Are Social Media Platforms the Next Dying Malls? | Hacker News Reader

Are Social Media Platforms the Next Dying Malls?

honest-broker.com

35 pointspaulpauper15 comments

> 2. Malls died because there were too many of them. Social media is now entering that same phase.

This is a good thing for social networks, not bad. The model of everyone being in the same place is what's failed. Twitter and Reddit became entrenched enough to turn hostile to their users. The passive will stay with those, but the deliberate are now able to seek out the community that suits them. It's good that there's more selection. It would be a big failure if the whole eternal September migrated to Mastodon or Bluesky or some other single place.

We've long known that smaller communities are higher quality. "Too many" choices ensures we'll avoid the failure of recreating Twitter elsewhere.

The author of the piece is thinking about their "vocation". If people advertising their blog are discouraged from joining the new spaces, that just preserves them for more organic communication and less self promotion.

I hope so, but I actually think that "malls" are far less toxic and detrimental to society; so I'm not sure malls are even remotely comparable to "social media".

All else being equal, what has less environmental/societal/* impact? An empty mall, or an empty facebook?

Less impact? An empty mall.

I’d be over the moon for “empty Facebook”

At least malls had a functional economic agreement between the mall owner and the shops. With social media platforms, they will bring in partners and then screw them the second they can cannibalize their business opportunities. Imagine a mall where the owners forcibly removed successful shops with their own carbon copy the moment that shop figured out a good business model.

> Imagine a mall where the owners forcibly removed successful shops with their own carbon copy the moment that shop figured out a good business model.

Isn't that kind of what Amazon does?

Amazon isn't a mall though

What is it then? Seems like a virtual version of a mall to me.

The virtual part is the problem.

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

> A shopping mall (or simply mall) is a large indoor shopping center, usually anchored by department stores.

Everybody on HN is already perfectly aware that Amazon.com is not a physical shopping mall.

Instead of telling us what we already know, explain why you think the difference matters.

The lack of a physical space.

If a mall were to replace Build-a-bear with Stuff-a-snail and the Stuff-a-snail tanks then the mall is on the hook for that space's rent (or really the mall just takes a profitability hit; w/e).

If Amazon decides to replace Duracell AA Batteries with Amazon Basics AA Batteries and every gadget comes with a lithium battery now so nobody needs AA then Amazon just cancels future orders and doesn't have to pay taxes for the land the battery factory is on. Not even sure Amazon needs to cancel future orders either; AmazonBasics might work like "Amazon Brand" and they let a third party use the AmazonBasics (or alternative) trademark.

If the item is just "Amazon Brand" and not AmazonBasics then Amazon literally has no risk as it's just a seller (not Amazon) having some exclusive agreement to sell that product on Amazon. If that seller does well then Amazon collects fulfillment fees and if that seller does poorly then Amazon collects warehousing fees.

Sounds like Amazon and/or Walmart.

Surveillance and censorship don't facilitate meaningful social interaction. People do want to use computers to coordinate social value, but the model of involving a 3rd party is not desirable.

Correspondence through letters is a ghost of times past but people write messages & communicate to each other more than ever, over multiple media. Will particular platforms be as abandoned as writing a letter and sticking a stamp on it someday - yes

Autonomous agents will soon handle distribution, making these platforms unnecessary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com