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Comment by TheAdamAndChe | Hacker News Reader

Thinking of Facebook merely as a consumer platform seems overly broad to me. Each of those are social networks, but they fill a particular niche in the social experience. YouTube is for asynchronous videos from people you generally don't directly know, Reddit is for pseudoanonymous communities, etc.

Facebook's niche is in one-to-many communication with people you directly know. It's also arguably one of the stickiest forms of social network because of the strength of its network effects. There is very little real competition in that niche.

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Finding niches is how competition happens. Another term for it is market differentiation. Even if two products/companies start out identically, they quickly diverge somewhat.

Pepsi doesn't copy Coca-Cola's marketing about being a sexy/mainstream drink, they create their own niche of being for younger independent personalities.

When people choose to get their viral news from Reddit rather than Facebook, or their viral videos from YouTube rather than Facebook, that's competition period.

The difference between Coke and Pepsi is marketing and flavor, but they directly compete in the same market. The products they have are virtually the same, only minor differences.

The product differences between, say, Facebook and YouTube are night and day. You wouldn't add an acquaintance on YouTube and start messaging them through that platform. I'm not sure you can even message people like that on it anymore. But you can on Facebook. They're fundamentally different products, they only align because they both have some sort of social aspect to them. Kind of.

I'd look at it a different way: "Facebook" and "YouTube" aren't single products, but rather each one is a collection of something like 10-20 products that live on a single platform.

For "viral videos", Facebook and YouTube (and Reddit) absolutely directly compete in the same market.

For "educational videos", YouTube competes with other platforms.

While for "tracking social acquaintances" Facebook competes with the Contacts apps by Apple and Google, as well as other messaging apps.

Really there's no such product category as a "Facebook" or a "YouTube". And Facebook's original product category -- to keep track of social contacts and post public and private social messages -- is now only a tiny part of Facebook.

Facebook and YouTube are both in the market for users to show advertising to, and generally every minute spent on one is a minute explicitly not spent on the other. If facebook were selling communication with friends, then YouTube would not be a competitor, but that's not Facebook's business, nor would anyone argue that Facebook has a monopoly on talking to your friends.

This is a matter of perspective. Being intimately familiar with the differences between YouTube and Facebook, you can point out many differences. I'm sure if you were a food scientist or food marketing exec you could point out many difference between different soft drinks. These differences are market differentiators, not evidence of being in an entirely different market. Outside of the tech sphere, people see social media as a monolith in the same way that you see the soft drink industry.

> Another term for it is market differentiation.

Companies differentiate products to avoid competition. It’s marketing 101.

But... they're still competing.

You don't think ballpoint pens and gel pens compete with each other?

Just because the consumer gets more choice doesn't mean they're not competing.

Hacker News is a monopoly in the social-news-aggregator-with-a-tech-focus-along-with-other-interesting-content-and-strong-moderation-space. dang better watch out for the FTC.

You can define any company as a monopoly if you dig deep down enough through market segments and features.

That argument goes the other way as well, you can construct every company as being not a monopoly by painting the market segment broad enough.

I don't think this is a valid argument.

At least in the cases of Standard Oil and Bell, you would have needed to define the markets as energy and communication (including the post office) for them to not have had near total control.

You could state the generalized product they sold and their total control was evident.

How is "communication" not potentially as broad as "Social media platform"? Basically every form of digital communication falls under the banner of social media platform these days. (The GP comment cites Reddit, YouTube and SMS—as diverse a set of websites from Facebook (while still being communication-focused) as I could imagine)

It is exactly a valid argument. The points you and the parent comment are making are the very heart of the issue in horizontal merger and monopolization cases: what is the relevant market?

Draw it narrowly (I.e., convince the judge to accept a narrow market definition) and making the case against a merger or in favor of monopolization becomes easy. Convince the judge to draw it broadly and it becomes much harder to stop a merger or to make a monopolization claim.

You are misunderstanding me. Yes the issue is exactly about where to draw the line. The parent's dismissed statements that facebook is a monopoly by saying "you can make every company a monopoly if you make the category narrow enough". My argument is exactly what you are saying, you can not dismiss the statement "facebook is a monopoly" by saying "every company is a monopoly if we make a narrow enough category", you need to actually make arguments (and convince the judge) why the category should be this narrow/broad.

If you keep narrowing the focus down, every product becomes a monopoly on its functionality?

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