Comment by rndgermandude | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rndgermandude | Hacker News Reader

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Let's pretend facebook leaves and a EU competitor who follows the GDPR comes alive and Europeans start using it... And the other people outside the EU start using it to stay connected with their EU friends and family... and companies all around the world start using it to stay connected with their EU clientèle... and some major "celebs" start using it either as a political statement or because they don't like that facebook invades their privacy... and then other people outside the EU start using it to stay connected with the other outside-EU people, celebs and companies who already started using it...

We actually had a "facebook" in Germany once named StudiVZ. What killed it was low quality (i.e. many bugs), mismanagement, but more importantly facebook's network effect. If facebook leaves or gets pushed out of the EU, it's entirely possible it will suffer a lot or even go the MySpace route, being hit by hard by the network effect a new European player may create.

Unfortunately it is the nature of the internet social network sector to be monopolistic. Few (if any?) local social networks have survived because people typically - especially europeans - have friends outside EU. VK is a notable exception and i wonder how they made it - possibly anti-americanism played a role.

In a way, facebook should wish they have some competition, so they can avoid all the nosy anti-trust questions, but they don't.

vk is big in Russia (and some other parts) because they are proper Russian, in Russian and for Russians, and they are largely unmoderated, so you can easily find nice and nasty in the same place and also all the warez, porn (incl revenge and child) etc you will ever want. It's really the "wild east" there; I was pretty shocked when somebody started spamming child porn vk groups to one of the websites I moderate (and they were active weeks later still).

Then again, I was told by some Russian acquaintances that vk does not try to push American/European morals (like no nudity for America, no "hate speech"/gore for EU) and that really is how they explain it is so popular (then again, of course you wouldn't want to run an LGBT community on vk). Other folks from the West and Latin America found it useful too. E.g. I read that some German Nationalists/White Supremacist fringe groups moved to vk because it will not crack down on those groups, unlike Facebook.

But back to my point: if the EU really cracks down on facebook so that it is (forced to) stop(s) being available in the EU, then some new player from the EU might fill the gap and the network effect of friends and family may drive people to the EU version that anybody can use and away from the US version that EU cannot use and is a privacy nightmare anyway; so the effect may point in the opposite direction this time. I know the likelihood of this happening is pretty low, but a lot less low now with the GDPR and the EU politicians' new found interest in facebook's business model.

I'm sorry but what is your source of information exactly? "Hate speech" vkontakte is very dangerous in Russia and could put you in prison for a long time. Even upvotes and reposts could lead to very undesirable outcome. On the other hand I never heard of any problems for LGBT communities: despite western propaganda no one really cares about them. It didn't took me long to google them.

I don't remember any significant bugs in studivz. Also, in my opinion, the site's design was very clear and straightforward. I definitely preferred it over Facebook and would still.

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