7 ms·

Facebook and other social media platforms might be heading for the type of reckoning the fast food industry had in the late 90s and early 2000s. http://marko.l

• gaius 9y ago
  McDonalds is still a viable business. When Facebook goes, it will evaporate like MySpace did. And not a moment too soon.
  • blawson 9y ago
    I'm not too sure. I think there's a lot of value in a centralized identity management system. Facebook seems to have filled that role. I can see a near future where it acts as a sort of SSO for the web. That doesn't necessarily sound like a $550B company, but could still be worth quite a bit.
    • vanilla_nut 9y ago
      I wonder if their rampant quest for click-money (annoying users with constant emails, useless spammy notifications, ads, sponsored content) is going to poison that well, though. I anecdotally know a lot of people in their early-mid twenties who have already deleted their accounts. If too many people start doing that, Facebook loses its one trump card.
      • ethiclub 9y ago
        Similarly, tv channels on YouTube (for the UK, see BBC, C4, E4) appear to be jumping on the bandwagon with clickbait, videos empty of genuine content, misleading titles and clips repeatedly churned through different videos. This appears to have short term benefits (huge view counts), but surely it turns people off long term and impacts the brand.
    • Splines 9y ago
      The number of sites that tie their cart to that horse is pretty low. Most sites offer their own authentication or offer multiple ones besides FB.
    • gaius 9y ago
      centralized identity management system. Facebook seems to have filled that role. They blatantly cannot do this unless they actually implement their real names policy. Which they won’t.
  • sgc 9y ago
    There will always be a market for a dominant social media platform, just like there will always be a market for a dominant search provider, os, office suite, document interchange format, etc. All tech with a wide reach needs uniformity. Whether or not we have reached the maturity with social media to make facebook as difficult to unseat as apple, adobe, microsoft, or google remains to be seen. But they will not just evaporate like the wonky myspace of old. Times have changed. I personally think they have reached that level, and also do not use them because I greatly dislike social media in just about any form. But I am self-aware enough to know I am part of a tiny minority.
  • cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    Don't know why this is so downvoted much. Just because Facebook evaporates doesn't mean the very concept of "social graph" will go down altogether with it. Facebook will probably be replaced with more flexible identity and social graph architecture that's more decentralized. It's different from McDonald's because humans have to eat, and McDonald's can always pivot or acquire other companies to provide the type of food that's more in vogue, but what Facebook has created is equivalent to a nightclub. When a nightclub loses its reputation it's very hard to recover.
    • sjg007 9y ago
      How would it be decentralized? You and your webpage on your box gave rise to yahoo and then google.
• andrepd 9y ago
  Absolutely. When will governments (EU?) step the hell up and regulate this huge part of our lives?
  • moretai 9y ago
    Why don't you regulate yourselves?
    • marnett 9y ago
      The article posted above was suggesting that Facebook is more a detriment to society than a plus. Society is typically safeguarded from toxic products through regulation. So, if Facebook is a perfectly engineered attention trap, you or I self-regulating, which plenty of us here do anyway, helps society in no meaningful way.
• Chathamization 9y ago
  I wonder how much the push back against McDonald's is class based. It's not healthy, but the same can be said for a lot of the food we eat. A lot of fast casual burgers, which seem to hold a higher position in the public perception, have more calories. Of course, overall health is more complicated than just calories, but it's worth pointing out since that's one of the main complaints against McDonald's (including in the article you linked to). Cereal has declined in popularity, but it doesn't seem to have had quite the same negative stigma, even though a lot of it is simply processed flour and sugar (which was then marketed as being "part of this balanced breakfast"); neither do brands like Starbucks or Coke.
  • walshemj 9y ago
    I though that too "oh no look at those chavs" at MacDonald's Supersize me also did not see what happened to you if you eat a full xmass dinner every day for a month did it.
    • stryk 9y ago
      It might be a mistake asking this, but what the heck is a 'chav' ?
      • metavrsl 9y ago
        It’s an English word for rougher lower class young men. People look down on them, it’s partially a class thing and partially how they dress and how they’re just boisterous. Don’t know what the equivalent word in the USA is but in Australia we say Bogan which is similar.
        • Impossible 9y ago
          Equivalent words for lower class people in the USA often have a racial slur component involved so you don't see them used in the same context. I thought the word "bro" might be close but bro has a upper or middle class connotation, being derived from frat brother, rather than lower class.