We'll see, I guess. This feels like an attempt to apply lessons of what happened yesterday to today. It feels like assuming success only has one mold. And it resists acknowledging how much people hate the thing we have, how many people consider it toxic and damaging.
I think people just need to be lead to greener pastures. Right now the alpha geeks aren't cooler & better, don't have great & obvious advantages for being out on the frontier trying cool shit. The Tim O'Reilly "Follow The Alpha Geeks" advice is rarely wrong, in my view, for the alpha geeks mostly want to expand capabilities & power & enable, in ways most consumer efforts are too bounded & limited to go for, but we keep forgetting this wisdom's words anyways.
Once the alpha geeks are unqualifiedly better than the mundane normy-nets, the tables will start to turn. I think the geeks are doing the good work, are putting in the right effort.
Dogfood your way to success. Do what empassions & excites you. Don't worry about l-users. Focus on being really good & powerful. You'll be out competed if you do what sigmoid10 says & compete to be the lowest common denominator of social networking, and your product will suck as bad as everything else we have.
Truly good works market themselves. Places where genuine authentic people (and creative fun bots) mix & share themselves in are what we are searching for, is the authenticity that the engagement-loop corporate networks break & burry. There's different races here. I do think the broader we are searching for better more open pattern en mass to replace the walled garden networks (a challenge many distributeers reject), but the path to victory is assymetric competition, is tapping into different sources of value & raising it up in different ways.
Do you believe in humanity? Or do you think synthetic gloss shit forever & ever will always win?