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Comment by ohthehugemanate | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see a sentence that starts with "we need..." I automatically think "shut up and build it, or you're just complaining."

If it's a real need, then building it is a good idea, and will probably make you money. But 99.9% of the time, it's just a turn of phrase way to bitch about the way the world and human kind actually works. Yeah, if we had another Facebook the world would be better. And if I had wheels I'd be a cart. What's your point?

We don't have another Facebook, and we aren't likely to get one, because we don't actually "need" that enough to pay tens or hundreds of people to build it. You just want to wish it into existence.

TL;DR: shut up and build it, or stop complaining.

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I've actually spent quite a bit of time working on a design document for an open source version of the Facebook platform. I got a fair bit of the architecture and requirements down for what I believed would make the project successful. Then I came to the slow realization that the world had categorically no use for a Facebook alternative.

The features of Facebook are largely meaningless. What matters is the absolute stranglehold Facebook has and will maintain via acquisitions of users. It's not a question of simply getting the user to register for another site. Many Facebook users will have as many as five or more Facebook products on their mobile. They'll also be logged into a half dozen other properties on the internet with Facebook's OAuth scheme.

Icing on the cake? Tinder. Every college aged person I've spoken to has little interest in Facebook. But they've all reinstalled it in order to use Tinder.

You cannot get a mass migration to occur unless their is an absolute PR Apocalypse at Facebook or if you can offer absolute parity to the slow dopamine drip provided by constant notifications and social validations coming from all their products. At once.

I think there is space for an alternative - keep in mind that that doesn't mean that they have to be hugely popular.

For example, some online communities I am a part of subsist mainly in chat rooms, or forums. Those communities are so tightly knit in many ways. While a lot of us are also friends on FB, our ties in these communities are still very strong.

I'm in some such communities too, but efforts to get anything going on other sites outside fb come to nothing because you just end up with more social media to keep track of for no real benefit - you can't do anything sufficiently interesting that you can't already do on FB, and you've lost all the network effects for content discovery, rapid dissemination of news or sufficiently entertaining content etc.

OK you gain privacy but that's really a negative freedom. I assume everything I do online is visible to spies and corporations anyway unless I go to the bother of running Tor (and probably even then), so moving some of my social activity off FB isn't much more effective than virtually waving a fist in Mark Zuckerberg's direction.

Let's be realistic here, small specialist forums are simply not going to overcome large-scale network effects absent massive functional advantages.

> I assume everything I do online is visible to spies and corporations anyway unless I go to the bother of running Tor

Not quite sure what's your point here but most subject specific forums on the web have a huge bunch of users with nicknames and not their real names. With the same reasoning you could also say: no need to close the door to WC when you go there to do your needs since people outside know what you're doing there anyway! If you use VPN and a lot less of your personal information will be sold to advertisers.

You can sign up to Tinder with your mobile number now.

This is one of the dumbest and most self-defeating ways engineers shoot down, and exclude themselves from, important discussions.

Sometimes social problems actually require society to talk about them rather than run off and build yet another product.

Most people who say "We need to.." are also users who are very well aware of the problem, but may not be able to solve it themselves, or don't know what the solution looks like, or like a PG essay just inviting action.

But by collectively trying to identify the nitty gritty details of the problem, hopefully that will prepare the spec for engineers and makers to build from. So yes, we need to listen!

Edit: Just realised that previous reference to PG was a bit too casual so have adjusted

"Need," in the "greater good for society" sense, is often disconnected from profitability. Shut up and build it? There have been several attempts at undercutting Facebook in the last decade and they failed. Their failure is not evidence of Facebook's divinity, of a mandate to rule all social networks. To assert as much is to claim that consumers are rational actors through and through, which is not true.

The road to hell is littered with "solutions" "for the greater good" foisted upon a population that did not actually want it.

Facebook is popular by and large because the people that use Facebook like Facebook.

Your generalization lumps short term want/enjoyment with long term need.

Let's stop making diabetes medicine. If people actually wanted to not have diabetes, they'd stop eating candy.

Your comment presupposes market failures aren't a thing -- they are, ergo, your reasoning doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Further, even if that wasn't the case, advertising what's wrong with Facebook is a valid way to try and make competitors more viable: by writing critical articles, people without the technical skills to make a new Facebook change the market conditions, making it easier for a Facebook competitor to become viable. So they're doing exactly what you suggest -- using their labor to increase the chances of success for an alternative. Free markets at work!

tl;dr: Your suggestion is wrong if you either do or don't believe free markets are the solution.

You want Technology Review to build a social network?

What an immature and offensive attitude. People are trying to express their demand and invest some imaginative effort in describing the sort of service they'd like - not least because they may not know how to go about building such a thing - and you're coming along saying 'supply your own demand or STFU.' Maybe you should take your own advice.

Basically, you should not talk about anything except your daily job. Got it.

i mean i could see what you're saying if it was an engineer who was complaining. But if this is a journalist then i think it is fine. Perhaps someone will read the article and build it and we'll all be better off.

While I agree that building an alternative is better than complaining, I think the author is right to publish a story like this. The idea being that folks that are able to build a viable alternative might happen to read the MIT Tech Review article and build it. Complaining about how people that complain aren't productive is counterproductive in this case. Additionally, more articles like these are needed to remind people to snap out of it and do something else.

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