Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by puranjay | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

puranjay

The "millennial" social networks were all about sharing

The Gen-Z social networks will be all about creation

Zuckerberg does not have a finger in this pie and that should be an alarming sign for any Facebook share holders.

View on HN

> Zuckerberg does not have a finger in this pie and that should be an alarming sign for any Facebook share holders.

Why? Facebook can wait until one proves to be the winner and buy them out. Or, in case the target is unwilling to be taken over (like Snapchat was), Facebook simply integrates their model into FB/Instagram, exposes it to billions of people at once and crushes the target.

I'm not sure they can truly afford it at TikTok's current valuation. TikTok's maker, ByteDance, also has a "revenue moat" in the form of their news app.

The time to buy TikTok was three years and 500M users ago.

ByteDance is valued at over $80 billion, if the Chinese government would even allow the purchase. They've also invested a helluva lot of machine learning resources into building a platform that's hard to copy.

Hard to copy??? It's 30 second videos. They don't have any amount of machine learning or tech that FB doesn't, and in this case we're just talking about user recommendations, which FB is the absolute master of (perhaps on the level of Google, but no one else is close to those two).

If it was that easy, Tencent would already have copied them. Google's video recommendations (at least on YouTube) are absolutely horrible, and Facebook has almost zero experience recommending videos. Effective recommendations really make a difference; that's how ByteDance's first product, Toutiao, a news aggregator, became so popular.

People use youtube for more than 40 minutes at a time on average, FB; 20 minutes. These are because their recommendation systems are, counter to your opinion, really good. Facebook's whole business depends on presenting posts based on how likely you are to engage with them. Other companies might not want to copy TikTok right now because it brings in a whopping $3 million per month, so probably not worth it. There are more reasons behind not copying a business than the ease of doing so.

> Facebook simply integrates their model into FB/Instagram

FB got away with it because Vine and Snap had really awful UX.

I don't remember an app that lasted less time on my phone than Vine, it's almost like it was made exclusively for people glued on their phone all day. Sound on by default? REALLY?

Vine is a video app -- those tend to work pretty poorly without sound

>Facebook can wait until one proves to be the winner and buy them out

ByteDance is one of the most valuable unicorns in the world, I can't see that ever happening.

> Facebook can wait until one proves to be the winner and buy them out.

Isn't it Chinese government policy not to block such transactions?

Google didn't buy Baidu, and Ebay didn't buy AliExpress, and Paypal didn't buy WeChat Pay.

It's funny to say PayPal didn't buy WeChat Pay.

It might be a temporary thing. Yahoo owned a chunk of Alibaba and Naspers owns a large chunk of Tencent.

Moving off topic a bit: almost every generation is known by a non-alphabetic name, except for Generation X, which never received its own label.

  - Lost Generation (1883 - 1900 cohort, extinct as of 2018)
  - Greatest Generation (1901 - 1927, WWII generation)
  - Silent Generation (1928 - 1945, McCarthy, Korean war, civil rights)
  - Baby boomers (1946 - 1964, post-war, Vietnam War, hippies)
  - Generation X (1965 - 1980)
  - Millennials (1981 - 1996, formerly known as Generation Y)
  - Generation Z (1997 - early-2000s)

Some are starting to call Generation Z "Post-Millennial", but I think they'll get their own label in due time. Something reflexive of the time in which they grew up, which is something we probably won't be able to call out just yet.

"iGeneration" is a label that gets tossed around occasionally, but it's so meh.

In the meantime, I've been calling them Zoomers or Zoomies :P

I'd like to add that before the term "Millennial" was invented, Gen-Y were sometimes referred to as echo-boomers. This is because if you look at a graph of births/year you see a big spike for the baby boomers, and later you see another smaller but still noticeable spike when they start having kids. Hence, echo-boomers

"X" really is the name of Generation X. It was a response to the feeling of being lost and unnoticed after the attention paid to baby boomers. Some of that was just youthful disaffectation: "oh, look, all of the good jobs are filled by older people who don't understand me, and my culture isn't as cool as the classics they grew up with". And some is the lack of a big defining event (basically, war) that focused culture on some specific thing.

There was no Generation W. Only the Baby Boom (starting in 1944 and going on a decade or so) was an actual demographic event, followed by a smaller "baby bust" and an even smaller "baby boom echo" that corresponds vaguely to GenX. Subsequent "generations" are pretty much exclusively in the minds of marketers and social media.

So to the degree that Generation X is a notion worthy of a name, "X" is the name they gave themselves, following Douglas Coupland's book, which didn't coin the term but attracted a lot of attention. The book was mostly about dotcom culture, and "dotcom" would be a better name for it since that was the defining event of that generation (if it had one at all).

"Z" is now entering the same phase: graduating into the world of work, hating entry-level jobs, and not yet having its big cultural moment. If there is one at all.

Zoomers sdoes to be the popular term nowadays.

Zoomers is definitely the right term there.

So Reddit is essentially a millennial social network?... And Hacker News too?

Gee. I feel old now. Real kick in the face. ;)

Would mean GitHub is a Gen Z social network, so don't feel too old.

Gen Z Social Network -> Creation does not imply that Creation -> Gen Z Social Network

Reddit and HN also appealed to us people born in the late ‘70s - early ‘80s whom I wouldn’t call millennials (I’m born in 1980 and I definitely do not consider myself a millennial). We are an interesting generation, we joined the workforce a little after the dot-com crash but before the 2008 financial crisis and especially before all this social media crazyness.

That would be Generation X. Oft forgot, but still there.

Late 70s early 80s is a cusp microgeneration called Xennials or Orgeon Trail, sharing traits of both GenX and Millenials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

Reply on news.ycombinator.com