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Comment by Cymruboogaloo | Hacker News Reader

Facebook stole pretty much wholesale, Stories from Snap, The timeline from Twitter, and now reels is its Tiktok clone. They've recently introduced "rooms" which is its theft of Houseparty not Zoom which everyone thought.

Facebook is a horrible company which hasn't come up with and original idea in years. It now uses its "sign in with facebook" button to see which apps people are using before copying them completely and leveraging its social graph. At this point its a parasite on the web that stalls innovation.

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Insta, Snap and Tiktok (and in some ways Twitter) are all slowly converging on being almost the same identical product, FB isn't the only one cloning features.

Feels really there is a lack of true creativity and innovation across the board and they're more being driven by feature FOMO than anything else at this point.

And what they can't copy, the will buy with their monopoly money: Yahoo bought Tumblr, Flickr. Google bought Android, Youtube. Apple bought beats, siri. And all do a lot of acqui-hiring which kills competition in early stage.

I would be happy about FB dying, but what is wrong with copying good interface ideas?

I hate FB, but I hate making such stuff patentable/copyrightable/unreusable/uncopiable even more.

Those aren't good interface ideas those are features that alot of trial and error and research went into. Think of it like a new drug. Theres alot of R&D poured into these things. not on the same regulatory or financial scale but work goes into that. Facebook blocks the growth of these by copying wholesale and throwing it at its database of users so they never have to leave their ecosystem.

Look at what instagram has become from photosharing app to an everything platform that has a horrible UX.

> I would be happy about FB dying, but what is wrong with copying good interface ideas?

Nothing, in my opinion. The problem arises when a company is so large that simply implementing a good interface idea completely destroys the value of the original. The best example is Snapchat. Snapchat got big, fast, because its main conceit, while simple, was pretty unique. As soon as Instagram implemented it, Snapchat fell off a cliff, because why use Snapchat when you can just use Instagram?

It does the same thing on mobile, that's why it knows what to buy.

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