5 ms·

I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point. My bet is that the micro-niche ma

by nhangen 15y ago

I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point. My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example. As more people move to avoid the noise, they'll find solace in mini-communities, and I think that's the way forward. Not just one service, but hundreds.

abalog 15y ago
I concur with you.
pointillistic 15y ago
Technically speaking it takes to much "gardening" to run HN-like site. There are millions of niche forums there already. But it's the platform and the interface that makes HN different. I don't know if there is a technical expertise to similarly run other communities there. Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.
- paulitex 15y ago
  > Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project. 1. go to http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install 2. download, untar arc3.tar 3. see news.arc (hn source)
evgen 15y ago
Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.
- rhizome 15y ago
  They just changed all Facebook Groups to a more-simplified version just a month or two ago so I doubt they're going to get any more sophisticated on that level. What do you imagine they would do otherwise? More to the point, what's the business case for doing what you describe? They could require FGroups to self-categorize in order to narrow and aid their advertising sales, but that's not foolproof and lots of groups would just as soon choose "Other."
- tokenadult 15y ago
  Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. Facebook private groups https://www.facebook.com/groups https://www.facebook.com/groups are working quite well among my circle of friends to provide a focused view of one or another niche community that forms a natural subset of my friends. There is a particular Facebook secret group that I visit absolutely every time I'm on Facebook, which is several times a day. That's a practical place for me to ask focused informational questions, and also a place where I can share a lot of camaraderie with dear friends who have had similar--and yet very diverse--life experiences. Because of the stronger filtering abilities of Facebook, I can indeed see how it could supplant many niche sites. (Thus far, HN gets the second share of my attention after Facebook, among all websites, and it will be interesting to see what the consensus here is about the overall community experience in the next year or so.)
  - Leynos 15y ago
    One problem with Facebook Groups I find is that you can't have wall posts from your groups appearing in your primary timeline/newsfeed. Because of this, you have to make a concious effort to visit the group to catch up. Since none of the groups I joined have the same level of activity I'm used to on specialized forums for those subjects, I never bother to check up on them - which of course lends itself to a vicious circle of inactivity.
    - agscala 15y ago
      Posts from groups that I'm a part of do show up in my main feed. Maybe you need to tweak some settings here or there?
jimbokun 15y ago
Strangely enough, could it be time to attack Facebook the same way they attacked MySpace? Facebook bootstrapped a user base by initially restricting to people with harvard.edu email, which made them more comfortable sharing. Then they expanded to other universities, but only allowed visibility to people within the same .edu. Now that everyone has been socially obligated to friend their Mom, maybe it's time to attack Facebook with .edu specific sites again? What other natural community boundaries would make sense to target with exclusive sites?
- aheilbut 15y ago
  datemyschool seems to be killing it so far...
sixtofour 15y ago
I'm in a mini community of about 10. We all know each other. We communicate through email. I've gotten more out of that than I ever got out of Facebook, and some of the people in my mini group were part of my network in Facebook.
danielrhodes 15y ago
While I find the idea of many micro-communities compelling, I don't think that this is the direction things are going. Here's why: the Internet is extremely diverse as it is and overall makes for a bad user experience where people have to cognitively deal with many different (and disagreeing) interfaces, rules, quirks, web addresses, and so on. At the beginning this heterogeneity was seen as an advantage because the amount of easily accessible information was unparalleled. However, in the past few years it seems like most successful platforms (be it YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Amazon, Wikipedia, iOS, etc.) have done well because there was a consistent and one-stop shop experience throughout. There is still tons of room on many different verticals to improve and disruption to occur, but I wouldn't expect things to come full circle.
- icebraining 15y ago
  Well, there's Reddit and its collection of small communities under the same banner. But I think as more and more CMSs start introducing semantic information in their HTML, we'll start to have more client side features that work across all such websites, and eventually we'll go full circle and reinvent USENET, but now with a dozen layers of abstraction to support it.
- pnathan 15y ago
  When you are shopping, you want a trusted second party. E.g., Amazon. While Wikipedia is cool, it still doesn't beat the enthusiast's homepage. And Facebook has never had the personality of GeoCities.

by nhangen 15y ago

abalog 15y ago

I concur with you.

pointillistic 15y ago

Technically speaking it takes to much "gardening" to run HN-like site. There are millions of niche forums there already. But it's the platform and the interface that makes HN different. I don't know if there is a technical expertise to similarly run other communities there. Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.

paulitex 15y ago
> Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project. 1. go to http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install 2. download, untar arc3.tar 3. see news.arc (hn source)

evgen 15y ago

Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.

rhizome 15y ago
They just changed all Facebook Groups to a more-simplified version just a month or two ago so I doubt they're going to get any more sophisticated on that level. What do you imagine they would do otherwise? More to the point, what's the business case for doing what you describe? They could require FGroups to self-categorize in order to narrow and aid their advertising sales, but that's not foolproof and lots of groups would just as soon choose "Other."
tokenadult 15y ago
Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. Facebook private groups https://www.facebook.com/groups https://www.facebook.com/groups are working quite well among my circle of friends to provide a focused view of one or another niche community that forms a natural subset of my friends. There is a particular Facebook secret group that I visit absolutely every time I'm on Facebook, which is several times a day. That's a practical place for me to ask focused informational questions, and also a place where I can share a lot of camaraderie with dear friends who have had similar--and yet very diverse--life experiences. Because of the stronger filtering abilities of Facebook, I can indeed see how it could supplant many niche sites. (Thus far, HN gets the second share of my attention after Facebook, among all websites, and it will be interesting to see what the consensus here is about the overall community experience in the next year or so.)
- Leynos 15y ago
  One problem with Facebook Groups I find is that you can't have wall posts from your groups appearing in your primary timeline/newsfeed. Because of this, you have to make a concious effort to visit the group to catch up. Since none of the groups I joined have the same level of activity I'm used to on specialized forums for those subjects, I never bother to check up on them - which of course lends itself to a vicious circle of inactivity.
  - agscala 15y ago
    Posts from groups that I'm a part of do show up in my main feed. Maybe you need to tweak some settings here or there?

jimbokun 15y ago

Strangely enough, could it be time to attack Facebook the same way they attacked MySpace? Facebook bootstrapped a user base by initially restricting to people with harvard.edu email, which made them more comfortable sharing. Then they expanded to other universities, but only allowed visibility to people within the same .edu. Now that everyone has been socially obligated to friend their Mom, maybe it's time to attack Facebook with .edu specific sites again? What other natural community boundaries would make sense to target with exclusive sites?

aheilbut 15y ago
datemyschool seems to be killing it so far...

sixtofour 15y ago

I'm in a mini community of about 10. We all know each other. We communicate through email. I've gotten more out of that than I ever got out of Facebook, and some of the people in my mini group were part of my network in Facebook.

danielrhodes 15y ago

While I find the idea of many micro-communities compelling, I don't think that this is the direction things are going. Here's why: the Internet is extremely diverse as it is and overall makes for a bad user experience where people have to cognitively deal with many different (and disagreeing) interfaces, rules, quirks, web addresses, and so on. At the beginning this heterogeneity was seen as an advantage because the amount of easily accessible information was unparalleled. However, in the past few years it seems like most successful platforms (be it YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Amazon, Wikipedia, iOS, etc.) have done well because there was a consistent and one-stop shop experience throughout. There is still tons of room on many different verticals to improve and disruption to occur, but I wouldn't expect things to come full circle.

icebraining 15y ago
Well, there's Reddit and its collection of small communities under the same banner. But I think as more and more CMSs start introducing semantic information in their HTML, we'll start to have more client side features that work across all such websites, and eventually we'll go full circle and reinvent USENET, but now with a dozen layers of abstraction to support it.
pnathan 15y ago
When you are shopping, you want a trusted second party. E.g., Amazon. While Wikipedia is cool, it still doesn't beat the enthusiast's homepage. And Facebook has never had the personality of GeoCities.