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I suppose we disagree on your last point, and that colours a lot of the rest. I don't think it all comes down to money. Some of it does. I certainly don't see

I suppose we disagree on your last point, and that colours a lot of the rest. I don't think it all comes down to money. Some of it does. I certainly don't see a straight line from FB being an excellent way to sell ads and facebook being the most popular platform. FB won because FB was where people posted and read posts. No one even knew that facebook would be such a great ad platform at that point. I don't think users cared much. This is what I mean by incidental. Not coincidental and not without consequence, just not having a determining cause and effect relationship. ...incidentally (yep, again), twitter and youtube are not great ad platforms, by comparison. That's in large part why podcasts are comparatively better, economically, in some cases, for content makers. Youtube sets a low bar. Control for content quality, length, viewer loyalty or whatever you think is relevant and you'll still rarely find direct youtube ad revenue good relative to television, radio or most comparable mediums. low bar. Anyway, my larger point is that the same rules apply for open, decentralised, democratized or other characteristic you/me/we would like our FB-killer to have. It must win the platform game. The platform game is determined by users, chickens, eggs, internal economics, external economics, UX paradigms, early adopters, people, stuff.... That will determine the success of rss-based ideas just like it determined FBs success. I don't think this is reducible to "it's all about the money," or at least not reducible to a way that preserves much meaning..

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
I don't think we disagree on any of the facts you suggested. Obviously you need to win the platform if you want to be successful. You're interpreting from business point of view and I'm interpreting from macro economical view. And in this view, every human activity revolves around money. If something is not economical, each economic actor will leave, and the technology will lose out. Of course, on a lower level there's user experience, network effects, etc. but on a more fundamental level if you think of the entire world as a network of human value transactions, it does become mostly about money what people spend their time on (with opportunity costs and all) > FB won because FB was where people posted and read posts. No one even knew that facebook would be such a great ad platform at that point FB got traction because it was free. If they charged for posting it would have lost to some other service. And during the early days FB survived because they raised money from VCs, and the VCs thought that there WILL be ways to make money if they got tons of users somehow. If FB was some drug dealing, child trafficking service, then VCs wouldn't have put money into it. Even if we don't go that far, we can just look at music tech industry to see how this applies. Investors really got burned by Napster and never wanted to invest in a music tech company anymore because they knew it was a difficult industry to make money in. Imagine how many people will be building web services if it was guaranteed that nobody made any money from it. That's why I keep saying it's all about money. But I get your point, and I will compromise with you and say it's not "all" about money but "mostly" about money. After all, people build these web services in hopes of making money. That's why they form corporations (corporation's main function is to make money)
- dalbasal 9y ago
  My point is about the economics, nit the business perspective. micro not macro.^ The most revenue generating social network does not win. Whoever wins wins. The value of what wins to advertisers determines how much winners win, but it does not determine winners. Also, advertising revenue does almost nothing to fund content creation on these networks. The "supply side" economics of FB, YouTube & twitter is completely non-existant. The bar is essentially @ 0, so no matter what competes with them this can only get better. The relevant point for this topic is that RSS' value or lack thereof to advertisers has almost no impact on its chances of success. Podcasts, OTOH. These are an existence proof for (1) RSS being useful in the context and (2) decentralised distribution networks works reasonably well for content/media producers. ^macroecobomics is about the money system: inflation, money supply...

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

I don't think we disagree on any of the facts you suggested. Obviously you need to win the platform if you want to be successful. You're interpreting from business point of view and I'm interpreting from macro economical view. And in this view, every human activity revolves around money. If something is not economical, each economic actor will leave, and the technology will lose out. Of course, on a lower level there's user experience, network effects, etc. but on a more fundamental level if you think of the entire world as a network of human value transactions, it does become mostly about money what people spend their time on (with opportunity costs and all) > FB won because FB was where people posted and read posts. No one even knew that facebook would be such a great ad platform at that point FB got traction because it was free. If they charged for posting it would have lost to some other service. And during the early days FB survived because they raised money from VCs, and the VCs thought that there WILL be ways to make money if they got tons of users somehow. If FB was some drug dealing, child trafficking service, then VCs wouldn't have put money into it. Even if we don't go that far, we can just look at music tech industry to see how this applies. Investors really got burned by Napster and never wanted to invest in a music tech company anymore because they knew it was a difficult industry to make money in. Imagine how many people will be building web services if it was guaranteed that nobody made any money from it. That's why I keep saying it's all about money. But I get your point, and I will compromise with you and say it's not "all" about money but "mostly" about money. After all, people build these web services in hopes of making money. That's why they form corporations (corporation's main function is to make money)

dalbasal 9y ago
My point is about the economics, nit the business perspective. micro not macro.^ The most revenue generating social network does not win. Whoever wins wins. The value of what wins to advertisers determines how much winners win, but it does not determine winners. Also, advertising revenue does almost nothing to fund content creation on these networks. The "supply side" economics of FB, YouTube & twitter is completely non-existant. The bar is essentially @ 0, so no matter what competes with them this can only get better. The relevant point for this topic is that RSS' value or lack thereof to advertisers has almost no impact on its chances of success. Podcasts, OTOH. These are an existence proof for (1) RSS being useful in the context and (2) decentralised distribution networks works reasonably well for content/media producers. ^macroecobomics is about the money system: inflation, money supply...