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Comment by colinmhayes | Hacker News Reader

Completely disagree. Those three things are all gated by intense network effects. Social media type products are generally as sticky as they come. Facebook will continue to be the platform that everyone uses, because who wants to be on a marketplace or messaging app that doesn't have the most people?

> one could easily have two-three chat apps and use each with different people

I guess theoretically, but in reality, no. People are going to use one app. Apple realized this with iMessage and it's become one of their biggest advantages in the U.S. market. Texting an iPhone user as an android user is legitimately a bad experience, because apple knows that their users aren't going to download a new chat app so they can go ahead and make the experience dogshit for the out group users.

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> who wants to be on a marketplace or messaging app that doesn't have the most people?

But it doesn't have the most people. I have long lost that sense that FB is where everyone is. That feels so 2016

> Apple realized this with iMessage

In general iMessage is not a good example because it a product that leverages the unique position of Apple owning the hardware. No other company can play the same game. Apple don't want you to use iMessage on other systems, they deliberately make the experience worse for Android. But who else can afford that?

You definitely can seamlessly use Whatsapp, Viber, FB Messenger, Telegram and Signal all at the same time on all your devices.

Your anecdote is noted, and I have a similar experience with regard to Facebook usage in my circle. That doesn’t change the fact that Facebook has more users than any other platform in the world.

I think you misunderstand my point about iMessage. Apple users have a very good reason to use different chat apps. Most people probably text non iPhones every once in a while. Yet every iPhone user I know refuses to download other chat apps. It’s not like there’s a big barrier to getting WhatsApp, they just don’t want multiple chat apps. People who are already using WhatsApp feel the same way, and there’s much less reason for them to switch, since the product doesn’t purposefully knee cap users.

This is only true in the US though. Everywhere else in the world iMessage is a dead product, because Apple doesn’t have the market share to push it. If Apple’s market share in the US ever drops significantly then iMessage will promptly die there too.

> because who wants to be on a marketplace or messaging app that doesn't have the most people?

People who care about something, like, here? I think FB was a transitory medium for people who were not on the internet to discover what's out there. Most of them are going to end up in topical communities because the central market is too crazy

> Texting an iPhone user as an android user is legitimately a bad experience

What are the issues? I never use text except for spams at this point, all discussions I have with friends are on whatsapp/messenger.

There are a lot. The biggest for me is that texts take around 10 seconds to send, so having long conversations isn't really practical.

Ah, I guess iMessage sends it directly right? I’m still confused as to why people wouldn’t switch to whatsapp instead. For example, if your connection sucks iMessage will fallback to text and if you’re abroad or talking to a foreign number then you’ll get charged, that sounds like a massive issue to me.

> I’m still confused as to why people wouldn’t switch to whatsapp instead.

Because all their friends use iMessage too. Switching isn't trivial when you have to convince your whole network tos witch with you.

I guess we live in different bubbles, I can count on one hand the number of people I know that don't use whatsapp. Even my 87 yo grand mother uses whatsapp

i don’t know. the past decade has been everyone shouting about network effects, yet i can’t count on either hand the number of matching-related apps i’ve both left and joined over that duration. on the other hand, i’m still using basically the same http networking protocol during that same duration. network effects are real (hence http still dominating), but the higher you crawl up the stack the “softer” the effect.

It’s harder to change things down the stack. I guess the more things are built on top of fb (like sign in w fb) the harder it’ll be to change it?

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