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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

> I think Sundar has been a pretty good CEO and probably a better businessman

Has he though? I get the sense that he’s really Balmering it up in that he inherited a super successful company, and didn’t do much with it except not screw up.

The two big growth areas- social and cloud- are dead or a distant and growing third.

Google hasn’t done much new or exciting through his whole term. So no new products, the 2016 election and congressional testimony debacle, randomly firing different people with no sound reasoning.

It would be neat if someone could establish a vision beyond “10% growth forever through lots of rent seeking.” Maybe a company has to go through their Ballmer to get to their Nadella.

Maybe they can somehow convince Jeff Dean to be CEO and just write an AI that generally maximizes profit.

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YouTube and Gmail are massive social networks.

If you want to water down the definition beyond recognition then snail mail is a social network.

Snail mail is a social network. I think the OP meant online social networks, though.

It's in the nature of social networks that new social networks don't look like old ones. Youtube is definitely a social network, and so is Twitch, Discord, TikTok, etc. Youtube has the additional advantage of having persistent count, so I would count on Youtube lasting much longer than any other social network whose popularity changes generation to generation.

It is interesting that the part of "social network" that now defines something as a social network is really the feed. Its a neverending not-river of more. Chatrooms notwithstanding, a newsfeed a la facebook/youtube/reddit/, it's a mix of professional content and user generated. The actual messaging with each other, and sharing with each other is tangent to what they do. Social network is almost a misnomer because most of the interaction is person->ai. For a lurker who doesnt have friends, doesnt comment, and doesnt share; youtube and tumblr are closer to netflix than they are to anything "social." That grouping should be called something like an Autofeed Broadcaster, of which gmail is tangentially like, because people use it to consume mass marketing and newsletters.

Discord feels more like the odd one out because it is a realtime river, not sorted or ranked like reddit. That sort of content rearranging is what makes modern social networks different from forms and chat.

I would debate both of those are social networks. Now I will grant you that in the past I would have considered YouTube one, but today it's just content delivery with comments.

Thats exactly what the facebook newsfeed is. A streaming feed of content, posted by publishers and users alike, and through likes, shares, and comments its popularity rises and it floats its way up the algorithm. Then when it gains reach, lots of people comment on it.

Facebook still has user to user messaging, Youtube does not.

Just because you have an algorithm that determines what should flow to the top of the main page, doesn't make it a social network.

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