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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

The cohort of young people that used AIM/MSN/Y! (depending on your region) aged up into Facebook Chat [1]. Facebook captured the 'chat with people you know in real life' usecase, gradually leaving distance-only or interest-specific friends on the old chat networks. This greatly contributed to their decline.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15417521

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> The cohort of young people that used AIM/MSN/Y! (depending on your region) aged up into Facebook Chat [1].

Speak for yourself, most of my social group is split between iMessage and WhatsApp.

Even so, what Facebook has that MySpace didn't is enough money to buy up its competitors to stay relevant (e.g. WhatsApp). So this might be what will happen, even if Facebook itself fades in relevance.

(Bear in mind that even if Facebook Messenger grew in popularity as AIM declined, so too did the number of people online increase, and the number of people with smartphones -- saying that one increased while the other decreased is not sufficient.)

> Even so, what Facebook has that MySpace didn't is enough money to buy up its competitors to stay relevant

Echoing that, I'd add that FB/Zuckerberg knows when to do one of the following with an upcoming competitor a) snatch it up b) throw company's resources at duplicating it

Good point, it was pretty interesting that Facebook was allowed to buy WhatsApp. That just seemed like slow monopoly building in live action to me. Regulators just can't keep up

While it's anecdotal I was heavy on AIM and never got into Facebook chat. It's actually a bummer for me, I loved chatting and the chat apps all kinda died off.

While I use a lot of FB Chat, I feel like the thing I use most like old AIM is Steam's chat. I chat randomly with a lot of people, some of which I don't know in real life.

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