Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

DyslexicAtheist

as much as I applaud the effort, the next Uber or Facebook won't be a better Uber or Facebook but something totally different. I wish companies would stop trying to be better copies of existing services. Facebook had traction because it was radically different from anything that was before.

Also they have no idea how to finance and fund their growth:

>Our business model is not and will never be advertisements.

We will have a transparent revenue model based on a generic way for people to securely transact physical and digital goods and services inside the network. This will be done through an atomic digital unit of value. Although this initially reflected as a marketplace, our ambitions go way beyond that.

Apart from this, we’re also planning to help enterprise customers setting up their own internal, self-hosted and secure social networks with extra functionality such as projects, identity and access management.

> Facebook had traction because it was radically different from anything that was before.

Not really. Facebook was hardly the first social network, but it was better (at certain things, like friends discovery) and worse at others (like publishing your own content).

> the next Uber or Facebook won't be a better Uber or Facebook but something totally different.

Based on what premise?

> I wish companies would stop trying to be better copies of existing services.

Why? Almost all creativity and improvement goes by creating a better version of something that exists already.

Probably because, if one wants a social network, there are already many good ones in the market. And the people who care enough about privacy to quit facebook, probably won't use any social network at all.

> Facebook had traction because it was radically different from anything that was before.

How was Facebook radically different than other social media sites? In my opinion, it was almost exactly the same as the rest. They just leveraged some clever marketing.

Social networks, back then, was to bring minds together, not people.

The only major difference with FB was it limited your network to your college.

In terms of features it was a static page with the only dynamic capability being the ability to poke someone.

Facebook is just another social media site, not really much different than Myspace was before it.

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