We Need More Alternatives to Facebook • Hacker News Board

Post by quadrangle » Tue, May 23, 2017, 4:40 PM UTC

AJ007 wrote: post #16

quadrangle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish this anecdote were true, but I bet this is a rose-glasses thing where the metrics show things getting worse. While a minority of Americans might avoid Facebook, places like Fiji have been completely colonized where everyone has zero-rated Facebook on their mobile devices and so the development of anything outside Facebook has been sabotaged and Facebook is the new AOL with network effects destroying the potent…

If Facebook is the new AOL, the analogy fares poorly for Facebook's future. Becoming a global media monopoly, Facebook is going to have trouble. They may be able to skirt US anti-trust authorities at home, but not abroad. More local jurisdictions will demand global jurisdiction over what Facebook chooses to do. The bigger they become the more targets are painted on them. They are already far too large to escape scrut…

I wish that Facebook as new AOL would just have the same outcome and give way to a free and open internet. BUT Facebook gets to be AOL2 in a world where they have far far far more clout (order of magnitude larger user base and many orders of magnitude more significant impact on real life — not just an online diversion but central to politics, life, work, business, etc) and are smart enough to learn all the lessons from AOL's history in order to not repeat the same mistakes. Facebook's internet.org lost in India but won elsewhere. We're talking major power struggles where it's not clear that Facebook will lose in the end.

Google is indeed a whole other monster with a different set of issues. It's more of a blob with tons of parts, some more benign than others. Some parts comparable to Facebook, some more legitimate.