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A bit offtopic but You know what? 1. I am not using whatsapp and recently I stumbled upon an iOS app that asked for a phone number to register and then tried t
by nrvn 6y ago
A bit offtopic but You know what?
1. I am not using whatsapp and recently I stumbled upon an iOS app that asked for a phone number to register and then tried to send OTP through whatsapp. SMS was a fallback option there which showed afterwards and was not active for 5 minutes because of the “timeout” between otp requests )))
2.A bottle of water advertised some lottery and had a QR code which was a FB link leading to a page that showed me a vague message about FB messenger which I don’t have.
It turns out that some people/companies nowadays assume FB and affiliated/owned companies to be a kinda standard for communication.
Boys and girls, write down and remember a simple rule: none of the commercial organizations will provide means of communication (apps, public APIs and SDKs) as standards unless those aforementioned means fit their business model.
Real standards belong either to public domain or to established non-commercial foundations with clear and transparent governance, leadership and policies.
Back on topic. I remember FB as a site that united students and alumni of major universities. This was probably the only period of fun in facebook history.
I remember VK.com being a Russian facebook clone with similar initial posture and user base which was also fun until its users started to go to jail for political reasons.
I would argue that this fate is waiting any “social” “network” after some point in their evolution.
A Cozy platform for chitchats and pic sharing gains more and more users, attention and money and transforms to a monster that starts eating its children and encourages all the deadly sins.
If you know an example of a social media that managed to escape this fate I will be happy to stand corrected.
- h0l0cube 6y ago> If you know an example of a social media that managed to escape this fate I will be happy to stand corrected. Mastodon has a growing active community, is completely open source, federated, and community driven.
- hakfoo 6y agoI think the universe of topic-driven forums is the best I've seen so far. What eventually wrecks any of the "meet friends/family/strangers and chat loosely" MySpace/Facebook/Google+/etc. networks toxic is that they're "unbounded" to serve their business model. They want to show 50% quarter-over-quarter active-user growth, and when that caps out, they need to squeeze the user bases for ever more interaction and engagement. Quality is not on the radar. So they're incentivized first to load the site with bots, desperate virality and recruitment efforts, and low-quality content, and later more and more obnoxious algorithms and dark-pattern design. A topic-driven forum tends to have different motivations. The definition of success is to be a compelling community and content for a specific, and typically finite, audience. You're not going to growth-hack Hacker News or Deskthority in quite the same toxic way as Facebook does. A small, but tighter-knit community often can be self-funded via subscriptions or donations, and if you go ad supported, there's a potential for a high-quality non-programmatic-nightmare ad experience, based on direct relations with advertisers directly relevant to the site theme and audience. There's also granularity and control created by it not being a single all-purpose systen. Each new community is an opt-in choice rather than an algorithmic imposition, and you can punt the toxic ones without having to delete them all.