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No longer viable for many / for new entrants on the majority of the social internet, which is facebook, twitter, etc other giga-sites. You can do it if you hav
by Groxx 2y ago
No longer viable for many / for new entrants on the majority of the social internet, which is facebook, twitter, etc other giga-sites. You can do it if you have other means to jump-start your followers (pre-existing popularity elsewhere, $$$$$ advertising, interaction-farming bots, etc), but they're all catering for celebrity accounts ("real" and manufactured, i.e. facebook spammers) and drowning out newbies because that's what drives giga-traffic and giga-advertising money.
Nobody likes that they are the biggest social internet sites, but they are unambiguously the biggest, by a very large margin, and they like to copy each other's worst profitable parts.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoThis seems like a tautology, by definition most people do not have significant differentiating factors between them. Because only the most noteworthy fraction of the population are well… noteworthy. So the only reliable factors to boost the vast majority of the population way above their peers would be money, endorsements, etc…
- Groxx 2y agoIt being a difficulty in general in any multi-billion-person environment: seems very likely yes. It's not a tautology for a site to bias for it though. That's a decision.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoHow do you know for sure they are biased ‘for it’ instead of being roughly on the ball, reflecting the natural gradient?
- Groxx 2y agoBy the massively higher amount of spam and scams on Facebook, compared to IRL. I don't step outside on any random day and get immediately blasted in the face by dozens of One Weird Tricks and AI-generated images of Jesus crossed with shrimp.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoHave you thought this through? There’s probably over a million literally deranged people on Facebook. Even if you only come across a tiny fraction of them, that’s still way more then you could possibly ever encounter in real life, in one physical community, due to simple probability and population density…
- Groxx 2y agoAnd building a thing where you massively increase their reach is a decision, yes. As an example, it could be Nextdoor-y[1], bound to physical location rather than global. And that's not a stretch either: it's what Facebook was in the early days. They decided to change it, to become what it is now. [1]: I do not in any way mean to imply Nextdoor is doing things right, just showing that "social network structure" is a decision, not some kind of inevitability.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoHuh? Facebook was never bound to physical location… Even Harvard kids doing exchange programs overseas signed up for it in the first year of operation.