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It's kind of crazy to look back and see just how much worse we are today than some years ago with regards to this stuff. I remember an old social media named Or

It's kind of crazy to look back and see just how much worse we are today than some years ago with regards to this stuff. I remember an old social media named Orkut, had pretty much everything facebook had and more, also had a huge userbase in brazil and india(?) iirc, but just goot overtaken by facebook. Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks(I assume, could be wrong there when it comes to joining calls without being "friends" and such). Never used communicator but I assume it would fill the role just as well by your description. Not even going to mention forums getting gutted and being replaced with discord servers that nobody uses voice(the reason i'd assume one would prefer to use a discord server). Cmmunities that didn't want to go for a forum had several "closed community" website creators(that I cannot for the life of me remember the names) and that all got replaced by subreddits... Quite sad to see the internet continuously being shrunk down to the lowest common denominator, some federated efforts like the fediverse make me quite hopeful, a shame most of them mimick twitter.

mig39 4y ago
Even crazier when you realize Orkut was owned by Google!
- midoridensha 4y ago
  That was the problem. Orkut was successful, but that doesn't stop Google from shutting down services. Trusting a Google service to be around long-term is folly unless it's Maps or Gmail.
  - kareemsabri 4y ago
    I don't think Orkut was successful for Google, where success in measured in annual revenue in billions.
    - flakeoil 4y ago
      I guess that's what the parent comment meant. Google tries many new products (in-house developed or acquired). If it does not reach a user base of several 100 million users (or 10's of billions of revenue) after a few years then they will scrap it.
  - akira2501 4y ago
    IIRC the other major problem was that Orkut was invite-only for a very long time. That's partly was it was so popular in a few South American countries, it was very difficult to get yourself on the platform, and even if you did, it was difficult to use it to communicate with anyone locally. Google was not the giant then that it is now.
    - colordrops 4y ago
      Google has had more than one product that I've been excited to use but was invite only, and then only got the invite after interest had died both for the public and myself. Ones I can remember are Orkut, Wave, and Ingress.
      - pas 4y ago
        Inbox? or do you mean the game Ingress?
      - random42_ 4y ago
        GMail was also invite only IIRC.
        Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
        The difference is that GMail is useful even if none of your friends are on it. Making a social network like Google+ be invite-only when everybody was already on Facebook was an absolutely bone-headed move and I think was THE driving factor for its failure. There were so many memes about people finally getting an invite to Google+ and then discovering nobody was there. Without your friends on it, you're not going to make it part of your daily routine, and eventually just forget about it entirely. By the time it wasn't invite-only anymore, the hype was gone and Google+ had already been considered to be a joke.
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
      Orkut's biggest problem was that Google didn't want to devote any resources to moderation but its creator had enough political power to keep the lights on. It didn't take long for users to figure out they could do whatever they wanted. It quickly became a cesspool of racism, child porn, and other illegal activity, mostly by Brazilians, who bullied everyone else off the platform
  - f1shy 4y ago
    I am not so sure of those two either (at least free)... the search may stay.
- random314 4y ago
  But Orkut was in the wrong department. Hence had to be shutdown. The sheer stupidity of shutting down a 20% project that actually took off in a big way!
agumonkey 4y ago
It's interesting to understand why facebook got so much wind.
- Maursault 4y ago
  Facebook is vanity. It is really all about ego. People love to stroke their ego. It is hilarious to me how many will defend pride and how many somehow confuse pride with virtue, when the opposite of pride, humility, is the virtue. What made Facebook popular is the same thing that makes any vice popular, such as gambling or drinking, because pride is a vice, also known as an indulgence, and pride, ego, and vanity are definitely not virtues. Facebook (and, to similar extent, Twitter) has tricked its users into believing that vice and indulgence are virtuous, and excessive vice and excessive indulgence are most virtuous. But we all used to know that excessive vanity and excessive pride, or hubris, is counted among the seven deadly sins. Facebook is basically a mass-vehicle for sin, and sin, as a transgression of divine law, feels really great. And that is how Facebook (and Twitter) did it, by presenting opportunity to violate the First Commandment and make everyone worship themselves and think they're God, at least while they're logged-in.
  - kqr 4y ago
    Oh, that's not what got Facebook big. You can stroke your ego in emails or blogs or on forums. What made Facebook great was that it encouraged users to share personal information (including pictures and bio items) and then made it easy for everyone to anonymously take part of this information. You could look at pictures of your crush in cute outfits or co-workers in embarrassing situations. You could read about the layoff your ex' new partner had to endure. You could see where the cool kids had their coffee. All of this at any time of day, and nobody but you would know that you knew. It's the ultimate low-key stalking tool and it was designed this way from the start, because early on they understood that's what people want. I don't remember the exact quote but I do know one of the early decisions was that photos ought to be open by default and you shouldn't be able to tell who has looked at them -- in contrast to many other social networks at the time.
    - 4y ago
jerojero 4y ago
Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit. Although you post still stands, I think you're very wrong in thinking about the reasoning why people use one or another platform. Let's think about discord for a minute, why is everyone using it? And what are they using it for? I think the answers here are rather simple, people have a need for communication with peers; this communication usually takes many forms: text, voice, video, gifs, images. Discord is a platform that offers people a very simple and quick way of building communities capable of providing people will all of these forms of communication but really, now a days, every messenger application does the job. So the differentiating factor for discord is the ability to organise these communities better than any other platform (save for slack, which discord modelled itself after). Now, it's not perfect, it's impossible to build horizontal communities on discord but it does the job. So functionally, discord offers people seeking to build communities pretty much everything they could want. Now, it still has some problems: mainly that it's not very good for long-form or persistent messaging like a forum. And this is why you usually have discord communities with a reddit counterpart, a forum-like website and a real-time interaction community. This let discord built a very wide userbase, and once you have that then you really get to enjoy the magic sauce: network effects. To put it simply, people use discord because everyone else uses discord and everyone else uses discord because people use discord. As the internet grows it becomes increasingly difficult to break network effects even if you have an offering that's better. But even then, it's also extremely difficult to be novel given that these big companies can simply acquire you when they start seeing you as a threat (look at adobe buying figma). Companies are quicker than regulators at seeing potential market disruptions and threats, so in most cases they can stay ahead of the game. Imo, a lot of the failings of these companies come from underestimating the competition and then trying to play catch-up.
- rvense 4y ago
  > Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit. Technically, reddit and Discourse is more like forums, but a lot of things that would have been a forum 15 years ago are now Discord "servers".
  - ajkjk 4y ago
Thorrez 4y ago
>"closed community" website creators(that I cannot for the life of me remember the names) ning?
nl 4y ago
WTF is it with this weird "things were better in the old days" nostalgia? They really, really weren't! > Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks When it came out, Skype was amazing because it let you get video calls on your computer. The audio was flaky (I paid for a number for a work line and yeah - wasn't good!), the video broke up all the time, and it dropped out a lot. But we were new to video calls that worked at all and it seemed like a miracle!
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > WTF is it with this weird "things were better in the old days" nostalgia? They really, really weren't! A lot of things really, really were. Some weren't. Generally speaking, I do think that modern software tends to be worse in terms of usability, robustness, and resource usage. But it tends to be prettier and have more "features", so that's something.
  - nl 4y ago
    I've gone months without rebooting my MBP, and weeks without restarting Firefox. I don't remember the last time software crashed and I lost work. 15 years ago I'd reboot nightly because things were more stable. 20 years ago I debugged an issue in the JVM where it was deleting any file it touched (http://nicklothian.com/blog/2003/08/13/a-java-bug-worthy-of-your-vote/ http://nicklothian.com/blog/2003/08/13/a-java-bug-worthy-of-...). 25 years ago it was normal for a computer to crash multiple times a day and wasn't uncommon for files that had been saved to get corrupted by a crash. So yeah, very happy with modern software reliability.
- edejong 4y ago
  Totally not my experience. I had long, uninterrupted conversations with my (now) wife. Daily. During my studies I organized group meetings with dozens of participants without many problems. Skypes original decentralized network design was genius.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Same here. To me Skype should have been the last mover in this space. Everything just worked. I actually had an investment meeting with a Skype competitor who took us through the whole infrastructure of why Skype worked and what he was going to do. Now a few years later there's a zillion ways to do a video call, and Skype itself doesn't seem to be as good as it once was. I really wonder what on earth happened.

mig39 4y ago

Even crazier when you realize Orkut was owned by Google!

midoridensha 4y ago
That was the problem. Orkut was successful, but that doesn't stop Google from shutting down services. Trusting a Google service to be around long-term is folly unless it's Maps or Gmail.
- kareemsabri 4y ago
  I don't think Orkut was successful for Google, where success in measured in annual revenue in billions.
  - flakeoil 4y ago
    I guess that's what the parent comment meant. Google tries many new products (in-house developed or acquired). If it does not reach a user base of several 100 million users (or 10's of billions of revenue) after a few years then they will scrap it.
- akira2501 4y ago
  IIRC the other major problem was that Orkut was invite-only for a very long time. That's partly was it was so popular in a few South American countries, it was very difficult to get yourself on the platform, and even if you did, it was difficult to use it to communicate with anyone locally. Google was not the giant then that it is now.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Google has had more than one product that I've been excited to use but was invite only, and then only got the invite after interest had died both for the public and myself. Ones I can remember are Orkut, Wave, and Ingress.
    - pas 4y ago
      Inbox? or do you mean the game Ingress?
    - random42_ 4y ago
      GMail was also invite only IIRC.
      - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
        The difference is that GMail is useful even if none of your friends are on it. Making a social network like Google+ be invite-only when everybody was already on Facebook was an absolutely bone-headed move and I think was THE driving factor for its failure. There were so many memes about people finally getting an invite to Google+ and then discovering nobody was there. Without your friends on it, you're not going to make it part of your daily routine, and eventually just forget about it entirely. By the time it wasn't invite-only anymore, the hype was gone and Google+ had already been considered to be a joke.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    Orkut's biggest problem was that Google didn't want to devote any resources to moderation but its creator had enough political power to keep the lights on. It didn't take long for users to figure out they could do whatever they wanted. It quickly became a cesspool of racism, child porn, and other illegal activity, mostly by Brazilians, who bullied everyone else off the platform
- f1shy 4y ago
  I am not so sure of those two either (at least free)... the search may stay.
random314 4y ago
But Orkut was in the wrong department. Hence had to be shutdown. The sheer stupidity of shutting down a 20% project that actually took off in a big way!

agumonkey 4y ago

It's interesting to understand why facebook got so much wind.

Maursault 4y ago
Facebook is vanity. It is really all about ego. People love to stroke their ego. It is hilarious to me how many will defend pride and how many somehow confuse pride with virtue, when the opposite of pride, humility, is the virtue. What made Facebook popular is the same thing that makes any vice popular, such as gambling or drinking, because pride is a vice, also known as an indulgence, and pride, ego, and vanity are definitely not virtues. Facebook (and, to similar extent, Twitter) has tricked its users into believing that vice and indulgence are virtuous, and excessive vice and excessive indulgence are most virtuous. But we all used to know that excessive vanity and excessive pride, or hubris, is counted among the seven deadly sins. Facebook is basically a mass-vehicle for sin, and sin, as a transgression of divine law, feels really great. And that is how Facebook (and Twitter) did it, by presenting opportunity to violate the First Commandment and make everyone worship themselves and think they're God, at least while they're logged-in.
- kqr 4y ago
  Oh, that's not what got Facebook big. You can stroke your ego in emails or blogs or on forums. What made Facebook great was that it encouraged users to share personal information (including pictures and bio items) and then made it easy for everyone to anonymously take part of this information. You could look at pictures of your crush in cute outfits or co-workers in embarrassing situations. You could read about the layoff your ex' new partner had to endure. You could see where the cool kids had their coffee. All of this at any time of day, and nobody but you would know that you knew. It's the ultimate low-key stalking tool and it was designed this way from the start, because early on they understood that's what people want. I don't remember the exact quote but I do know one of the early decisions was that photos ought to be open by default and you shouldn't be able to tell who has looked at them -- in contrast to many other social networks at the time.
  - 4y ago

jerojero 4y ago

Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit. Although you post still stands, I think you're very wrong in thinking about the reasoning why people use one or another platform. Let's think about discord for a minute, why is everyone using it? And what are they using it for? I think the answers here are rather simple, people have a need for communication with peers; this communication usually takes many forms: text, voice, video, gifs, images. Discord is a platform that offers people a very simple and quick way of building communities capable of providing people will all of these forms of communication but really, now a days, every messenger application does the job. So the differentiating factor for discord is the ability to organise these communities better than any other platform (save for slack, which discord modelled itself after). Now, it's not perfect, it's impossible to build horizontal communities on discord but it does the job. So functionally, discord offers people seeking to build communities pretty much everything they could want. Now, it still has some problems: mainly that it's not very good for long-form or persistent messaging like a forum. And this is why you usually have discord communities with a reddit counterpart, a forum-like website and a real-time interaction community. This let discord built a very wide userbase, and once you have that then you really get to enjoy the magic sauce: network effects. To put it simply, people use discord because everyone else uses discord and everyone else uses discord because people use discord. As the internet grows it becomes increasingly difficult to break network effects even if you have an offering that's better. But even then, it's also extremely difficult to be novel given that these big companies can simply acquire you when they start seeing you as a threat (look at adobe buying figma). Companies are quicker than regulators at seeing potential market disruptions and threats, so in most cases they can stay ahead of the game. Imo, a lot of the failings of these companies come from underestimating the competition and then trying to play catch-up.

rvense 4y ago
> Forums weren't replaced by discord. Forums were replaced by Reddit. Technically, reddit and Discourse is more like forums, but a lot of things that would have been a forum 15 years ago are now Discord "servers".
- ajkjk 4y ago

Thorrez 4y ago

>"closed community" website creators(that I cannot for the life of me remember the names) ning?

nl 4y ago

WTF is it with this weird "things were better in the old days" nostalgia? They really, really weren't! > Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks When it came out, Skype was amazing because it let you get video calls on your computer. The audio was flaky (I paid for a number for a work line and yeah - wasn't good!), the video broke up all the time, and it dropped out a lot. But we were new to video calls that worked at all and it seemed like a miracle!

JohnFen 4y ago
> WTF is it with this weird "things were better in the old days" nostalgia? They really, really weren't! A lot of things really, really were. Some weren't. Generally speaking, I do think that modern software tends to be worse in terms of usability, robustness, and resource usage. But it tends to be prettier and have more "features", so that's something.
- nl 4y ago
  I've gone months without rebooting my MBP, and weeks without restarting Firefox. I don't remember the last time software crashed and I lost work. 15 years ago I'd reboot nightly because things were more stable. 20 years ago I debugged an issue in the JVM where it was deleting any file it touched (http://nicklothian.com/blog/2003/08/13/a-java-bug-worthy-of-your-vote/ http://nicklothian.com/blog/2003/08/13/a-java-bug-worthy-of-...). 25 years ago it was normal for a computer to crash multiple times a day and wasn't uncommon for files that had been saved to get corrupted by a crash. So yeah, very happy with modern software reliability.
edejong 4y ago
Totally not my experience. I had long, uninterrupted conversations with my (now) wife. Daily. During my studies I organized group meetings with dozens of participants without many problems. Skypes original decentralized network design was genius.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Same here. To me Skype should have been the last mover in this space. Everything just worked. I actually had an investment meeting with a Skype competitor who took us through the whole infrastructure of why Skype worked and what he was going to do. Now a few years later there's a zillion ways to do a video call, and Skype itself doesn't seem to be as good as it once was. I really wonder what on earth happened.