Comment by IshKebab
6 hours ago
It is wrong, but so are you. The truth is that social networks are big because they HAD genuine utility. The Facebook was amazing... at least until about 2010. I was at uni when it started and I vividly remember thinking "I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is" (we didn't have physical face books in the UK) and then a year later thefacebook turned up. Amazing for everyone's social lives.
But after 2010 it just gradually got shitter.
WhatsApp replaced it (in most ways; in some ways there is no replacement) and has so far been amazing but it feels like we're about at the "2010" of WhatsApp. Meta is starting to turn the screws. An AI button. Notifications about new features. Integration with Meta accounts. Eventually it will probably merge with Facebook Messaging or some bollocks and then we'll all have to move elsewhere.
Anyway my point is, these things genuinely became big because they were great. They stayed big despite becoming shitter due to network effects.
Also because they closed all the gates of interoperability once they got big enough.
If they didn't have the incentive to get a monopoly we would have kept a more decentralized web.
> If they didn't have the incentive to get a monopoly we would have kept a more decentralized web.
And we would have kept a more inconvenient web, since without that incentive, Facebook etc. would never have had reason to pay for an army of software developers to implement and improve the site and servers to host it.
Are you implying something about Facebook is convenient?
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> I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is
Did you miss Myspace and Friendster? Orkut had a market, I think. The reason that Facebook succeeded later is because it had a good API and invited people to write apps for it (mostly surveys and games, remember Zynga?), tracked its users across the internet, and sold them in targeted slices to advertisers. It was Friendster as a commercial platform (like Salesforce was CRM as a commercial platform.) It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.
I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput, being created by very talented people using Erlang. The reason people use it is because they always have and their friends do, and for a lot of countries with expensive SMS it provided messaging (and became so integrated into business that people weren't allowed to live without it.)
This is my argument about why these things were successful; I think that "they were great" isn't a credible one. They simply grabbed a large chunk of already proven markets quickly, but oriented themselves toward corporate needs to leverage that into total control.
> It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.
I might be misremembering a bunch but myspace never had a feed that showed you your friend’s updates.
It also wasn’t able to magically show you the people who were at that random house party you went to the night before that you hit it off with but were too drunk to get their number.
Facebook didn't have the feed initially either (and it was really disliked when it was introduced - people thought it was like stalking). But yes to your second point. Real people who you actually wanted to know and had actually met were on Facebook. That wasn't really true of any of the other sites.
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> Did you miss Myspace and Friendster?
MySpace was a) awful, b) only used by a tiny tiny fraction of people (1% maybe), and c) rarely had people's real names & photos on it. Not remotely comparable to Facebook. Even fewer people used Friendster and Orkut, at least in the UK.
> I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput
Free. No ads. Reliable. E2E encryption. Group chats. Cross platform. There's so much that's great about it. It was successful because the alternative was SMS which was shit. I'm guessing you're American.
> rarely had people's real names & photos on it
This is a feature, not a bug. There is nothing worse for a society's collective privacy than a surveillance machine where people willingly post every detail of their lives. Stalin would have dreamed of today's anti-social media as a surveillance tool.
> There's so much that's great about it.
There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry. And that's assuming messages are truly encrypted and not analyzed behind your back by Meta. E2EE is kind of meaningless when the endpoints cannot be trusted. SMS is insecure in transit but it isn't controlled by a single for-profit company with close ties to government agencies.
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