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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Counter point: HN, Facebook before the timeline, the entire pre-Facebook internet, Reddit before the IPO path.

The giants grew market share and started deploying profitable advertising models. Once a giant gets the profit bug, they stop being stewards.

Open source social media and messaging largely sucks. Either the UI/UX sucks, like Matrix, or the demographics suck, like Bluesky's hyper-polarized audience.

None of this means it's impossible. We've just seen the successful attempts become evil and lots of bad attempts that fail.

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>HN, Facebook before the timeline, the entire pre-Facebook internet, Reddit before the IPO path.

What is the counter point? None of those had more MAU than any of the big social media platforms of today. All of the big social platforms have experimented to find what kind of experience the average user actually prefers and has used that to improve their platform and continue growing. The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline. Trying to win over people to a social media platform that takes measures to be worse and to avoid growing metrics is not a successful strategy.

>The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline.

"The cigarette of today is a much better cigarette for the user now that we have filters in them."

>The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline.

Absolutely bullshit. FB today is terrible. It's a dopamine casino filled with engagement bait and ads that leave users wildly unsatisfied.

> All of the big social platforms have experimented to find what kind of experience the average user actually prefers and has used that to improve their platform and continue growing. The Facebook of today is a much better platform to the average user than the Facebook pretimeline.

I mean if we’re using that as metric I think then you’d have to admit that fentanyl producers have made a better product than Facebook. I would be surprised if the median user didn’t prefer fentanyl over Facebook, assuming they tried both.

>have to admit that fentanyl producers have made a better product than Facebook

Why? Even if you add all of the users of fentanyl producers together you won't even get to 1% the MAU of Facebook.

> like Bluesky's hyper-polarized audience

Every social network started from a hyper-polarized audience and grew it from there. In the case of Google, geeks, in the case of Facebook, the sort of men who browse "HotOrNot" websites, rating pictures published without consent for sexual attractiveness.

> In the case of Google, geeks,

Google was open for everyone almost immediately

> in the case of Facebook, the sort of men who browse "HotOrNot" websites,

Facebook was for every college student almost immediately after it started growing. And shortly after the on-campus growth phase, it was opened up for everyone.

Reddit skews mildly liberal, but not overtly so. It was able to grow usage amongst all demographics. X, on the other hand, is increasingly becoming conservative, but it still has a large audience on all sides of the spectrum. Neither has to jumpstart growth.

Bluesky started out almost entirely polarized to the point it will be nearly impossible to be inclusive of anyone else. This will kill its ultimate growth potential. Threads basically skipped right over it.

> Either the UI/UX sucks, like Matrix

It's ridiculous to say that the UI/UX of a protocol sucks.

Matrix has clients with good UX and ones with less good UX (especially in the past). I would challenge anyone to install Element X and say that it has a bad UI/UX - it's objectively at least as good as WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage. It's probably not as good as Telegram yet (but TG has it easy given it's not E2EE).

Don’t forget X, it’s a sewer. Grok generating non consensual nudes and csam, nazis, trolls, and scammers.

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