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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

I'd hesitate to generalize AOL's fall into Facebook's future.

AOL's core proposition was being better than the Internet (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and internet exploded in size and scale, AOL's value evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation.

And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL Instant Messager (AIM), because it was the most network/platform component of AOL.

So how would that happen to Facebook, and what would it look like?

Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Facebook has rightly identified onboarding younger cohorts as key to their survival, but I don't see any realistic way Facebook dies a natural death in under 40 years.

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I actually think in a way one of Facebooks core proposition is being the internet for most people which is not that far off from AOL. The similarity here is that no one knows what is going to render FB obsolete right now. Just like no one knew what was going to do the same for AOL. AOL lost in part I believe because they were not really able to transition from Dialup "internet" Provider to Content Aggregator when broadband became a thing. The value add just wasn't there.

It may come to pass that Facebook is a generational phenomenon, like rock-'n'-roll. It'll be the thing for "old people" soon enough.

Instagram will be the thing for “old people” soon enough

Not if they manage to pull off Instagram for Kids

I can’t understand how Instagram for Kids can succeed. Any parent that knows half of the bad stuff Facebook allegedly does (and how other “for Kids” efforts have utterly failed to protect the children) would never let their kids on such a platform. I would sooner buy a product labeled Crack Cocaine for Kids; it would be safer for them.

So the assumption is that currently, without instagram for kids, kids are not using social media at all and are not exposed to adult content on the internet? Are we living on the same planet?

I dont understand this, instagram for kids is supposed to give parents more control over what kids do on the internet. How could this make things worse?

To me it looks like, blind oposition to insta kids is largely due to irrational hatred towards facebook (partialy because it is cool to hate facebook now, and partially due to political conformism. As both D and R have found reasons why Facebook is bad to them)

If you were to ask me. Kids should be given less and less access of social media apps like these. Social media might have some good positive use cases but for the most part it is problematic and tends to err on the negative side. Recent studies have shown that Instagram has harmful and negative effects on teenagers. What makes you think it is okay to ignore this alarm?

Remember. Kids are using Instagram because a guardian/supervisor has allowed them to.

Instagram for Kids is a cheap attempt by Zuckerberg to groom young minds into assimilating into the sick digital abyss of social media. Not because we want to make safe spaces for kids. Nothing about unrestricted access to Instagram-like apps is safe, let alone positive, for young minds.

Nice try Mark!

The downfall of Facebook will be web3 social and/or the decentralized metaverse.

AOL also had to deal with the Time Warner merger when they had to be laser focused on the transition to broadband. Without that, billions of people could be using AOL today

    Users would need an order of magnitude superior 
    alternative, and most critically, users would 
    need to move en mass.

Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook.

I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own.

But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very often, and I've got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise.

History tells us that something eventually will replace it. But, it's hard to imagine.

> But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise.

That used to be a fear of mine, but after deleting my account I’ve found it to be a core feature. It forces me to be intentional with my relationships; if I want to stay in touch with someone I have to make the effort. Otherwise, the relationship is likely more parasocial than actively rewarding, and I’m consciously ok focusing my energies on the people I currently want in my life to the exclusion of those relationships that have slipped into parasocial territory.

That sounds like a healthy place to be -- congrats on achieving that.

I've largely achieved that as well, I think. Slightly different road traveled, perhaps. I have a larger than average extended family: a dozen aunts/uncles and a corresponding number of cousins. It's impossible to have a close relationship with all of them, but I do enjoy keeping up with how they're doing and knowing when big life events (and deaths) happen.

So, my day-to-day life has absolutely nothing to do with FB. I've got notifications off and I typically feel no desire to check it. Instead I'm focused on my much smaller number of intentional, meaningful relationships. But, from time to time I do enjoy scrolling through FB and seeing how so-and-so is doing.

Do you have an extended family you keep in touch with? Do you keep up with them through other means, or have you just sort of let them fade from your life?

I have a similar sized extended family, but I’ve honestly let them fade from my life. I’m old enough that the weddings and babies era is long behind us and we’re scattered all over the country. All I care to get I get from my mom, which is nice because it gives us something to talk about.

I have surrounded myself with chosen family and am always meeting new people. I give generously of myself to the people in my life because it brings me joy to do so. It’s a conscious trade off that means I lose touch with some people, and I’m ok with that. Most relationships should have an expiration date anyway; far too many people just go through the motions out of a sense of obligation.

Being able to passively keep in touch with many of the thousands of people I've met in my life is incredibly valuable to me.

It feels incredibly sad to just let those relationships die because you're focusing your energies on the people that are currently around you.

Not trying to nitpick, and not arguing with the sense of sadness you feel -- I sympathize -- but I wouldn't call "passively keeping in touch" with thousands of people "relationships." It's something, but I'm not sure what, it seems like we may not have a good word for "casual strangers," the level of familiarity beneath acquaintance that we know because we met them once and then know only what they post in one social media database or another.

Also, to be honest, I felt the way you did before I deleted a twitter account with about 2k following and 10k followers. I felt like it was dominating my attention, and that made me mad. In a fit of pique I deleted it and it's almost funny how quickly I realized I didn't know any of them, and the passive consumption of their social media database entries was scratching some kind of itch but the same one I get from e.g. binging Star Trek series.

Very strange all around.

    but I wouldn't call "passively keeping in touch" with 
    thousands of people "relationships." It's something, 
    but I'm not sure what, it seems like we may not have a 
    good word for "casual strangers,"

Well, strictly speaking... it's a relationship, just a very casual kind. They are not intrinsically bad.

The healthiness of it can vary widely. It's a very individual thing.

The relevant questions to ask one's self would include: overall, is this bringing me happiness? Are my "casual relationships" on FB causing me anxiety -- either directly, or because of more subtle FOMO, etc? Are they taking time away from other things that would make my life better, such as more meaningful relationships?

There is a happy path there. I genuinely like seeing that so-and-so from high school just had a baby, or whatever. "We sat through so many classes together," I think. "She was always cool to me. Good for her, she seems happy. Cute baby!" I might never really be close to her again, but I do like seeing that she's doing well.

I seem to be in the minority though. Maybe FB is like cocaine. Seems like some people manage to use it occasionally without damaging their bodies or lives. But the vast majority of people are worse off for it.

I admire you for saying that you genuinely enjoy/extract value from seeing "so-and-so from high school just had a baby, or whatever" on Facebook. I'm on the side of the others in that I don't feel like I lost anything from deleting my FB account (except I can't remember birthdays anymore). But it's interesting to hear you say you do.

This particular thread reminded me of another recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650 - an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you need it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?

It's funny - maybe the perfect compromise is exactly what you described. You sometimes want mostly mindless FB updates from people you "know" and otherwise converse with your core friends and family through in-person interactions and other more engaging medium.

Yeah. I mean, it doesn't have to be a contest right? I mean, I can't imagine having only deep, soulful relationships.

My neighbors are nice! We make small talk. That's fine. I like it.

Maybe the unspoken thing here is that it can be a human thing to feel you're a part of a community. A safety net of sorts. If I have to leave town on short notice for an emergency, who's going to feed my cats? I could find that person via my FB network. One of them would or would know somebody that could. One of them could ping me for the same thing. That kind of thing.

    This particular thread reminded me of another recent 
    thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650 
    - an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you 
    need it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?

I feel like it could work to some extent, but I would feel really weird trying to get a group of friends to go in on it? Plus, I don't know. I'd feel like I was always trying to put on a show or something.

I feel like real relationships arise from shared experiences. Doing things together. Playing sports, writing code, gaming together, whatever.

I don't think an app about sharing your life can really accomplish that.

I think the sad part was realizing those relationships had died long ago, and that being friends on Facebook just makes it feel like they haven’t. It pushes into that parasocial territory which IMO is the biggest problem with social media: if our need for human connection is hunger, parasocial relationships are counterfeit food that makes you feel full but contains no calories.

Those passive relationships are why I left Facebook. I had hundreds of friends, from people I had met once or twice to family and close friends of decades - but few of them put any effort into the relationships, instead relying on Facebook to prompt them to wish well on major events or update them on news.

Those relationships you don't want to let go of? They're largely worthless.

Worthless in what way? I get happiness knowing about the lives of people I have cared about.

An interesting person from 15 years ago doesn't usually stop being an interesting person just because I haven't talked to them regularly.

You shared moments of a finite life with them.Thus they are valuable. You read this comments, wasting expensive seconds of your life on it. Thus the relationship to a internet stranger was valuable.

All those connections are paid for in the most expensive currency that is.

How do you keep in touch with them on Facebook? What makes your post reach them, if most don’t check often?

I want Facebook for this purpose but it feels like it’s really not a blog. At all.

I post things about my life, they post things about theirs. We read it and know what's going on.

A friend of mine from high school happened to be in my city for a weekend. He posted on Facebook asking if he knew anyone there. We went out and had drinks and caught up.

I had a bunch of super close friends at a crappy job back when I was in college. We all went our separate ways but occasionally Facebook reminds one of us of some funny photo from the old days. It's triggered a few large group chats that have been pretty fun.

Every once in awhile I'll think about an old friend from school or a job or wherever and it's nice to just see what they're doing without having to go through starting a whole conversation. (Although I often will since Facebook is a good way to reach out to people.)

That sort of "easy, zero-effort blog for everyone you know" was what made it useful. I got tired of using it when it got harder to surface that sort of stuff and harder to avoid the marketing, link spam, comments-section-style arguments, and scammers that flocked to the platform as it expanded.

As someone old enough to remember and have used Livejournal, the Facebook experience is very different.

LJ was "peak internet" for me. I had a smallish network of friends on there and we read and commented on each others' stuff. You could be as personal or as detached and anonymous as you wanted.

You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there; felt like you could actually express yourself.

Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ. Maybe it was mostly crap, but it was often thoughtful and personal if you had the right friends. It felt like nothing was ever created on Tumblr; it was just endless pithy comments and jokes about things created elsewhere.

Livejournal, to me, was a fusion of three things: a simple HTML editor (aka posts) + a time-sorted view and access controls + discoverability through your network.

The things that made it different than Facebook were (1) that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability and networking was user intentional and exploratory (pull, rather than suggested / push), & (3) access controls were simple, understandable, and obeyed user intent.

I enjoyed LJ for a few years (my first blog, 2005-2008). Wrote a good deal about startups that I explored as a user in that period (this was the APG era, where APG stands for After Paul Graham, meaning after he wrote his early influential essays about startups and his launching YC - called Startup School at the time, IIRC) and other software topics.

But later, after a Russian group acquired LJ:

https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html (2nd post on the subject, there was a previous one on the same blog, IIRC).

Interestingly, some years later, I mentioned the same point, on my next blog or on Twitter, and then suddenly my old blog became accessible again (it was not, for a while, after the above-linked incident).

Why can’t we have this on Facebook?

What could fb do to enable this kind of experience for those that want it? Not that they would, but I’d really like to have a vision of what they should do.

The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ?

> The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ?

https://dreamwidth.org is a community fork of LJ that has a large and active userbase, is open source, and invests a lot into mentoring users › contributors › maintainers. Dreamwidth is a Google Summer of Code participant, for example.

Thanks for the tip!

LJ was awesome! I feel like Mastodon is kiiiinda similar modern-day equivalent (despite the Twitter-mimicry). Huh, now that I say that "out loud", that's interesting - I had never thought of it until now. It seems to really capture that "share your world but also bring in others and socialize as narrowly or broadly as you want", along with sharing media and so on.

Whenever I looked at Mastodon, it seemed cool technologically, but I couldn't really imagine anybody outside of the tech crowd using it. Is that an accurate perception?

LJ was cool because you had quite a diverse group using it. Artists, musicians, teenagers, etc.

This was before MySpace siphoned away the youth crowd, fifteen years ago or whenever it was. I wouldn't see them ever coming back to blogging. In fact I don't really see anybody returning to blogging.

(No disrespect meant to blogs. Blogs are awesome. That was a really good era for the internet.)

Agree. Everyone who is on Facebook has email, and a mobile phone. If sending (or answering) an email or a text message or making a phone call is too much work, what kind of friendship are you really worried about maintaining?

You could say that about any medium.

"If writing them a physical letter is too much work, what kind of friendship are you really worried about maintaining?"

That sounds strawman-y, but I have a (annoying) family member who legitimately expresses this thought regularly.

Yeah, I haven't deleted my account, but I don't log in anymore (and blocked all FB-related domains on my Pi-Hole). I still keep in touch with a lot of people, but it's definitely challenging. I've just totally lost contact with TONS of people, ones who I'd love to keep talking with here and there. I accept the "loss" and do what I can to regain contact with people. Drag them kicking & screaming to stuff like Signal, Matrix, Mastodon, etc. Honestly I focus even harder on these alternatives because I think they are more important than ever.

Typical case of spitting against the wind

I log in ocassionaly to see the job ads on a special developers page for my country, but I unfollowed the feeds of all my "friends". I didn't "unfriend" them, I just don't want to see their stupid stuff.

I just can't imagine doing this. Facebook is the only way to keep in touch with many people around me.

>But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise.

I don't use FB but I would imagine if I did and I wanted to get off it and there were dozens of people I wanted to keep in touch with but would lose touch with I would send these dozens of people a message a week before, saying "I am going to get off facebook, can you send me your email / phone number, my number is X, as I would like to maintain contact."

Or does FB not allow you to do that?

Facebook socialising is a lot less direct than an email. I see Instagram photos and the like from friends and enjoy it but if they all emailed those photos to me every day I’d feel overwhelmed by the experience. In any case, they wouldn’t do that anyway, because they’re already posting to Instagram because that’s where all their other friends are.

Yeah, I'd do that as well. I've seen others do it.

But people might not see your "hey, leaving FB post." They might not check FB often. Or it just kind of gets buried. etc.

Phone numbers and emails change, though. "Contact rot" happens. So, I don't know. I guess I like to have multiple ways to contact people.

This is all predicated on the fact that FB is absolutely not a distraction to me. I look at it maybe once or twice a month. I have all notifications turned off. So, it is not a drain on my (fragile) attention span.

Maybe most importantly, a lot of the folks I keep up with on FB aren't necessarily people I talk to directly. We would not really be keeping up by email/phone/letter/whatever. Some people see that as evidence that, hey, those are obviously people you don't need in your life. Perhaps that's true for some. For me, I enjoy having acquaintances as well as friends.

> Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook.

Facebook's network effect was overwhelmed twice, once by instagram and again by whatsapp... shame both those ended up squarely in Facebook's court. Remains to be seen how much dent can TikTok / Twitch / YouTube / Snap / Azar / Telegram can make on to that once-in-a-generation trifecta.

> once-in-a-generation

That's why Facebook is investing in VR. Not because they're optimistic about it, or because they want to own the space, but because it's the closest horizon that has the potential to fundamentally change interaction.

If it does, they have a foot in the door and can flood resources into it. If it doesn't, small price to pay for hedging an existential threat.

>Facebook's network effect was overwhelmed twice, once by instagram and again by whatsapp

This doesn't seem accurate, do you have evidence to back up this claim? Instagram had 30 million users and no revenue upon acquisition. Facebook had over a billion, and billions in revenues.

Growth, and especially growth in younger demographics, is probably the metric Facebook was looking at.

Right, that's why they bought instagram. But that's a far cry from the claim OP made their "network effect was overwhelmed"

I don't think one can break a scale-free network like that of Facebook by playing the same game as Facebook.

One way to counter a scale-free network is to create adjacent scale-free networks that replaces its competition one part at a time. This is what, I believe, WhatsApp (with messaging) and Instagram (with images) were on the verge of doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network#Immunizatio...

I believe this is based on the writers perception, not reality.

I can argue that my friends now use all use email, eclipsing facebook, whatsapp and instagram, better buy those stocks in SMTP. ;)

Perception, yes: https://stratechery.com/2020/social-networking-2-0/

You don't actually care about those people if the only way you have of contacting them is Facebook. Just pull the trigger and dump it.

This is a profoundly presumptuous and shitty claim.

Some people use Facebook to communicate. To not use Messenger is to not communicate with them. And some of us like people. Sorry?

> Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook.

Email, probably.

But you can switch email hosts or roll your own. With some more modern problems (getting marked as spam if you're not recognized) aside, you weren't forced to keep using your @aol.com or @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com accounts in order to communicate with people on those services via email.

With Facebook, it doesn't matter how much you dislike the company or how good some competitor is. You still can't talk with people on Facebook (and often, even view content) without being logged into an active Facebook account.

Arguably, Gmail is currently the email provider with the strongest network effect due to all the ways it ties in to Android and the rest of the Google ecosystem.

Worth noting that Gmail also 'solved' spam, which was the strongest reason to change email addresses/providers.

Those are powerful reasons to stick to Gmail. One is a legitimately good and useful feature; the other is a rather shady attempt at artificial lock-in, IMO.

But neither of those things are network effect.

"Network effect" refers specifically to "the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products."

> But neither of those things are network effect

> "Network effect" refers specifically to "the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products."

Sorry, I skipped a couple of logical steps.

Gmail/Google accounts are a namespace where the identifiers are persistent long-term, thus the ordinary network effect that email has is undiminished, unlike previous email providers where you had to change the account every so often largely to cope with spam. [0][1]

Also, Gmail participates in the associated network effect of every Google service that has one, and there are quite a few, though Google has a bad habit of killing them off.

[0] The idea being that you're trying to reduce the email network's utility for spammers to reach you more than you're reducing it for yourself to be reached by non-spammers, which is like chemo killing the cancer faster than it kills you.

[1] Spam per-se wasn't the only reason, of course. In the Before Times I had to change my address due to a few older relatives repeatedly setting in motion endless Reply-All storms / email chain letters, and of course I also changed ISPs occasionally.

As my post was written, I guess I wasn't really qualifying things. I could have worded that a little more precisely.

I was thinking of proprietary platforms such as FB, not open protocols like email.

If we're counting protocols then I suppose we'd have to include the phone networks and MMS and I think those would eclipse email.

Although, I don't think it's useful to compare proprietary closed social networks to open protocols; seems very apples-vs-oranges.

The problem is, that only an engaged user is valuable for a facebook advertiser. What will be the point in putting ads on facebook when most users use it like you do today?

It's off-to-the-side of your main point, but AOL Instant Messenger shut down in December 2017. Per https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/12/14/67582/aol-instan... it was down to 500,000 active users a month the summer before it was shut down.

In a trip down memory lane, https://www.aol.com/ is just... a pop news site now? Per Wayback, they shifted away from portal around 2010/11.

What I think is this, for Facebook to be profitable, it is just a bad thing for your health and quality of life, it's plain and simple.

The only way it can sustain it's growth and profitability would be to find more ways to hijack your mind and your feelings and keep you more "engaged" and addicted, and keep repeating that behavior to more and more people on earth. To become more toxic.

Unless they decide to completely remodel their business, and lose money (never going to happen), it's only going to remain a force for bad in the world. Nothing can change that really because we all know that after spending an hour on Facebook, we feel worse. I don't feel like this after using Google search for an hour (although I know there are negatives too that too).

What's happened is, it's unmasked now, everyone can see that it is bad, studies have shown it's negative effects, now we're just working out what we do with it, how do we get away from it. Do we kill it, ignore it, put warnings on the login page that it' addictive, how do we cure ourselves from Facebook?

We are in unknown territory with Facebook, but I have no doubt it will fall eventually. The laws of thermodynamics hold true for institutions as much as everything else—one day Facebook will lose to entropy and it will become a fraction of the size it is now.

Microsoft?

Microsoft is an interesting case in that it has lost its influence while growing its market cap. Microsoft is several times as big as it was when PG called it dead 14 years ago[0], but founders today aren't afraid to compete against it or refuse its acquisition offers. Microsoft makes plenty of money, but does not have a great deal of control over what anybody else does.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Microsoft had to make fundamental changes to stop its slide into irrelevance, and the old corporate culture is still trying to reassert itself. There's a battle of cultures happening and it might turn out New Microsoft was a last gasp.

Re: the entrenched social network... It shouldn't be too hard to create an alternative service / browser extension that will allow people to export their social network? Because then the alternative service could be set to automatically approve any future connection requests from the people previously identified.

I'd sign up for such a social-graph-based service that just did individual messaging, group discussions, and events (invitations + pictures).

Identity is an issue with social graph export... But on the other hand, doesn't the existence of LinkedIn show that people are willing to re-create their social graph on multiple services?

> Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative

Is there currently any alternative? All the alternatives I'm aware of ATM are Twitter clones; i.e., meant to be public microblogs, rather than restricted audience microblogs.

Recommend me a good alternative and I'll see if I can get some of my network to join it. (And don't say "Mastodon" unless they've added a FB-like mode where you can restrict your posts to a specific set of people.)

Have you considered MeWe? It is actually impossible to use it as a publicly accessible microblog.

> The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation.

Were all AOL's mergers dumb? IIRC, they used their sky-high stock price to buy Time Warner (among other things), and once AOL was no longer the cash cow they turned out to own a lot of valuable things.

As with all mergers, it depends on to whom / for what.

For AOL shareholders, by 2002, between the merger and the dotcom bubble bursting, 2002$200 B (so about 2021$5.5 T?) had been wiped from AOL's market cap.

So that was, presumably, not good.

What a weird way of looking at it. First, how did you turn 2002's $200B into 2021's $5.5T?

But my point was if it wasn't for the merger, the AOL stockholders would have lost far more in the dotcom bubble bursting. Pointing out they lost a lot in the combined events isn't really a counterargument.

One possibility is that a Facebook account becomes something that most people have but they seldom use, like a LinkedIn account.

The news feed could get less interesting, resulting in fewer visits.

I think this is already the case and is why FB doesn’t want to get rid of the offending content, for many users this is the only thing still keeping them engaged. Turn that off and it’s just a stream of advertising, memes, and dinner pics.

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