nmoore63 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2019 5:42 pm
Speaker to Animals wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2019 5:38 pm
Kath wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2019 3:03 pm
It does, though. If you have a computer and internet, you can literally start a new social media site in a day. There's zero barrier to entry.
Between MySpace and FB, it all came down to what the market wanted. If FB hadn't provided a better product, they wouldn't have put MySpace out of business. Most of the kids I know aren't using FB, they are using IFunny, Instagram, Twitter, or others I can't remember.
The only "kid," in my life (she's 24,) that uses FB is my soon to be daughter-in-law. Nerd's kids don't, my niece and nephew don't, none of their friends do. A couple of them have accounts that they haven't used in at least two years. They count as users when FB produces numbers.
Something will overtake FB eventually, which means it cannot be a monopoly.
Network effect. Google it.
And because of it Facebook never amounted to anything and MySpace reigns supreme.
There were at least a dozen social networks at that time competing for market share. But the nature of a social network dictates the more users on the network, the more attractive it becomes to users, and therefore the larger market share it gets.
The user base and actual time usage of any social network in the early 2000s was nothing like today. There was no equivalent of current Facebook that 2000s Facebook had to beat. All they needed was a better interface and social network model to beat their competitors.
The best interface hands down from that era was Zaads, but it's model was limited to new age type shit, so it fizzled. Facebook has a slightly less shitty interface than Google's original social network (they used essentially the same model) so people tried both and stuck with Facebook.
Now that Facebook won, the only thing that can really upset their monopoly is themselves and their shitty behavior driving people from social media altogether. But if somebody else replaces them, everybody will switch to the new network platform and you still get a monopoly.
The only way you can overcome the network effect at this point is interoperability. If it does not matter which service you use (for basic social media operations), and you can easily interact with other network platforms from the one you use, then you can have competition.
Basic social media operations here involve finding profiles, adding friends, sending private messages, and writing posts on a user's profile. Everything else can be unique to the network platform.
Just do that and I guarantee Facebook would implode because it is a particularly awful social network interface. Just on so many usability levels that site gets a fat F. The only reason they even lasted this long is the network effect.
