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Not sure about Facebook, I mean there's reddit, twitter, etc. Each w/ it's own niche...but Amazon, and Apple, imho are the biggest offenders. Amazon would be fi

Not sure about Facebook, I mean there's reddit, twitter, etc. Each w/ it's own niche...but Amazon, and Apple, imho are the biggest offenders. Amazon would be first on my list.

basch 6y ago
On one hand, theres no way Facebook is a monopoly. On the other hand, the question isnt really whether it is, but if they are being anticompetitive.
- ToFab123 6y ago
  They hold the power to change an elections. No politicians like that.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    unless you are changing them in the direction wanted.
    - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
      Short term, yes, but what guarantee does any political group have that the tech companies won't turn on them at some point? Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase, which means they're naturally going to continue to lean more and more conservative.
      - basch 6y ago
        >Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase I don't buy it. Facebook has always been an adult network. It started as something that kept kids out. They opened up, but they dont need them. Eventually, when people get older they sign up for it. It't not sexy, its utilitarian. Their biggest risk to their business is more addictive products, not their customer age. People can get addicted at any age. TiKTok, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube are still more commoner<>celebrity networks, while Facebook is a WhitePages and now a YellowPages too.
        detaro 6y ago
        From what I see, it's less important with young adults now than it was a few years ago, and it started as something only for young adults that spread upwards through the age groups. It could be reaching a stable point though, true.
        basch 6y ago
        The whole "facebook isnt cool anymore" thing has been going on for a decade now. Linkedin isnt cool. The WhitePages arent cool. Plenty of other properties, like twitch, discord, twitter, carve out their niche. Snapchat was going to be the facebook killer, people got bored with snapchat. But facebook keeps growing. Now TikTok is looking like a threat. But no matter what everybodys favorite place to hangout is, they also have a facebook. And companies keep throwing money into facebook ads. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
      - yeetman21 6y ago
        Politicians only think short term
  - sidlls 6y ago
    They do? What evidence is there to suggest this?
    - Mindwipe 6y ago
      Pretty poor evidence generally, mostly on the say so of snake oil salesmen trying to convince political campaigns to pay them handsomely to do so with extremely uncertain results. I note the conspiracy theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. CA certainly wanted their clients to think that such a thing was possible. They were fantasists, for money.
      - jen20 6y ago
        > theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. You have to have a pretty warped view on proceedings for this to be the case.
        Mindwipe 6y ago
        You really don't. I am certainly not trying to argue that Brexit is a good thing. But the CA narrative has completely fallen apart. https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/10/how-cambridge-analytica-scandal-unravelled https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/... https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2847/documents/27859/default/ https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2847/documents... The ICO spent three years investigating CA, and the report is very clear that the findings were that they had no effect.
CogentHedgehog 6y ago
Facebook controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. If you add those together, Facebook controls an overwhelming majority of the social media market share -- way more than the relatively tiny niche held by Reddit and Twitter. Edit: Facebook has 2603 million active users, Instagram has 1083M, Reddit has just 430 million. Twitter is estimated at 326 million. TikTok is the closest thing to a true Facebook competitor with 800M users, and a large share of them are probably concentrated in China -- and the Trump administration already tried to get them banned. (I'm excluding messaging services and YouTube here since they're a different niche). Source is Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  Reddit has gone significantly more mainstream over the past few years. I remember when a reddit post got 2000 upvotes that was a big deal. Then suddenly it became 4k, 8k, and then I stopped caring it got so large. Reddit is becoming into a weird beast because I've found theres a mentality of people who assume you actively subscribe to the stuff set by default hence why people get upset when you don't tout the same opinion. I've even had people ask me what I was doing in their subreddit, said I came from /r/all, and they basically said "yeah right." Reddit is probably going to dominate the online forum market since it's so much easier to create a subreddit than it is make your own website with forums. My only beef with this is reddit silences things they don't like, and not just things that sound reasonable. My rationale is let these people be. They're dumb enough to discuss this garbage on your platform, so why not collect that data and just monitor it? Better than they go elsewhere and now you have no idea. Also reddit trying to take their anonymous platform and make it so you act as a community member has always been weird to me. That makes sense for public people, not for general users. Especially when bot accounts just harvest upvotes. Twitter is basically what facebook used to be now.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    You need to use actual numbers. The total size of the active worldwide userbase on all of Facebook's platforms is at least one order of magnitude larger than reddit. And the revenue they extract from it is larger still. Reddit is merely the world's largest Internet forum. They don't have a moat.
coldcode 6y ago
Apple is dominant as a monopoly in what exactly? Their own store, their own hardware, their own OS, their own services? Every business Apple is in has large alternatives. They make money selling you things, not from ads. Everything Google and Facebook do is designed to ensure they make ad revenue or sell your data in some way for money; they need to control every thing in their supposed business (search, android, social media, etc) to ensure they dominate in collecting ad/data revenue which is the only business they make money on. Apple only wants to sell you more devices or device related services which is their business. You can live quite well without any Apple product at all, many people do. Try living without Google. Amazon on the other hand is worse, as they want to control all business segments they get into, even totally unrelated to their business of being a store that sells things. Using your dominance in one type of business to force everyone to also support unrelated businesses with no alternatives is one common definition of monopoly; think dominating railroads to force everyone to use your oil (Standard Oil).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hef19898 6y ago
  Amazon and is not t the same time. eCommerce dominant? Sure, but then you have Alibaba, Shopify and eBay in addition to other marketplaces. Cloud? Surely dominant, but you also have Google and Microsoft. Retail? There Amazon is still small if you include stationary retail. Logistics? As much as everybody is complaining, Amazon Logistics is still more of an in-house alternative to UPS, Fedex, DHL,... So again, no real dominance of the parcel delivery market. It kind of gets tricky when you combine all that, but I assume that this would be a fun thing to argue infornt of a court I guess. Google seems to me to be much more straight forward, they clearly dominate search and web ads. The latter with the exception of social, which would be facebooks domain. And with Android, Google is the second largest player in Mobile if you ignore hthe hardware aspect. Not saying either company should be broken up, that's for couts to decide.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    I don't see Alibaba or eBay as competitors to Amazon--the former because it doesn't really operate in the US (almost nobody in the US would know what Alibaba is) and the latter because it just serves a completely different market with different mechanisms and so on. Shopify might be, but it's so tiny in comparison it's hardly unreasonable to suggest it isn't a legitimate competitor. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, might be nearing that status as far as eCommerce is concerned.

Not sure about Facebook, I mean there's reddit, twitter, etc. Each w/ it's own niche...but Amazon, and Apple, imho are the biggest offenders. Amazon would be first on my list.

basch 6y ago

On one hand, theres no way Facebook is a monopoly. On the other hand, the question isnt really whether it is, but if they are being anticompetitive.

ToFab123 6y ago
They hold the power to change an elections. No politicians like that.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  unless you are changing them in the direction wanted.
  - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
    Short term, yes, but what guarantee does any political group have that the tech companies won't turn on them at some point? Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase, which means they're naturally going to continue to lean more and more conservative.
    - basch 6y ago
      >Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase I don't buy it. Facebook has always been an adult network. It started as something that kept kids out. They opened up, but they dont need them. Eventually, when people get older they sign up for it. It't not sexy, its utilitarian. Their biggest risk to their business is more addictive products, not their customer age. People can get addicted at any age. TiKTok, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube are still more commoner<>celebrity networks, while Facebook is a WhitePages and now a YellowPages too.
      - detaro 6y ago
        From what I see, it's less important with young adults now than it was a few years ago, and it started as something only for young adults that spread upwards through the age groups. It could be reaching a stable point though, true.
        basch 6y ago
        The whole "facebook isnt cool anymore" thing has been going on for a decade now. Linkedin isnt cool. The WhitePages arent cool. Plenty of other properties, like twitch, discord, twitter, carve out their niche. Snapchat was going to be the facebook killer, people got bored with snapchat. But facebook keeps growing. Now TikTok is looking like a threat. But no matter what everybodys favorite place to hangout is, they also have a facebook. And companies keep throwing money into facebook ads. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
    - yeetman21 6y ago
      Politicians only think short term
- sidlls 6y ago
  They do? What evidence is there to suggest this?
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    Pretty poor evidence generally, mostly on the say so of snake oil salesmen trying to convince political campaigns to pay them handsomely to do so with extremely uncertain results. I note the conspiracy theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. CA certainly wanted their clients to think that such a thing was possible. They were fantasists, for money.
    - jen20 6y ago
      > theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. You have to have a pretty warped view on proceedings for this to be the case.
      - Mindwipe 6y ago
        You really don't. I am certainly not trying to argue that Brexit is a good thing. But the CA narrative has completely fallen apart. https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/10/how-cambridge-analytica-scandal-unravelled https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/... https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2847/documents/27859/default/ https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2847/documents... The ICO spent three years investigating CA, and the report is very clear that the findings were that they had no effect.

CogentHedgehog 6y ago

Facebook controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. If you add those together, Facebook controls an overwhelming majority of the social media market share -- way more than the relatively tiny niche held by Reddit and Twitter. Edit: Facebook has 2603 million active users, Instagram has 1083M, Reddit has just 430 million. Twitter is estimated at 326 million. TikTok is the closest thing to a true Facebook competitor with 800M users, and a large share of them are probably concentrated in China -- and the Trump administration already tried to get them banned. (I'm excluding messaging services and YouTube here since they're a different niche). Source is Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
Reddit has gone significantly more mainstream over the past few years. I remember when a reddit post got 2000 upvotes that was a big deal. Then suddenly it became 4k, 8k, and then I stopped caring it got so large. Reddit is becoming into a weird beast because I've found theres a mentality of people who assume you actively subscribe to the stuff set by default hence why people get upset when you don't tout the same opinion. I've even had people ask me what I was doing in their subreddit, said I came from /r/all, and they basically said "yeah right." Reddit is probably going to dominate the online forum market since it's so much easier to create a subreddit than it is make your own website with forums. My only beef with this is reddit silences things they don't like, and not just things that sound reasonable. My rationale is let these people be. They're dumb enough to discuss this garbage on your platform, so why not collect that data and just monitor it? Better than they go elsewhere and now you have no idea. Also reddit trying to take their anonymous platform and make it so you act as a community member has always been weird to me. That makes sense for public people, not for general users. Especially when bot accounts just harvest upvotes. Twitter is basically what facebook used to be now.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  You need to use actual numbers. The total size of the active worldwide userbase on all of Facebook's platforms is at least one order of magnitude larger than reddit. And the revenue they extract from it is larger still. Reddit is merely the world's largest Internet forum. They don't have a moat.

coldcode 6y ago

Apple is dominant as a monopoly in what exactly? Their own store, their own hardware, their own OS, their own services? Every business Apple is in has large alternatives. They make money selling you things, not from ads. Everything Google and Facebook do is designed to ensure they make ad revenue or sell your data in some way for money; they need to control every thing in their supposed business (search, android, social media, etc) to ensure they dominate in collecting ad/data revenue which is the only business they make money on. Apple only wants to sell you more devices or device related services which is their business. You can live quite well without any Apple product at all, many people do. Try living without Google. Amazon on the other hand is worse, as they want to control all business segments they get into, even totally unrelated to their business of being a store that sells things. Using your dominance in one type of business to force everyone to also support unrelated businesses with no alternatives is one common definition of monopoly; think dominating railroads to force everyone to use your oil (Standard Oil).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hef19898 6y ago
Amazon and is not t the same time. eCommerce dominant? Sure, but then you have Alibaba, Shopify and eBay in addition to other marketplaces. Cloud? Surely dominant, but you also have Google and Microsoft. Retail? There Amazon is still small if you include stationary retail. Logistics? As much as everybody is complaining, Amazon Logistics is still more of an in-house alternative to UPS, Fedex, DHL,... So again, no real dominance of the parcel delivery market. It kind of gets tricky when you combine all that, but I assume that this would be a fun thing to argue infornt of a court I guess. Google seems to me to be much more straight forward, they clearly dominate search and web ads. The latter with the exception of social, which would be facebooks domain. And with Android, Google is the second largest player in Mobile if you ignore hthe hardware aspect. Not saying either company should be broken up, that's for couts to decide.
- sidlls 6y ago
  I don't see Alibaba or eBay as competitors to Amazon--the former because it doesn't really operate in the US (almost nobody in the US would know what Alibaba is) and the latter because it just serves a completely different market with different mechanisms and so on. Shopify might be, but it's so tiny in comparison it's hardly unreasonable to suggest it isn't a legitimate competitor. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, might be nearing that status as far as eCommerce is concerned.