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Pretty good read. Liked this quote: > Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya once recalled his work with Facebook this way: “We trumpeted [our platform] like

Pretty good read. Liked this quote: > Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya once recalled his work with Facebook this way: “We trumpeted [our platform] like it was some hot-shit big deal. And I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates…And Gates said something along the lines of, ‘That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a ‘platform.’ A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.’” The brilliant Microsoft founder knew that his own Windows operating system was a true platform because, as Microsoft openly bragged, the company itself captured only a minority of the value created through the Windows ecosystem. Facebook, YouTube and Google are in a completely different category—because the vast majority of the wealth they generate is controlled by the social-media oligopolies themselves. They aren’t platforms so much as rent-seeking agents that oversee a set of critical economic protocols.

tokyodude 8y ago
I don't know about the Google of today but the Google of say 2003 clearly fit that definition. It was making it possible for 1000s of mom and pop shops to reach a much larger audience. I remember specifically a story about a small company that made custom cowboy boots that was doing much better now that it could could buy a few keywords and target people looking for those kinds of boots so that seems to fit. Youtube certainly seems like a platform for others to make money, the top example being PewDiePie himself making 7 million year 2 or 3 years ago from just youtube ad share. No idea how much more he made from product placements or endorsements. There's clearly some amount being made by groups like Vox, Kurzgesagt, Corridor, and similar channels who . Would those channels be able to survive if they had to pay to stream their own video?

tokyodude 8y ago

I don't know about the Google of today but the Google of say 2003 clearly fit that definition. It was making it possible for 1000s of mom and pop shops to reach a much larger audience. I remember specifically a story about a small company that made custom cowboy boots that was doing much better now that it could could buy a few keywords and target people looking for those kinds of boots so that seems to fit. Youtube certainly seems like a platform for others to make money, the top example being PewDiePie himself making 7 million year 2 or 3 years ago from just youtube ad share. No idea how much more he made from product placements or endorsements. There's clearly some amount being made by groups like Vox, Kurzgesagt, Corridor, and similar channels who . Would those channels be able to survive if they had to pay to stream their own video?