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The fundamental problem is economic. It's not that Facebook is invulnerable or that it can't be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is

The fundamental problem is economic. It's not that Facebook is invulnerable or that it can't be disrupted—of course it can! The reputational risk Facebook is facing is existential, if it reaches a tipping point things could go south very quickly for them. The bigger problem is that making something like Facebook requires a lot of resources. You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. Users expect these things for free, so there will always be some monetization strategy a couple steps ahead of the current cultural standard for ethics. Startups with high-minded ideals can certainly start strong, but they will inevitably sputter since capitalist incentives overwhelm at scale. I mean just look at Google, it could be the poster-child of disappointed expectations, having come out of academia with their "don't be evil" slogan, but inevitably all large companies come under the thrall of a Wall Street mentality sooner or later. This goes triple if there is no monetization strategy and they are relying on VC funding. I'd love to see some of these decentralized or other high-minded social media efforts succeed, but even if they overcome the fundamental technical challenges, polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect will require a ton of resources that will require funding that seems incredibly difficult to obtain in the current economic culture.

bognition 9y ago
> You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. I'm not sure thats true. At the time of their acquisitions Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55. Both of those are extremely small when compared to the size of Facebook. And given the size of the acquisition price tags i'd wager facebook felt like both were existential threats.
- tsunamifury 9y ago
  Both raised millions before being acquired, and likely would need to raise 100s of millions to start today. Facebooks has reached both network effect and economy of scale which is very hard to unseat.
  - phoneboy 9y ago
    Not really a problem though is it. Compare with DASHs DAO that spend around 30M$ a year on improving and building the system.
wellboy 9y ago
Given that probably 90% of FBs engineering power was spent on scalability and data mining, it seem more feasible than you make it sound.
TimJRobinson 9y ago
You could have said this same argument about Wikipedia vs Encarta back in 2000. An open source, distributed social network doesn't need many servers and can be built by volunteers, so you don't need VC funding or a monetization model. Just get everyone to host and share their content and the content of their peers. It may be like Linux and never be fully mass market, but that's totally fine by me, I share different content with my geekier friends than with my non-technical family anyway.
- threatofrain 9y ago
  I think the volunteer model abuses a minority of weird humans with the instinct to help too much. We need a model that scales while addressing the status quo diversity of humanity. What I really mean is the fact that almost nobody wants to help, and almost everyone wants free stuff at world-class level (they don't want shitty free things, they want Google/FB level of free).
zerostar07 9y ago
> requires a lot of resources That doesn't like a problem that is hard to solve. Any website that will have the growth of facebook can invent solutions along the way. > polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect I rarely visit facebook but i don't think it's particularly good UX. Tiny Links all over the place, you can barely follow a conversation without getting distracted.

bognition 9y ago

> You can't achieve that scale, feature-set and UX quality without a lot of engineering manpower. I'm not sure thats true. At the time of their acquisitions Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55. Both of those are extremely small when compared to the size of Facebook. And given the size of the acquisition price tags i'd wager facebook felt like both were existential threats.

tsunamifury 9y ago
Both raised millions before being acquired, and likely would need to raise 100s of millions to start today. Facebooks has reached both network effect and economy of scale which is very hard to unseat.
- phoneboy 9y ago
  Not really a problem though is it. Compare with DASHs DAO that spend around 30M$ a year on improving and building the system.

wellboy 9y ago

Given that probably 90% of FBs engineering power was spent on scalability and data mining, it seem more feasible than you make it sound.

TimJRobinson 9y ago

You could have said this same argument about Wikipedia vs Encarta back in 2000. An open source, distributed social network doesn't need many servers and can be built by volunteers, so you don't need VC funding or a monetization model. Just get everyone to host and share their content and the content of their peers. It may be like Linux and never be fully mass market, but that's totally fine by me, I share different content with my geekier friends than with my non-technical family anyway.

threatofrain 9y ago
I think the volunteer model abuses a minority of weird humans with the instinct to help too much. We need a model that scales while addressing the status quo diversity of humanity. What I really mean is the fact that almost nobody wants to help, and almost everyone wants free stuff at world-class level (they don't want shitty free things, they want Google/FB level of free).

zerostar07 9y ago

> requires a lot of resources That doesn't like a problem that is hard to solve. Any website that will have the growth of facebook can invent solutions along the way. > polishing up the UX to what the masses have come to expect I rarely visit facebook but i don't think it's particularly good UX. Tiny Links all over the place, you can barely follow a conversation without getting distracted.