15 ms·

Stop trying to make social networks succeed

273 points by ZacnyLos 3y ago

derbOac 3y ago
I agree that the fates of social networks can develop and evolve intrinsically over time, and that there's maybe too much effort placed on advocating for their use with an immediate horizon as the goal. However, it's pretty clear that network effects matter in social networks and other forms of IT. In some sense this is precisely why some people feel burned at the moment, in part. In that regard, I don't really blame people for selling a social network or manipulating uptake, even if I don't like the network itself. It's how these things proceed in part. I also agree with the author that it's ok if a community is small. I've come to the opinion that sometimes having a smaller community can be a good thing. On the other hand, some platforms — the web, email — are pretty dominant, and we've lacked an open social network platform that solves the problem of putting content distribution directly in the hands of content producers. Part of what Mastodon, Bluesky, and Lemmy are trying to do is be that platform. I also think it's normal for developers to want to make as many users of their products happy. So to the extent they make lots of users happy, they're happier?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > we've lacked an open social network platform that solves the problem of putting content distribution directly in the hands of content producers I don't know about "open", but YouTube does this pretty well IMO. Search results aren't based on your profile, and it all seems pretty un-"managed", in a Twitter Files sense. I know it does do demonetization if people complain, but while it's not perfect, it's not unreasonable.
  - TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
    YouTube prioritizes "authoritative sources" when searching for certain topics, which means channels of legacy media outlets. Are we sure that your profile doesn't affect search results? I'd expect the opposite, considering it's Google and one of the things they're known for is changing search results based on your profile.
    - danjoredd 3y ago
      I think it does. I remember that some of my more common search results changed to include children's content after I went on a lazytown binge out of nostalgia
wunderland 3y ago
Incredibly reductionist argument. Success is impossible to define therefore all social networks are failures? There are clearly properties of a social network that users would like to see: ease of use, reach, quality of content and moderation while also allowing for openness and free speech. Working toward a future where something like this exists at scale is worthwhile and a workable-enough definition of success.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lapcat 3y ago
  > Incredibly reductionist argument. Success is impossible to define therefore all social networks are failures? Incredibly reductionist interpretation of the article.
- kelnos 3y ago
  That's not what the article is saying at all. The author is saying that any social network can be a success as long as it meets whatever metrics they care about. A tiny private forum that only serves two people is successful if those two people only care about talking with each other. Zuck will consider Threads a success if it gets to 1 billion users; that's still "only" an eighth of the world population, but that doesn't matter because the people running it get to define what success means to them.
Zambyte 3y ago
> Like every human endeavour, every social network is there for a limited duration and will be useful to a limited niche of people On a grand enough scale, sure. If we expand the scope of "social network" very slightly to consider things like the web and email, this fact becomes less clear. I am fairly young, and I suspect at least email will be used for the rest of my life. The difference between the modern landscape for new protocols and the landscape when the early internet protocols were made is that there was little struggle for power. People made things they wanted, and they took off if other people wanted the same thing. Now we have a bunch of competition for what is essentially the same experience. Does that mean there will never be one dominant protocol (or shudders, one application) for social media? I wouldn't bet on that claim. I think it will just take longer to reach somewhere that we land on as a common denominator. It seems to be that a protocol must be flexible enough to support the division of communities and migration of users, like the article says is human nature. Protocols can support that though - email is one such protocol that does. ActivityPub is another, seems to be the route that we are headed towards right now.
mikece 3y ago
If more emphasis was placed on social groups than networks I think it would be better all around. Hands-down the best online group of which I'm a member is a Mastodon group who are fans of the same podcast. There are similar groups of fans of this podcast on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere but their Mastodon server is orders of magnitude more active because we're there for the same reason.
gochi 3y ago
I agree with most of what was said except one tiny piece, I don't think we should give up on a universal social network. We have some of the pieces, but the puzzle still isn't solved and I like seeing people challenge that. The rest is definitely true though, all social networks are doomed for the same result: disappear into the void or become riddled with ads and so many additional services that the core network moves on. We'll keep repeating this cycle until the universal social network is actually achieved. I'm ok with that, having made several transitions already it's nothing new.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > I agree with most of what was said except one tiny piece, I don't think we should give up on a universal social network. That wasn't one tiny piece. The central thesis of the article was against the idea of a universal social network. Literally: "stop dreaming of a universal network."
  - gochi 3y ago
    A tiny piece can be integral. But I would disagree with the idea that it's the central thesis. The rest can operate without it just fine. I would even go as far as to quote you on your interpretation about the article being stop dreaming of a universal network: "Incredibly reductionist interpretation of the article."
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  We blame ads and bad decisions by the ownership, but also the users are responsible for turning each social network into its own eternal September and I don't know if human nature can be solved. Can't we enjoy the Twitter replacements being smaller communities and leave it at that, enjoy it while we can? Since it's a long understood pattern that a community will degrade as it gets larger, even without Musk type shittery.
- pxoe 3y ago
  internet is kind of The universal social network.
ChatGTP 3y ago
I think social media is a large feed stock for training AI and for selling advertisements. People will throw money endlessly at it for this reason.
evrimoztamur 3y ago
I am from a generation which grew up with phpBB forums of various kinds, and I loved the format. I still struggle with understanding why we can't remain within decentralised forums. Was it such a hassle to check like four URLs a day to see what was happening in the threads you participated in? Are centralised feeds such a core necessity to us?
- Arainach 3y ago
  All of social media suffers from a paradox: you need enough users contributing valuable content to make it worth showing up, but not so many that it degrades to memes. The key benefit to centralized social networks is solving this by having a huge user base but letting you curate the content you engage with (subscribing to users, joining subreddits, etc.). Small forums have a huge discovery problem. I loved forums, but with the modern legal landscape, liability for uploaded content, DMCA requests, etc. I would never want to run/moderate one - and that was true even before the current swarm of LLM-generated spam.
- jrm4 3y ago
  Not to us, but there are other folks out there. As I've implied elsewhere, I like little geek communities too, but the big easy networks can and have fulfilled an important purpose of essentially being a better world "town square" than, e.g. network news. They're incredibly far from perfect, but they've done a LOT of good, and are likely to continue to be necessary.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > they've done a LOT of good And a LOT of bad. Overall, do the costs of global social networks outweigh the benefits? I'm skeptical.
    - jrm4 3y ago
      As a Black person in America, I'm not in the slightest. Documented and spread proof that "we're not crazy, look at this stuff that actually does happen."
dgb23 3y ago
> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate. This is something I didn't really understand when I was younger. In every online community that has had some amount of hype surrounding it, there are prominent figures either hyping it up further or spreading doom and gloom when the metrics don't match their expectations. What I didn't get when I was younger was that this doesn't need to affect me at all. Unlike the people mentioned above, my financial or reputational interests don't align with the size of the online communities I participate in. For me it comes down to "do I enjoy participating". If you aren't an advertiser, streamer, content creator or anything of the sort, you don't really benefit from hype, growth or any of those things. So don't let these things affect your enjoyment of talking to people online or playing video games with them etc.
- izzydata 3y ago
  Even a lot of regular people these days are caught up in the addiction of getting the maximum amount of engagement out of everything they post online. They don't want to talk to people. They want thousands of strangers to praise them. So the bigger the network the more likely they can accomplish this. I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers doing it.
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    > I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers doing it. “Prank” channels come to my mind at this. Like the one that got shot semi-recently for messing with people, who then said it was “worth it”. It’s a shame how hard people can hyperfocus on fake Internet points and even let it hurt their actual relationships. I had a friend who was intensely upset over a comment suggesting a new camera angle because it “made their channel look bad” to be constructively criticized.
  - pier25 3y ago
    The human brain wasn't made for this. Seeing the effects of social interactions with millions of people (albeit virtual) does something weird to the brain.
Apreche 3y ago
Social networks wouldn't have any users if they didn't solve a problem and/or fulfill a need that people have. What problem is it that they solve? IMO they solve exactly two problems. 1) People with no technical skills or knowledge (can't setup their own web site) want to be able to publish text, photo, and video content to the public, to a community, and/or to their direct contacts. They do not want to have to use any technology other than their phone, and they refuse to pay for this with any amount of money. 2) Since there are texts, photos, and videos being published, people want to be able to gather all the published content that interests them in one place for convenient reading. As long as people have these needs, someone will make software that fulfills them, regardless of how they measure success. Because people can't be serving the content directly from their phone, we have no way to do this today without some form of cloud hosting. Non-technical people can't set that up themselves. And even if they could, it would cost them money. The only solution we have right now is for some organization to create and manage a centralized-ish platform. Even if that organization were a benevolent non-profit, it needs to pay the bills for hosting and labor. You could maybe ride on donations, but good luck with that. Therefore, the organization needs to somehow extract some value from the non-paying users. This inevitably leads to advertising, selling user data, locking users into a walled garden, and all the other mechanisms we have seen that harm the platform in order to get the resources to keep it alive. And this is the key to making a successful social network that will last. How can you meet those two needs, and pay the bandwidth and storage bills, without doing any of the things that make the platform suck? Nobody's figured it out yet!
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  The cost per user to maintain these kinds of platforms is extremely low. That's why advertising supported models work. So that means if you charged for a platform, you wouldn't need to charge each user very much on a monthly or yearly basis. Such a platform could still be one that require no technical skills or knowledge from the users, who just want to publish their stuff. Many people (especially tech people) have an almost psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services. But do we always have to cater to those people, who'd refuse to pay $10 per year for an ad-free social network? I even suspect that a paid social network would be of higher quality, since the payment is an effective barrier against bots and some low-quality users.
colesantiago 3y ago
This is like saying stop trying to make humans communicate with each other.
- lapcat 3y ago
  No, it's not. "Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one."
  - colesantiago 3y ago
    We know in this world that isn't possible anymore unless you're, you know, actually their friends. Again, today's social networks want to grow in users, so it is not up to the author to say that we should stop making social networks succeed.
    - feintruled 3y ago
      For me, he's saying you don't need to TRY to make them succeed - they will succeed or not on their own merits, and for their own niches.
    - lapcat 3y ago
      "We know in this world that isn't possible anymore unless you're, you know, actually their friends." "We" don't know any such thing.
      - colesantiago 3y ago
        3BN Instagram users disagree with you.
        lapcat 3y ago
        [flagged]
        colesantiago 3y ago
jrm4 3y ago
Couldn't disagree more. Big "winners" in this space can be dangerous, but they can also be an important tool/unfortunate necessity when it comes to national or global "news." Which is to say, yes, I want a good replacement for Twitter because social media more-or-less succeeded where "the Rodney King story" failed.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > I want a good replacement for Twitter because social media more-or-less succeeded where "the Rodney King story" failed. Could you please explain this? I know what the Rodney King story is, but I don't understand the relevance here.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    I read that as “the Rodney King story” being the story in the traditional news or later documentary format. Without the social media explosion, the situation might not have got the attention it needed meaning the story fizzled out (or, more cynically, the police would have been able to control the narrative long enough for the general public not to pay attention because something else was happened elsewhere to take over the news coverage).
    - lapcat 3y ago
      I don't understand this comment either, because the Rodney King beating was in 1991, long before "the social media explosion".
      - dspillett 3y ago
        To be honest, I was completely mixing up the timeline of police attrocities against minorities and other communities/individuals. I'm not sure if that says more about the number of those matters making the is a lot to remember, or about my own privilege of being so far removed from most of it that I don't need to keep track in any detail.
    - telotortium 3y ago
mattbuilds 3y ago
I think the VC world's obsession with growth has tainted how we (me included) view things, especially stuff like social media. There is a fixation with growing and doing it rapidly that I believe is harmful. I don't know when this switch flipped, but I've felt it gradually building up over time. Things can just be what they are, grow naturally and then die naturally. I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to achieve an unnatural growth is probably not good for both the quality of the product and the long term stability of it. I would love to see more niche things grow organically and fill a role for some people, at some time and not try to be everything for everyone. Because when that's the case, does anyone really enjoy it?
- djbusby 3y ago
  For me, I think the big mind-shift was the dot.com explosion/implosion. VC driven growth at all costs ("GaaC"), monetize later. That's when I first saw it. Prior to that what I remember was mostly building a small business. On one you grow and grow fast, needing multiple rounds, to exit. The other was build a business with one or two rounds, then have a product that generates profit. The GaaC method also means spreading the company into all kinds of things - maybe away from the core - which I think causes loss in the original value prop.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    It's funny because having lived through that, we all thought the implosion of .com companies that worked this way, during the .com crash, was a repudiation of this strategy. But it came back within 10 years, and stronger. I also remember clearly that at the beginning of things with Facebook there was a strong sense from the press of "how the hell will this thing ever make money?" and big questions like that around the IPO. Hell, there was that going on for Google around their IPO, too. There was a brief period from about 2001 to 2007 or 2008 or so when there was perhaps more responsibility to try to start on a more even revenue-earning foundation with sounder business plans. But that all blew up in the 2010s. It's possible this was all tied into the massive cuts in interest rates, and QE etc after 2008 that made debt really cheap.
- 3y ago
jakelazaroff 3y ago
This sentence made me chuckle: > But, to this day, there are more people in the world without an account on Facebook than people with one. So that's an upper bound of what, four billion people? I think basically anyone watching would consider that a success! When people are wondering which social network will "succeed", they're not watching the different apps duke it out like a sports tournament. They just want to find a space in which they can communicate with most of the people they care about.
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
Social media is over if you think trading Musk for Zuckerberg is progress. On a side note though, Meta just changed their whole narrative in one day after being dragged for the last year over the Metaverse. If I were an investor I'd be very bullish on Meta. What was considered a colossal failure in over hiring helped result in a chance to add a new growing platform.
- dahwolf 3y ago
  There's definitely a growing social media fatigue, a feeling of saturation or boredom. That feeling will only accelerate as social media further fractures. The increasingly attractive option is not to switch, instead to quit. The type of social media figures that are broadcasters will face a particularly challenging situation. I recently heard a Chrome Devrel person complain about it. They used to just post announcements on Twitter and take some feedback there as well. Now they have to go and try to reach this audience across Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Discord, Bluesky, Threads...a growing list. And there's no network effect where you get a mass following for free, you have to painstakingly build it up on each network independently.
dahwolf 3y ago
Unsure what the point of this article is. I've never seen any person or even VC company make the claim that they're on to the one and only 100% coverage network. I'm quite sure everybody is aware that social networks come and go and that at any point in time there will be multiple of them.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Stop trying. Stop trying to make anything better. Stop trying to create any kind of social space. Just read my blog. Subscribe to my newsletter. That's all you need.
- jfax 3y ago
  Better than what?
  - pixl97 3y ago
    #5 Hey stop talking and start buying things. Internet not supposed to make only some money. Internet supposed to make all money. It’s the rules. https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other... Better than #4 of the garbagetown list of social media trajectory.
ActualLupu 3y ago
My strongly held belief is still that Messenger apps and SMS are still the dominant social media apps and are the only ones worth investing in the success of. At the end of the day, no one can or wants to manage a gigantic social media presence outside of commercial applications. Most people are really only invested in social media so they can make better connections off of social media.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Stop trying. Many people are trying ... The problem with trying is that no one agrees.
the-printer 3y ago
> Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier. I appreciate the realist point of view in this paragraph and the two that precede it. I’d like to go a step further and propose that we should deemphasize the explicit desire to develop communities online for what feels like the sake of having an online community. Online communities should be derivatives of offline identities, roles, interests etc, more often than not. But as more people seem to find “themselves” in a digital landscape that isn’t inherently social as much as it is social under certain contexts, the lines are being blurred, or disregarded entirely. I used to be indifferent to federated networks, but I now understand the appeal of them when it comes down to being able to engage with predefined communities. There is a lot to be said about the number one issue that newcomers confront being “which instance do I join?”.
magic_hamster 3y ago
The author mixes services such as Whatsapp and telegram which are mostly messaging apps with "social network" features, and full blown social networks that revolve more around posts, followers and content. Meta launched a new platform today and got 10M people to sign up in the first 7 hours. I am lost for words. Not sure how anyone still wants anything to do with Meta. How can you possibly want more social platforms by Meta. Meta couldn't die fast enough in my opinion. And yet, millions of people signed up. I guess social networks can still succeed.
- duderific 3y ago
  I guess people want something similar to Twitter that is not Twitter, since Twitter has become a roaring dumpster fire. I've never much understood the appeal of Twitter, because the discussions devolve and it seems like the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. Also the UI makes it hard to follow threads; I much prefer a nested layout a la HN to whatever Twitter is.
  - magic_hamster 3y ago
    I am also not a regular Twitter user, but even if I were, under no circumstances will I join another platform by Meta. Haven't we learned the lesson by now?
- kelnos 3y ago
  First, understand that not everyone is like you. Many people are vastly different, and have attitudes and things they care about that do not match your preferences. Some people seem to be totally fine with the idea of a platform that sells data about them to third parties, and tries to track them all over the internet. Because they believe they get value out of the platform, but are unable or unwilling to pay for it with their own money. I'm not like these people, but I understand that they exist, and more or less understand why they want what they want.
CppPro 3y ago
[flagged]
vvoyer 3y ago
This is well written. It reminds me of a 10+ years old article on ploum.net, only in French but here's a translation: https://ploum-net.translate.goog/ploum-en-j2ee/?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fr&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://ploum-net.translate.goog/ploum-en-j2ee/?_x_tr_sl=fr&...
douglee650 3y ago
This piece reads like an elaborate retelling of the Tower of Babel
s17n 3y ago
It’s true that there are a couple different models of a social networking application - Facebook, Twitter, Wechat, and Telegram all of meaningfully distinctions. But basically, there’s a lot more similarity than difference, and probably no good reason for more than a handful of these things to exist. The idea of a custom network for your community is silly - your community probably doesn’t have any unique needs.
rcarr 3y ago
I really want someone to make BoringBook - it's free until a billion people have signed up and then after that it costs $1 a year. It gives you a page you can post to and customise like myspace, an encrypted messaging client, local group pages and business pages. There are no ads, other than whatever businesses post on their pages. There are three feeds: your immediate network (which is the default), your local network (things from other people and businesses in your town) and the global feed. All of the feeds are capped at 100 posts to prevent infinite scrolling with the feeds refreshed every hour. Nothing else. It will never make more than 8 billion dollars a year (which is what would happen if everyone on the planet signed up). BoringBook - the social media utility company.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Eh, first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton. So, to actually pay for that you're going to either ask for VC money or show ads. But then it turns out that money you got from the above will be far and beyond more than you'll ever earn by having people pay for the service. Your VCs and ad networks will want more engagement so you'll start down the dark path of increasing that all while showering yourself in money and not giving a single shit about the average person.
  - rcarr 3y ago
    > first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton I highly doubt that the actual essential infrastructure required to run it is going to cost more than 8 billion dollars/year. Twitter costs about $5 billion a year. Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year, enough to cover the costs, offer some dividend, and put some money aside for a rainy day. We're not fucking about with R&D because we're BoringBook, we're making a boring product that doesn't need to do anything fancy. It's a utility company. Pension funds can invest in it safe in the knowledge that they will get a small but reliable dividend year after a year. The silly VC money can go towards innovative tech like AR or growing meat in petridishes or medical research or something. We don't need it fucking around and messing with the social structure of society anymore.
jchw 3y ago
> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate. Trying to get social media users out of "big number go up" mindset is really, really hard. Twitter has something like 450 million active users, and a lot of them are miserable with it, especially the heavier users. But if you try to suggest maybe just not using it, it seems like it is a "foregone conclusion" that it is the only way to go, as if there's no possible way to just do something else. Why go somewhere where you can get 100 meaningless "like" button clicks when you can go on twitter and get tens of thousands of meaningless "like" button clicks? The worse part is that this mindset is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because users that think this way don't think it's worth bothering with anything that has less than a hundred million users. Naturally, this helps ensure that most of the growth will continue to go to just a handful of highly popular networks, since they're the only ones worth bothering with. While counts of users are meaningless, there are some knock-on effects to having most people believe alternatives are worthless. For people who produce art or videos or other forms of content, it means that you pretty much have to use the mainstream platforms, because a large amount of people are unwilling to use anything else even to follow people they're interested in, which also depresses your ability to grow and succeed. While monetary success and internet fame should absolutely never be the goal of social media or the internet, the fact remains that if you are an artist on the Internet, you are not going to get as many commissions or as much business opportunity if you're not on huge platforms like Twitter, and that means that the financial sustainability of a lot of internet creative works depends on a few tech companies. But that's kind of the thing. That's basically WHY federated networks are good and we should want them to succeed. Indeed, it is true that there is no meaningful success metric for a social network. However, the "success" of the Fediverse is a bit different: I think it "succeeds" when it becomes viable to publish on ActivityPub as a complete alternative to needing to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But of course, that's not a constant value. It's not some constant amount of users. It depends on many factors. However, it will be pretty obvious when you see it, because it will come in the form of seeing people do healthy business over just ActivityPub. I empathize if this sounds arbitrary or pointless, but I think a lot of people don't grasp the impact of this. For all of its flaws, this would effectively mean that you could go back to running your own damn sites, because they can participate in ActivityPub just the same as anyone else. ActivityPub could fill the void left by the downturn in popularity of RSS, and then some.
charles_f 3y ago
> Some communities will find a new home on Mastodon or on Lemmy. Some will go elsewhere I wish protocols like mastodon or nostr would allow to federate all of these. I am not part of any "social network community" that I know of (apart from maybe HN) but I still occasionally use twitter, mainly as a substitute for blogs of the people I'd like to hear from, and get some comedy. They are from diverse communities and I certainly won't join everything and check everything.
sentientmachin3 3y ago
I would like a more strict version of this article, "Stop trying to make social networks".
paxys 3y ago
Not everyone is looking for a small self-hosted space for their friends and family and local community. Heck why do I even need an online social network for that when I can just go out and talk to them? The vast majority of users on networks like Twitter are looking to connect with a wider world. And "success" in those terms simply means having a critical mass to make such a network sustainable and interesting (and maybe profitable). Zuck himself has stated multiple times since yesterday that his idea of success for Threads is 1 billion users. That is a lot fewer than 8 billion, but it is success nonetheless.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  Mental illness. A big chunk of people on Twitter are not well up top. Normal people go to the bar to watch baseball or play boardgames or something. It's not normal to be a Krassenstein or a BrooklynDadDefiant or whatever - those people are nuts.
  - PM_me_your_math 3y ago
    It is important to point out that people like the krassenstein brothers or brooklynDadDefiant are not real people in the same sense as any Joe off the street is with an opinion. They are front-men for SuperPACs and they get paid by orgs like ActBlue. None of their ideas are ever their own, and they closely follow the daily order of battle from the DNC. Their engagement is also less-than-organic. Krassenstein were originally banned for paying for engagement from east asia and using custom software and fake accounts to artificially inflate their reach. The point is never to influence anyone. Their game is manufactured consent.
happytiger 3y ago
It’s my belief that the continued attempt to dominate the social networking space is related to predicted upcoming societal changes. They are the hot glue underneath a AML/KYC-based identity verification systems at scale and the sticky requirement for anyone looking to build such a system at scale. There is no better verification than social context for identity, and at core these are giant graph databases that have personal histories which can be leveraged for social credit and reputation applications. Watching these oligarchs jockey to try to concentrate people into social platforms is clearly more than a casual priority, so that’s why I suspect multiple motives that exceed the intrinsic social value of the platforms. It’s been my learning that the really massive companies in Silicon Valley a often have a back door leverage-style data platform to try to build a monopolistic position at some future inflection point in addition to their “front and center” business. I further suspect is a land grab to try to build the “WeChat of the West,” which explains quite clearly the relatively sky-high Twitter purchase (at least vs revenues) price as simply attaching a financial valuation to a portion of the initial userbase more than makes up for the purchase price. People are very focused on the front side applications (the social network hook) but the true value of these businesses is in building the next generations of FICO. When I read comments like, “Our communities are worth a lot more than the underlying tool used at some point in time.”, and “We are selling them, we are transforming them into a simple commercial asset for the makers of the tool we are using, the tool which exploits us.” I do wonder if people think as I do that it’s far more extensive than simple social networking companies. The approach to global finance is incredibly clear: social credit is the new core and communities are the oil of social credit. In the end it’s all about financial inclusion, as is laid out in this WEF article that explains just why social credit applications are so important to financial inclusion and global growth: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/this-new-approach-to-credit-scoring-is-accelerating-financial-inclusion/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/this-new-approach-to-... So, consider that niche social networks do not serve this purpose very well, and so there is little incentive to “build small” at this stage. I’d love to see more social network applications that are focused on quality connections myself, and for a while that was Reddit. But Reddit’a value was really just the aggregation of all the independent communities that used to exist in forums and similar into one website.
- mypastself 3y ago
mrweasel 3y ago
At least stop putting social networks into products where they don't belong... Looking at you Github.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
callamdelaney 3y ago
Demise of twitter is.. not matching with my experience.
lost_tourist 3y ago
I stopped reading after he declared reddit and twitter dead. That's ludicrous. They may have taken some body blows lately, but dead? Okay I guess.
somsak2 3y ago
> The lesson here is simple: you are living in a small niche. We all do. Your experience is not representative of anything but your own. hmm, really disagree here. if you look at history the consolidation of "networks" is insane. we used to be way more fragmented, now if you pick the top 10 social networks worldwide you probably cover 90%+ of the internet connected population. hell, Facebook alone has 40% MAUs of all living humans! a few hundred years ago what eg newspapers had that kind of reach? nothing even remotely in the same league.
kafkaesque 3y ago
> Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier. This resonates with me. The beauty of the Web was to allow you to find your niche anywhere in the world from your own place of living. But that concept has been contaminated and taken over by your typical big corporation. It is now diluted by hostile ads, psychological warfare, and manipulation, all while, on the surface, pitching you the idea that you can "cater" your experience to whatever you like. The Web, or any community that is online or offline, should incite togetherness through a common good, whether it's artistic in nature or for the betterment of a community. Before the Web or BBS, this was done in forms of artist communities and forums in person. Seeking to return to this format, but with the aide of the Web is probably something I would prefer, but highly unlikely because younger generations seem to only live in their phones and in a Web reality.

273 points by ZacnyLos 3y ago

I agree that the fates of social networks can develop and evolve intrinsically over time, and that there's maybe too much effort placed on advocating for their use with an immediate horizon as the goal. However, it's pretty clear that network effects matter in social networks and other forms of IT. In some sense this is precisely why some people feel burned at the moment, in part. In that regard, I don't really blame people for selling a social network or manipulating uptake, even if I don't like the network itself. It's how these things proceed in part. I also agree with the author that it's ok if a community is small. I've come to the opinion that sometimes having a smaller community can be a good thing. On the other hand, some platforms — the web, email — are pretty dominant, and we've lacked an open social network platform that solves the problem of putting content distribution directly in the hands of content producers. Part of what Mastodon, Bluesky, and Lemmy are trying to do is be that platform. I also think it's normal for developers to want to make as many users of their products happy. So to the extent they make lots of users happy, they're happier?

robertlagrant 3y ago
> we've lacked an open social network platform that solves the problem of putting content distribution directly in the hands of content producers I don't know about "open", but YouTube does this pretty well IMO. Search results aren't based on your profile, and it all seems pretty un-"managed", in a Twitter Files sense. I know it does do demonetization if people complain, but while it's not perfect, it's not unreasonable.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
  YouTube prioritizes "authoritative sources" when searching for certain topics, which means channels of legacy media outlets. Are we sure that your profile doesn't affect search results? I'd expect the opposite, considering it's Google and one of the things they're known for is changing search results based on your profile.
  - danjoredd 3y ago
    I think it does. I remember that some of my more common search results changed to include children's content after I went on a lazytown binge out of nostalgia

wunderland 3y ago

Incredibly reductionist argument. Success is impossible to define therefore all social networks are failures? There are clearly properties of a social network that users would like to see: ease of use, reach, quality of content and moderation while also allowing for openness and free speech. Working toward a future where something like this exists at scale is worthwhile and a workable-enough definition of success.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lapcat 3y ago
> Incredibly reductionist argument. Success is impossible to define therefore all social networks are failures? Incredibly reductionist interpretation of the article.
kelnos 3y ago
That's not what the article is saying at all. The author is saying that any social network can be a success as long as it meets whatever metrics they care about. A tiny private forum that only serves two people is successful if those two people only care about talking with each other. Zuck will consider Threads a success if it gets to 1 billion users; that's still "only" an eighth of the world population, but that doesn't matter because the people running it get to define what success means to them.

Zambyte 3y ago

> Like every human endeavour, every social network is there for a limited duration and will be useful to a limited niche of people On a grand enough scale, sure. If we expand the scope of "social network" very slightly to consider things like the web and email, this fact becomes less clear. I am fairly young, and I suspect at least email will be used for the rest of my life. The difference between the modern landscape for new protocols and the landscape when the early internet protocols were made is that there was little struggle for power. People made things they wanted, and they took off if other people wanted the same thing. Now we have a bunch of competition for what is essentially the same experience. Does that mean there will never be one dominant protocol (or shudders, one application) for social media? I wouldn't bet on that claim. I think it will just take longer to reach somewhere that we land on as a common denominator. It seems to be that a protocol must be flexible enough to support the division of communities and migration of users, like the article says is human nature. Protocols can support that though - email is one such protocol that does. ActivityPub is another, seems to be the route that we are headed towards right now.

mikece 3y ago

If more emphasis was placed on social groups than networks I think it would be better all around. Hands-down the best online group of which I'm a member is a Mastodon group who are fans of the same podcast. There are similar groups of fans of this podcast on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere but their Mastodon server is orders of magnitude more active because we're there for the same reason.

gochi 3y ago

I agree with most of what was said except one tiny piece, I don't think we should give up on a universal social network. We have some of the pieces, but the puzzle still isn't solved and I like seeing people challenge that. The rest is definitely true though, all social networks are doomed for the same result: disappear into the void or become riddled with ads and so many additional services that the core network moves on. We'll keep repeating this cycle until the universal social network is actually achieved. I'm ok with that, having made several transitions already it's nothing new.

lapcat 3y ago
> I agree with most of what was said except one tiny piece, I don't think we should give up on a universal social network. That wasn't one tiny piece. The central thesis of the article was against the idea of a universal social network. Literally: "stop dreaming of a universal network."
- gochi 3y ago
  A tiny piece can be integral. But I would disagree with the idea that it's the central thesis. The rest can operate without it just fine. I would even go as far as to quote you on your interpretation about the article being stop dreaming of a universal network: "Incredibly reductionist interpretation of the article."
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
We blame ads and bad decisions by the ownership, but also the users are responsible for turning each social network into its own eternal September and I don't know if human nature can be solved. Can't we enjoy the Twitter replacements being smaller communities and leave it at that, enjoy it while we can? Since it's a long understood pattern that a community will degrade as it gets larger, even without Musk type shittery.
pxoe 3y ago
internet is kind of The universal social network.

ChatGTP 3y ago

I think social media is a large feed stock for training AI and for selling advertisements. People will throw money endlessly at it for this reason.

evrimoztamur 3y ago

I am from a generation which grew up with phpBB forums of various kinds, and I loved the format. I still struggle with understanding why we can't remain within decentralised forums. Was it such a hassle to check like four URLs a day to see what was happening in the threads you participated in? Are centralised feeds such a core necessity to us?

Arainach 3y ago
All of social media suffers from a paradox: you need enough users contributing valuable content to make it worth showing up, but not so many that it degrades to memes. The key benefit to centralized social networks is solving this by having a huge user base but letting you curate the content you engage with (subscribing to users, joining subreddits, etc.). Small forums have a huge discovery problem. I loved forums, but with the modern legal landscape, liability for uploaded content, DMCA requests, etc. I would never want to run/moderate one - and that was true even before the current swarm of LLM-generated spam.
jrm4 3y ago
Not to us, but there are other folks out there. As I've implied elsewhere, I like little geek communities too, but the big easy networks can and have fulfilled an important purpose of essentially being a better world "town square" than, e.g. network news. They're incredibly far from perfect, but they've done a LOT of good, and are likely to continue to be necessary.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > they've done a LOT of good And a LOT of bad. Overall, do the costs of global social networks outweigh the benefits? I'm skeptical.
  - jrm4 3y ago
    As a Black person in America, I'm not in the slightest. Documented and spread proof that "we're not crazy, look at this stuff that actually does happen."

dgb23 3y ago

> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate. This is something I didn't really understand when I was younger. In every online community that has had some amount of hype surrounding it, there are prominent figures either hyping it up further or spreading doom and gloom when the metrics don't match their expectations. What I didn't get when I was younger was that this doesn't need to affect me at all. Unlike the people mentioned above, my financial or reputational interests don't align with the size of the online communities I participate in. For me it comes down to "do I enjoy participating". If you aren't an advertiser, streamer, content creator or anything of the sort, you don't really benefit from hype, growth or any of those things. So don't let these things affect your enjoyment of talking to people online or playing video games with them etc.

izzydata 3y ago
Even a lot of regular people these days are caught up in the addiction of getting the maximum amount of engagement out of everything they post online. They don't want to talk to people. They want thousands of strangers to praise them. So the bigger the network the more likely they can accomplish this. I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers doing it.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  > I'd wager for some individuals something might not even be worth doing if they can't be seen by thousands of strangers doing it. “Prank” channels come to my mind at this. Like the one that got shot semi-recently for messing with people, who then said it was “worth it”. It’s a shame how hard people can hyperfocus on fake Internet points and even let it hurt their actual relationships. I had a friend who was intensely upset over a comment suggesting a new camera angle because it “made their channel look bad” to be constructively criticized.
- pier25 3y ago
  The human brain wasn't made for this. Seeing the effects of social interactions with millions of people (albeit virtual) does something weird to the brain.

Apreche 3y ago

Social networks wouldn't have any users if they didn't solve a problem and/or fulfill a need that people have. What problem is it that they solve? IMO they solve exactly two problems. 1) People with no technical skills or knowledge (can't setup their own web site) want to be able to publish text, photo, and video content to the public, to a community, and/or to their direct contacts. They do not want to have to use any technology other than their phone, and they refuse to pay for this with any amount of money. 2) Since there are texts, photos, and videos being published, people want to be able to gather all the published content that interests them in one place for convenient reading. As long as people have these needs, someone will make software that fulfills them, regardless of how they measure success. Because people can't be serving the content directly from their phone, we have no way to do this today without some form of cloud hosting. Non-technical people can't set that up themselves. And even if they could, it would cost them money. The only solution we have right now is for some organization to create and manage a centralized-ish platform. Even if that organization were a benevolent non-profit, it needs to pay the bills for hosting and labor. You could maybe ride on donations, but good luck with that. Therefore, the organization needs to somehow extract some value from the non-paying users. This inevitably leads to advertising, selling user data, locking users into a walled garden, and all the other mechanisms we have seen that harm the platform in order to get the resources to keep it alive. And this is the key to making a successful social network that will last. How can you meet those two needs, and pay the bandwidth and storage bills, without doing any of the things that make the platform suck? Nobody's figured it out yet!

carlosjobim 3y ago
The cost per user to maintain these kinds of platforms is extremely low. That's why advertising supported models work. So that means if you charged for a platform, you wouldn't need to charge each user very much on a monthly or yearly basis. Such a platform could still be one that require no technical skills or knowledge from the users, who just want to publish their stuff. Many people (especially tech people) have an almost psychotic adversity against any kind of paid online services. But do we always have to cater to those people, who'd refuse to pay $10 per year for an ad-free social network? I even suspect that a paid social network would be of higher quality, since the payment is an effective barrier against bots and some low-quality users.

colesantiago 3y ago

This is like saying stop trying to make humans communicate with each other.

lapcat 3y ago
No, it's not. "Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one."
- colesantiago 3y ago
  We know in this world that isn't possible anymore unless you're, you know, actually their friends. Again, today's social networks want to grow in users, so it is not up to the author to say that we should stop making social networks succeed.
  - feintruled 3y ago
    For me, he's saying you don't need to TRY to make them succeed - they will succeed or not on their own merits, and for their own niches.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    "We know in this world that isn't possible anymore unless you're, you know, actually their friends." "We" don't know any such thing.
    - colesantiago 3y ago
      3BN Instagram users disagree with you.
      - lapcat 3y ago
        [flagged]
        colesantiago 3y ago

jrm4 3y ago

Couldn't disagree more. Big "winners" in this space can be dangerous, but they can also be an important tool/unfortunate necessity when it comes to national or global "news." Which is to say, yes, I want a good replacement for Twitter because social media more-or-less succeeded where "the Rodney King story" failed.

lapcat 3y ago
> I want a good replacement for Twitter because social media more-or-less succeeded where "the Rodney King story" failed. Could you please explain this? I know what the Rodney King story is, but I don't understand the relevance here.
- dspillett 3y ago
  I read that as “the Rodney King story” being the story in the traditional news or later documentary format. Without the social media explosion, the situation might not have got the attention it needed meaning the story fizzled out (or, more cynically, the police would have been able to control the narrative long enough for the general public not to pay attention because something else was happened elsewhere to take over the news coverage).
  - lapcat 3y ago
    I don't understand this comment either, because the Rodney King beating was in 1991, long before "the social media explosion".
    - dspillett 3y ago
      To be honest, I was completely mixing up the timeline of police attrocities against minorities and other communities/individuals. I'm not sure if that says more about the number of those matters making the is a lot to remember, or about my own privilege of being so far removed from most of it that I don't need to keep track in any detail.
  - telotortium 3y ago

mattbuilds 3y ago

I think the VC world's obsession with growth has tainted how we (me included) view things, especially stuff like social media. There is a fixation with growing and doing it rapidly that I believe is harmful. I don't know when this switch flipped, but I've felt it gradually building up over time. Things can just be what they are, grow naturally and then die naturally. I suspect that injecting cash and attempting to achieve an unnatural growth is probably not good for both the quality of the product and the long term stability of it. I would love to see more niche things grow organically and fill a role for some people, at some time and not try to be everything for everyone. Because when that's the case, does anyone really enjoy it?

djbusby 3y ago
For me, I think the big mind-shift was the dot.com explosion/implosion. VC driven growth at all costs ("GaaC"), monetize later. That's when I first saw it. Prior to that what I remember was mostly building a small business. On one you grow and grow fast, needing multiple rounds, to exit. The other was build a business with one or two rounds, then have a product that generates profit. The GaaC method also means spreading the company into all kinds of things - maybe away from the core - which I think causes loss in the original value prop.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  It's funny because having lived through that, we all thought the implosion of .com companies that worked this way, during the .com crash, was a repudiation of this strategy. But it came back within 10 years, and stronger. I also remember clearly that at the beginning of things with Facebook there was a strong sense from the press of "how the hell will this thing ever make money?" and big questions like that around the IPO. Hell, there was that going on for Google around their IPO, too. There was a brief period from about 2001 to 2007 or 2008 or so when there was perhaps more responsibility to try to start on a more even revenue-earning foundation with sounder business plans. But that all blew up in the 2010s. It's possible this was all tied into the massive cuts in interest rates, and QE etc after 2008 that made debt really cheap.
3y ago

jakelazaroff 3y ago

This sentence made me chuckle: > But, to this day, there are more people in the world without an account on Facebook than people with one. So that's an upper bound of what, four billion people? I think basically anyone watching would consider that a success! When people are wondering which social network will "succeed", they're not watching the different apps duke it out like a sports tournament. They just want to find a space in which they can communicate with most of the people they care about.

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

Social media is over if you think trading Musk for Zuckerberg is progress. On a side note though, Meta just changed their whole narrative in one day after being dragged for the last year over the Metaverse. If I were an investor I'd be very bullish on Meta. What was considered a colossal failure in over hiring helped result in a chance to add a new growing platform.

dahwolf 3y ago
There's definitely a growing social media fatigue, a feeling of saturation or boredom. That feeling will only accelerate as social media further fractures. The increasingly attractive option is not to switch, instead to quit. The type of social media figures that are broadcasters will face a particularly challenging situation. I recently heard a Chrome Devrel person complain about it. They used to just post announcements on Twitter and take some feedback there as well. Now they have to go and try to reach this audience across Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Discord, Bluesky, Threads...a growing list. And there's no network effect where you get a mass following for free, you have to painstakingly build it up on each network independently.

dahwolf 3y ago

Unsure what the point of this article is. I've never seen any person or even VC company make the claim that they're on to the one and only 100% coverage network. I'm quite sure everybody is aware that social networks come and go and that at any point in time there will be multiple of them.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

Stop trying. Stop trying to make anything better. Stop trying to create any kind of social space. Just read my blog. Subscribe to my newsletter. That's all you need.

jfax 3y ago
Better than what?
- pixl97 3y ago
  #5 Hey stop talking and start buying things. Internet not supposed to make only some money. Internet supposed to make all money. It’s the rules. https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other... Better than #4 of the garbagetown list of social media trajectory.

ActualLupu 3y ago

My strongly held belief is still that Messenger apps and SMS are still the dominant social media apps and are the only ones worth investing in the success of. At the end of the day, no one can or wants to manage a gigantic social media presence outside of commercial applications. Most people are really only invested in social media so they can make better connections off of social media.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

Stop trying. Many people are trying ... The problem with trying is that no one agrees.

the-printer 3y ago

> Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier. I appreciate the realist point of view in this paragraph and the two that precede it. I’d like to go a step further and propose that we should deemphasize the explicit desire to develop communities online for what feels like the sake of having an online community. Online communities should be derivatives of offline identities, roles, interests etc, more often than not. But as more people seem to find “themselves” in a digital landscape that isn’t inherently social as much as it is social under certain contexts, the lines are being blurred, or disregarded entirely. I used to be indifferent to federated networks, but I now understand the appeal of them when it comes down to being able to engage with predefined communities. There is a lot to be said about the number one issue that newcomers confront being “which instance do I join?”.

magic_hamster 3y ago

The author mixes services such as Whatsapp and telegram which are mostly messaging apps with "social network" features, and full blown social networks that revolve more around posts, followers and content. Meta launched a new platform today and got 10M people to sign up in the first 7 hours. I am lost for words. Not sure how anyone still wants anything to do with Meta. How can you possibly want more social platforms by Meta. Meta couldn't die fast enough in my opinion. And yet, millions of people signed up. I guess social networks can still succeed.

duderific 3y ago
I guess people want something similar to Twitter that is not Twitter, since Twitter has become a roaring dumpster fire. I've never much understood the appeal of Twitter, because the discussions devolve and it seems like the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. Also the UI makes it hard to follow threads; I much prefer a nested layout a la HN to whatever Twitter is.
- magic_hamster 3y ago
  I am also not a regular Twitter user, but even if I were, under no circumstances will I join another platform by Meta. Haven't we learned the lesson by now?
kelnos 3y ago
First, understand that not everyone is like you. Many people are vastly different, and have attitudes and things they care about that do not match your preferences. Some people seem to be totally fine with the idea of a platform that sells data about them to third parties, and tries to track them all over the internet. Because they believe they get value out of the platform, but are unable or unwilling to pay for it with their own money. I'm not like these people, but I understand that they exist, and more or less understand why they want what they want.

CppPro 3y ago

[flagged]

vvoyer 3y ago

This is well written. It reminds me of a 10+ years old article on ploum.net, only in French but here's a translation: https://ploum-net.translate.goog/ploum-en-j2ee/?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fr&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://ploum-net.translate.goog/ploum-en-j2ee/?_x_tr_sl=fr&...

douglee650 3y ago

This piece reads like an elaborate retelling of the Tower of Babel

s17n 3y ago

It’s true that there are a couple different models of a social networking application - Facebook, Twitter, Wechat, and Telegram all of meaningfully distinctions. But basically, there’s a lot more similarity than difference, and probably no good reason for more than a handful of these things to exist. The idea of a custom network for your community is silly - your community probably doesn’t have any unique needs.

rcarr 3y ago

I really want someone to make BoringBook - it's free until a billion people have signed up and then after that it costs $1 a year. It gives you a page you can post to and customise like myspace, an encrypted messaging client, local group pages and business pages. There are no ads, other than whatever businesses post on their pages. There are three feeds: your immediate network (which is the default), your local network (things from other people and businesses in your town) and the global feed. All of the feeds are capped at 100 posts to prevent infinite scrolling with the feeds refreshed every hour. Nothing else. It will never make more than 8 billion dollars a year (which is what would happen if everyone on the planet signed up). BoringBook - the social media utility company.

pixl97 3y ago
Eh, first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton. So, to actually pay for that you're going to either ask for VC money or show ads. But then it turns out that money you got from the above will be far and beyond more than you'll ever earn by having people pay for the service. Your VCs and ad networks will want more engagement so you'll start down the dark path of increasing that all while showering yourself in money and not giving a single shit about the average person.
- rcarr 3y ago
  > first the infrastructure to run a billion (real) people is going to cost you an epic fuckton I highly doubt that the actual essential infrastructure required to run it is going to cost more than 8 billion dollars/year. Twitter costs about $5 billion a year. Let's charge $2/year to be on the safe side. We've now raking in $16 billion a year, enough to cover the costs, offer some dividend, and put some money aside for a rainy day. We're not fucking about with R&D because we're BoringBook, we're making a boring product that doesn't need to do anything fancy. It's a utility company. Pension funds can invest in it safe in the knowledge that they will get a small but reliable dividend year after a year. The silly VC money can go towards innovative tech like AR or growing meat in petridishes or medical research or something. We don't need it fucking around and messing with the social structure of society anymore.

jchw 3y ago

> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate. Trying to get social media users out of "big number go up" mindset is really, really hard. Twitter has something like 450 million active users, and a lot of them are miserable with it, especially the heavier users. But if you try to suggest maybe just not using it, it seems like it is a "foregone conclusion" that it is the only way to go, as if there's no possible way to just do something else. Why go somewhere where you can get 100 meaningless "like" button clicks when you can go on twitter and get tens of thousands of meaningless "like" button clicks? The worse part is that this mindset is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because users that think this way don't think it's worth bothering with anything that has less than a hundred million users. Naturally, this helps ensure that most of the growth will continue to go to just a handful of highly popular networks, since they're the only ones worth bothering with. While counts of users are meaningless, there are some knock-on effects to having most people believe alternatives are worthless. For people who produce art or videos or other forms of content, it means that you pretty much have to use the mainstream platforms, because a large amount of people are unwilling to use anything else even to follow people they're interested in, which also depresses your ability to grow and succeed. While monetary success and internet fame should absolutely never be the goal of social media or the internet, the fact remains that if you are an artist on the Internet, you are not going to get as many commissions or as much business opportunity if you're not on huge platforms like Twitter, and that means that the financial sustainability of a lot of internet creative works depends on a few tech companies. But that's kind of the thing. That's basically WHY federated networks are good and we should want them to succeed. Indeed, it is true that there is no meaningful success metric for a social network. However, the "success" of the Fediverse is a bit different: I think it "succeeds" when it becomes viable to publish on ActivityPub as a complete alternative to needing to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But of course, that's not a constant value. It's not some constant amount of users. It depends on many factors. However, it will be pretty obvious when you see it, because it will come in the form of seeing people do healthy business over just ActivityPub. I empathize if this sounds arbitrary or pointless, but I think a lot of people don't grasp the impact of this. For all of its flaws, this would effectively mean that you could go back to running your own damn sites, because they can participate in ActivityPub just the same as anyone else. ActivityPub could fill the void left by the downturn in popularity of RSS, and then some.

charles_f 3y ago

> Some communities will find a new home on Mastodon or on Lemmy. Some will go elsewhere I wish protocols like mastodon or nostr would allow to federate all of these. I am not part of any "social network community" that I know of (apart from maybe HN) but I still occasionally use twitter, mainly as a substitute for blogs of the people I'd like to hear from, and get some comedy. They are from diverse communities and I certainly won't join everything and check everything.

sentientmachin3 3y ago

I would like a more strict version of this article, "Stop trying to make social networks".

paxys 3y ago

Not everyone is looking for a small self-hosted space for their friends and family and local community. Heck why do I even need an online social network for that when I can just go out and talk to them? The vast majority of users on networks like Twitter are looking to connect with a wider world. And "success" in those terms simply means having a critical mass to make such a network sustainable and interesting (and maybe profitable). Zuck himself has stated multiple times since yesterday that his idea of success for Threads is 1 billion users. That is a lot fewer than 8 billion, but it is success nonetheless.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago
Mental illness. A big chunk of people on Twitter are not well up top. Normal people go to the bar to watch baseball or play boardgames or something. It's not normal to be a Krassenstein or a BrooklynDadDefiant or whatever - those people are nuts.
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago
  It is important to point out that people like the krassenstein brothers or brooklynDadDefiant are not real people in the same sense as any Joe off the street is with an opinion. They are front-men for SuperPACs and they get paid by orgs like ActBlue. None of their ideas are ever their own, and they closely follow the daily order of battle from the DNC. Their engagement is also less-than-organic. Krassenstein were originally banned for paying for engagement from east asia and using custom software and fake accounts to artificially inflate their reach. The point is never to influence anyone. Their game is manufactured consent.

happytiger 3y ago

It’s my belief that the continued attempt to dominate the social networking space is related to predicted upcoming societal changes. They are the hot glue underneath a AML/KYC-based identity verification systems at scale and the sticky requirement for anyone looking to build such a system at scale. There is no better verification than social context for identity, and at core these are giant graph databases that have personal histories which can be leveraged for social credit and reputation applications. Watching these oligarchs jockey to try to concentrate people into social platforms is clearly more than a casual priority, so that’s why I suspect multiple motives that exceed the intrinsic social value of the platforms. It’s been my learning that the really massive companies in Silicon Valley a often have a back door leverage-style data platform to try to build a monopolistic position at some future inflection point in addition to their “front and center” business. I further suspect is a land grab to try to build the “WeChat of the West,” which explains quite clearly the relatively sky-high Twitter purchase (at least vs revenues) price as simply attaching a financial valuation to a portion of the initial userbase more than makes up for the purchase price. People are very focused on the front side applications (the social network hook) but the true value of these businesses is in building the next generations of FICO. When I read comments like, “Our communities are worth a lot more than the underlying tool used at some point in time.”, and “We are selling them, we are transforming them into a simple commercial asset for the makers of the tool we are using, the tool which exploits us.” I do wonder if people think as I do that it’s far more extensive than simple social networking companies. The approach to global finance is incredibly clear: social credit is the new core and communities are the oil of social credit. In the end it’s all about financial inclusion, as is laid out in this WEF article that explains just why social credit applications are so important to financial inclusion and global growth: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/this-new-approach-to-credit-scoring-is-accelerating-financial-inclusion/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/this-new-approach-to-... So, consider that niche social networks do not serve this purpose very well, and so there is little incentive to “build small” at this stage. I’d love to see more social network applications that are focused on quality connections myself, and for a while that was Reddit. But Reddit’a value was really just the aggregation of all the independent communities that used to exist in forums and similar into one website.

mypastself 3y ago

mrweasel 3y ago

At least stop putting social networks into products where they don't belong... Looking at you Github.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

callamdelaney 3y ago

Demise of twitter is.. not matching with my experience.

lost_tourist 3y ago

I stopped reading after he declared reddit and twitter dead. That's ludicrous. They may have taken some body blows lately, but dead? Okay I guess.

somsak2 3y ago

> The lesson here is simple: you are living in a small niche. We all do. Your experience is not representative of anything but your own. hmm, really disagree here. if you look at history the consolidation of "networks" is insane. we used to be way more fragmented, now if you pick the top 10 social networks worldwide you probably cover 90%+ of the internet connected population. hell, Facebook alone has 40% MAUs of all living humans! a few hundred years ago what eg newspapers had that kind of reach? nothing even remotely in the same league.

kafkaesque 3y ago

> Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier. This resonates with me. The beauty of the Web was to allow you to find your niche anywhere in the world from your own place of living. But that concept has been contaminated and taken over by your typical big corporation. It is now diluted by hostile ads, psychological warfare, and manipulation, all while, on the surface, pitching you the idea that you can "cater" your experience to whatever you like. The Web, or any community that is online or offline, should incite togetherness through a common good, whether it's artistic in nature or for the betterment of a community. Before the Web or BBS, this was done in forms of artist communities and forums in person. Seeking to return to this format, but with the aide of the Web is probably something I would prefer, but highly unlikely because younger generations seem to only live in their phones and in a Web reality.