Comment by echelon
3 days ago
It's 100% the network, not the tech.
You can have 1:1 parity with any company or product, but unless you have their word of mouth distribution and adoption, you will lose. Every time.
People in aggregate, as crowds, are relatively static and inflexible. Once they learn a fact once, it sticks. You cannot unteach that without lifting metaphorical mountains. The first mover with escape velocity wins.
The amount of energy needed to undo that is massive.
You'll have fringe 0.01%ers adopt some other tool, but they'll never carry enough gravitas to bring the entire network with them.
Anecdotal evidence:
- Github, Facebook, and Reddit have never been unseated
- Instagram has never been replaced, only supplemented
- Twitter/X has only lost steam due to extremely bad press, an unwanted name change, and a huge effort from Meta (which leveraged traffic and synergy from Instagram). And even then, it's still well within the public zeitgeist. Bluesky and Mastodon didn't even make dents.
- Google has never been displaced (granted, Google pays a lot of money to maintain defaults and maintain a web "pane of glass" monopoly, redefine the address bar as a search bar, etc.)
Why should Github, Facebook, Reddit, or anybody else be unseated.
Just because I use Codeberg doesn't mean Github should die. Just because I never ever visit Facebook doesn't mean you should stop using it.
Why can't we all just play nice?
> Why
This is why VCs won't fund consumer. It's frothy, fickle, and the incumbents have saturated the network effects market. And that totally sucks.
I'm a believer in strong antitrust and that a fire every decade or so clears the forest of dead growth and renews the ecosystem. Evolution and reinvention staves off ossification. Instead of working on hyper-optimization of things like better ad targeting in search of more growth, we're working on more important problems and lifting bigger weights.
More startups means better compensation for ICs and innovators. Rewards for capital risk rather than extremely large wealth funds and pension plans.
Look at your Fords and Boeings. Totally stagnant. Newer international competition is refreshing and energized.
Or Google of just two years ago, before they had their "come to Jesus" moment. Where they witnessed visions of the loss of their single largest cash flow flashing before their eyes.
All your examples have replaced some other service in the past.
Except GitHub, maybe.
Granted, the replaced services were nowhere near the popularity levels of the current ones, and have made horrible decision.
> All your examples have replaced some other service in the past.
This was pre-broadband penetration, pre-smartphone. That was a really different era.
Social networking wasn't really that big before Facebook. Friendster, MySpace, and Xanga were all niche communities.
> Except GitHub, maybe.
Github toppled SourceForge, which was awful.
Reddit is probably the player that unseated the closest peer competitor. It toppled Digg, which was pretty big at the time. (Digg had itself disrupted Slashdot, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us, but those were niche communities.)