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"Every moment in business happens only once." -- Peter Thiel The success of the old Facebook was very much rooted in a particular time and place. The leading

"Every moment in business happens only once." -- Peter Thiel The success of the old Facebook was very much rooted in a particular time and place. The leading edge of the Millennial generation (which was raised to be both more social and more trusting than previous generations) was in college. The Internet was new, and people were figuring out what it was for. The economy was humming along, and recovering from the dot-com bust, and people had few concerns that basic needs like housing and food would be taken care of. A website where the point was to throw sheep at each other was a nice idle diversion for that time surplus. It also helped that Facebook was started in one of the highest social-status dorms, in the highest social-status college, among the highest social-status demographic (college students), in a generation that was tightly socially connected. I'd remarked to a coworker, when Google was just starting Google+, that we were replicating all the technology in Facebook (and many good ideas not in Facebook that had been pioneered by LiveJournal), but we were missing the particular social moment in time that Zuckerburg capitalized on. In short, yes, consumer preferences have changed. Consumer preferences are always changing. The new Facebook is messaging, or hanging out in person, or maybe TikTok. Replicating the old Facebook won't give back the moment in time that lead to its ascendance.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
threeseed 3y ago
Also it was before many parents were on the internet. Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them. And so they instead prefer messaging apps for these relationships. And then for communicating within their age group it's much more about trends and what is new and different as every young generation is enticed by.
- xela79 3y ago
  > Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them the amount of young people who realize this and actually take action, if a very very small part, majority is just spoon-fed the new normal of these "social" apps
rednerrus 3y ago
Probably time to bring back dodgeball. What is Dennis Crowley up to?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!
Dwedit 3y ago
Google + killed itself by being invite-only at the time when there was buzz. Once the invite-only period ended, the buzz was gone.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  I can anecdotally confirm this to be the case. I was in college when G+ came out, and there was a lot of interest in my friend groups; except that nobody could get in. There was a moment when a lot of people wanted to make G+ accounts, and if they had been able to do so, the network effect of them making accounts would have spurred a number of others to do the same. But they couldn't, and by the time they could, interest had died. G+ had one really good shot, and missed.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    No, G+ was annoying. You had to classify people in circles. Then nothing happened. The reason why the hype died was that it was a bad product. That’s why Youtube made it mandatory to transform your name into a G+ account. Talk about pathetic.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Again it's an example of what working before not working in the future, though. Invite-only had worked great for GMail; it actually intensified the buzz. It failed miserably with Wave and Plus, showing that the same tactics sometimes work and sometimes flop.
  - dnissley 3y ago
    While the invite-only period may have been necessary for scaling reasons, I have my doubts that it was necessary for buzz-building reasons.
  - DougWebb 3y ago
    Gmail was invite-only to join and get an @gmail.com account, but once you had it you could interact with any email account user, and they could interact with you. GMail isn't a walled garden. Facebook, Wave, G+, etc are. That's why they depend on rapid user growth very early on when the hype is fresh.
randomdata 3y ago
> people had few concerns that basic needs like housing and food would be taken care of. Interesting, as the US housing market crash came two years after Facebook's launch, the same year it opened to the public, and the food commodities boom followed a year later. Farm gate food prices were higher back then than they are now, even in nominal dollars!
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I pretty strongly disagree with this. I don't think that user preferences have changed so much, in that I think a lot of people would respond well to an "old-school"-style Facebook, even if released right now. The issue is simply that that version of Facebook probably has people only using it 15-30 mins a day max, but you really need to get the continual mindless scrolling to maximize ad rates. Facebook is just suffering "the tyranny of the marginal user", the topic which was so well-discussed on HN a couple months back.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  You're welcome to try it. "Old school Facebook" took a couple days to implement, and it'd probably be even quicker with modern web frameworks. I was on FB in 2005, and it was definitely not 15-30 mins/day. People were on there for hours, or rather they'd go on, scroll for 15 mins, then come back next hour for another 15 mins, and so on. But again, that sort of behavior was a product of the times, and I really doubt you would get that sort of engagement if you put the same product in front of users today. But try it! If you're familiar with a database-backed web framework like Django or Rails, it'd probably take a weekend to re-implement the original Facebook. Do it and see if you get any traction.
  - dkasper 3y ago
    The really old school Facebook didn’t even have feeds. You spent time on there because you had to check out everyone’s walls.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    > If you're familiar with a database-backed web framework like Django or Rails, it'd probably take a weekend to re-implement the original Facebook. Do it and see if you get any traction. The issue is not whether it can technologically be built easily. While I always chuckle a little bit whenever developers say "It can be built in a weekend!" (in classic fashion...), my issue is not that it's technologically challenging. Of course the hard part with any app like this is getting the network critical mass, which is a very hard problem. But my point is really to argue against this being a consumer led difference in preferences. This is really an issue where, economically, the tech powers that be have found that hijacking our dopamine pathways via TikTok/etc. algorithms is more profitable than a "come in and check on your friends"-app.
shafyy 3y ago
> "Every moment in business happens only once." -- Peter Thiel Sounds smart, but doesn't mean anything.
- starttoaster 3y ago
  It sounds like what it's intending to get across is that there are market conditions that lead to a product taking off, and market conditions by nature change, which means a product taking off today doesn't necessarily mean that the same product would take off tomorrow. So I'm curious about your opinion. How does it mean nothing to you?
- nostrademons 3y ago
  It's actually pretty profound for a certain audience, and that audience overlaps pretty heavily with HN. A lot of people expect to gain lessons about what'll work in the future by studying the past. They'll point to successful product X, and then build product Y that tries to replicate all the good parts of product X, and not realize that there are a lot of subtle interactions between a product and the social & environmental conditions of its audience that lead to it taking off. If you build the same product but the environment is different, you get different results. Similarly, it's a lesson to pay very careful attention to what's going on in the environment today, and index more on that than what has worked with the environment of the past. That's why good VC presentations always have a slide for "What has changed? Why is this a good idea now when it wasn't in the past?"
- swalling 3y ago
  A less grandiose version of this aphorism: timing the market matters just as much as what product you ship. People tend to focus on product attributes and pricing because compared to timing, it is more in your control. An example of this that I think about a lot is Zoom. Zoom nailed video/audio quality more than most of other competing products, but otherwise they didn't offer anything that new compared to legions of other enterprise A/V platforms. They just happened to offer unlimited free meetings for <= 100 participants right as the pandemic happened. This was all pretty much lucky timing and some good choices around freemium growth mechanics. This window of opportunity closed quickly for competing products as behavior changed and network effects took hold. The only new competitor that emerged mid-pandemic was Teams, because MSFT could literally force install it on every Windows machine.
ajkjk 3y ago
"but we were missing the particular social moment in time that Zuckerburg capitalized on." That feels like a narrative that is designed to avoid taking responsibility for messing up. IMO it was 100% possible for Google at the time Google+ was made to completely win social, and they didn't because... what they built wasn't good, or apt, or visionary. Just picture Steve Jobs' Apple trying instead, except hypothetically imagine that their talent is in community design instead of hardware/UI design. They would've done it. Google can't, because... you know... Google is arrogant? and doesn't really do "visionary".
wil421 3y ago
Don’t forget the Facebook started as an exclusive club, you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. In the beginning you even had to be in specific colleges for sign up. Yes, the Harvard dorms were a big reason it gained traction.
- bhpm 3y ago
  Facebook started at Harvard, not Stanford.
  - wil421 3y ago
    Edited.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  The difference being that everyone in your social circle could get in at the same time. Most college students want to socialize with students at their college. Artificially segmenting the market by a waitlist chronologically doesn’t have the same affects. That’s why a lot of social platforms give “invite codes” to existing members - invite your friends to bootstrap connections so your members aren’t on a desert island.
deanCommie 3y ago
Good callout with Google+ Google+ was in every measurable way better than Facebook. It was cleaner, faster, and had features that people claimed they wanted (to be able to have full control over which CIRCLES they share different info with) And it completely busted because adoption of a social network is impossible without critical mass. At the time it was because people didn't have a strong enough reason to leave Facebook. Today it's because they wouldn't have a strong enough reason to leave TikTok/Instagram/Whatsapp/etc.
- dendrite9 3y ago
  I remember being interested in Google+ but I got an access code through a friend of a friend on the other side of the continent, and by the time I started to see people I actually knew using it the moment had passed.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

threeseed 3y ago

Also it was before many parents were on the internet. Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them. And so they instead prefer messaging apps for these relationships. And then for communicating within their age group it's much more about trends and what is new and different as every young generation is enticed by.

xela79 3y ago
> Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them the amount of young people who realize this and actually take action, if a very very small part, majority is just spoon-fed the new normal of these "social" apps

rednerrus 3y ago

Probably time to bring back dodgeball. What is Dennis Crowley up to?

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!

Dwedit 3y ago

Google + killed itself by being invite-only at the time when there was buzz. Once the invite-only period ended, the buzz was gone.

margalabargala 3y ago
I can anecdotally confirm this to be the case. I was in college when G+ came out, and there was a lot of interest in my friend groups; except that nobody could get in. There was a moment when a lot of people wanted to make G+ accounts, and if they had been able to do so, the network effect of them making accounts would have spurred a number of others to do the same. But they couldn't, and by the time they could, interest had died. G+ had one really good shot, and missed.
- eastbound 3y ago
  No, G+ was annoying. You had to classify people in circles. Then nothing happened. The reason why the hype died was that it was a bad product. That’s why Youtube made it mandatory to transform your name into a G+ account. Talk about pathetic.
nostrademons 3y ago
Again it's an example of what working before not working in the future, though. Invite-only had worked great for GMail; it actually intensified the buzz. It failed miserably with Wave and Plus, showing that the same tactics sometimes work and sometimes flop.
- dnissley 3y ago
  While the invite-only period may have been necessary for scaling reasons, I have my doubts that it was necessary for buzz-building reasons.
- DougWebb 3y ago
  Gmail was invite-only to join and get an @gmail.com account, but once you had it you could interact with any email account user, and they could interact with you. GMail isn't a walled garden. Facebook, Wave, G+, etc are. That's why they depend on rapid user growth very early on when the hype is fresh.

randomdata 3y ago

> people had few concerns that basic needs like housing and food would be taken care of. Interesting, as the US housing market crash came two years after Facebook's launch, the same year it opened to the public, and the food commodities boom followed a year later. Farm gate food prices were higher back then than they are now, even in nominal dollars!

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I pretty strongly disagree with this. I don't think that user preferences have changed so much, in that I think a lot of people would respond well to an "old-school"-style Facebook, even if released right now. The issue is simply that that version of Facebook probably has people only using it 15-30 mins a day max, but you really need to get the continual mindless scrolling to maximize ad rates. Facebook is just suffering "the tyranny of the marginal user", the topic which was so well-discussed on HN a couple months back.

nostrademons 3y ago
You're welcome to try it. "Old school Facebook" took a couple days to implement, and it'd probably be even quicker with modern web frameworks. I was on FB in 2005, and it was definitely not 15-30 mins/day. People were on there for hours, or rather they'd go on, scroll for 15 mins, then come back next hour for another 15 mins, and so on. But again, that sort of behavior was a product of the times, and I really doubt you would get that sort of engagement if you put the same product in front of users today. But try it! If you're familiar with a database-backed web framework like Django or Rails, it'd probably take a weekend to re-implement the original Facebook. Do it and see if you get any traction.
- dkasper 3y ago
  The really old school Facebook didn’t even have feeds. You spent time on there because you had to check out everyone’s walls.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > If you're familiar with a database-backed web framework like Django or Rails, it'd probably take a weekend to re-implement the original Facebook. Do it and see if you get any traction. The issue is not whether it can technologically be built easily. While I always chuckle a little bit whenever developers say "It can be built in a weekend!" (in classic fashion...), my issue is not that it's technologically challenging. Of course the hard part with any app like this is getting the network critical mass, which is a very hard problem. But my point is really to argue against this being a consumer led difference in preferences. This is really an issue where, economically, the tech powers that be have found that hijacking our dopamine pathways via TikTok/etc. algorithms is more profitable than a "come in and check on your friends"-app.

shafyy 3y ago

> "Every moment in business happens only once." -- Peter Thiel Sounds smart, but doesn't mean anything.

starttoaster 3y ago
It sounds like what it's intending to get across is that there are market conditions that lead to a product taking off, and market conditions by nature change, which means a product taking off today doesn't necessarily mean that the same product would take off tomorrow. So I'm curious about your opinion. How does it mean nothing to you?
nostrademons 3y ago
It's actually pretty profound for a certain audience, and that audience overlaps pretty heavily with HN. A lot of people expect to gain lessons about what'll work in the future by studying the past. They'll point to successful product X, and then build product Y that tries to replicate all the good parts of product X, and not realize that there are a lot of subtle interactions between a product and the social & environmental conditions of its audience that lead to it taking off. If you build the same product but the environment is different, you get different results. Similarly, it's a lesson to pay very careful attention to what's going on in the environment today, and index more on that than what has worked with the environment of the past. That's why good VC presentations always have a slide for "What has changed? Why is this a good idea now when it wasn't in the past?"
swalling 3y ago
A less grandiose version of this aphorism: timing the market matters just as much as what product you ship. People tend to focus on product attributes and pricing because compared to timing, it is more in your control. An example of this that I think about a lot is Zoom. Zoom nailed video/audio quality more than most of other competing products, but otherwise they didn't offer anything that new compared to legions of other enterprise A/V platforms. They just happened to offer unlimited free meetings for <= 100 participants right as the pandemic happened. This was all pretty much lucky timing and some good choices around freemium growth mechanics. This window of opportunity closed quickly for competing products as behavior changed and network effects took hold. The only new competitor that emerged mid-pandemic was Teams, because MSFT could literally force install it on every Windows machine.

ajkjk 3y ago

"but we were missing the particular social moment in time that Zuckerburg capitalized on." That feels like a narrative that is designed to avoid taking responsibility for messing up. IMO it was 100% possible for Google at the time Google+ was made to completely win social, and they didn't because... what they built wasn't good, or apt, or visionary. Just picture Steve Jobs' Apple trying instead, except hypothetically imagine that their talent is in community design instead of hardware/UI design. They would've done it. Google can't, because... you know... Google is arrogant? and doesn't really do "visionary".

wil421 3y ago

Don’t forget the Facebook started as an exclusive club, you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. In the beginning you even had to be in specific colleges for sign up. Yes, the Harvard dorms were a big reason it gained traction.

bhpm 3y ago
Facebook started at Harvard, not Stanford.
- wil421 3y ago
  Edited.
vineyardmike 3y ago
The difference being that everyone in your social circle could get in at the same time. Most college students want to socialize with students at their college. Artificially segmenting the market by a waitlist chronologically doesn’t have the same affects. That’s why a lot of social platforms give “invite codes” to existing members - invite your friends to bootstrap connections so your members aren’t on a desert island.

deanCommie 3y ago

Good callout with Google+ Google+ was in every measurable way better than Facebook. It was cleaner, faster, and had features that people claimed they wanted (to be able to have full control over which CIRCLES they share different info with) And it completely busted because adoption of a social network is impossible without critical mass. At the time it was because people didn't have a strong enough reason to leave Facebook. Today it's because they wouldn't have a strong enough reason to leave TikTok/Instagram/Whatsapp/etc.

dendrite9 3y ago
I remember being interested in Google+ but I got an access code through a friend of a friend on the other side of the continent, and by the time I started to see people I actually knew using it the moment had passed.