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Comment by _hao | Hacker News Reader

I've been of the opinion for the last 5 years at least, that if Meta and all of it's associated products and platforms suddenly disappear from existence, nothing of actual value will be lost. There are better competitors for everything they do. I don't think I can pinpoint one single unique thing about Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp at this stage in time. Everything they do is done or executed better by a competitor. They had some sort of advantage in the late 2000's and early 2010's, but that's it. I'm not optimistic for their future and relevance.

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For better or worst, Fb has become the de facto place for cruising sailors to share information about different regions of the world. Tips, alerts, advice, questions, etc. I sail the world and there is no other place for groups quite as good for finding the information we need. There’s a niche group for every area around the world full of people sharing advice and answering questions. The good groups have great moderation and quality content.

Network lock-in: successful

They can move to Discord, Whatsapp (huh!), Signal, Reddit or some sailor forum.

If FB disappeared they could reroute.

Bigger things are disappearing and we are going to be fine*. E.g. much world trade with the US.

Moving a community is much much harder than you're making it out to be. Especially when there's a long history of content and - most importantly - trust between members.

Asking people to re-learn the new modalities and UIs and where everything is etc.. particularly for a less technical crowd.

It is easy when you are forced to do it. It's also hard to wear a face mask all day and stay indoors.

> Discord, Whatsapp (huh!), Signal

where nothing is searchable, linkable, or otherwise legible. That's a tradeoff. It has some upsides, but downsides as well.

(granted search has been struggling to not suck in general lately, facebook among others has joined the campaign against legible links, so losses are taking place in web environments anyway)

Discord is searchable

looking at this feels like the best case for fediverse-based socmed like mastodon or lemmy. Though maybe too complex for regular users.

I'll reach for it - Meta increases consumer spending and has enabled a lot of small businesses to profit during the previous economic booms. Yeah they were drop shipping products from China using the de minimis exception, or hocking worthless supplements, or promoting influencer products that are no different then the generic but costs twice as much, but a lot of people made a living off an ecosystem that arguably would not exist without Meta.

Further the success of Facebook was arguably the biggest contributor to startup culture ever - I would expect we'd have seen a fraction of the growth in VC if Facebook had never come to pass.

Groups, WhatsApp, etc, would be replaced overnight with, at least initially, a worse version. More hacking, probably worse moderation at scale, worse accessibility, etc.

Meta also gentrified East Palo Alto, and the Zuckerbergs now own a substantial amount of real estate in Redwood City and elsewhere. They've made a big footprint on the peninsula that deserves credit for the now $8 lattes in my hometown.

I would go even further and say the world would be a significantly better place without any Meta products (and most other social media). At this point, they are a considerable net negative on society as a whole.

Sure, but you can say this about every company & product in existence. Either a better version already exists, or will pop up in minutes after the current one disappears. Network effects are strong enough that this simply won't happen. Meta has close to 4 billion active users across all of its apps. That's literally half the planet.

I am keenly aware that virtually every acquaintance of my age is connected to me via Facebook. If it disappears, they all disappear. There is no replacement. There is no backup plan.

That being said, I've already cut Facebook out of my life years ago for sanity. So really, I'm just mourning what's already all but gone in my life.

It annoys me when people who have no friends say this like this applies to everyone else

Facebook marketplace has effectively taken over craigslist for local item sales, and the non-anonymous nature of it makes it better.

That's about all I got.

What's a good event planner/organizer?

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