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Comment by JimtheCoder | Hacker News Reader

How much of the previous disruptions came with actual improvements to the user experience? Or at least something novel?

Moving from Facebook to Instagram offers a different experience. Moving from Instagram to TikTok offers a different experience.

Moving from Twitter to Mastodon offers...a very similar experience, but without the central control...which also has downsides.

The MySpace to Facebook shift also occurred almost 20 years ago? A slightly different environment...

I guess what I am trying to say is that I am not so optimistic that they will die.

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> How much of the previous disruptions came with actual improvements to the user experience? Or at least something novel?

There was a major "conscious shift" of society to get everyone on the social media boat with a lot of promise and it changed everything. Now we're all on the boat and our lives have not gotten magically better. The new hope is split up two different ways

1. New technologies really do have something magic that will let us have our cake and eat it too -- the benefits of a centralized medium without centralized control

2. "new" technologies are really just a sneaky way of fragmenting the larger system and moving back to something smaller and simpler.

My theory is, on the whole, that we're afraid to admit that we're sick of the big centralized networks and need to dress up that fact by pretending that the real feature of new networks is actually something technical.

edit: See also Bitcoin

Last chance to evacuate Reddit before it is recycled.

Both reddit and twitter have been extremely unprofitable for a long time. The only reason they were allowed to run for so long without making a profit is because investors were willing to bleed money in the hopes that they would be able to make money eventually.

When websites got killed by bad monetization ideas replacements were again available only because of those investors (like the digg->reddit migration).

Overall it's going to be harder for new ones to pop up, and if they are they're going to have those same monetiation schemes.

> How much of the previous disruptions came with actual improvements to the user experience? Or at least something novel?

I think that's one of my biggest critiques with the commonly suggest Reddit alternatives. They seem to not be offering much innovation in the space.

I've been working on a platform that's sort of like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid that combines the feature set of Discord with the discovery and threaded style of discussion of Reddit with the monetization ability of Patreon.

Here's an example community:

https://sociables.com/community/Sports/board/trending

> I am not so optimistic that they will die

In the end, the people that drink the Kool-Aid offered by the platform will stay, and the wise people migrate to better platforms. The mega platforms like FB are cults with the main userbase being stalwarts that won't leave.

I think changing algorithmic/ad-ridden feeds to chronological or user-controlled feeds is a big enough change to stand in its own in many cases. The community culture can also be a big change. Even if current sites have nailed most of the UX aspects, they are so big and eager to monetize that they almost can’t achieve good outcomes in this area by their very nature.

Another thing I expect to induce significant change is the increasing familiarity with the digital world and growing technical competency among users. We’ve seen a huge shift in the past decade of increasing social media usage amongst boomers and such with low technical competency. People who grow up in the digital world, and people who work with technology enough to understand how it works (which the internet used to self select for, then it didn’t, but as an absolute share of society it’s an ever-growing pie) have stronger opinions on how sites should work and are more willing to use nonstandard solutions like federated clients.

Facebook died not because of its UX but because its community went to shit, it was no longer the cool place to be. IMO, Twitter and Reddit (which was never cool, but was interesting, but not much anymore) have suffered the same. They may never “die” but in a way that makes them already dead.

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