Is that headline damning with faint praise? Mere "thousands" doesn't seem like enough to get critical mass on a social network. For comparison Google+ had something on the order of 300 million users and failed to get traction.
If Google+ failed with google immediately signing anyone with a gmail account up for it and pushing it fairly hard with all their channels - how extremely unlikely is it for someone to organically take Facebook’s market share away?
Oh no problem, you’ll only need someone with more resources than Google!
If HN fails to ever hit 1M users, PG (or Sam Altman) isn’t going to shut it down or cut off its funding, and neither he nor Y Combinator are expecting or relying on it to generate revenue. It continues to exist after over a decade because the Y Combinator folks find the content and discussion interesting.
And hey, that’s all well and good. I’m glad that HN sticks around when a more profit-driven site would’ve failed years ago. But it’s important to note that what works for HN likely wouldn’t work for anyone else.
> But it’s important to note that what works for HN likely wouldn’t work for anyone else.
It's also important to note that what does work for HN, might work for others too. We won't know unless we try. Strict moderation is something that helped HN, helped make Flashback (Swedish Forum) tolerable and something many of the greatest subreddits applied with great success. Just an example.
The value isn't in selling ads.
I see this whole line of reasoning that thousands of people isn't enough to be newsworthy a symptom of valleythink where all that is valued is growth.
There are other factors that indicate success and the community for the most part has lost sight of those for the tunnel vision of "must get funding!"
Sounds like this isn't envisioned as a profit-making business, either. I'd happily donate some money to have a place my friends and family can easily hang out online that isn't trying to sell us to anything.
I would say in general, places where you interact with other people ends up building some sort of social network of it's insides.
spamming was the only problem i saw. and i just couldn't comprehend that the same company that defeated spams in email couldn't do the same on their social network.
someone made a comment earlier about twitter killed vine and now tiktok is being a better vine. maybe someday we will see a social network where the emphasis is on communities and not the self. that's what google+ did better than anything that was out there.
That seems to be filled by irc channels (less now), subreddits and more recently discords.
Technically anyone can use the dating service Christian Mingle. But you might not find a lot of atheists or Jewish people on there, simply because of the name and the implication of the people who would use a service with that name.
Fortunately, the protocol name is almost a filtering function that removes anyone so immature as to be put off by the name. The rest embrace the name, who doesn't like a good butt?
To confirm: a copy of my messages and images is permanently stored in my friend´s and my friend´s of friend´s diaries (up until the point where they delete them, I presume)
On the other hand, being the social network for a smaller audience is very do-able. Even Facebook started locally at Zuckerbergs college, then expanded to other colleges, before eventually opening up. Being the social network for a single school only requires a few thousand people.. then you're the social network everyone (in that school) wants to be on to discuss events relevant to the school... and you've created your foothold.
Google was never interested in a creating a foothold in a small niche. They said "We're google.. basic marketing rules don't apply" and they learned they were wrong.
In this case at least the users had agency and actually signed up.
Still a small number in the grand scheme, but G+ was a bit of a different beast due to how Google launched it.
It's kind of like running for president of the United States and bragging that you got "hundreds" of votes.
If you're going to blow up to the size of facebook you're just going to suffer from the very same problems. More diversity and more competition and more alternatives is what this is supposed to be part of. I think the point here is to build an ecosystem of saner social networks, not the next Franken-network.
> Social media consultant Zoe Cairns said she thought the network would have to grow its numbers quickly in order to prove itself to be a viable alternative to the giants.
> "It's going to need a lot of money ploughed into it," she said.
> "People are so used to social media being free. I think businesses might pay for it, but people are so used to having news at their fingertips for free."
I'm not sure it matters for this social network. It's positioning as a news-based platform doesn't require people you know personally to use the site in order for it to have value.
Perhaps conversely, too many people on a social network may be detrimental to these aims, as ever more narrow-minded echo chambers or factions can achieve critical mass.
What a compelling experience...