4 ms·

There is no reason why a social media company needs to exist as such. It should be easy to make a personal html/css based website three decades after the innova

There is no reason why a social media company needs to exist as such. It should be easy to make a personal html/css based website three decades after the innovation that was the WWW. However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora) and everybody is too busy arguing about something on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook and watching the latest viral 30second tiktok vids to care. Everybody is in one pasture or another being shepherded by vampire corporate interests harvesting their time and emotions.

jasode 5y ago
>There is no reason why a social media company needs to exist as such. It should be easy to make a personal html/css based website You're misunderstanding the true sticky feature of Facebook for the billions of normal non-geek users. It's not html/css authoring; it's the real names database. In other words, the so-called "social graph" of known identities rather than something like HN/reddit which have mostly anonymous or pseudonymous ids. I tried to explain the "Rolodex of real names" aspect in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  this is very insightful. I realize I don't have socials because I want to present content, I have it to receive chronologically sorted updates on people I know in real life. Except now it's not chronological, and so I'm disinterested
  - sdoering 5y ago
    It shouldn't, but as network effect shows it works. It is easy. It provides some (felt) value for the people using it. A cigarette does the same. It provides value the moment it is lit and the first drag enters the lung. I quit smoking a little more than 9 years ago. There are still quite a few moments I miss this felt value. I quit Facebook about a year ago. I still keep the account but removed everything I ever posted there. Still as I recently started to do genealogy my SO showed me the groups she uses for that on Facebook (it is the only thing she does there). So probably I will start using FB again once I dig deeper into my ancestors as these groups are really helpful and provide value. If these groups were some other place I would gladly be there. Sadly they are not.
- carapace 5y ago
  That may well be true (and FWIW I agree with you) but that just kicks the can down the road. It just raises the question of why this incredibly valuable "Rolodex of real names" should be the owned property of a single private corporation? They are our names and relationships, after all.
- rvense 5y ago
  I grew up, to a large extent, on various message boards in the 00's, and I remember when many of us got blogs and it was great. But this was the major change with Facebook, and that's really what made it mainstream to put your thoughts and feelings on the internet. Suddenly you were the same self on the internet as off it.
squeaky-clean 5y ago
The inability to over customize your page with html/css and blast autoplay music are one of the reasons Facebook won out over MySpace. Personally my ideal "social network" would be personal RSS feeds for everyone, but that's never going to be the winning method. It needs to be something dead simple for a non-techie.
rvense 5y ago
> However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora) I don't mean to be obtuse, I hate Googlebook more than most, but... have you tried? Where I lived before I had a fixed public IPv4, and I put a box up with Caddy on it serving markdown to the world and people actually did find it and sent me e-mails about it. All I did was post links to small forums. Granted, it wasn't exactly mainstream content. But it worked.
beaconstudios 5y ago
Social media isn't about making a website - non technical people can already do that with services like squarespace and carrd. The point is to be able to communicate with other people in various ways over the Internet.
gambler 5y ago
Funny. I was literally recording a podcast about this very subject today and yesterday. No, it's not published anywhere at this point.

jasode 5y ago

>There is no reason why a social media company needs to exist as such. It should be easy to make a personal html/css based website You're misunderstanding the true sticky feature of Facebook for the billions of normal non-geek users. It's not html/css authoring; it's the real names database. In other words, the so-called "social graph" of known identities rather than something like HN/reddit which have mostly anonymous or pseudonymous ids. I tried to explain the "Rolodex of real names" aspect in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061

jvanderbot 5y ago
this is very insightful. I realize I don't have socials because I want to present content, I have it to receive chronologically sorted updates on people I know in real life. Except now it's not chronological, and so I'm disinterested
- sdoering 5y ago
  It shouldn't, but as network effect shows it works. It is easy. It provides some (felt) value for the people using it. A cigarette does the same. It provides value the moment it is lit and the first drag enters the lung. I quit smoking a little more than 9 years ago. There are still quite a few moments I miss this felt value. I quit Facebook about a year ago. I still keep the account but removed everything I ever posted there. Still as I recently started to do genealogy my SO showed me the groups she uses for that on Facebook (it is the only thing she does there). So probably I will start using FB again once I dig deeper into my ancestors as these groups are really helpful and provide value. If these groups were some other place I would gladly be there. Sadly they are not.
carapace 5y ago
That may well be true (and FWIW I agree with you) but that just kicks the can down the road. It just raises the question of why this incredibly valuable "Rolodex of real names" should be the owned property of a single private corporation? They are our names and relationships, after all.
rvense 5y ago
I grew up, to a large extent, on various message boards in the 00's, and I remember when many of us got blogs and it was great. But this was the major change with Facebook, and that's really what made it mainstream to put your thoughts and feelings on the internet. Suddenly you were the same self on the internet as off it.

squeaky-clean 5y ago

The inability to over customize your page with html/css and blast autoplay music are one of the reasons Facebook won out over MySpace. Personally my ideal "social network" would be personal RSS feeds for everyone, but that's never going to be the winning method. It needs to be something dead simple for a non-techie.

rvense 5y ago

> However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora) I don't mean to be obtuse, I hate Googlebook more than most, but... have you tried? Where I lived before I had a fixed public IPv4, and I put a box up with Caddy on it serving markdown to the world and people actually did find it and sent me e-mails about it. All I did was post links to small forums. Granted, it wasn't exactly mainstream content. But it worked.

beaconstudios 5y ago

Social media isn't about making a website - non technical people can already do that with services like squarespace and carrd. The point is to be able to communicate with other people in various ways over the Internet.

gambler 5y ago

Funny. I was literally recording a podcast about this very subject today and yesterday. No, it's not published anywhere at this point.