Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting?

Discoverability. Facebook has it inside the app. Email and texting require you to go out of band for it.

It's impossible to exaggerate the value of this. Groups of people who had lost contact in high school have gotten back in touch in retirement, planned trips, and traveled to a place to meet up together because Facebook has in-band discoverability. Before Facebook such a group of people would just hope someone in the group had enough time and patience to manually track everyone else down, which was probably hundreds of dollars of their time wasted.

Musicians find gigs through it. Friends of friends are leaky so you don't even have to bother people to find useful connections or fan pages. Businesses list specials, trips, blogs, etc. Way cheaper than sending out a snail mail newsletter or even managing an email list.

All Facebook's users save oodles of time connecting with acquaintances and making new connections, for whatever reasons they wish to connect.

Honestly, it's an incredibly difficult question to answer fully because I'm not sure where the short circuit is. Why do you see value in messaging protocols but not social networks?

> Musicians find gigs through it. Businesses list specials, trips, blogs, etc.

Also students are highly reliant on it. These types of loose connections but strong network effects are hard to break.

However... > Way cheaper than sending out a snail mail newsletter or even managing an email list.

This is true less frequently. Facebook used to be a good organic channel to build, but now FB is forcing more payments, by forcing ads to FB pages, and then again for boosting posts on those pages. Plus, the costs are rising.

> Groups of people who had lost contact in high school have gotten back in touch in retirement

I experienced this too, but I also had a controlled test, since I wanted to track down some high school friends who weren't on Facebook. Turned out not to be so hard, and caught up with a bunch of other old friends along the way. :)

Sometimes the alternatives offer other advantages we don't see if we frame the problem as replacing what we have now exactly.

> This is true less frequently. Facebook used to be a good organic channel to build, but now FB is forcing more payments, by forcing ads to FB pages, and then again for boosting posts on those pages. Plus, the costs are rising.

Less frequently than what? Keep in mind the OP I was responding to apparently didn't see any value to Facebook over email/texting. The fact that Facebook is willing to degrade its service even to be slightly better than managing an email list in return for higher ad revenue isn't particularly relevant to that.

> I experienced this too, but I also had a controlled test, since I wanted to track down some high school friends who weren't on Facebook. Turned out not to be so hard, and caught up with a bunch of other old friends along the way. :)

> Sometimes the alternatives offer other advantages we don't see if we frame the problem as replacing what we have now exactly.

That's great, but it has nothing to do with the value of Facebook's in-band discoverability over email/texting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com