging by myself and others who hang arou…

Is HS a social network? I think of it more like a forum. On HN I don't really care exactly who I interact with. It's just as good to me without my family and friends being users (better, in fact :). Real social networks aren't like that.

"Real social networks"? There is nothing in "social network" that requires the relationship to be equal in real-life or that you even know the identity of the person you're writing with. Most would consider Twitter social media, and most people I know constantly interact and discuss with people they don't really care who they are and that's not what's important anyways.

I would say in general, places where you interact with other people ends up building some sort of social network of it's insides.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#118

Post by rhizome »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #14

I can't see this as a Facebook rival. From my understanding, this is a social news site with fact checking. I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family, and get updates on my nieces and nephews since I moved from Houston, TX to NYC 5 years ago. Until someone replaces that aspect in a way that works while still enabling my family to do their memes and quizzes, and all that crap I avoid, there will be…

Facebook's greatest threat is from Nextdoor, and I can't wait until it happens.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#119

Post by capableweb »

rafiki6 wrote: post #79
capableweb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many users do you think HN has? No matter how many, I think I would call HN mostly a success (currently/temporary?). Seems that to have a good social network, it's less about quantity of content and more about quality. Most of Twitter is shit, but it contains some average content too, and a small amount of gold nuggets. HN feels to have much better signal/noise ratio and judging by myself and others who hang arou…

I think the key difference is HN doesn't need to make money

Sure, we all choose our incentives. Facebook chose to follow money.

Re: Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

#120

Post by capableweb »

Uehreka wrote: post #82
capableweb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many users do you think HN has? No matter how many, I think I would call HN mostly a success (currently/temporary?). Seems that to have a good social network, it's less about quantity of content and more about quality. Most of Twitter is shit, but it contains some average content too, and a small amount of gold nuggets. HN feels to have much better signal/noise ratio and judging by myself and others who hang arou…

I don’t think it makes sense to compare HN to other social networks. It wasn’t started as a business that would need to turn a profit, it was started as a side project by a rich guy (Paul Graham) who wanted to see what smart people thought about things. If HN fails to ever hit 1M users, PG (or Sam Altman) isn’t going to shut it down or cut off its funding, and neither he nor Y Combinator are expecting or relying on i…

I agree that HN is not like most social networks, but it also bears resemblance with many other social networks. Largely the ones that are not founded for the reason of profits.

> But it’s important to note that what works for HN likely wouldn’t work for anyone else.

It's also important to note that what does work for HN, might work for others too. We won't know unless we try. Strict moderation is something that helped HN, helped make Flashback (Swedish Forum) tolerable and something many of the greatest subreddits applied with great success. Just an example.

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