The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history • Hacker News Board

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#151

Post by code_duck » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 3:42 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #19

iMark wrote: post #9

Yahoo failed, in part, because its competitors were better. Being better than Facebook doesn't mean just replicating its technology, it means having a better social graph. That's a hard problem to solve.

Facebook is one vision of ~modern life. Social networks are massively overrated in term of human value IMO. I think whatsapp is probably closer to what would be useful and not toxic. I don't believe people need profiles and graphs and whatever.

The profiles and graphs are really for advertisers, aren’t they? It seems like this discussion is centering on the utility that Facebook’s consumer products provide for it members. As we are often reminded, due to their business model, interests of users are indirect, secondary. Facebook’s main service is of course for advertisers.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#152

Post by abruzzi » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 3:45 PM UTC

sys_64738 wrote: post #139

nolok wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated The worst part is that Yahoo innovated a lot ... In incubators, side projects, etc ... But they failed to bring their innovations to their main products, or to turn their side things into full blown products. They had no plan, neither overall or per product. Take emails for exemple, for the longest time (and still now, although not as dominating) THE key to user identity…

Yahoo failed because they were a directory service that saw the search box as less relevant. Google recognized that searching is the human approach, not ordering stuff into folders, which is an obsessive compulsive trait.

Categorization and catalogs go back centuries so I don’t think I’d call it an OCD trait. Early search engines (90s) were very bad, the change that caught Yahoo was the quality of search. I remember doing searches on altavista, getting a million hits, and at least the first dozen were nothing but log files. The game changer for search was its ability to prioritize relevant content over accidental matches. That started training us to search, which was a new way to interact with information. You couldn’t search an printed encyclopedia. In the 90s Yahoo was much more useful than Webcrawler.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#153

Post by code_duck » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 3:47 PM UTC

StephenMelon wrote: post #46

ben_w wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t need to be a better graph, it needs to be good enough to grow. Most FB users probably aren’t “power users”.

Facebook jumped the shark when they started trying to encourage private individuals to “create engagement” and pay to boost their posts. If internal marketing jargon is leaking into your UX, you clearly have serious problems with how your staff are being incentivised. Facebook could have become an engine that allowed society to maximise human capital and but they sacrificed all that potential at the altar of growth h…

I remember when that first came out, and was based on how many friends you had. It would have cost me $90 to promote my vacation photos to a group of people semi-randomly selected by Facebook and chance from my friends list, and for people with more ‘friends’, they wanted up to $500, if I recall.

Socially, it is extremely out of touch to even offer such a service to individuals.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#154

Post by hodder » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 3:48 PM UTC

dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

Blockbuster's demise was fairly widely predicted - at least among the tech crowd.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#155

Post by AJ007 » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 3:52 PM UTC

dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

Adding to other snarky comments about The Economist here, if it is published in The Economist it probably is the crowded view. I read the magazine for years and I'm not sure if I gained much unique insight about anything.

Certainly Facebook is not Yahoo. I think you are right, Facebook is almost exactly the opposite of Yahoo in every way, from the founder sticking around to how acquisitions were picked and managed.

I don't particularly like Facebook or agree with it. I prefer the communication platforms on the internet looked more like the internet, decentralized. Unfortunately for both Facebook's proponents and critics we are now in a negative news cycle echo chamber.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#156

Post by le_clochard » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 3:53 PM UTC

resters wrote: post #149

It's remarkable that Sandberg is being thrown under the bus for not doing enough to stop Donald Trump from being elected. What she is (in hindsight) expected to have done is to have insisted that Facebook's news feed algorithm be used as a content filter to suppress stories promoted by politically marginalized groups. This is much the same way China's government uses its Great Firewall to control which information re…

$85,000 on Facebook ads. Surprisingly small amount, that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/10/w...

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#157

Post by dagw » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 3:55 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #148

dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

> There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool Are you implying that's no longer true?

I don't think many people see Zuckerberg as a fool.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#158

Post by pier25 » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 4:05 PM UTC

wild_preference wrote: post #134

pier25 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it's really a matter of time. Facebook has become the social network for grandmas and aunties. Facebook has expanded to new countries in the last decade which has brought these millions of users, but younger generations in countries that have had Facebook for a long time are not using it anymore. In the US most Facebook users are between 25-34. There are barely any teenagers. https://www.statista.com/statis…

Staking your claim on what teenagers today do today doesn't make much sense to me because teenagers get older. Facebook just has to be the social network people end up on. I'd at least look at college-aged people, not the weird, limited social life of high schoolers.

Maybe. Time will tell.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#159

Post by pier25 » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

sodosopa wrote: post #123

pier25 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated Their most popular property ended up being Flickr, and they let it rot when smartphones and apps started being popular 10 years ago. Instead pro users fled to 500px and other communities, and social users wen to Instagram.

Yahoo! didn't build Flickr. Flickr came from Game Neverending. It was an in-game feature and it did so well, the game was never released. That came from Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield's team and their innovative work at Ludicorp. It was purchased and then became a squandered opportunity by Yahoo!

Never said they built it. But at its peak (I'd say around 2006-2010) it was owned by Yahoo.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#160

Post by tasuki » Fri, Nov 23, 2018, 4:10 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #69

Personally I haven't been able to muster empathy for people who amassed a thousand lifetimes' worth of personal wealth and then are suddenly threatened with the potential of being left with...only a few hundred lifetimes' worth.

Well, perhaps you'd like to try harder? Or do you think they don't deserve your empathy? In the end, people with infinite money have to deal with many of the same issues we deal with: relationship/personal issues, health problems, death of close ones, etc.