[jkw]

Facebook has been unable to stop new entrants: Pinterest, Snap, Tiktok, Twitter - All global and multi billion dollar companies, and still growing.

More to come are: Telegram, Discord, Houseparty, Clubhouse

Plus global competition from: Wechat, Weibo, Line

Social networks come and go. The space is a lot more whimsical than people think. Remember Friendster, MySpace, AIM. A new challenger will emerge every 3-5 years.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> Remember Friendster, MySpace, AIM. A new challenger will emerge every 3-5 years.

I honestly laugh whenever I hear people still bring up those early social media companies as evidence that social media heavyweights somehow come and go. None of those companies ever came near the global reach of FB. A quick Google search gives a peak user count of MySpace of between 75 and 100 million, for FB it's 2.7 billion.

Those companies basically all existed before the vast majority of people were even on any social network, and importantly none of them had real-name policies initially. And the modern challengers you give all have some specific, much smaller niche, e.g. image galleries for Pinterest. There is simply no other social network that has ever challenged Facebook in the "connect all my friends and let me give and see life's updates" space.

[input_sh]

I agree and and I'd like to offer two more incredibly damning evidence of it being a monopoly like no other.

First, there are countries where Facebook is de facto synonym for the Internet. Thanks to its marketplaces, groups, and events, there are places where much of the online economy is heavily based on Facebook.

Second, I'd argue that nearly every mobile provider in the world that offers zero-rating does so by providing access to Facebook's services either free of charge or at a much lower price than the rest of the Web.

Absolutely no other company in history had these two advantages over not just their social media competition, but the rest of the Web as a whole.

[saalweachter]

Facebook was also founded half a year after MySpace, and Friendster two months earlier.

By any reasonable measure, that was "at the same time"; it wasn't so much one replacing the other replacing the next as three early competitors fluctuating until one won out.

[chosenbreed37]

Good point. It may well be true that FB 2.7 billion acts as a moat. What I find interesting is that FB has had a bad rap since it reached the 1 billion mark. But instead of going the number of users has gone up. That being said many of those can't be a active though

[indymike]

Facebook was really the winner of generation one of social networks. Friendster and Myspace were the first movers, but there were a ton of social networks born in that timeframe.

[pmachinery]

> None of those companies ever came near the global reach of FB. A quick Google search gives a peak user count of MySpace of between 75 and 100 million, for FB it's 2.7 billion.

None of those browsers ever came near the global reach of IE. A quick Yahoo search gives a peak user count of Netscape of around 80 million, for IE it's around 800 million.

Not that I believe for one second Facebook has 2.7 billion active individual human users. I've never even used it but I've signed up to about 10 accounts over the years, and everybody I know also has multiple accounts for various reasons.

In fact based just on people I know, I wouldn't be surprised if already most people are just using "Facebook" for messenger.

[daniellarusso]

Friendster did sell its patents to Facebook, and I believe Friendster could have ‘lived on’ as a patent licensor.

[kyuudou]

Sure, but already FB is tainted with an "only old people use that" meme for several years now. Once the boomers start really dying off, I think this is when FB will fade.

Plus, I think society as a whole is beginning to see the toxic ills of social media in general and will push back in a "retro" "back to the basics" kind of movement, embracing old traditions like community, family and friends in meatspace.

[Alphaeus]

Facebook proper might be tainted with "only old people use it", but Instagram still has massive influence among younger people.

[dhimes]

They might fade when we boomers do, but they also could stay in that sweet spot of people who have disposable income and are apt to spend it— a sweet spot advertisers love. They could end up targeting 40-65 year olds perpetually.

[Cymruboogaloo]

Facebook stole pretty much wholesale, Stories from Snap, The timeline from Twitter, and now reels is its Tiktok clone. They've recently introduced "rooms" which is its theft of Houseparty not Zoom which everyone thought.

Facebook is a horrible company which hasn't come up with and original idea in years. It now uses its "sign in with facebook" button to see which apps people are using before copying them completely and leveraging its social graph. At this point its a parasite on the web that stalls innovation.

[whywhywhywhy]

Insta, Snap and Tiktok (and in some ways Twitter) are all slowly converging on being almost the same identical product, FB isn't the only one cloning features.

Feels really there is a lack of true creativity and innovation across the board and they're more being driven by feature FOMO than anything else at this point.

[vlkr]

And what they can't copy, the will buy with their monopoly money: Yahoo bought Tumblr, Flickr. Google bought Android, Youtube. Apple bought beats, siri. And all do a lot of acqui-hiring which kills competition in early stage.

[matkoniecz]

I would be happy about FB dying, but what is wrong with copying good interface ideas?

I hate FB, but I hate making such stuff patentable/copyrightable/unreusable/uncopiable even more.

[Cymruboogaloo]

Those aren't good interface ideas those are features that alot of trial and error and research went into. Think of it like a new drug. Theres alot of R&D poured into these things. not on the same regulatory or financial scale but work goes into that. Facebook blocks the growth of these by copying wholesale and throwing it at its database of users so they never have to leave their ecosystem.

Look at what instagram has become from photosharing app to an everything platform that has a horrible UX.

[bart_spoon]

> I would be happy about FB dying, but what is wrong with copying good interface ideas?

Nothing, in my opinion. The problem arises when a company is so large that simply implementing a good interface idea completely destroys the value of the original. The best example is Snapchat. Snapchat got big, fast, because its main conceit, while simple, was pretty unique. As soon as Instagram implemented it, Snapchat fell off a cliff, because why use Snapchat when you can just use Instagram?

[ddorian43]

It does the same thing on mobile, that's why it knows what to buy.

[johnnyfaehell]

Snap, Tiktok, Pinterest, and even twitter were never competing for the space that Facebook has. The main space Facebook has is social advertising and there is no competitors and anyone tries to enter that market gets attacked by Facebook since Facebook runs it. Try starting a company that will allow you to buy influencer ads on Instagram and uses the API the influencer can grant to you to correctly identify how much money to pay the influencer. Facebook will remove your API access the minute it realises you're trying to do advertising and they're not getting a cut. Facebook are very open that their problem is they're not making any money on it. We understand their reasoning but it's againist the law to then sue companies for trying to get public data and the other attacks. If Google can't rank it's own products higher in google search Facebook shouldn't be allowed to remove API access solely because you're providing a service they don't even provide and don't even want to provide.

[jonplackett]

What facebook has that none of the others do not is a value almost like infrastructure. They ARE your online identity in a way that pinterest/snap/twitter are not. Wechat is comparable (probably even more than FB) but only in China.

What FB has been able to do is smooth out those up and down waves by acquiring challengers (Insta/Whatsapp). They tried to buy snap too but when that didn't work they just copied features and now also copying TikTok.

So I don't think they're subject to those equalising forces as has been the case previously (and which do still affect everyone else - RIP Vine).

[tekkk]

Unable, maybe. But not from lack of trying. You say social networks come and go but Facebook is still very much the largest network as it was ten years ago. Now is it because of cool innovations and better products or because of copying and stifling competitors, it's debatable.

But what makes this worse is the fact that Facebook hasn't been very vigilant about their privacy practises or political influencing on their platforms. And they haven't really suffered any repercussions from that. Which might embolden them and others to continue to do so unless something is done.

[7952]

A new entrants champions a new feature or approach. That is then adopted into an existing product which can grow due to network effects. This can then expose the feature to a massive audience in a more culturally neutral form. So YouTube adds short video, Microsoft add Slack style chat to Office, and everyone adds Zoom style video calls. The original product slowly try's to build a wider platform, but is unable to compete on the same level.

[evgen]

All of those so-called challengers who died were ones that basically were killed by Facebook in its rise to power. None of the 'global competition' is really competitive outside of China, and the new entrants are copied as soon as they come out with something interesting. New challengers may emerge rapidly, but unless something is done from a regulatory side those same challengers will flame-out into either death or mediocrity within a few years of appearing.

As a simple example, those 'new entrants' (can we really call any of those four new other than TikTok?) are all multi-billion dollar companies, but by quickly cloning the interesting features of those entrants Facebook probably siphoned off as much value from those entrants as they are now worth. In a world without Facebook copying them all four of those companies would have market caps that were at least 2x their current levels.

[xbmcuser]

The networks that would have surpassed in Facebook in reach were either bought i.e whatsapp instagram or copied i.e snapchat and many others