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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that a big part of why the social networks took over as much as they have is that the average non-technical person did not like the thousands of small web sites: every web site is a snowflake, and if you make web sites for a living, then the differences between them tend to be interesting, but to the average non-technical person, the differences tend to be confusing or at least a little distracting or annoying, is my guess.

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It's a combination of things really. Part of it was not being able to discover new content (Google notwithstanding, since Google is good for finding things when you know what you want, while social media feeds you things you didn't even know you wanted). The other part was not being able to talk back or otherwise iterate on what people had published in a way that others could see it easily. Finally, it comes down to money... people wanted to make money and social media (and yes, I count Youtube among social media in its earliest incarnation) made it a lot easier to do that.

Despite this, people are departing existing aggregators and social media for SIGs to get around the spam, the screeching, and general annoyance... so we're probably going to see a more balanced network over the next decade... because making money isn't everything.

Good point about making money. But we're using a service that lets people discover stuff on thousands of small sites in the way you describe. (Before this site existed, I used Slashdot to discover stuff, and before that Usenet newsgroups.)

We're here today, but we'll be gone tomorrow(-ish). Before HN I was on Reddit, before that Digg, before that Slashdot, and so on. Being in any particular place at any particular time is no guarantee we'll be there going forward because the social networking anacyclosis is undefeated.

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