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Facebook is doing the same thing to your forum that your forum did to USENET.

In the 90s, USENET was lively and active. It was federated, decentralized, and you could use any client you wanted to access the information. Web based forums came along and shifted that control away from the loose internet and into the owners of the forums.

That's one way to look at it.

I don't remember it quite that fondly.

I also remember the missing replies, broken threads, spam you couldn't really do much about, endless flamewars about top-quoting vs bottom-quoting, etc.

Plus the pace was just glacial - it could take hours for some posters posts to appear.

Maybe is was better in the REALLY old days - a bit of quick, non-exhaustive google groups searching shows my first usenet posts in June of 1997.

Hmm, I graduated from college before the REALLY old days were over, apparently. :)

I don't mean to glorify USENET. The web based forums brought many cool new features -- you could post images that worked reliably, the Slashdot-style moderation stuff was a big boon, etc. I just meant to point out that the internet moves in cycles, and those cycles seem to lead towards newer technology and more centralized control.

As an administrator of an online message board, I concur. Web content is being so efficiently aggregated that some forums turn into the awkward conversation between two redditors: "Check this out!" "Heh, yeah. I saw that."

Communities before were usually separated by platforms, because the platforms were not yet sophisticated enough to support vast communities of varying opinions. Now we have a few big players that can do this and more. Social media has turned into a war over who can blow the most filter bubbles, and with services like OpenID and "connect with facebook", everything has slowly become part of the same identity.

I'm hoping that a new platform will eventually come along to pry this apart, but it's going to take a completely different paradigm to cause it. Unless something like Google+ proves otherwise, websites like Facebook and Twitter et al have the potential to monopolize social networking.

The problem is that most of the web has been gobbled by inane "check this out!" comments and insightful, rich discussion is confined to an ever smaller % of it.

A lot of people feel very alienated by this lowest common denominator standard of the web and the fact that niche sites are dying even in absolute terms. Hopefully we will see a revival, when more people realise they were better off before this over-sharing nonsense. People adapt more easily to a lower standard than to a higher one, though.

I hope you don't mind a shameless plug, but I believe something like my startup might be this new platform of which you speak: http://loggur.com.

I'm not claiming that my startup in particular will be it, but something like it. Just saying this probably puts me in the category of "just another young whipper snapper who aspires to be the next Zuck"... but I have no desire to do anything like Facebook or Google or intentionally copy any particular model. I just want to do what works (well).

Loggur is clearly an infant at this point and I'm sure the initial impression given by its current presentation of the idea doesn't exactly scream "innovation" or "the next big thing"... but bear with me. I'm starting off relatively simple and will iterate as I get feedback (as is expected of any startup) but the general end result, as I envision it, will essentially be an extremely wide variety of user-editable tools specific to each user and/or community, from communication to productivity and automation - or both. I realize that the current presentation is pretty vague, but that will change after iteration and solid examples. The current descriptions are based on an alpha version which I put together earlier this year to prove the concept.

The concept of loggur seems interesting, but to be completely honest, I thought the "help us get featured on" written in small characters before the logos of TechCrunch, Mashable, etc. was deceiving in a really lame way.

I've seen other startups on HN do the same thing and received positive responses for doing so, which is why I did it. It seems to be a matter of perspective, I guess. As per your response, I'll make the "Help us get featured on" text larger. My intention isn't to be deceiving or lame. I just hope to someday be able to remove that text.

Heads-up: that site won't let me answer "no" to "Do you want the mobile version?"

Ah thank you very much for pointing that out! It must have broken when I switched from Apache to Nginx+Memcached. It's fixed now.

In my opinion, such a platform, or several, using an entirely different paradigm, already exist. To overtake Facebook, it is simply a matter of making it as easy to use as Facebook, and Facebook annoyances having reached a breaking point. Whether there is yet sufficient impetus to do the UI work and whether Facebook users are ready to move on to the next thing is another question.

I'm going put put my two cents in, and say that a platform capable of replacing Facebook for discussion and community on the web has already been created.

It's called Reddit.

Bear with me here, I realize this is probably an unpopular opinion.

On Reddit, all content is open -- I don't think I've ever seen a 'closed' sub-reddit available only to members. I'm not sure it's even possible.

Yet, in spite of all communities being effectively open, most sub-reddits have a strong sense of community, and are very active. Personally, I really enjoy proggit and r/math for this reason -- active discussion, community moderation, and a strong sense of community.

True. I have little interest in actual discussions on G+ or FB because of the public use of my full name, and the connections that I have there. There are, and will remain, plenty of people that enjoy interaction that has a bit more anonymity. r/truereddit is quite good.

I think part of what has happened to these dwindling forums is that they are functionally out-dated, and a bit too insular. -It takes too much time for new people to get up to speed on most boards. (dont forget Hubski, btw. :))

but you still have to register for reddit... reddit's owned by conde nast, it's not an open platform. Conde nast could at a moment's notice shut the entire thing down, or put it behind a paywall, or sell your 'likes' to an advertiser. This is a problem common to all centralised solutions.

No, you don't have to register. You have to register to post.

As for shutting it down: The code is open source, so while it'd be hard to unite around a common replacement, if they tried to shut it down it would not be the end.

Nitpick: Reddit is no longer owner by Condé Nast, they are now a subsidiary of the parent company, Advance Publications.

This is the type of thinking that will hasten Facebook's demise. And it's a perfectly reasonable line of thought.

The next time you hear the phrase "It doesn't scale" in reference to something, ask yourself why it needs to. In some cases it might not.

Centralised approaches (e.g. websites on the open internet) obviously need to scale. Facebook is a public website. And it's on the open internet, for anyone with an account to see and ready to be hacked by those with skill who do not need accounts.

I always come back to this: How many people do you really need to be reading your profile? Friends, coworkers, family, ... potentially anyone, anywhere in the world with a computer and an internet connection? It just does not make sense.

There are private subreddits, such as Gryffindor.

There is a closed subreddit available to members who have purchased Reddit Gold: /r/lounge.

(If you haven't seen it, that subreddit is just "look how rich I am" silliness.)

> mainstream people seem to think of Facebook as "the internet"

For quite a few years people used the Internet Explorer icon on pamphlets and posters as an icon representing The Internet. It seems people are now starting to use Facebook's icon for that.

Just to corroborate, I've done user testing with young people (13-15) and Facebook is definitely seen as 'the internet' - along with YouTube.

When I was 13-15 "the internet" was IRC and nothing else. I still can't understand how I managed to spent countless hours doing just that (scripting and that "flooding" thing seemed to be great fun though)

The same goes for the other end of the spectrum, people over 50-60 who started using the intern.. ehm sorry, facebook to connect with their grandchildren and play games. Their whole browser experience ends there, they don't ever type a URL in and have no notion of bookmarks other than facebook's app bookmarks (and they get disillusioned when they're missing).

Interesting. Can you impart any more information?

Certainly.

This was user testing with groups of young people in Tower Hamlets, London in 2010.

Aside from testing the UX spec we talked more widely around discovery and every group indicated that they began most tasks with a search on YouTube. Music, games, movies, homework research: all started visually on YT.

Facebook came up because the majority of these kids didn't have email addresses, instead doing all their email-like conversations on Facebook messaging and their IM on Blackberry BBM.

they began most tasks with a search on YouTube

This really underlines why buying YouTube was a smart move for Google.

It's also weird IMHO when you see an advert or movie trailer, and they tell you to visit their facebook page, rather than their own website...

It is just a repetition of the "Use AOL Keyword "ID4" (for Independence Day).

Walled gardens for the less technical savvy have been the norm. Outside of the hacker/coder/geek culture, has it ever really been different? Prodigy -> AOL -> MySpace -> Facebook

I agree, over the years we've seen this type of thing again and again. I tried to explain to my mom once about the concept of a browser and that the IE icon on her desktop was not the Internet. After a while I gave up after realizing she was perfectly happy with her misconceptions about what the Internet is.

It's only a matter of time when something else will replace Facebook as "the Internet". These things work in cycles.

I think the web is going to undergo a radical change in the next 5 or so years.

Hasn't it radically changed every year?

"6. The only constant in the world is change."

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/egoless-programming-the-...

What kind of change? Further toward a centralized, monopolistic, Facebook-esque service or an implosion of that model?