This is interesting. I feel like saying "Facebook is geared to stupid people" is offensive and inaccurate, but I've definitely felt like "social" applications h

This is interesting. I feel like saying "Facebook is geared to stupid people" is offensive and inaccurate, but I've definitely felt like "social" applications have a fatal flaw, which is that they can't succeed without getting progressively dumber over time. The early adopters of services like Facebook and Twitter are smart, curious, technologically-adept people like HN posters. But if the product isn't "dumbed down" a bit, it can't appeal to the masses and can't really grow, and if it stops innovating (which is hard to do while not growing, because VCs aren't likely to fund a product that only 5% of the population is smart enough to use) then the smart people get bored. So, a "social" application feels intense pressure to grow and inevitably becomes stupider (in terms of its users) over time. Add to this the fact that dumb people have more free time and lower standards regarding the use of it, and the usage-weighted average IQ can easily drop below 100. Then you become Myspace. Facebook was built to dumb down harmlessly. It started at Harvard, then the Ivy League, then the top 100 (or so) colleges, then all colleges, then everyone. This was a great strategy for marketing while scaling and it worked. How it will progress from here is unclear. For non-"social" counterexamples, Google and Wikipedia have managed to avoid this by taking what "social" views as a contrarian strategy: instead of trying to suck people in and get them to spend hours on the site (which creates the low time-weighted IQ problem) they try to get people to the information they want as quickly as possible. Google's ideology is, "You're smart enough to know where you want to go, we're just going to get you there." Facebook's is, "We're going to try to suck you in to our space as long as we can."