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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'

#261

Post by wutbrodo »

post_below wrote: post #151
jay_kyburz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It really was strange, continues to be, the way Google wanders away from products before finishing them. I get ditching things that don't work, but G+ is a great example of something that had plenty of traction in it's early days and, as far as I can see, lost it purely because G didn't seem to care about it.

Can you elaborate on what you mean? From inside Google at the time, the general consensus was that they cared too much about it, at the cost of much of the rest of the company.

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

#262

Post by wutbrodo »

freehunter wrote: post #219
detaro wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A word for chatting is somehow unsuitable as a name because you have to say the horrible 4-letter word "butt"?

An archaic word that was only chosen because it includes the word “butt”?

I wouldn't extrapolate the the level of immaturity it takes to make that connection to whoever named the service. The last time I giggled at hearing the word butt as part of a larger word or phrase was probably the second grade (cigarette butts, pork butt, etc)

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

#263

Post by aylmao »

psweber wrote: post #62
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 fantasize about a product like that sometimes. A private, pay social site geared towards families. Your family pays a yearly subscription. Photo/video sharing. Event planning. Family news timeline. Everything purely linear. No manipulation to maximize engagement. No ads. Just real information about your family that you care about. One side of my family has about 30 people that are all willing to travel to meet some…

This essentially already exists if you put a little effort into it. You could set up a Diaspora, Mastodon or Pixelfed instance open to just to family members in some cloud cloud provider, and this way pay a monthly fee for a private social network.

It'd be awesome to see someone contribute back some automatic flow which gets you up and running in 5 minutes, instead of having to figure out how to run these in AWS yourself, for example. Could be a fun project though.

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

#264

Post by rkoten »

iamnothere wrote: post #161
filmgirlcw wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Mastadon, and any other number of attempts at this have failed (calling Mastadon a failure is unfair, but its not Twitter and won’t ever be), so will this. Who says that success should be measured by Twitter? It may be that no other social network approaches Twitter and Facebook in size given their dominance, but that doesn't mean that there can be no other social networks. In my opinion, one-size-fits-all social w…

While I absolutely agree that niche spaces that fit your interests tend to have much higher content quality, this argument doesn't quite apply to social networks that attach to your IRL persona. No point in switching until most your IRL connections are there.

In this case, if all your friends hang out at McDonalds, you're not gonna want to sit at your local bistro alone.

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

#265

Post by post_below »

wutbrodo wrote: post #261
post_below wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really was strange, continues to be, the way Google wanders away from products before finishing them. I get ditching things that don't work, but G+ is a great example of something that had plenty of traction in it's early days and, as far as I can see, lost it purely because G didn't seem to care about it.

Can you elaborate on what you mean? From inside Google at the time, the general consensus was that they cared too much about it, at the cost of much of the rest of the company.

From the outside it appeared to be a bare framework that was never fully developed.

I didn't use it often but I checked on it periodically just to keep up on what was, hopefully, going to be a contender in the social media world. What I saw was almost no change in user facing functionality over the course of it's existence.

There also didn't seem to be any significant attempt at marketing, monetization or collaboration with the community.

Meanwhile there were significant influencers and content producers with large numbers of followers. The dream of any social media company.

I always assumed it folded because they couldn't agree on a path to monetization.

But from the perspective that they actually did care about it (which I read as they devoted significant resources to it even if that didn't translate to anything that was publicly visible)... It starts to sound more like a company that's hit the self hobbling critical mass of size and internal bureaucracy.

What did it look like from the inside?

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

#267

Post by kalado »

xchaotic wrote: post #128

The pricing to me seems horribly expensive especially as they are fighting a competitor that is ‘free’ and has way better network effects?

Yeah, way to expensive. A "pay-what-you-want" model with a minium of 2$-4$ a month would be much more successfull, I feel.

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

#268

Post by wutbrodo »

post_below wrote: post #265
wutbrodo wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on what you mean? From inside Google at the time, the general consensus was that they cared too much about it, at the cost of much of the rest of the company.

From the outside it appeared to be a bare framework that was never fully developed. I didn't use it often but I checked on it periodically just to keep up on what was, hopefully, going to be a contender in the social media world. What I saw was almost no change in user facing functionality over the course of it's existence. There also didn't seem to be any significant attempt at marketing, monetization or collaborati…

People were generally pretty irritated (as was the public) by the integration of every Google product into it. Leadership (both internally and externally) was pretty clear that it was meant to be a platform, one that unified all of Google's products with a shared social layer.

I worked in research at the time and have never been a heavy social media user, so it didn't really affect me much, but the internal story seems to fit reality more than what you're describing: the change in user facing functionality was progressive integration of Google products (like YouTube)

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

#269

Post by deusofnull »

saghm wrote: post #149
deusofnull wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 allow…

remember like a decade back there was a instant messanger aggregator? it was called like, chatzilla or something, i forget. but in the logic of today's walled garden system of tech fiefdoms, would never happen without some regulatory requirement.

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

#270

Post by Kye »

fortran77 wrote: post #108

I tried it. Despite it trying not to spread "misinformation" it really isn't that much better. And I'm getting barraged by "friend requests" from Russian Women just like any other social network. What would be nice is if people paid for Journalism again. They major newspapers and news magazines should figure out how to have a common payment system that lets you subscribe in one place to nearly everything, with a cons…

Someone sent one as soon as I got in and there's no way to reject. Now there's a big "pending requests" box on every page and an easy to misclick Accept button.
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