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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'

#141

Post by zepto »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #111
marcoseliziario wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google plus didn’t do anything significantly better than Facebook

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

#144

Post by hinkley »

falcor84 wrote: post #131

While 160,000 is a very small number compared to Facebook's user base, it's two orders of magnitude more than what the "thousands"in the title made me imagine. A more generous title would have used something like "a sixth of a million".

Someone else in the thread is implying it’s closer to 190k. At any rate we are now into “hundreds of thousands”.

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

#145

Post by metalliqaz »

mongol wrote: post #135
metalliqaz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes I think it is a social network. They come in many shapes and forms. I think a forum is a social network too.

HN doesn't even have direct messages, though.

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

#146

Post by jay_kyburz »

TomMasz wrote: post #129
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...

I hear you but Facebook, for better or worse, is the social networking site everyone you know is on. It has a tremendous advantage over any upstart for that reason. Lots of geeky folks flocked to Google+ in its early days but that wasn't enough to replace Facebook. Even when they gave everyone who had a Google account of some kind a G+ profile it still wasn't enough. I will definitely check this out but it'll be back…

Google+ always had a weird broken interface and they just never finished it. I was one of the geeks that flocked to it, and had plenty of friends there. It didn't fail because of network effects, it failed because they stopped working on it before it was finished.

It was really strange and I always assumed at the time that Facebook and Google had come to some agreement behind the scenes.

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

#148

Post by gist »

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 somewhat like linkedin is also used for socially acceptable bragging and puffery. So for example it's ok to post things that others would be jealous of (or think you are bragging) if done another way. That is definitely some of the appeal of those platforms.

And the best part is nobody even knows if the people reading are turned off or think you are bragging that never gets echoed back in any way.

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

#149

Post by saghm »

deusofnull wrote: post #130
konstantinentia wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I similarly relocated away from family. Turns out that if they know you don't use Facebook they will go out of their way to update you directly. Just believe that you are worth it, and my friend, you are.

I've been trying to get my family to install signal for our family group chat to no avail... i feel signal is so much smoother than fb msgr, but no one outside my techie / ativist friend groups ever agree to even try it.

I think a large part of the difficulty here is that mostly people already use multiple messaging services out of a group including things like vanilla SMS, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Snapchat, and some might eve use all of them, so they're hesitant to add yet another one into the mix. I'd personally be thrilled to delete all of the messaging apps on my phone besides one if the one that remained allowed me to message with my full set of family and friends, but unfortunately that isn't likely to be feasible anytime soon.
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