Can Facebook be replaced? Let’s invest $100,000

Basically recreate the Facebook experience from around 2008-2010.

Probably still not enough, and people would definitely doubt your motivation ("they're going to sell out like Facebook anyway...").

IMO trying to replace Facebook is the wrong direction. Seems most people totally forgot that we actually should not care what our ex girlfriends neighbour is eating today and can't imagine a world without a central social network.

IMO we already have more than enough badly done MySpace clones. It's time we put our egos aside and move on

I've been evolving a plan and strategy over the years to address these problems, unfortunately it's all mostly on hold while I try to organize more stem cell injections to heal chronic pain I have; our healthcare systems aren't adequate in dealing with uncommon scenarios either.

Re: Funding - One I'd add to the list is to lobby government to provide $X annually per citizen that gets allocated to the user's choice to pay for their social network platform of choice; this would have to be tied to specific rules/guidelines. E.g. mandatory tax money that the person distributes how they want. Whether this will lead to the desired outcome, I'm unsure - people might still just want to give their money to Facebook or a platform who takes that money + still does less-than-good or less-than-desired behaviours, requiring regulation and oversight, costing taxpayers anyway. It might also incentivize private dollars to be more willing to invest in platforms if there's that money per-user that would be available.

Another I'd add or that's not explicitly stated is to create enough value that people - or enough people - are willing to pay; this ties into freemium model or subscription model.

I think the solution is, as you list, is a mix of different funding sources.

Investment should likewise not solely come from the VC model, it should come from a combination of sources: - From government -- if you can't convince a government to invest, then why not? - From philanthropic -- who will have a longer horizon than traditional VC, and who will hopefully require a higher burden on evidence that the leader(s) are good people. - From traditional VC -- who can benefit by reducing risk from the other funding sources, and to leverage the experienced VC's network and resources.

Also, brand names.

Facebook is brandable, Diaspora - I'm still not sure I pronounce it properly. App.net was a good attempt, a little more brandable than Diaspora - at least with technologists, however not necessarily consumer-friendly; their mission and fight, similarly to how Evan from Snapchat pushed back against what was essentially Mark bullying (sell to me or we'll copy you); ~7 years ago I wrote a blog post after Fred Wilson suggested I turn a comment into its own post, related to The Independent Web - and the requirement that that will require sharing, which means not being greedy, and not trying to capture 100% of value; http://mattamyers.tumblr.com/post/2903098250/the-independent...

Another competitive advantage: differentiation. Copying Facebook doesn't give anything to people that they don't otherwise have.

Whenever I see discussion about people creating a competitor to Facebook, they miss out on these two staples - differentiation and branding.

I've been evolving my own ideas and plans, multiple platforms to create an ecosystem, however I've been struggling with chronic pain the last few years - and finding doctors locally to do continue the simple stem cell injections I was getting (and that 100% were healing the pain) has proven difficult due to incompetence in the system; I've come to realize that doctors are selected for their memorization skills (via tests), and not for critical thinking skills. The pain primarily disrupts my executive function and decision making, and so this has lead to me almost being paralyzed - but more unfortunately dependant on other people who haven't been competent or available enough to do the work of finding a willing doctor for me. What confuses people is I can reason and storytell still, not really any decision making required when simply stream of consciousness writing, otherwise I find myself stuck in routine I had before I was introduced to the pain in my body. I can ramble on forever, until mentally exhausted anyhow - and then I ground again slightly to feeling the pain more clearly. Actually I wrote about how I reconnected with the pain in an HN comment yesterday, if curious in a simplified version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16894072

The brand name for one of two main platforms I have been evolving my plans for is ENGN, pronounced engine. There's a story of how I evolved to that name, my focus is fading now though, so won't share it now. Randomly writing long comments pretending people will care as a mechanism to give meaning and feel connected to people more than I currently can in real life; I can't really participate in emotional bonds/relationships with emotion as the added stress is another variable to manage with the pressure the pain puts on my system.

I honestly don't know if I will find a doctor to heal the pain within a timely manner - have already been at my wit's end, however I don't want my life's work to disappear, so I have it written to give my domain names, etc to Elon Musk - as he's the only most obvious holistic thinker that wears his heart on his sleeve, and does his best to think through things will affect everyone; the current condition and lack of organization for my plans would likely be describable as a clusterfuck, so the domains and logos may be the only thing really usable for him/the team he'd hopefully put to work if I'm not around to execute on it myself.

Clearly I got a second mental wind, though it's getting cooler outside now and the hunger signal is telling me/directing me to get food now. Thanks for reading, internet stranger, if you got this far.

If I had the focus/concentration and self-direction/executive function ability, I'd go through all of the social network plan repository and comment on it all from my perspective.

At first cut I think of Telegram, Signal, Discord, Snap, WeChat, Line (East Asia), KakaoTalk (Korea). Maybe HN.

Edit: Read a comment of yours below to see you're talking about email.

I watched the exact same thing obsess the tech world and Silicon Valley in particular, for over a decade, regarding Windows. Windows never got replaced, instead the ground changed under it, an inflection opened up new opportunities (which created nothing more than a duopoly in iOS + Android for two other giants). That's exactly what will happen with Facebook. Five or six years from now, they'll be doing a hundred billion dollars in sales, they'll be larger than ever before, and more profitable than ever before. Some day the ground will shift under them, opening up a big opportunity, and it'll require a technology shift. Then we'll probably just get another tech giant or three dominating the new thing, rinse and repeat. This is all extraordinarily predictable. The easiest thing of all to predict? Decentralization will perpetually continue to fail as a mass-consumer premise. Decentralization is the ultimate tech fantasy, and the greatest demonstration that engineers very often have a poor understanding of typical consumers. Nothing has had more thought & effort put into it, with fewer results to show for it, than decentralization for mass consumer products/services, over the last 15-20 years.

https://web.archive.org/web/20121009223506/https://motherboa...

Excerpts:

* The team of four young kids had little real-world programming experience.

* The team found themselves crushed under the weight of expectation.

* The first release, on September 15, 2010 was a public disaster, mainly for its bugs and security holes.

* Google+ imitated Diaspora core features such as circles, and invested lots of money, but still failed.

* The team ran low on money, and VC interested waned.

* Sadly one of team members suicided.

Facebook took over Harvard, MIT, and then spread uni to uni until people were clamoring to get on. I still remember when I wasn't able to get onto FB. Pinterest's growth was really weak early on when they tried to be all things to all people, but then they doubled down on women, fashion, and crafters. Hacker News started oriented around the Valley and Valley-leaning/Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. Reddit's initial userbase is a bit more complicated to define but was not anywhere as diverse as it is now.

If you look at less successful, but still succeeding, social networks you see a little of this occurring. Orkut was general but quickly became a Brazilian social network. Ello was general but doubled down on designers and is still going. Sticking to your niche works fine if you lack the escape velocity to go general.

Diaspora's problem, to me, is that "people sick of Twitter" is not really a cohesive community. Similarly for app.net and Mastodon. "People sick of Facebook" is likely to be a similarly pointless target market.