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The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to

The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet": the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts. For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online publishing, email and chat, news feeds etc. - turning it into a restricted, ad-infested, bastardized version of itself, I have only one answer: Facebook could only do that because there was a margin for simplification that attracted the average users. If you want to move to a world without Facebook, you need to make it simpler yet, and even more compelling for average users. The margin for simplification Facebook operated in circa 2004 is long since gone and a perfect Facebook clone will not break it's strong incumbent advantage. So when I hear things like token operated blockchain based distributed social networks I really have a hard time understanding how does it simplify things. Yes, it might get a niche following inside crypto circles, but it has nothing to do with "a world without Facebook".

zappo2938 9y ago
My 90 year old grandpa still uses my late grandmother's AOL account and is afraid to stop paying the monthly service. He doesn't use Facebook mostly only FWD:FWD:FWD emails.
FlyingSnake 9y ago
You're right, this is a weird article with a bizarre solution. Throwing obscure technology at a simple human problem is not the solution here. Facebook simply made social communication easier for the average Joes, and in the quest to do so became a monster. IRC/AIM/MSN/Gmail before that, and Snapchat/Slack after that shows that humans just want to communicate about silly things. Whatever comes next needs to solve the problem to share the silly tidbits, without the greed to turn the users into a data farm.
ghostcluster 9y ago
I think you're downplaying the technical sophistication of Facebook, as well as the pioneering moves it made during its growth phase. Compared to MySpace, which was incumbent during its rise, Facebook did everything faster, with less friction for the everyday user. MySpace would often try and stuff full interstitial page loads between core parts of its user interface. Facebook invented photos tagged with social profiles. Facebook invented the one-column social news feed. Since going public, Facebook's ad platform has remained at the forefront of useful and powerful online services. You can target users by interest, worldwide location, age, and more. It is an elegant platform that has been mishandled by aloof executies.
- FlyingSnake 9y ago
  The technical sophistications of Facebook were indeed instrumental in it's meteoric rise. After all they were the face of 'Move fast and break things" movement. I'm not sure if blockchain is the solution to the next social platform, but the excessive hype around the term has made me sceptical about that.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > Facebook invented the one-column social news feed. Did it? Seems a lot like a twitter feed one could build for oneself. And I disagree that facebook won for being faster or more innovative. Most people I know switched because it was less obnoxious with glittery animations and autoplay audio. Also, the crowd, at least initially, was more attractive to young adults since it was exclusive to people with a university email address. Arguably it took the lead, at least initially, by doing less.
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    To read your messages in MySpace required you load a full page of Ads so you could then press "Next" and then see your Messages. Facebook in its first years did everything in its power to lower the number of page loads necessary to navigate the entire interface. So you're right, it was less obnoxious by being faster. And I don't know if you realize how big a deal tagged photos and a nice UI for uploading and managing them was. MySpace had nothing like that. "Twitter Feeds" and news feed launched at the same time in summer 2006. Facebook filed for a patent in August. https://mashable.com/2010/02/25/facebook-news-feed-patent/#ciw3g8qQsEq7 https://mashable.com/2010/02/25/facebook-news-feed-patent/#c... Nobody used Twitter until the following year when it made a huge splash at SXSW and caused its first growth spike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Twitter
tlb 9y ago
When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database? There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.
- Alex3917 9y ago
  > What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whomever would run the database? No person or company is allowed to own more than 24.9% of a banking charter, and preferably not more than 10%. The reason is that having multiple entities each pursuing their own agenda makes it less likely that everyone will collude and run off with the money. It doesn't especially matter who those entities are, as long as they're not closely affiliated with one another. Similarly, for whatever problems democracies have, they tend to function at least marginally better than corporate-owned countries like Rhodesia, Batavia, etc. And economically, there is a reason why currencies tend to be a better store of value over time than in-app credits or company scrip. Personally I think creating government privacy legislation would be a much better use of time than trying to build a social network on blockchain, but I understand the thought process.
  - Yoric 9y ago
    > No person or company is allowed to own more than 24.9% of a banking charter, and preferably not more than 10%. I'm curious, is that a law? From which country?
    - Alex3917 9y ago
      It's a U.S. law, not sure about other countries. I believe it's the Bank Holding Company Act: https://www.federalreserve.gov/bcreg20080922b1.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/bcreg20080922b1.pdf
- gurrone 9y ago
  I would like to add: Do they understand that it's impossible to delete anything that got commited to the block chain once a block is accepted? I mean at least if they think about a blockchain in the sense of the Bitcoin blockchain. Implementing a deletion of prior blocks is an interesting problem.
adrianN 9y ago
AOL had pretty much the same moat, so there is hope that Facebook can be dethroned.
- Someone 9y ago
  Back then, there was room in the world for Facebook to dig its own decently sized moat before it had to meet AOL head to head. Nowadays, that’s harder, certainly in the West. Because of that, I think it’s likely that, if a company manages to dethrone Facebook, it will come from China, where the government is willing to act as a kind of incubator. So, IMO, rather than seeing Facebook dethroned, the more likely outcome is a world with two (or maybe three? Europe seems not concerned about being part of the Facebook camp ?yet?, but it, Russia or Arab countries may at some time start helping a large local competitor emerge) giants that split the world geographically, and can’t merge because countries will forbid them from doing that.
  - wrinkl3 9y ago
    I don't know much about the Arab countries, but Russia is perfectly happy with its own state-approved versions of Facebook (Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki).
gerbilly 9y ago
>"The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet" I don't think people actually want the Internet, they want a walled garden. Facebook is the new Compuserve, or AOL.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
sharpercoder 9y ago
simpler is not directly needed, as Facebook already reaches the minimum viable simplicity for many functionalities. More compelling certainly would help. The killer in getting adoption of any social network is the network effect. You want to be on the social media application because your friends & family is on it.
- Yoric 9y ago
  Which means that it could work on specific communities, right? Just as Facebook started from a single community.
  - harryf 9y ago
    The principle is already well described in Crossing the Chasm[1]. You need early adopters and then figure out from there how to go a mainstream audience. You probably also need some groundbreaking shift in the medium to create an opportunity e.g. how shift from laptops to smaetphones made photos and videos more compelling than text for some use cases, leading to Instagram and Snapchat. And then Facebook bought Instagram and used it to make Snapchat redundant... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm
ReverseCold 9y ago
The blockchain can just be used to do PKI. People having cryptocurrency wallets installed means they have a private key, and when people have private keys you can do a whole lot of cool stuff. My blockchain/IoT startup[0] primarily uses the blockchain as just that, a backend for PKI. [0]: https://ethyl.io/ https://ethyl.io/
- davidcbc 9y ago
  Why does the average Facebook user care?
  - ReverseCold 9y ago
    They don't. GP said they had a hard time understanding what the use of a blockchain in social networks would be. I was trying to get at the point that blockchain being ubiquitous leads to people having private keys which would enable an end to end encrypted social network.
- detaro 9y ago
  Why not just give people private keys? Why attach them to a blockchain?
  - ReverseCold 9y ago
    My point was that blockchain being ubiquitous leads to people already having a set of keys that they can use. Of course you can manage keys yourself, but it's a lot harder than if the user already has it set up.
TaylorAlexander 9y ago
Facebook is the new AOL. It’s got everything old people need to be happy on the internet. It’s even the color blue!
breakyerself 9y ago
Something with a the functionality of facebook and the commenting system of reddit would get me on board. When you get into a discussion with someone under a comment they posted on CNN you literally have to check in periodically to see if they replied and if two conversations get going on the same thread the're just layered in chronological order so things get really confusing. Facebook seems to actively discourage discourse. Just leave a comment and go away. I also like how Mastodons feed just shows everything posted by people you're following in chronological order. I don't need a custom algorithm to decide what shows up in my feed when unless it's an algorithm of my design. Also facebook has broken a lot of its features on mobile browsers to try and force people into installing it's apps. I don't want facebooks crappy apps on my phone so I have to force the desktop page to load to view private messages, but that breaks the website completely so I have to reload the mobile version of the site m.facebook.com while forcing desktop mode to be able to read private messages from the phone. I would say that during it's rise to market leader facebook was the most user friendly social networking site, but the whole thing rattles and the tires are getting bald now
zerostar07 9y ago
there s the issue of content moderation. Facebook is considered generally safe enough that people post their photos without thinking they ll be placed next to nudes.
asabjorn 9y ago
A moat is only useful if the project serves its purpose well. The question I ask myself is how a product that so demonstrably[1] makes people unhappier the more they use it can be sustainable. What problem does Facebook cure? The engagement loops trigger behavioral patterns that are supposed to encourage healthy relationships, but in this case it pulls us into a low-fidelity world of screens that pulls us away from enjoying the moment together with people that actually chose to be there in real life with us. The endless feeds are arguably even more destructive as it removes the natural stopping point and the small moments of boredom where our minds get a chance to be creative instead of just consuming. Maybe real life has a moat that is stronger than Facebooks network? I believe all need people that are offended when we don't hang out often enough more than Facebook likes and pretty pictures, so if the choice is between the two .... [1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-us-unhappy https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-u...
- nordsieck 9y ago
  Despite the title of the article, it doesn't show that Facebook use makes people unhappy - merely that it is correlated with unhappiness. > A moat is only useful if the project serves its purpose well. It's not clear to me that the purpose of Facebook is to make people happy. Instead, I think it's purpose is to be an low friction way to keep connected to lots of people. It seems to fulfill that purpose quite well. That people are uncomfortable with boredom is not an inditement of the balm with which they sooth themselves.
  - asabjorn 9y ago
    > Despite the title of the article, it doesn't show that Facebook use makes people unhappy - merely that it is correlated with unhappiness. True. Correlation is not causation. However, my argument is that it doesn't seem to solve a problem I can think of well that leads to healthier real-life relationships and heavy use instead seem to correlate with the opposite. Can you think of any? I do think it solves image-sharing and life-updates with remote-family as well as remote-friends well. > It's not clear to me that the purpose of Facebook is to make people happy. I agree with you there. What problem Facebook cures is dependent on the person and situation. Things I can think of is; boredom, anxiety, loneliness, social recognition, etc > That people are uncomfortable with boredom is not an inditement of the balm with which they sooth themselves. Yes, that is the issue. Real life is hard and when attempting to connect we might receive the same rejections that we are afraid of. At least on facebook someone will like your post and comment on it, although maybe it doesn't strengthen a core group of friends like comments/likes in real life would.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
We need the DoJ to take Facebook to court for being a social network monopoly. If AT&T exhibited destructive network effects, Facebook is them times ten. “Market share” measured solely in purchasing consumers is no longer a good sole metric for monopolies.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > We need the DoJ to take Facebook to court for being a social network monopoly. Being a monopoly isn't actionable. > If AT&T exhibited destructive network effects, Facebook is them times ten. No, it's not. AT&T was far worse than Facebook in the practical, and exercised, ability to deny choice in ancillary markets. > “Market share” measured solely in purchasing consumers is no longer a good sole metric for monopolies. It hasn't ever been the legal sole metric.
empath75 9y ago
What if we don’t need a Facebook alternative. I haven’t looked at it in 6 months and I don’t have a social-network-sized hole in my life.
walkingolof 9y ago
The network effect works both ways, which many online games and services have discovered. I think Facebook will be replaced with something more local, closer to you, less invasive.
NicoJuicy 9y ago
blockchain solution x won't help much, because the hard part is not the tech. It's attracting enough users to survive.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

zappo2938 9y ago

My 90 year old grandpa still uses my late grandmother's AOL account and is afraid to stop paying the monthly service. He doesn't use Facebook mostly only FWD:FWD:FWD emails.

FlyingSnake 9y ago

You're right, this is a weird article with a bizarre solution. Throwing obscure technology at a simple human problem is not the solution here. Facebook simply made social communication easier for the average Joes, and in the quest to do so became a monster. IRC/AIM/MSN/Gmail before that, and Snapchat/Slack after that shows that humans just want to communicate about silly things. Whatever comes next needs to solve the problem to share the silly tidbits, without the greed to turn the users into a data farm.

ghostcluster 9y ago

I think you're downplaying the technical sophistication of Facebook, as well as the pioneering moves it made during its growth phase. Compared to MySpace, which was incumbent during its rise, Facebook did everything faster, with less friction for the everyday user. MySpace would often try and stuff full interstitial page loads between core parts of its user interface. Facebook invented photos tagged with social profiles. Facebook invented the one-column social news feed. Since going public, Facebook's ad platform has remained at the forefront of useful and powerful online services. You can target users by interest, worldwide location, age, and more. It is an elegant platform that has been mishandled by aloof executies.

FlyingSnake 9y ago
The technical sophistications of Facebook were indeed instrumental in it's meteoric rise. After all they were the face of 'Move fast and break things" movement. I'm not sure if blockchain is the solution to the next social platform, but the excessive hype around the term has made me sceptical about that.
humanrebar 9y ago
> Facebook invented the one-column social news feed. Did it? Seems a lot like a twitter feed one could build for oneself. And I disagree that facebook won for being faster or more innovative. Most people I know switched because it was less obnoxious with glittery animations and autoplay audio. Also, the crowd, at least initially, was more attractive to young adults since it was exclusive to people with a university email address. Arguably it took the lead, at least initially, by doing less.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  To read your messages in MySpace required you load a full page of Ads so you could then press "Next" and then see your Messages. Facebook in its first years did everything in its power to lower the number of page loads necessary to navigate the entire interface. So you're right, it was less obnoxious by being faster. And I don't know if you realize how big a deal tagged photos and a nice UI for uploading and managing them was. MySpace had nothing like that. "Twitter Feeds" and news feed launched at the same time in summer 2006. Facebook filed for a patent in August. https://mashable.com/2010/02/25/facebook-news-feed-patent/#ciw3g8qQsEq7 https://mashable.com/2010/02/25/facebook-news-feed-patent/#c... Nobody used Twitter until the following year when it made a huge splash at SXSW and caused its first growth spike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Twitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Twitter

tlb 9y ago

When people propose blockchain solutions, I always think: How would it work with just a regular database? How would a blockchain make it better? What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whoever would run the database? There are good answers to these for some applications, but I don't see what they are here.

Alex3917 9y ago
> What coalition of people will run the blockchain, and why would they be more trustworthy than whomever would run the database? No person or company is allowed to own more than 24.9% of a banking charter, and preferably not more than 10%. The reason is that having multiple entities each pursuing their own agenda makes it less likely that everyone will collude and run off with the money. It doesn't especially matter who those entities are, as long as they're not closely affiliated with one another. Similarly, for whatever problems democracies have, they tend to function at least marginally better than corporate-owned countries like Rhodesia, Batavia, etc. And economically, there is a reason why currencies tend to be a better store of value over time than in-app credits or company scrip. Personally I think creating government privacy legislation would be a much better use of time than trying to build a social network on blockchain, but I understand the thought process.
- Yoric 9y ago
  > No person or company is allowed to own more than 24.9% of a banking charter, and preferably not more than 10%. I'm curious, is that a law? From which country?
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    It's a U.S. law, not sure about other countries. I believe it's the Bank Holding Company Act: https://www.federalreserve.gov/bcreg20080922b1.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/bcreg20080922b1.pdf
gurrone 9y ago
I would like to add: Do they understand that it's impossible to delete anything that got commited to the block chain once a block is accepted? I mean at least if they think about a blockchain in the sense of the Bitcoin blockchain. Implementing a deletion of prior blocks is an interesting problem.

adrianN 9y ago

AOL had pretty much the same moat, so there is hope that Facebook can be dethroned.

Someone 9y ago
Back then, there was room in the world for Facebook to dig its own decently sized moat before it had to meet AOL head to head. Nowadays, that’s harder, certainly in the West. Because of that, I think it’s likely that, if a company manages to dethrone Facebook, it will come from China, where the government is willing to act as a kind of incubator. So, IMO, rather than seeing Facebook dethroned, the more likely outcome is a world with two (or maybe three? Europe seems not concerned about being part of the Facebook camp ?yet?, but it, Russia or Arab countries may at some time start helping a large local competitor emerge) giants that split the world geographically, and can’t merge because countries will forbid them from doing that.
- wrinkl3 9y ago
  I don't know much about the Arab countries, but Russia is perfectly happy with its own state-approved versions of Facebook (Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki).

gerbilly 9y ago

>"The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as "the Internet" I don't think people actually want the Internet, they want a walled garden. Facebook is the new Compuserve, or AOL.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

sharpercoder 9y ago

simpler is not directly needed, as Facebook already reaches the minimum viable simplicity for many functionalities. More compelling certainly would help. The killer in getting adoption of any social network is the network effect. You want to be on the social media application because your friends & family is on it.

Yoric 9y ago
Which means that it could work on specific communities, right? Just as Facebook started from a single community.
- harryf 9y ago
  The principle is already well described in Crossing the Chasm[1]. You need early adopters and then figure out from there how to go a mainstream audience. You probably also need some groundbreaking shift in the medium to create an opportunity e.g. how shift from laptops to smaetphones made photos and videos more compelling than text for some use cases, leading to Instagram and Snapchat. And then Facebook bought Instagram and used it to make Snapchat redundant... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

ReverseCold 9y ago

The blockchain can just be used to do PKI. People having cryptocurrency wallets installed means they have a private key, and when people have private keys you can do a whole lot of cool stuff. My blockchain/IoT startup[0] primarily uses the blockchain as just that, a backend for PKI. [0]: https://ethyl.io/ https://ethyl.io/

davidcbc 9y ago
Why does the average Facebook user care?
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  They don't. GP said they had a hard time understanding what the use of a blockchain in social networks would be. I was trying to get at the point that blockchain being ubiquitous leads to people having private keys which would enable an end to end encrypted social network.
detaro 9y ago
Why not just give people private keys? Why attach them to a blockchain?
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  My point was that blockchain being ubiquitous leads to people already having a set of keys that they can use. Of course you can manage keys yourself, but it's a lot harder than if the user already has it set up.

TaylorAlexander 9y ago

Facebook is the new AOL. It’s got everything old people need to be happy on the internet. It’s even the color blue!

breakyerself 9y ago

Something with a the functionality of facebook and the commenting system of reddit would get me on board. When you get into a discussion with someone under a comment they posted on CNN you literally have to check in periodically to see if they replied and if two conversations get going on the same thread the're just layered in chronological order so things get really confusing. Facebook seems to actively discourage discourse. Just leave a comment and go away. I also like how Mastodons feed just shows everything posted by people you're following in chronological order. I don't need a custom algorithm to decide what shows up in my feed when unless it's an algorithm of my design. Also facebook has broken a lot of its features on mobile browsers to try and force people into installing it's apps. I don't want facebooks crappy apps on my phone so I have to force the desktop page to load to view private messages, but that breaks the website completely so I have to reload the mobile version of the site m.facebook.com while forcing desktop mode to be able to read private messages from the phone. I would say that during it's rise to market leader facebook was the most user friendly social networking site, but the whole thing rattles and the tires are getting bald now

zerostar07 9y ago

there s the issue of content moderation. Facebook is considered generally safe enough that people post their photos without thinking they ll be placed next to nudes.

asabjorn 9y ago

A moat is only useful if the project serves its purpose well. The question I ask myself is how a product that so demonstrably[1] makes people unhappier the more they use it can be sustainable. What problem does Facebook cure? The engagement loops trigger behavioral patterns that are supposed to encourage healthy relationships, but in this case it pulls us into a low-fidelity world of screens that pulls us away from enjoying the moment together with people that actually chose to be there in real life with us. The endless feeds are arguably even more destructive as it removes the natural stopping point and the small moments of boredom where our minds get a chance to be creative instead of just consuming. Maybe real life has a moat that is stronger than Facebooks network? I believe all need people that are offended when we don't hang out often enough more than Facebook likes and pretty pictures, so if the choice is between the two .... [1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-us-unhappy https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-u...

nordsieck 9y ago
Despite the title of the article, it doesn't show that Facebook use makes people unhappy - merely that it is correlated with unhappiness. > A moat is only useful if the project serves its purpose well. It's not clear to me that the purpose of Facebook is to make people happy. Instead, I think it's purpose is to be an low friction way to keep connected to lots of people. It seems to fulfill that purpose quite well. That people are uncomfortable with boredom is not an inditement of the balm with which they sooth themselves.
- asabjorn 9y ago
  > Despite the title of the article, it doesn't show that Facebook use makes people unhappy - merely that it is correlated with unhappiness. True. Correlation is not causation. However, my argument is that it doesn't seem to solve a problem I can think of well that leads to healthier real-life relationships and heavy use instead seem to correlate with the opposite. Can you think of any? I do think it solves image-sharing and life-updates with remote-family as well as remote-friends well. > It's not clear to me that the purpose of Facebook is to make people happy. I agree with you there. What problem Facebook cures is dependent on the person and situation. Things I can think of is; boredom, anxiety, loneliness, social recognition, etc > That people are uncomfortable with boredom is not an inditement of the balm with which they sooth themselves. Yes, that is the issue. Real life is hard and when attempting to connect we might receive the same rejections that we are afraid of. At least on facebook someone will like your post and comment on it, although maybe it doesn't strengthen a core group of friends like comments/likes in real life would.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

We need the DoJ to take Facebook to court for being a social network monopoly. If AT&T exhibited destructive network effects, Facebook is them times ten. “Market share” measured solely in purchasing consumers is no longer a good sole metric for monopolies.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> We need the DoJ to take Facebook to court for being a social network monopoly. Being a monopoly isn't actionable. > If AT&T exhibited destructive network effects, Facebook is them times ten. No, it's not. AT&T was far worse than Facebook in the practical, and exercised, ability to deny choice in ancillary markets. > “Market share” measured solely in purchasing consumers is no longer a good sole metric for monopolies. It hasn't ever been the legal sole metric.

empath75 9y ago

What if we don’t need a Facebook alternative. I haven’t looked at it in 6 months and I don’t have a social-network-sized hole in my life.

walkingolof 9y ago

The network effect works both ways, which many online games and services have discovered. I think Facebook will be replaced with something more local, closer to you, less invasive.

NicoJuicy 9y ago

blockchain solution x won't help much, because the hard part is not the tech. It's attracting enough users to survive.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]