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There is a major point of difference, between online media monopolies and the old railroad, infrastructure and commodity monopolies of old is "What happens if t

There is a major point of difference, between online media monopolies and the old railroad, infrastructure and commodity monopolies of old is "What happens if they dissolve." If Toyota fell off the edge of the disc, next year the world has less capacity to produce cars. A lot of capital will need to be obtained, and that will need to be turned into factories over several years before the world's productive capacity is restored. Meanwhile, people will have fewer new cars. If Facebook, Twitter, or even (many parts of) Google disappear... Alternatives will emerge almost immediately. Social networking is not expensive to provide, and certainly not capital intensive. It'll be via a different UI, but none of us will lack for social media, messaging and such. This is a crucial difference, economically. Social media is worth literal trillions, yet the industry could disappear without any consumer shortages. Something to consider, as the power of these giants starts to resemble the old colonial trading companies'. This may be the least necessary industry ever.

kkdsafjid 6y ago
Are you sure social networking is not expensive to provide? What makes you think so?
- dalbasal 6y ago
  I think this is one of those "difficult to fully work through in a comment thread" topics. So, I don't expect to convince anyone that isn't already sympathetic to this point. That said... For a bottom-up argument, consider mostly text based media like twitter or whatsapp. If you're involved in similar tech, I think it's quite easy to roughly estimate both the development and infrastructure requirements for something like this. It isn't too different from an email service or another text-centric media. Also (like email) it lends well to a distributed architecture, so may not even need a centralized infrastructure. Hosting and serving video is costlier. Again, distributed architecture can make this irrelevant, or a much smaller. Even assuming a Facebook clone though, hard costs like video streaming are a small fraction of facebook revenue. Re: distributed architecture. Remember that this is what the internet/web is fundamentally designed to do. It's not radical, and there are working examples out there that will work at massive scale. The www itself is such an example, but there are also more explicit examples that work more like Facebook does. For a comparative argument, consider FB or Twitter when they were much (revenue-wise) smaller. Consider minor social networks (like HN). These might have 1/100th of FB or Twitter's usage, but generally operate on orders of magnitude less revenue user-for-user. Basically, there are enough demonstrative examples to convince me that it is possible, even trivial.
  - kkdsafjid 6y ago
    Diaspora thought like you and went the length. Not sure how it played out, but iirc in the beginning they found it more work than they had expected. https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ I think there may be a lot more aspects to it that need attention than one anticipates at first.

kkdsafjid 6y ago

Are you sure social networking is not expensive to provide? What makes you think so?

dalbasal 6y ago
I think this is one of those "difficult to fully work through in a comment thread" topics. So, I don't expect to convince anyone that isn't already sympathetic to this point. That said... For a bottom-up argument, consider mostly text based media like twitter or whatsapp. If you're involved in similar tech, I think it's quite easy to roughly estimate both the development and infrastructure requirements for something like this. It isn't too different from an email service or another text-centric media. Also (like email) it lends well to a distributed architecture, so may not even need a centralized infrastructure. Hosting and serving video is costlier. Again, distributed architecture can make this irrelevant, or a much smaller. Even assuming a Facebook clone though, hard costs like video streaming are a small fraction of facebook revenue. Re: distributed architecture. Remember that this is what the internet/web is fundamentally designed to do. It's not radical, and there are working examples out there that will work at massive scale. The www itself is such an example, but there are also more explicit examples that work more like Facebook does. For a comparative argument, consider FB or Twitter when they were much (revenue-wise) smaller. Consider minor social networks (like HN). These might have 1/100th of FB or Twitter's usage, but generally operate on orders of magnitude less revenue user-for-user. Basically, there are enough demonstrative examples to convince me that it is possible, even trivial.
- kkdsafjid 6y ago
  Diaspora thought like you and went the length. Not sure how it played out, but iirc in the beginning they found it more work than they had expected. https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ I think there may be a lot more aspects to it that need attention than one anticipates at first.