SV really isn't as much of a meritocracy as people like to pretend, as so many times just being first to the party and locking people in is enough to keep them there. I'm sure tons of businesses on exchange would love to ditch and move to Google Apps for Business, but the change is just too much of a hassle, even if the features are exactly as desired. Same for Google businesses looking at the MS office world with starry eyes.
The merit often has less to do with a product's success and continued success as much as how efficient they are at locking people in. Going back to Facebook, it's not like there's a way to migrate or exfiltrate your data in any meaningful way to another system.
This is an exaggerated comparison, but the mafia adds value much in the same way, in that often you don't have a choice in the matter. This isn't to say people are forced to use Facebook, but much like a mafia town, it's hard to do business otherwise.
Sure, and that applied to Friendster and Myspace and others as well, until Facebook came along.
There are other examples. The iPhone was not the first smart phone, but it was better than all of the others when it came out. It dominated for a while, and even though it's no longer the dominant smart phone (I believe there are more Android phones), all smart phones are derivatives of that first iPhone. Google beat Yahoo and AltaVista. Historically, I think it's usually second-movers that win, because they tend to benefit from the first-movers defining the problem, and one of the second-movers solves it better.
But the next big social network or software that connects may not look anything like Facebook. It will be most likely be unrecognizable as a social network even.
"If you don't want someone doing cocaine, make a better cocaine!"
> Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives.
https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/185/3/203/2915143/Assoc...
"Face-to-face social interactions enhance well-being. With the ubiquity of social media, important questions have arisen about the impact of online social interactions. In the present study, we assessed the associations of both online and offline social networks with several subjective measures of well-being. We used 3 waves (2013, 2014, and 2015) of data from 5,208 subjects in the nationally representative Gallup Panel Social Network Study survey, including social network measures, in combination with objective measures of Facebook use. We investigated the associations of Facebook activity and real-world social network activity with self-reported physical health, self-reported mental health, self-reported life satisfaction, and body mass index. Our results showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being. For example, a 1-standard-deviation increase in “likes clicked” (clicking “like” on someone else's content), “links clicked” (clicking a link to another site or article), or “status updates” (updating one's own Facebook status) was associated with a decrease of 5%–8% of a standard deviation in self-reported mental health. These associations were robust to multivariate cross-sectional analyses, as well as to 2-wave prospective analyses. The negative associations of Facebook use were comparable to or greater in magnitude than the positive impact of offline interactions, which suggests a possible tradeoff between offline and online relationships."
Facebook is toxic.
>Facebook is toxic.
Or alternatively mentally ill people like Facebook.
It's a vicious cycle, so correlation becomes causation!
Maybe there isn't enough proof to say "Facebook is toxic", but it certainly seems true that Facebook is not as good as real human interaction.
Given that loneliness and isolation actually is toxic [0], for many it's not that online interactions are replacing offline interactions; they're the only interactions these people can get.
[0]http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/174569161456835...