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What Happens When Facebook Goes the Way of Myspace?
- throwaway123mmm 8y agoThe new york times seems to have a personal agenda against facebook. Their reporting is unfair and wrong at best.
- bildung 8y agoWouldn't it be easy for you to post an example of the article being wrong, then? Otherwise it looks like you have a personal agenda against the new york times.
- ada1981 8y agoHaven’t you heard? Even the esteemed President of the United States acknowledges the problem with the NYT.
- solarkraft 8y agoI usually assume that the opposite of what he says is true.
- dominotw 8y agohow can some guy saying "i don't like facebook" be proven "wrong" ?
- throwaway52341 8y agoYou can't fool me, NYT. Salty about loss in revenue and readers? That you are no longer alone in controlling the public narrative? The media vendetta against facebook is blatantly obvious. Note that in the true spirit of collectivism the NYT never accepts that the user of a social network has any responsibility of using it like a grown up at all, instead the users are seen like little children who have to be guarded and guided by the corporation. What happens when NYT goes the way of MySpace? Probably article like these.
- golergka 8y ago> in the United States and Canada And that key detail is why this article is wrong. US and Canada are certainly most lukrative markets in terms of profit per single user, but they are far, far from the only markets in the world. Facebook usage in North America may start stagnating in the next few years, but it is still rapidly growing in other areas. And after that, well, you just run out of people in the whole humanity itself - and that's not a business problem that we have any historical example of.
- sytelus 8y agoAlso, we have to discount for the bubble of information that we sweat about as tech community. Outside of tech community, very few people seems to be noticing this and DAU/MAU for FB were even reported to have bit increased, although at lower rate. One cannot escape to see that NYT wants to hit FB in anyway it possibly can. When they don’t have news they line up opinion pieces.
- mijamo 8y agoThere are plenty of examples of companies facing a saturated market. The logical next step is to grow vertically as you cannot grow horizontally anymore. Some succeed, many fail. In the long run, nearly all companies fail.
- grecy 8y ago> There are plenty of examples of companies facing a saturated market Globally though? Are there companies that have saturated the entire planet. Facebook use is BOOMING in the developing world. I've been moving around Africa though 30 countries for 2.5 yeas now - it's rare to meet someone that doesn't have Facebook and whatsapp.
- AstralStorm 8y agoAt a certain point, Facebook might face being either broken up or outright nationalized in some places...
- chvid 8y agoThis article reads like something between a hit-piece and a I-don't-like-Facebook-opinion-piece. A similarly article could be written about Google but it is not. I think the interesting question is why not?
- chvid 8y agoWhat Happens When Google Goes the Way of Myspace? Google earned more than $XXX billion in profit last quarter, and yet it has spent much of 2018 trapped in a defensive crouch. This year was defined by brutal press coverage, internal strife, executive departures and unwanted attention from authorities. The company stands accused of various offenses: degrading politics; empowering despots; leaving users vulnerable to abuse; abusing its users’ data for profit. It is in a constant state of crisis such that its executives’ responses to scandals end up becoming scandals themselves. But the single event most pertinent to Google’s future, and with the most explanatory power regarding its recent past, came in Xxx, when the company admitted its flagship site had found a worrying limit. In late 2017, XXX million people a day were using Google in the United States and Canada. Despite strenuous efforts — you may have noticed more notifications lately — that number hasn’t been exceeded since. ... The advertising data exposed in a user’s personal Google archive is, of course, just a sliver of what is available to the company. Google’s real profile of who you are — the one that it uses to fill your feeds and show you ads — is far more comprehensive. The company’s relentless accumulation of user data isn’t just a grab for power or a default behavior. It’s a long-term investment. You may forget Google; it could happen sooner than you expect. But it’s not likely to forget you.
- libdjml 8y agoThere are a load of criticisms you could call out about google, but suggesting that their “one primary platform and single focus (social media)” is about to collapse is not valid; they’re far too broadly invested (from mobile phones to search to email) to claim they’re about to become irrelevant.
- chvid 8y agoIf you look at where their revenue is, it it probably not broad at all (just search advertisement and AdSense). And if you look solely at the US and Canada their adaption is probably petering out as well. And heart what is their core business other than a massive invasion of privacy and data mining of personal information? What about all these stories that has push management on the defence? (Google China, that right-wing guy and so on.) The point is. What this article is saying about Facebook could just as easily had been said about Google with just about the same validity. Why does Facebook get bad press whereas Google does not?
- maeln 8y agoFacebook as a website can go the way of MySpace. But Facebook as a company will probably not. The subject is touched a bit toward the end of the article but the reality is this: Facebook has reached a critical mass, as a company, that MySpace never did. As such, they can just continue to buy all the other new social network that pop-up and make sure that they have a dominant position in the social network market. Unless they make a big mistake (which completely possible), Facebook, as any modern dominant company, will just continue consolidating and securing their market share.
- pavlov 8y agoFacebook today is in the same place as Microsoft in 2003-2007. Bad old API decisions made in pursuit of quick marketshare have come back to haunt. The main product is seen as lackluster and stagnated. Entries into new markets are seen as "me too" and out of sync with the brand image (Portal and Lasso might be Facebook's Zune). Microsoft survived all that and is now the world's most valuable corporation again. Facebook isn't going to die either because it's effectively the Windows of people's lives.
- mr_toad 8y agoMicrosoft lives on enterprise sales; AD domain servers, CALs, Exchange, SQL server. I’m not sure Facebook has an equivalent product.
- johannes1234321 8y agoInstead of AD servers it has ad servers.
- juststeve 8y agoand clients
- kazen44 8y agoAlso, mosts of microsofts enterprise products are of quite good quality. especially active directory. Not to mention the insane, massive momentum microsoft has in terms of MSP's/Partners..
- revskill 8y agoFacebook open sourced many useful libraries, and it's what matters to me first. Secondly, as a user, it has problem, just like any company.
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y agoFacebook was instrumental in electing the worst president ever that is causing damage that will last for decades, it seems that every month now a story break that they handle their users' data even worse than thought possible before, but hey, they made this cool open source library so i guess it all balances out!
- chillacy 8y agoWhy blame Facebook and not: - voters for actually choosing this guy - the media for giving this guy so much coverage - people for not fact checking Blaming Facebook feels like shooting the messenger. It’s not going to fix any of the underlying issues going into 2020. At worst it’s a distraction, like birthers against Obama.
- hackinthebochs 8y agoIt's a strange meme that "facebook elected Trump" when every news org gave him billions worth of free coverage because it was good for their bottom line. They elected Trump because they knew a Trump presidency would be the best thing to happen to them since Monica Lewinsky. Somehow we all seem to have forgotten that.
- johannes1234321 8y agoSome companies abuse their users more. Some less. Some purposely as key part of their business model. Some more by accident. Everybody crossed a red traffic light once in their live, still we should go after people ignoring red lights.
- Zelphyr 8y agoSo it’s ok that they repeatedly, and in the sole interest of their bottom line, violate their users privacy (that they explicitly claim to protect and care about btw) and allow unscrupulous groups and governments to use that data to manipulate masses of people in ways nobody has ever dreamed of because... they gave away some lines of code?!
- Dowwie 8y agoThe New York Times is not what it used to be, either
- Theodores 8y agoI wish there was some truth to that. They have always been the tool of those that rule this world, whether those rulers be in Wall Street or the Pentagon. Their work cheerleading the world to war is a constant. They side with the interests of capital rather than people. Any aberrations to this, e.g. straying from one political party to another, is still representing and furthering time-old vested interests. Online media has yet to usurp the old timers of dead tree media.
- RRRA 8y agoI can't wait...
- buboard 8y agoWhatever vendetta the nytimes has with facebook has drawn too far too long. yawn
- hnauz 8y agoI'm starting to suspect they are trying to extort better ad prices from Facebook. This won't stop until they cave. I hope they don't cave. The press already has enough power as it is.
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y agoGood. The press should have more power than corporations. Especially corporations with the moral standing of Facebook.
- deanmoriarty 8y agoIn what sense is NYT not a corporation like FB, looking after the interest of their shareholders? They are public and listed on NYSE with a market cap of $4B, and their stock has still to recover from the 2002 prices, which probably makes all the main shareholders pretty mad considering the large market bull run of the past decade. Mind you, I'm not defending FB in any capacity, I just find it odd to not treat NYT articles like what they are: just another biased piece put out by a biased giant media corporation.
- hnauz 8y agoThe NYT is a corporation. A corporation who lied about the WMD, garnering support for a war which caused death and endless suffering to millions of people.
- matt4077 8y agoThat particular episode is old enough to have graduated high school now. The editor and reporter responsible were also fired, and it wasn’t so much that the reporter “lied”, let alone the paper, but that they were lied to by the administration at a time where there was still a general assumption that even Republican officials would not actually blatantly lie to the American public. So update your talking points. (yawn)
- honestoHeminway 8y agoHumanitys Personal Data Firesale
- ilovetux 8y agoI miss Myspace, it was way less creepy and IMHO led to much more meaningful communication.
- rorykoehler 8y agoAll I remember from MySpace is "Thanks for the add!"
- chillacy 8y agoMy favorite part was visiting my friends pimped out page and having my computer freeze. It was more free, injecting html and css directly on the page.
- wreath 8y agoI agree! I met a lot of (musically) like minded people that Im still in touch with until today.. I even “met” my wife there!
- rwmj 8y agoMyspace was very poorly implemented. Slow, often even displaying errors on some pages. The social network I miss is Mixi, which was a sort of proto-Facebook around in the early 2000s (in Japan and Japanese only). Mixi had some really interesting features like being able to see who had browsed your account. (To be fair Mixi still exists, but they kind of died when FB became popular, as well as putting itself out of business with some onerous changes to their terms of service and business practices.)
- uncletaco 8y agoThe social network I miss the most is MyOtaku. It was a lot like livejournal but the site was geared towards anime nerds. I used it until about 2008 or so when it just sorta got ate as all my friends from there added me on fb.
- LinuxBender 8y agoMyspace wasn't even meant to be a social networking site when it started. When I registered all the domains initially, there were hundreds of variants of "myspace, mylinuxspace, mywindowsspace, mydesktopspace" and such. It was supposed to be the box.com of the time. There was an app you installed and created an "X:" drive. They had a couple HP SureStore arrays.. I forgot how much storage exactly, but they were about 19TB comprised of 9 and 18 GB drives in raid 50 or 51. There was no de-duplication and basically it was the same few hundred megs of music, animated gifs and porn over and over again. They didn't make any money and sold everything to some news company. Even then, it was quite a while before it started to take shape as a social networking site.
- rdxm 8y agoin a perfect world this would happen and people would maybe go back to living in real life instead of the cesspool that is FB/Twitter, etc...
- cityzen 8y agoWell, hopefully one difference will be that people remember Tom as your first friend and Mark as the the lying asshole he is.
- AndrewSChapman 8y agoHonestly, I hope they do! Simply put, the company is ethically bankrupt and deserve to be made an example of how not to run a social network. You can't go selling peoples private messages to Netflix (the sheer audacity of that just blows my mind!). You can't allow peoples private data to be sold to data analytics firms that are trying to sway elections. Facebook is built on the belief that people don't need privacy and I think that's fundamentally wrong. As an aside, I hope people continue migrating to https://MeWe.com https://MeWe.com which has a clear privacy bill of rights at its core and zero ads. It makes money in a far more traditional approach by charging for "pages" and extended emotions etc.
- arethuza 8y ago"zero ads" So how do they make money? Edit: They are doing the freemium model - its in their FAQ https://mewe.com/faq https://mewe.com/faq
- vanattab 8y agoAhh yes the very traditional method of charging for extended emotions... Better then facebook I suppose.
- dominotw 8y ago> I hope people continue migrating to http://MeWe.com http://MeWe.com which has a clear privacy bill of rights at its core and zero ads. It makes money in a far more traditional approach by charging for "pages" and extended emotions etc. What is the guarantee that they stick to this and not got FB route later. Why should I trust "Sgrouples Inc."?
- AndrewSChapman 8y agoIf they changed it would be suicide. Their whole raison d'être is around privacy and no censorship.
- fortylove 8y agoI'm not so sure that'll still be true once they have a critical mass of users on there. Perhaps a lot of users will have been brought on through their network, instead of through their belief in the platform. Before you know it, perhaps most of their users won't care as much as the original set!
- flareback 8y agoI can't say that I really care. I don't have a facebook account. I'm sure if they go away someone new will step up and start doing the exact same things.
- dominotw 8y agoFacebook the website maybe... Facebook the company, NO. whatsapp, insta are still killers.
- gopher2 8y agoThe New York Times Technology section really wants me to delete my Facebook account. https://imgur.com/a/fV6WKun https://imgur.com/a/fV6WKun Is this content organization personalized? Or are they serving this to everyone?
- smarttack 8y agoIt's hard not to suspect that there is at least some personal vendetta involved here from the media. Facebook destroyed a lot of the business models which were already reeling in the internet age.
- samfisher83 8y agoI think they are like a bank or big tobacco. Too big to fail. They have 2 billion users. Supposed someone came up with a new search engine better than google. You can go switch to that and it wouldn't be too hard. For a new social network you would need all you friends too switch too. How is grandma going to share her grand kids pics.
- vidarh 8y agoWhile that is to an extent a hindrance, it is also an opening. Social groups in real life are relatively contained. Facebook just mushes it all together. This is one of the few things Google+ got right, with asymmetric relationships and ease of controlling who sees what. While Google+ "failed", that's the attack angle I'd take if I wanted to go after Facebook: Look for ways to let people better limit sharing, to encourage deeper sharing. To truly get that right you need to also let people manage separate identities. Though really, I'd like to see more decentralised approaches to take over.
- samfisher83 8y agoI think most people she want to share a pic and tag their friends. I don't think people want something so complicated.
- vidarh 8y agoIt doesn't need to be that complicated. The Google+ model let you do what you suggest, but also let you assign people to one or more circles, so that you could share with specific subsets of your friends by picking a circle. E.g. "family", "people it's ok to share pics from nights out partying with", "work colleagues" etc., and you can assign people to more than one circle. It provided a decent basis for enough containment, if it wasn't for their lack of willingness to deal with pseudonyms and multiple identities. As for "most people" wanting something simple: I'd argue that most people have something far more complex today: People sign up to multitudes of sites and create different identities for e.g. dating, different forums, their regular circle of friends. People often go to great lengths to separate them. People even often have multiple accounts on the same sites. Sites like Facebook stubbornly trying to get people to tie everything to a single name that they're know to by everyone is fundamentally flawed for this reason, and it will always present a barrier, and it's something that's exploitable if someone comes up with the right model to start eating away at them at the fringes.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rchaud 8y agoDidn't Cambridge Analytica shut down and re-open the same day under a new name? A company that built its riches on the back of a spectacularly successful surveillance apparatus isn't going to go away. Especially not now that its use as a psyops tool (2016 US electon, Rohingya genocide) has been proven. FB as a product may one day not exist, but its leaders will welcome the absence of the press spotlight so they can start working with law enforcement, military and other groups that will pay big for their knowledge. Think Peter Thiel and Palantir.
- parliament32 8y ago>What Happens When Facebook Goes the Way of Myspace? The world will be a better place.
- ElijahLynn 8y agoWhen Facebook becomes the new Myspace, there will not be a new Facebook, it will be something is user-centered, that cares about the user. It will likely be de-centralized, but I haven't found something that has the low friction onboarding that FB provides that accomplishes this yet. The new solution won't require you to pick a server (e.g. Mastodon) and will be straight forward to the user. It will come.
- thewileyone 8y agoLife goes on. Stop using social media for a few days and you'll find that you've lost nothing by avoiding it.