Remember Digg? Unlike the companies you listed, FB is user-facing - just like Digg.
If users happen to decide that a company is not "cool" anymore or dispase its public figure(Zuckerberg), it may actually go away.
Remember IE(stands for Internet Explorer)? Using Firefox and later Chrome became a crusade and the almighty brand of the richest person in the world that holds the monopoly on computers platforms bled to death.
Digg and IE "died" because there was a real practical incentive to move towards alternatives. This Facebook thing is mostly ideological at the core, in terms of day-to-day user experience it's no better or worse than it was a month ago. Digg also never was more than a small speck of dust compared to Facebook, even at the apex of its popularity. Facebook's huge network effect is hard to overcome.
If you want Facebook to die you have to come up with an alternative with improved usability to convince people to switch over. Now you have do that with the added handicap of "do no evil" (so less money from targeted advertising etc...) while fighting to gain market share against some of the biggest companies in the world. My guess is that if you manage to do all of that you'll just end up bought by Facebook anyway.
Additionally (at least for the IE example) there's another huge difference: those who wished to use an IE alternative could do so and continue to engage the same activities and access all the same content--with a few ActiveX exceptions--as they could before.
Most importantly, those who wished to make the switch from IE to Firefox or Chrome or Safari or Opera, etc. could do so without requiring any additional action by others. Again, outside of a few compatibility issues on a few sites, I could change the software I used without convincing webmasters or other users to do anything.
Same went for webmail. I could switch to Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail or whatever I wanted without requiring me to convince every other relative, friend, and business contact to do the same.
With something like Facebook, you can't just use a different platform to interact with those same people in the same way unless you convince them all to migrate with you. If everyone you know only wants to use Facebook, then that's your option. You can't set up your profile on Diaspora or Google+ or whatever and expect to enjoy all the things you prefer about them because there's no shared protocol like there is with web browsing or email.
unless the privacy protections are codified in the company charter from day one with some poison pill type mechanism. last I heard a social network called ello was trying to do that. lately they have rebranded themselves into a 'artist social net'. IMO still worth the switch if moving with close friends.
Honestly if fb were to just take the money from me and leave me alone i'd be happy to pay that ransom for my friends.
> Remember Digg? Unlike the companies you listed, FB is user-facing - just like Digg.
Digg was abandoned because it broke itself. The codebase that all those users knew and depended on was completely trashed (the original author hangs out here sometimes), the site dropped a number of its key functions, and the user experience was redesigned to maximize Digg's ability to show ads, no matter how obnoxious that got, with many people saying that it was almost entirely ads by this point (I had personally stopped using Digg years before the big v4 debacle, so I can't speak to this directly).
People want the path of least resistance. They'll tolerate some ads, but their tolerance ends when it's just easier to click over to the other guy's site and get a comparable experience. If you neuter/break Digg, and reddit is right there, well...
The path of least resistance for Facebook users is still Facebook, regardless of the news cycle. Facebook will remain dominant until it is no longer the path of least resistance, just like everything else.
Users have different levels of tolerance. The moment a switch is the path of least resistance differs for everyone, usually corresponding to their level of emotional investment in the platform and their individual tech savvy. Facebook has a lot of very invested, very non-tech-savvy users.
The right types of questions to ask are along the lines of whether we're sure competitors have sufficient ground to catch up to massive incumbents and keep them honest (and in this case specifically, whether certain misrepresentations or violations occurred that should be made to materially affect market standing through government intervention). For the most part, tech is non-competitive due to terrible legislation like the CFAA.
> The right types of questions to ask are along the lines of whether we're sure competitors have sufficient ground to catch up to massive incumbents and keep them honest (and in this case specifically, whether certain misrepresentations or violations occurred that should be made to materially affect market standing through government intervention).
I don't see how there could ever be any viable competition. Facebook already has many of the top engineering minds in the world who are pushing the edge of what computers are capable of, not to mention the largest database and neural network of human behavior ever created.
> I don't see how there could ever be any viable competition. Facebook already has many of the top engineering minds in the world who are pushing the edge of what computers are capable of, not to mention the largest database and neural network of human behavior ever created.
How is any of that necessary?
I don't give a shit about their bleeding-edge neural network or army of PhDs. I just want to send my mom pictures of my kids and maybe send an occasional party invitation to some friends. What does Skynet contribute to this workflow?
I would argue that all that technical bloat only made the Facebook experience worse. Facebook itself had humble beginnings. All a competitor needs is a LAMP or MEAN stack, an experience worth migrating to, and enough ethical sense to not treat its userbase like a science experiment.
>I would argue that all that technical bloat only made the Facebook experience worse. Facebook itself had humble beginnings. All a competitor needs is a LAMP or MEAN stack, an experience worth migrating to, and enough ethical sense to not treat its userbase like a science experiment.
It also needs the ability to make the transition plausible for consumers. There's really no reason that Facebook should be able to enforce a stringent walled garden and bar specific user agents that aren't negatively impacting the network and aren't exceeding the access of the user they represent.
But Facebook did exactly this in Facebook v. Power Ventures, leaving an entrepreneur with a ruined business and a bill for $3M in damages for creating a system that exfiltrated only one's own personal, copyrighted data from Facebook. It wasn't even taking other peoples' feeds or trying to multiplex data. It was simply trying to make one's own data accessible and portable.
Large tech companies have done this for decades, abusing the CFAA and the Copyright Act to enforce de facto platform monopolies. These companies know that if they can't assert ownership over the data, they'll have to compete on merit in the open marketplace, and who wants to deal with that?
This is also why you don't see new protocols like POP3 or NNTP anymore. Academics trying to build a transparently-syndicated collaboration platform are out. Big companies looking to hoard your data and assert some type of incidental, indirect ownership over it are in, and they want to make sure that you don't really have the option to leave. Lock-in is king.
Once a critical mass outside of the tech-savvy early adopter crowd is obtained, aggressive legal methods like those used against Power allow incumbents to hold onto power in perpetuity. Granny doesn't care about all of that tech mumbo-jumbo. She just knows that she can't see Auntie's pictures anymore because you broke it by switching her to F+. Since they're legally forbidden from multiplexing Facebook's content into a universal "social media reader", Granny's options are to stare at a blank feed or go back to Facebook -- even though Auntie would be perfectly willing to allow Granny to see her content through F+, and it's really more of an accident that Facebook is the platform that received the initial post.
What is Granny gonna do in this situation? Why have we awarded tech companies the right to hold user-generated content hostage like this? Wrap anything in custom HTML and it's suddenly very difficult for a third-party to access it without infringing your copyright on the exterior HTML wrapping, regardless of the status of the content inside. In the US, it's infringement to load copyrighted content into RAM, per the RAM Copy Doctrine.
Good luck convincing a technologically-illiterate judge that your software is no more disruptive than Chrome or Firefox, especially when you have to do so over the objections of Facebook's $X000/hr law firms and previously-referenced army of PhDs.
Such rules have stifled online innovation for decades now, and they're the reason that the internet is becoming a walled garden.
Under the GDPR, which mandates all companies provide a machine-readable export of user data within some fairly short timeframe (less than a week iirc), things may become marginally more fluid for people in EU countries, but I wouldn't count on it.
If you neuter/break Digg, and reddit is right there, well...
That case is about an almost identical twin, but I would also consider sites that are not so similar but serving the same function. I haven't had a Facebook account so not sure what it is exactly, but people are happy as long as I have Whatsapp.
I added IE to my example to illustrate that having all the money in the world may not save you when your brand becomes toxic. Some may say that FB users don't care but with IE it also was just geeks and devs, but it turned into a crusade and now everyone "knows" that the first thing you do after you have a fresh PC is to install Chrome.
Perhaps part of that was that IE was really bad at it's job and as users were told about Chrome and Firefox and they tried it and it was much faster - they switched because IE was not nearly as good. Facebook is pretty good at it's job - despite questionable practices. If Facebook started to suck from a user perspective (a bit like MySpace did) - users would move to another thing in a shot.
I would disagree with the claim that Facebook is "pretty good at its job" -- the News Feed is completely full of ads and "suggested content", notifications have become complete noise at this point, and even Messenger has ads in it now, and makes it difficult to get to your actual list of online friends.
In 2011, Facebook was good at its job, with a chronological news feed, meaningful notifications, and a messenger paradigm that worked much like AIM in the early 2000s -- you could see who was online, away, go invisible, etc. In 2018, Facebook has lost all of those positives, and with it a lot of user engagement, all for the sake of cramming the maximum number of ads down the users throats. And I'm not even getting into the nasty dark UX patterns, like hiding the ability to delete your profile (seriously, there isn't a link to do this anywhere on the site -- you need to search Google for it and they change the link all the time to break external guides) and showing random pictures of "friends who will miss you if you leave!" when you try to delete your account. I don't think your average user would mind leaving Facebook much if there was any actual alternative.
I think you're under the impression that facebook's job is to be good at showing you what you want and being useful. I'm pretty sure they think their job is to balance being just useful enough that you don't quit while maximizing revenue from you, which might entail being pretty crappy to use overall.
> I think you're under the impression that facebook's job is to be good at showing you what you want and being useful. I'm pretty sure they think their job is to balance being just useful enough that you don't quit while maximizing revenue from you, which might entail being pretty crappy to use overall.
This is just a minor quibble to lambda_lover's point, which still stands. Facebook may understand it's job is to shove as many ads in its users' faces as they will tolerate, but that's not why users use its app. It's users view its job as being useful to them, and being bad at that makes makes FB vulnerable to competitors or even just general dissatisfaction.
The difference is, if devs don’t support your brower, your browsing experience suffers.
Every developer on Earth could leave Facebook and it would not make the experience of using fb any worse. Facebook is not a software platform, it’s an ad platform.
If anything fb would get better if we stopped targeting it.
I remember the process, it had nothing to do with the dev support. Actually, it was the other way around - IE had all the dev support and websites broke down on Firefox but people were fanatics. There were extensions that let you render the page in IE if it's not working on Firefox.
When the Chrome came along, Firefox already put a dent in IE market share and it already became socially unacceptable for techies to use IE but regular people still used IE so the devs were forced to make sure that everything works perfectly on IE too. For the masses, thanks to the developers, IE displayed the websites just fine up until the bitter end.
Friends didn't let friends use IE and it was killed.
It’s far from dead, although we’re finally seeing Edge and Firefox rise a bit more sharply.
Slow-moving, heavily regulated corps with lots of internal legacy apps simply cannot use Chrome with its frequent feature deprecation, weak management, and constant desire to send telemetry and who knows what else to Google servers.
Facebook doesn’t need to predict — they can buy when it’s already big. They are able to monetize users much better than random startup social network so they are able to pay much more per engaged user than the company could get from VCs or the public market.
As ggg9990 noted, is not about discovering them when they are small and cheap and making money on the market increase, it's about buying them when they are got and making money on the execution of the business.
Facebook isn't the VC company, Facebook is who those companies hope to sell to later.
For public companies in the US, they are mostly incapable of making decisions like this as if can be shown to negativity effect enterprise value they can be sued by shareholders that do not have the same moral issues.
I read these kind of comments all the time, yet I'm still to see one actual court case showing that this is true. Are you really sure that this is true?
> If users happen to decide that a company is not "cool" anymore or dispase its public figure(Zuckerberg), it may actually go away.
This is already sort of happening anyway with the "my parents are on Facebook now" problem. That I think is a much bigger threat to Facebook's future than any regulations that are coming.
I don't think that is an apt analogy. Facebook users become so entrenched with their social network, pictures, etc. that it is much harder to delete than a bunch of interest categories.
I don't know. Once you get your photos off of Facebook I think you can leave really easily. You can still message all your important friends through sms or your chosen chat app. Snapchat exists as an alternative for casual photo sharing. Reddit or Twitter for posting news, memes or funny videos. I think people exaggerate the importance of Facebook. Young people can adapt to new technology quickly. I know I was able to drop Facebook pretty easily.
Young people might be able to adapt to new technology quickly, but they also have some of the strongest social pressures to remain on the technology all their friends are at. The difference between being in the "cool" message group and someone having to message you separately is a much bigger hurdle for them to face than where all your photos go.
Kinda agree. I can at least see how dating apps lock people in; most apps require a Facebook account. However, I also think there's a lot of reasons to not want to be instantly connected to everyone you know on Facebook. Annoying invites to political events you don't want to attend. Weird people/Sexual predators/Stalkers messaging you.
People can adapt. In my fantasy football group we used to do Facebook messages until me and another friend dropped Facebook. Now we do group messages or groupme. People you care about will find a way to contact you.
> Young people might be able to adapt to new technology quickly, but they also have some of the strongest social pressures to remain on the technology all their friends are at.
Exactly - that's the danger for FB. If the coolest of kids head somewhere else, that strong social pressure works against FB and not for it.
Yea but that's also a reason to leave. I know one of the main reasons I stopped using Facebook for photos was because I didn't want my Mom and extended family looking at the parties I went to at college.
That is why I have to remain. I want my mom to see pictures of my kids. I want to see pictures of my nephew's lip after he got hit with a ball (6 stitches). The girl who took 4th place in the state dance competition is of interest to me because I remember her mom from high school - the first place dancer is nothing to me. The real things in life that matter are why I'm on facebook and why I cann't leave.
Politics and some hobby groups are on Facebook and interesting, but the real meat is the personal photos and stories that would never be in the news.
I was totally ready to call you out and that the rebranding of IE to Edge resulted in no change in adoption and Microsoft wins by default but apparently I am totally incorrect. Chrome is _by far_ dominating the browser game[0]. And while I'd rather FF take that spot, dethroning Microsoft makes my nerd heart pretty happy.
Wow I honestly had no idea. I would of bet you $100 on the spot that Microsoft had more than 50% marketshare of browser traffic and considered you a sucker for taking the bet. I had no idea Chrome had dominated so much. I wonder what Firefox did wrong that it didn't become Chrome? It was the cool browser to use years before I ever heard of Chrome.
Maybe it was Google's push for the most part but Firefox made a reputation or being cluttered memory hogg and when Chrome came along it was so fast and fresh. Firefox used to lose it's smoothness when a tab misbehaves and didn't take advantage of the multi-core processors that were getting popular but Chrome was butter smooth even if a website is not responding(due to Flash Player mostly) because everything runs in a separate process and if a website died only that tab died.
It was no-brainer to switch to Chrome.
Also, Google was this cool company that was giving away revolutionary products. Don't do evil was their motto.
It probably helps that everyone visiting google.com, far and away the most popular search website, that isn’t already using Chrome is prompted to install it.
What happens if people start talking about how much they hate Zuckerberg and start looking for alternatives and the cool kids start suggesting each other some other social network that's technically good enough but never took off because didn't benefit from the network effect?
Then anything he touches becomes toxic. Zuckerberg isn't even divisive like Trump, he may have issue finding people to rally with him against the deserters.
Please, no, not yet another open and federated social media platform that is in fact not much more than an endless feed of bots posting and reposting twitter posts and rss feeds. The internet can't take much more of those.
I wanted these platforms to succeed, I've had an account and tried using most of them - Diaspora, Friendica, Red Matrix, someothermatrixIdontrememberthenameof, Mastodon, identica/statusnet, ... They're all the same. (I'm sure I'm forgetting at least one or two, but they all blend together.)
If users happen to decide that a company is not "cool" anymore or dispase its public figure(Zuckerberg), it may actually go away.
Remember IE(stands for Internet Explorer)? Using Firefox and later Chrome became a crusade and the almighty brand of the richest person in the world that holds the monopoly on computers platforms bled to death.