6 ms·

It's hard for me to imagine a less surprising result. And yet it's going to happen again, and again, and again. Voat, Parler, whatever.

SkyPuncher 5y ago
It's amazing how many "founders" think "having a better product" will win out against network effects.
- brodouevencode 5y ago
  In my admittedly naive way I always hope that they will win out by having the better product. But to your point, I think the network effects are much, much, much stronger than anyone (including Theil, from which I first heard this concept) had ever anticipated. So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent?
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > But to your point, I think the network effects are much, much, much stronger than anyone (including Theil, from which I first heard this concept) had ever anticipated. > So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent? You can't. And in fact, these doomed-to-be-shut-down sites are in fact exhibiting an extremely strong network effect. The founding group of malcontents has an existing network of relationships with both strong and weak ties, and the whole lot of them get pulled in en-mass. That's what you have to overcome in these cases, not the network effect that the mainstream sites exhibit. FB, Reddit, and Twitter don't necessarily have to be beaten in order for a smaller site to succeed on it's own terms. There are tactics that would make it likelier for such a site to endure, but the site would have to commit at the outset to a whole hearted strategy of weapons-grade muffling of the toxic sludge. Pretty much implement every undeployed UI trick and algorithmic tweak that can be found in the recent FB leaks. Implement shadowbans. Use rate limiting. Suppress the display of posts that have a higher ratio of angry emoji reactions. Brigade detection. Virality and repost limits. Anyway, if you're willing and prepared to dial the soft-moderation and filter-bubbles up to 11, you MIGHT be able to run a free-speech-centric site that is capable of withstanding an influx of Nazis and Trolls without degenerating into a festering cesspool that repels anyone else. But you're going to have to have a crew with pretty strong stomachs looking at all the sludge just in order to continually maintain and adjust the knobs on those measures. None of that will be cheap or easy, and in the end you'll have accomplished a rather dubious feat: a site that allows conspiracy theories and racist Nazi rants to be posted while limiting their spread as much as possible. So you can 'friend' your crazy uncle frank and comment on his fishing photos without having to deal with his anti-masking posts or Alex Jones fan-fiction. Of course the folks you're muffling will complain loudly, but realistically speaking that won't prevent them from using the site. I'm not sure you can build a viable business model around that value proposition, but from a technical and social standpoint it might work.
  - winternett 5y ago
    >So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent? The answer is and has always been to emphasize user equality and to hold each user individually responsible for their actions. Reddit screwed up all it's integrity when it stopped showing downvote stats in addition to upvote counts.. They needed brigading and skewed voting to allow sponsored posts, celebrity and popularity, and promoted ideals to be artificially promoted as favorable by a majority. Faked/limited stats, limited controls, and misleading numbers are trademark characteristics of an artificially skewed or profit-biased platform these days.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tomjen3 5y ago
  Of course one is biased in favour of ones own product, but the network effects of AIM were essentially completely overtaken by facebook messenger, thanks in part to a technological change (phones) and delivering a product that didn't require both parties to be online at the same time. Digg died and the population moved to reddit. MySpace is deader than most zombies.
hunterb123 5y ago
Afaik Parler is still up. Rumble is still up. Gab is still up. Conservatives want a place on the internet.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Very offensive comment. Insulting and generalizing people and ideology you don't understand. I am conservative, many issues I find liberals think they have the moral high ground on it's quite the opposite. Note I use these terms loosely and there is a spectrum of political ideologies that differ between people, even between issues.
    - exogeny 5y ago
      I would argue that the person who wrote that comment understood it better than anyone on this thread.
      - hunterb123 5y ago
        Then argue it. Why?
        exogeny 5y ago
        I don't believe for a second that you're arguing in good faith, given the parade of goalpost-moving with attendant downvotes you rained into the other post on this topic. But he understood it, literally, because he ran a community that embodied it. To my knowledge, neither me nor you can say that, so again, literally speaking he has a lot more experience in understanding the dynamics of this culture. You feel like he's painting conservatives with an unfair brush. OK. Take that up with him.
dang 5y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Igelau 5y ago
  How is that a shallow dismissal? Pointing out a pattern is a shallow dismissal? A dismissal of what?
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    I don't understand why this comment was singled out in particular, maybe it was edited. But I do think this kind of low value and lazy opionionating should be discouraged.
    - Igelau 5y ago
      > low value There's a pretty decent size thread of interesting discussion beneath it, demonstrating that it is of value. > I don't understand why this comment was singled out I don't moderate this site, but if I did I might be tempted to use a script to scrape for keywords and phrases that sound like violations of the guidelines and issue replies at a key press or automatically. And that's a good way to do it, except occasionally it causes... well... a shallow dismissal?
      - dang 5y ago
        We do not scrape for keywords or phrases that sound like violations of the guidelines. "Decent size" does not indicate value on HN. We want quality, not quantity. The responses that the root comment generated were mostly either generic (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995221) or outright flamewar crap.
  - dang 5y ago
    It was just generic without adding any information or insight. Moreover the generic point was dismissive. Hence, shallow dismissal.
rvz 5y ago
Gab, Parler and 4chan are still up, just so you know. The forever mission to stop them is still incomplete. It is only going to get harder as they keep on being resilient and censorship resistant. Done by none other than the ones who love chasing so-called 'nazis' for a living.
- exogeny 5y ago
  I mean, sure, yeah, Stormfront is still up too. I don't think "remaining up" is the totality of their goals. I think what the writer of the post is getting at is that pursuing this direction leads to no outcomes better than a marginally sustained existence.
brodouevencode 5y ago
Agree to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995247 The shutdowns will happen so long as 1) there's not enough market share for the competing product (presumably from the network effects) and 2) there's market suppression from the current players. In other words: as long as there is a competing first-landing player and that player is actively working against any newcomers will there be a change? Probably not. To put this into a historical context: Standard Oil was notoriously gobbling up or destroying small players as a very successful attempt to own the market. This is no different.

SkyPuncher 5y ago

It's amazing how many "founders" think "having a better product" will win out against network effects.

brodouevencode 5y ago
In my admittedly naive way I always hope that they will win out by having the better product. But to your point, I think the network effects are much, much, much stronger than anyone (including Theil, from which I first heard this concept) had ever anticipated. So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent?
- webmaven 5y ago
  > But to your point, I think the network effects are much, much, much stronger than anyone (including Theil, from which I first heard this concept) had ever anticipated. > So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent? You can't. And in fact, these doomed-to-be-shut-down sites are in fact exhibiting an extremely strong network effect. The founding group of malcontents has an existing network of relationships with both strong and weak ties, and the whole lot of them get pulled in en-mass. That's what you have to overcome in these cases, not the network effect that the mainstream sites exhibit. FB, Reddit, and Twitter don't necessarily have to be beaten in order for a smaller site to succeed on it's own terms. There are tactics that would make it likelier for such a site to endure, but the site would have to commit at the outset to a whole hearted strategy of weapons-grade muffling of the toxic sludge. Pretty much implement every undeployed UI trick and algorithmic tweak that can be found in the recent FB leaks. Implement shadowbans. Use rate limiting. Suppress the display of posts that have a higher ratio of angry emoji reactions. Brigade detection. Virality and repost limits. Anyway, if you're willing and prepared to dial the soft-moderation and filter-bubbles up to 11, you MIGHT be able to run a free-speech-centric site that is capable of withstanding an influx of Nazis and Trolls without degenerating into a festering cesspool that repels anyone else. But you're going to have to have a crew with pretty strong stomachs looking at all the sludge just in order to continually maintain and adjust the knobs on those measures. None of that will be cheap or easy, and in the end you'll have accomplished a rather dubious feat: a site that allows conspiracy theories and racist Nazi rants to be posted while limiting their spread as much as possible. So you can 'friend' your crazy uncle frank and comment on his fishing photos without having to deal with his anti-masking posts or Alex Jones fan-fiction. Of course the folks you're muffling will complain loudly, but realistically speaking that won't prevent them from using the site. I'm not sure you can build a viable business model around that value proposition, but from a technical and social standpoint it might work.
- winternett 5y ago
  >So maybe the question is how does one beat the network effects that are so prevalent? The answer is and has always been to emphasize user equality and to hold each user individually responsible for their actions. Reddit screwed up all it's integrity when it stopped showing downvote stats in addition to upvote counts.. They needed brigading and skewed voting to allow sponsored posts, celebrity and popularity, and promoted ideals to be artificially promoted as favorable by a majority. Faked/limited stats, limited controls, and misleading numbers are trademark characteristics of an artificially skewed or profit-biased platform these days.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tomjen3 5y ago
Of course one is biased in favour of ones own product, but the network effects of AIM were essentially completely overtaken by facebook messenger, thanks in part to a technological change (phones) and delivering a product that didn't require both parties to be online at the same time. Digg died and the population moved to reddit. MySpace is deader than most zombies.

hunterb123 5y ago

Afaik Parler is still up. Rumble is still up. Gab is still up. Conservatives want a place on the internet.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
[flagged]
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Very offensive comment. Insulting and generalizing people and ideology you don't understand. I am conservative, many issues I find liberals think they have the moral high ground on it's quite the opposite. Note I use these terms loosely and there is a spectrum of political ideologies that differ between people, even between issues.
  - exogeny 5y ago
    I would argue that the person who wrote that comment understood it better than anyone on this thread.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      Then argue it. Why?
      - exogeny 5y ago
        I don't believe for a second that you're arguing in good faith, given the parade of goalpost-moving with attendant downvotes you rained into the other post on this topic. But he understood it, literally, because he ran a community that embodied it. To my knowledge, neither me nor you can say that, so again, literally speaking he has a lot more experience in understanding the dynamics of this culture. You feel like he's painting conservatives with an unfair brush. OK. Take that up with him.

dang 5y ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Igelau 5y ago
How is that a shallow dismissal? Pointing out a pattern is a shallow dismissal? A dismissal of what?
- akvadrako 5y ago
  I don't understand why this comment was singled out in particular, maybe it was edited. But I do think this kind of low value and lazy opionionating should be discouraged.
  - Igelau 5y ago
    > low value There's a pretty decent size thread of interesting discussion beneath it, demonstrating that it is of value. > I don't understand why this comment was singled out I don't moderate this site, but if I did I might be tempted to use a script to scrape for keywords and phrases that sound like violations of the guidelines and issue replies at a key press or automatically. And that's a good way to do it, except occasionally it causes... well... a shallow dismissal?
    - dang 5y ago
      We do not scrape for keywords or phrases that sound like violations of the guidelines. "Decent size" does not indicate value on HN. We want quality, not quantity. The responses that the root comment generated were mostly either generic (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995221) or outright flamewar crap.
- dang 5y ago
  It was just generic without adding any information or insight. Moreover the generic point was dismissive. Hence, shallow dismissal.

rvz 5y ago

Gab, Parler and 4chan are still up, just so you know. The forever mission to stop them is still incomplete. It is only going to get harder as they keep on being resilient and censorship resistant. Done by none other than the ones who love chasing so-called 'nazis' for a living.

exogeny 5y ago
I mean, sure, yeah, Stormfront is still up too. I don't think "remaining up" is the totality of their goals. I think what the writer of the post is getting at is that pursuing this direction leads to no outcomes better than a marginally sustained existence.

brodouevencode 5y ago

Agree to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995247 The shutdowns will happen so long as 1) there's not enough market share for the competing product (presumably from the network effects) and 2) there's market suppression from the current players. In other words: as long as there is a competing first-landing player and that player is actively working against any newcomers will there be a change? Probably not. To put this into a historical context: Standard Oil was notoriously gobbling up or destroying small players as a very successful attempt to own the market. This is no different.