I am completely convinced that FB will go the way of the dodo in the next decade, and it will take Snapchat and Instagram with it.
Maybe social media platforms are inherently cyclical? At least under the "maximum growth" mindset:
* Innovators develop new platforms because they're unhappy with the old
* Early adopters like the new platform's features or community
* If it's good enough, the early majority slowly follows as knowledge disseminates
* New features and narratives are developed to attract the late majority and laggards
* The presence of those people, and tactics used to attract them, disenfranchise the early adopters
* Unhappiness rises until a new digital eden is discovered. Then the cycle repeats
but I'm a bit weird with account creation. A service generally has to really prove its worth before I bother to create an account. I spent a couple years on HN before before bothering with an account and commenting, and it took way longer after that until I finally found some Reddit communities that made me want to create an account (and even now, I comment sparingly), even though I looked at it occassionally.
Same, except I started with CompuServe, then MSN before /. I visit a few reddits now, but I still don't really like the feel for some reason.
Gave up on /. around the time cmdrtaco got married. Gave up on digg sometime before the downfall. Have stuck with HN (was fairly early here). Reddit on and off.
Someone will oneup this too with Arpanet or similar :)
And get off my lawn. :)
I've actually joked about building a Bluetooth telegraph key to make texting more concenient.
We put in a Warez bbs on the north Lake Tahoe cad server.
Fun times
A lot of the trolls and flaming on proggit is funny. HN feels too much like that episode of South Park where Kyle moves to San Francisco and everyone is huffing their own farts.
My personal journey was: BBS -> Usenet -> Slashdot -> phpbb/vb forums -> Ars -> Reddit -> HN
I haven't had any problems with Reddit as far as technical information goes, but I mostly go there for non-tech subs (eg AskHistorians).
I absolutely get what you mean about it being nasty though -it took me years and years to break down and finally make an account because of the nastiness.
Ok, now I'm officially an old man.
I was in the top 100 users back in those days. I loved their platform. It's a shame what they did with it. It is my opinion that Reddit has gotten away with a terrible UI compared to what Digg once had.
If you liked Digg you might also like: https://barnacl.es https://voat.co/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080221
Keith F. Lynch wrote up some interesting history of the net from his perspective:
All social apps grow until you need a newsfeed
All newsfeeds grow until you need an algorithmic feed
All algorithmic feeds grow until you get fed up of not seeing stuff/seeing the wrong stuff & leave for new apps with less overload
All those new apps grow until...
Personally I think that's why a site like reddit has more staying power than a site like Twitter. Twitter has too much of your identity invested in it while reddit has a place for nearly everyone.
Reddit with defaults or r/all is a horrible experience. It is what you make of it though, and if you don't make anything of it then it is obviously not for you. The advice I always give to someone trying reddit is to 1. make an account 2. unsubscribe from all of the defaults and 3. search it for whatever interests you. Pretty much everyone can find something for them, and moderation is going to be variable which I think is actually a net positive. A well moderated sub is a gem, such as AskHistorians, but not every sub needs to be moderated to the same extent as AskHistorians to remain useful or relevant either.
But your description is completely accurate if you are interested in anything remotely political.
I even had to unsubscribe from subs dedicated to my favorite video games because it gets so toxic.
As a rule, the more general purpose the sub is, the lower the quality of the community, especially if it has lax moderation. I'm not someone that is into gifs or "memes" so you'll have to ask someone else about those. I don't use reddit or any one site for news because I don't need that in my life, I have other channels for anything that actually matters. Programming subs are usually pretty good resources for whatever tool, language or technology they're promoting that you use or are interested in, but I steer clear from the pointless debates.
I would say search a few of your hobbies, whatever they are, there's probably a decent model train collecting sub but I wouldn't know, and if you want to use it professionally, search it for whatever tools you use. There's self-development subs like getdisciplined and most subs have others you can look for in the sidebar if you really want to dig down the rabbit hole, but go in prepared to unsubscribe from all of the defaults and build up your own personal collection of subscriptions from there.
I think so, because a huge part of social interaction is either being a trend-setter or following trends. Either one of those requires constant change.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
It's not a perfect analogy in this case, but it definitely hits a lot of your key points.
Not a surprise that Andy Rubin went on to build Android.
Then MSFT was like, OK we bought skype. EVERYONE WILL USE SKYPE.
MSN doesn’t integrate with your FB contacts automatically so not sure it could occupy the same spot.
Then new people I met (online and offline) were all using Skype. This was just right before Smartphones came out.
Then offline people slowly started joining Whatsapp or Facebook groups.
Online people stayed on Skype until Telegram took over a few years ago.
The United States got SMS a lot later in the piece than other countries, didn't they? From my experience the opposite of what you said appeared to be true - what started to kill SMS here was services like MSN messenger and eventually facebook etc afterwards
That little white F in a blue square is a global symbol and it won't be undone in a few bouts of bad PR.
I think we, the tech literate, forget just how other people interact with tech. I need only to look at my parents interacting with Facebook to see how they're still so addicted to it (my aunt still is addicted to candy crush ffs).
Don't forget all the social lock in Facebook has on you: a decade's worth of photos and all the friends you picked up along the way.
Sure, people are unplugging, but I personally think they've got critical mass.
Its downfall also illustrates how little it mattered that they were then hosting their users' digital life. A new generation rose using a new social medium, and this lack of new users eventually sucked the life out of it.
That, incidentally, is probably why Facebook paid so much for WhatsApp.
That is "the world's most recognized word is Coke/Apple" levels of mindshare. That simply doesn't go away overnight. People no longer drink 24 bottles of Coke a day[0] but Coke is still everywhere and ubiquitous.
Hence my assertion that Facebook has critical mass: the history of MySpace isn't a useful analogy for trying to stipulate what might happen to Facebook. After a certain size/ubiquity they can sidestep user exodus, if only through sheer acquisition of the replacement.
Perhaps a concession is that Facebook the product may be gone in a decade. I'll be very surprised if Facebook, Inc. is gone.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/bd4d1876-e464-11e4-9039-00144feab...
Of course, Facebook could acquire (and Messenger and Whatsapp and Instagram are powerful moats) but the core social network functionality is weaker than it appears.
There was a brief period of most of the people being reachable via Jabber too thanks to Gmail and Android, but Hangouts mostly screwed that up, both in terms of Jabber interoperability and their own native usage.
You remember numbers you use a lot, I have no idea why I remember by ICQ number though.
Ah, that explains why when I recently logged into ICQ for the first time in 15+ years, I apparently had no contacts. I thought they must have just wiped some old protocol at some point.
Speak for yourself, most of my social group is split between iMessage and WhatsApp.
Even so, what Facebook has that MySpace didn't is enough money to buy up its competitors to stay relevant (e.g. WhatsApp). So this might be what will happen, even if Facebook itself fades in relevance.
(Bear in mind that even if Facebook Messenger grew in popularity as AIM declined, so too did the number of people online increase, and the number of people with smartphones -- saying that one increased while the other decreased is not sufficient.)
Echoing that, I'd add that FB/Zuckerberg knows when to do one of the following with an upcoming competitor a) snatch it up b) throw company's resources at duplicating it
UK = (mostly) MSN MESSENGER
correct me if i’m wrong.
It makes sense.
Not sure if they were an ISP or something but I do remember their presence in British internet access.
Tech crowd started on ICQ. Masses started to arrive and use MSN.
Honestly, I wouldn't even be able to tell you what AIM was...
I don't think it was purely Facebook that killed MySpace and AIM, it's that they didn't get on phones quickly enough.
However unlike SMS it didn't cost eye-watering amounts of money to use. Whatsapp never became popular in the USA because most people on pay-monthly contracts received large SMS allowances.
In the rest of the world, networks felt threatened by SMS -- if texts were too cheap then people would stop making phone calls! So it was universally crippled with ridiculous limits and fees. Even in 2018 it costs me a lot of money to send an SMS, and I don't know anybody under the age of 35 who uses it.
AIM and AOL were popular when we didn’t have texts or even cellphones. It wasn’t so common to give kids cellphones early in those days.
As another person pointed out, I can send the message to the people I want not followers.
Within a few months of push notifications first being available, WhatsApp was released for iOS, in November 2009.
[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/1135141/aim_review.html
Chat apps are more like a visit at the coffee shop.
Then for some reason they messed it all up.
In 2008 Facebook introduced Facebook Chat, and ever since then Google has acted [1] to try to challenge Facebook for social networking -- and this caused Google's communication offerings to alternatingly be neglected or leveraged for that cause [2]. Google didn't win.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16351254 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483
Facebook exploded in the desktop web era. For today's kids desktops are for work, not socialising except when playing games online using Skype or Discord.
My girls are 13 and 14 and just created Facebook pages purely for updates on activities for a club. Everything else is in WhatsApp, WeChat (for Chinese relatives), Instagram, etc. Lightweight special purpose apps linked to tight groups of friends. The last generation wanted a one-stop solution to their social media needs. The new generation see that as some unwieldy monolithic platform for mums and dads.
Having said that, if there is a place of a monolithic platform like that maybe facebook is it. They can probably still stay relevant and useful, they're just not the be-all and end-all of social media they appeared to be. I hope.
What are some shifts that can take Instagram down? The main one I can think of is decentralizion and owning/controlling your own data, but that would hit almost everything.
Do you think the shift away from these sites will be structural/technological (again, like if the world generally moves towards a different business model than data collection), or do you think these sites will be hit for specific reasons?
No. I think it will be completely cultural. In other word, exactly what happened with MySpace, AIM, etc. Young people will want something new, different, novel. The underlying technology and functionality will, in all likelihood, be exactly the same.
But it will need a new platform. I can't see it happening on phones.
- Too many ads
- Too much spam (fake accounts)
- Dark UX patterns (withholding notifications to encourage addiction)
- Unpredictable sorting behaviour (if I have a post with better engagement than another post in the Top Posts for a given area, why doesn't my post beat theirs?)
- Unpredictable behaviour generally. My posts get only 20% the engagement they did 18 months ago.
I made a site for musicians to post music, sell or distribute it merch, control previews, analytics, yadayada all on an calpop p4 server when my then gf told me about Myspace.
I moved on to other things when she showed me FB and I learned I couldn't sign up without a .edu, they lost me there.
I registered in 2006 for a blind date, uploaded a pic of a salad bowl, never spelled my name correctly or used my real dob (I'm a melinnial and knew in 94 compartmentalize my online behavior) and doubled with an ethos crafted around consistency, I've done alright for my generation.
No friends, but still alive!
I think positioning a product that would allow you to move your content between the different mediums (i.e. myspace to facebook to ??? or blogger -> wordpress -> Medium) would be huge. Something like IFTTT but on steroids.
In fact I still have my ICQ # memorized (there were numbers not screen names or email addresses).
Before that, IRC :)
All they needed to die was something new and shiny that people felt could be a credible alternative.