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I pretty strongly disagree with this. I don't think that user preferences have changed so much, in that I think a lot of people would respond well to an "old-school"-style Facebook, even if released right now. The issue is simply that that version of Facebook probably has people only using it 15-30 mins a day max, but you really need to get the continual mindless scrolling to maximize ad rates. Facebook is just suffering "the tyranny of the marginal user", the topic which was so well-discussed on HN a couple months back.

You're welcome to try it. "Old school Facebook" took a couple days to implement, and it'd probably be even quicker with modern web frameworks.

I was on FB in 2005, and it was definitely not 15-30 mins/day. People were on there for hours, or rather they'd go on, scroll for 15 mins, then come back next hour for another 15 mins, and so on. But again, that sort of behavior was a product of the times, and I really doubt you would get that sort of engagement if you put the same product in front of users today.

But try it! If you're familiar with a database-backed web framework like Django or Rails, it'd probably take a weekend to re-implement the original Facebook. Do it and see if you get any traction.

The really old school Facebook didn’t even have feeds. You spent time on there because you had to check out everyone’s walls.

> If you're familiar with a database-backed web framework like Django or Rails, it'd probably take a weekend to re-implement the original Facebook. Do it and see if you get any traction.

The issue is not whether it can technologically be built easily. While I always chuckle a little bit whenever developers say "It can be built in a weekend!" (in classic fashion...), my issue is not that it's technologically challenging. Of course the hard part with any app like this is getting the network critical mass, which is a very hard problem.

But my point is really to argue against this being a consumer led difference in preferences. This is really an issue where, economically, the tech powers that be have found that hijacking our dopamine pathways via TikTok/etc. algorithms is more profitable than a "come in and check on your friends"-app.

I expect the consumer would much prefer to keep up with friends than some random performer. But friends don't want to create content anymore. It's a production problem. People don't want you, a casual onlooker, to know what is going on in their life. When they do, they will invite you into a private space. This is why Facebook moved to allow most activity to happen in private (chat, groups, etc.).

But that's exactly the issue. You need to hijack those dopamine pathways to get adoption. That's what adoption means - somebody found an activity appealing enough that they alter their behavior and give you some attention. If your product doesn't generate enough of an emotion to get people to alter their behavior, you won't get adoption.

That's why other successful products like Twitter, crypto, vaping, clickbait, greenwashing, political rage-bait, gaming, gambling, arguing on the Internet, pyramid schemes, etc. have been successful too. The one thing they all have in common is they hijack your dopamine pathways. Lots of other things like exercising, eating your vegetables, saving a small portion of your paycheck each month, becoming a homeowner, maintaining your home, investing in your relationships are all good for us, but people don't do them because they don't give us enough of a high to be worth doing daily.

You're metaphorically saying "If you build a product that helps people eat their vitamins, they will come." Spoiler alert: they won't.

> You need to hijack those dopamine pathways to get adoption.

That is absolutely untrue, and in fact has it backwards. Lots of tech products (even social media) got tons of adoption by appealing to a smaller set of users and fulfilling their needs extremely well. It's only when products, pushed by the demands of "infinite growth", decide the drug dealer path is the only way to go, that we're all just lobotomized versions of ourselves with "one working thumb" (seriously, this HN discussion of the tyranny of the marginal user is one of my all time faves, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507)

And my argument isn't that, as you seem to say, that checking in with your friends is somehow equivalent to eating your spinach. I'm just arguing that apps only need to go down this "lowest common denominator" version of ourselves when they're not satisfied being great products for a lot of people - all that matters to them is more people than last year, which requires an enshittification of the app eventually.

You’re right about the time spent. The novelty of finding people you know on a site like that was still pretty exciting. People would spend a lot of time poking around new people.

Facebook didn’t invent it but they were the winners of that generation.

Modern social networks don’t operate that way. It is no longer exciting to find out that person you went to 3rd grade with is online. Of course they are online, everyone is

Yeah this is super confusing revisionist history.

Even The Social Network had a scene where a young Dakota Johnson was telling to Sean Parker about how addicted she was to Facebook.

Facebook was absolutely as addictive to young tech-savvy consumers at the time, as TikTok is today.

The only difference is this was pre-mobile. So they were doing it from their laptops, not from their phones wherever they were.

source: i was there, i was one of them.

Don't bother coding, there's already Friendica that does everything old Facebook does and even more.

What matters is not the code. Never has been.

There are multiple “white label” Facebook knockoffs available right now. One of them even advertises near pixel-perfect replication of the original Facebook UI.

But nobody uses them.

I think we’ve learned the lesson of what happens when you give all your data to some third party. Nobody is super happy about it. But if you’re going to do that, then it’s better to stick with the Zuck you know than to risk it with the Zuck you don’t.

yes! also the op (comment) is basing themselves as Facebook being a business... which may escape the great scope what a social-media is. Facebook isn't 50 years old, social-media ins't 100 years old & we are wired to be social and we got computers!

i'm all to concise and non-exploitative networks... some people still chat on Habbo daily

Also it was before many parents were on the internet.

Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them. And so they instead prefer messaging apps for these relationships.

And then for communicating within their age group it's much more about trends and what is new and different as every young generation is enticed by.

> Now young people know from experience that little good comes from their parents and extended family being on the social network as them

the amount of young people who realize this and actually take action, if a very very small part, majority is just spoon-fed the new normal of these "social" apps

Google + killed itself by being invite-only at the time when there was buzz. Once the invite-only period ended, the buzz was gone.

I can anecdotally confirm this to be the case. I was in college when G+ came out, and there was a lot of interest in my friend groups; except that nobody could get in.

There was a moment when a lot of people wanted to make G+ accounts, and if they had been able to do so, the network effect of them making accounts would have spurred a number of others to do the same. But they couldn't, and by the time they could, interest had died. G+ had one really good shot, and missed.

No, G+ was annoying. You had to classify people in circles. Then nothing happened.

The reason why the hype died was that it was a bad product. That’s why Youtube made it mandatory to transform your name into a G+ account. Talk about pathetic.

Again it's an example of what working before not working in the future, though. Invite-only had worked great for GMail; it actually intensified the buzz. It failed miserably with Wave and Plus, showing that the same tactics sometimes work and sometimes flop.

While the invite-only period may have been necessary for scaling reasons, I have my doubts that it was necessary for buzz-building reasons.

Gmail was invite-only to join and get an @gmail.com account, but once you had it you could interact with any email account user, and they could interact with you. GMail isn't a walled garden. Facebook, Wave, G+, etc are. That's why they depend on rapid user growth very early on when the hype is fresh.

> people had few concerns that basic needs like housing and food would be taken care of.

Interesting, as the US housing market crash came two years after Facebook's launch, the same year it opened to the public, and the food commodities boom followed a year later. Farm gate food prices were higher back then than they are now, even in nominal dollars!

> "Every moment in business happens only once." -- Peter Thiel

Sounds smart, but doesn't mean anything.

It sounds like what it's intending to get across is that there are market conditions that lead to a product taking off, and market conditions by nature change, which means a product taking off today doesn't necessarily mean that the same product would take off tomorrow.

So I'm curious about your opinion. How does it mean nothing to you?

It's actually pretty profound for a certain audience, and that audience overlaps pretty heavily with HN. A lot of people expect to gain lessons about what'll work in the future by studying the past. They'll point to successful product X, and then build product Y that tries to replicate all the good parts of product X, and not realize that there are a lot of subtle interactions between a product and the social & environmental conditions of its audience that lead to it taking off. If you build the same product but the environment is different, you get different results.

Similarly, it's a lesson to pay very careful attention to what's going on in the environment today, and index more on that than what has worked with the environment of the past. That's why good VC presentations always have a slide for "What has changed? Why is this a good idea now when it wasn't in the past?"

A less grandiose version of this aphorism: timing the market matters just as much as what product you ship.

People tend to focus on product attributes and pricing because compared to timing, it is more in your control.

An example of this that I think about a lot is Zoom. Zoom nailed video/audio quality more than most of other competing products, but otherwise they didn't offer anything that new compared to legions of other enterprise A/V platforms. They just happened to offer unlimited free meetings for <= 100 participants right as the pandemic happened. This was all pretty much lucky timing and some good choices around freemium growth mechanics. This window of opportunity closed quickly for competing products as behavior changed and network effects took hold. The only new competitor that emerged mid-pandemic was Teams, because MSFT could literally force install it on every Windows machine.

Do you mean the consumer version?

The enterprise version has been around and available for subscription with the other office products before the pandemic.

If I recall correctly, they didn't start bundling it with Office via force installations with no uninstall until mid 2019?

zoom was successful before the pandemic. They grew, as did a lot of online services, but they were already established as a major player in that field by that time.

Zoom was a successful enterprise business pre-pandemic, but it was unequivocally the lockdowns that accelerated their growth and valuation. In one year they went from 10 million monthly meeting participants to over 350 million (https://www.vox.com/recode/21726260/zoom-microsoft-teams-vid...).

which is what I said, the issue is claiming they wouldn't be a successful company without the pandemic.

They would not have had a market cap of more than $100 billion dollars without it

yeah, and MS wasn't successful before Azure, when their market cap ballooned.

Stop rationalizing bologna.

They grew during the pandemic, as did a lot of online services. They were a perfectly viable company before said pandemic.

“Peter Thiel, thought leader”

You may find this statement obvious and as such uninteresting but it does have a clear, simple meaning. And while it is simple, I see people who think that they can "build the next X" by replicating X's features all the time.

["X" is used as a placeholder and not to refer to the ridiculously named social network]

Don’t forget the Facebook started as an exclusive club, you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. In the beginning you even had to be in specific colleges for sign up.

Yes, the Harvard dorms were a big reason it gained traction.

Facebook started at Harvard, not Stanford.

Edited.

The difference being that everyone in your social circle could get in at the same time. Most college students want to socialize with students at their college.

Artificially segmenting the market by a waitlist chronologically doesn’t have the same affects. That’s why a lot of social platforms give “invite codes” to existing members - invite your friends to bootstrap connections so your members aren’t on a desert island.

Good callout with Google+

Google+ was in every measurable way better than Facebook. It was cleaner, faster, and had features that people claimed they wanted (to be able to have full control over which CIRCLES they share different info with)

And it completely busted because adoption of a social network is impossible without critical mass.

At the time it was because people didn't have a strong enough reason to leave Facebook.

Today it's because they wouldn't have a strong enough reason to leave TikTok/Instagram/Whatsapp/etc.

I remember being interested in Google+ but I got an access code through a friend of a friend on the other side of the continent, and by the time I started to see people I actually knew using it the moment had passed.

Probably time to bring back dodgeball. What is Dennis Crowley up to?

If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!

"but we were missing the particular social moment in time that Zuckerburg capitalized on."

That feels like a narrative that is designed to avoid taking responsibility for messing up. IMO it was 100% possible for Google at the time Google+ was made to completely win social, and they didn't because... what they built wasn't good, or apt, or visionary. Just picture Steve Jobs' Apple trying instead, except hypothetically imagine that their talent is in community design instead of hardware/UI design. They would've done it. Google can't, because... you know... Google is arrogant? and doesn't really do "visionary".