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> if I create a new social network, it isn't very useful until a significant number of people are on board. That's a common misconception. As a social network

> if I create a new social network, it isn't very useful until a significant number of people are on board. That's a common misconception. As a social network creator, your job is to create a substantial amount of single player value in addition to multiplayer value, precisely to avoid this sort of chicken and egg problem. If your social network isn't both useful and differentiated (i.e. doing something completely different than FB) even when no other people are using it, then you have a real problem. That's why when Facebook launched it was basically just a prettier skin over the Harvard student directory, so that way it was valuable even if there were no other people using it.

tivert 8y ago
>> if I create a new social network, it isn't very useful until a significant number of people are on board. > That's why when Facebook launched it was basically just a prettier skin over the Harvard student directory, so that way it was valuable even if there were no other people using it. Facebook also launched in small, elite communities first, which allowed it to exploit network effects in communities that were more manageable than the global internet. I think that many people make the mistake of thinking of the "social" network as global-level vat filled with a solution of essentially identical nodes, and the "network effect" as a power caused by a product having a high concentration in that solution. In reality, the global "social" network is more like a warehouse full of jars, and smaller players start by building up their product's concentration in a fraction of those jars, instead of all the jars at once.