[hackthefender]

> big tech firms got big and stay big, not because of network effects or political power, but because of their rare expertise; and that they cannot keep their advantage in expertise forever

I am pretty sure Facebook got and stays big primarily because of network effects. You could create a website with all the technical features of Facebook, and few would use it because their friends aren't on it.

In my view, it is the pendulum of antitrust law swinging back to stricter enforcement that will end big tech, if at all. The hope that everything will just magically get better now that your local coffee shop can deliver beans to you with off-the-shelf software seems slightly optimistic.

But I hope I'm wrong.

[bko]

> In my view, it is the pendulum of antitrust law swinging back to stricter enforcement that will end big tech, if at all

They're incredibly useful to the state as large monolithic entities. It's much easier to spy on people and exert influence. Imagine the feds chasing dozens of social media platforms to fight election interference.

There is no chance any legislative body will break up tech. They'll more likely go the bank route and make them too big to fail, and regulate them, which amounts to giving the government direct or indirect power in what speech is allowed on the platform.

[throwawaysea]

It’s quite a perverse situation because it amounts to the government running around legal protections (like the first amendment) by simply having virtually all societal speech exist in privately controlled spaces. They can simply use the threat of legislative action to influence that private space. Glenn Greenwald has written a few different pieces about this, like: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-...

[civilized]

Facebook stays big because nobody else seems to have the magic combination of (1) a more compelling product vision for a social network, (2) capacity to execute and scale that vision.

Come on, can't anyone make a product that connects friends better than FB? I'm sure it's technically amazing, but from a product perspective, my god, look at the thing, it's an absolute garbage fire. You can tell from the notifications it sends that it wants you to watch shitty videos and read shitty news articles alone, not connect you with your friends.

Make a social network that feels like an actual social space and not an ad-infested media shithole, and I'll sign up, my friends will sign up, everyone will sign up, and FB will be toast in a couple months.

[wintermutestwin]

I agree with you, but queue the responses implying that without adtech stalkerware there is no way to pay for it.

My response to that tired theme: you don't need a mega $B valuation to pay for a simple social network for sharing baby pics with friends and family. A non-profit or a benefit corp structure would be just fine.

[civilized]

Check out RStudio PBC. Incredible tech company. Doing just fine.

And people pay $10/mo for Netflix, why wouldn't they pay a few bucks a month for an actually good social network? Heck, make it free for a month or six, no credit card needed, and when people see how good it is they won't leave. I pay for Disney+ just to let my kids watch Disney movies BECAUSE THEY'RE GOOD.

[ziml77]

You need a lot of people using the service for people to find it worth paying for. I saw this with Pillowfort; intended to be a place for the people who had been forced off of Tumblr to go. They require a one-time $5 payment to create an account because they don't want to bring in investors and be forced to exploit their users to maximize earnings. This payment stopped a lot of people from joining. They are used to being able to share their art and socialize online for free. And they had no guarantee that others would join and stick with the site.

[wccrawford]

People subscribe to Netflix (and its competition) because there's no legal way to get that service for free, and it doesn't matter if their friends are also using that same service.

People won't subscribe to a non-free Facebook competitor because Facebook is free and none of their friends are on the non-free competitor... And most of their friends never will be.

[civilized]

I get the idea, but I feel FB sucks so badly that eventually a much better product will figure out a way through the gauntlet. There's a lot of money sloshing around out there with nothing to do.

Most likely the product will be free for a while and switch to paid. It kind of sucks but for a really good product it could work.

[yellowapple]

That, or it remains free to use, but offers optional paid features. Seems to work well enough for free-to-play video games; Fortnite is presumably a decent enough money maker for Epic Games, for example.

This is almost Reddit's model (with Reddit Gold, and now the various other comment/post awards added recently), except Reddit also sells ads; it'd be interesting to see if the awards alone are enough to keep the lights on absent a need to appease investors.

[dash2]

Yes, there's a strong case for Facebook. But consider Skype: it was pretty easy for people to ditch Skype and move to Zoom. Facebook's strength isn't just a network, it also has a lot of people's recorded history. So, the power of network effects varies. I think if e.g. Signal came up with features that Whatsapp lacks, it would have a good chance to displace Whatsapp.

[bostik]

If Skype had remained as useful and easy to use as it was >10 years ago, Zoom would

A) probably never have picked up steam, and

B) had a much steeper uphill battle

Before the plague hit only startups really used Zoom. The corporate video call space was dominated by things like Webex (awful), BlueJeans (awful), whatever MS morphed into current Teams (only slightly less awful), or if you were lucky, Google Hangouts (also just slightly less awful). Skype wasn't even a contender, and even against the kind of all-star field I just listed, it was a shitty experience - which says a lot.

There was a big void for real-time video business conferencing that "just worked", but until early 2020, the space was cornered off by giants who saw it, at best, as barren ground. Enter global, mandatory remote working and all of a sudden the existing players had nothing to offer. The market had stagnated, and beancounters had driven out all expensive innovation. All of a sudden, the space blows up and the neglected main tech in use is no longer fit for the new purpose.

Zoom has a lot of problems, but what they did have was a product that "just worked" in almost any setup, coupled with architecture and infrastructure that at least COULD respond to insane, long-lasting spike in demand.

Skype had become a rotting corpse nobody wanted to look or smell, but that was too heavy to move and too putrid to touch. We needed big enough a fire to burn it to ashes to make space for someone less atrocious. Zoom just happened to catch the tailwind, mostly because all the existing players had also abandoned the space but would not dare to leave it unguarded.

[ForHackernews]

Is Skype that bad? Every time I've used it (rarely) over the last 10 years, it's worked pretty well for me.

[rsj_hn]

I've used google hangouts and then Meets at my work and it's fine. It does not require any special training to use, it works as you'd expect, and basically gets out of your way.

I've used Zoom for online classes (as a student) and don't see any difference or advantage between it and Meets. You still click a link and and a window open ups, your camera turns on, there is a chat box, etc.

[bostik]

I use Zoom and Meet daily too. They are both functional on the bare-bones level but fail miserably with anything more complex - such as a 10+ person meeting. Or screen sharing.

Meets craps its UI dimensions when you open chat. Zoom pops the chat window up in the middle of the screen, which is only slightly less bad. Both have problems if you have detachable video camera(s) in addition to laptop's own. And don't get me started on the audio path: even if you do manage to pick the right input and output, there's no guarantee the audio actually gets routed through. Expect to restart the video call software 25% of the time and pray it reconnects the streams all the way through.

Oh, and Zoom's screen sharing experience on multi-monitor OSX setup is unforgivable. When you choose to share a screen, it triggers a sequence where the audience sees your shared view but you do not. The window you chose to share gets hidden locally.

Whoever thought that would be an acceptable user experience needs to have their head examined. Possibly with a trepanner.

[gota]

Zoom allows annotation and drawing on top of a shared screen - actual shared screen, not a separate "whiteboard"

This means I can circle a word or append a box to a diagram on a pdf my colleague is screensharing with me.

I can have non-technical meetings on whatever.

But annotation over shared screens is 100% the feature that keeps me on Zoom for all tech work

[KronisLV]

> Skype had become a rotting corpse nobody wanted to look or smell, but that was too heavy to move and too putrid to touch. We needed big enough a fire to burn it to ashes to make space for someone less atrocious.

This upsets me greatly. I recall downloading the old versions of Skype a few years ago from http://www.oldversion.com/windows/skype/ and they were actually nice to use, felt responsive and just generally were most of what i'm looking for in a chat application.

At work, we still use the current versions of regular Skype (not Skype for business, which i'm told is a separate product and disgusting) for stand up calls and some meetings, as well as a chat solution for talking with colleagues, since Slack and Teams chats are too fragmented. It would have been nice to centralize everything on a single self-hosted platform, about which i wrote on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/lets-run-our-own-chat-plat... but until something like that would happen, Skype is the closest thing we've got (apart from e-mail, ugh).

I also used Skype throughout my university days to chat with my friends, and even all the way back in school, to keep in touch with people. Now, Skype has largely been displaced by Discord or WhatsApp for those purposes (no one seems to care for Telegram or Signal) and there are very few cases when anyone will turn to using Skype anymore.

And somehow, the product is way worse today than it used to be. The UI feels more "app-like" at the expense of being confusing and slow, there are occasionally bugs with how text shows up, it's spiraled downwards far from where the original native apps were and it seems that Microsoft will continuously throw the whole platform under the bus in favor of Teams.

But neither Teams, nor Zoom are good either! The sharing UI just jumps all over the place and in zoom even forces full screen. Zoom is obnoxious and doesn't let you open the options menu without being signed in, whereas Teams is broken and doesn't let you share files directly (neither does Zoom, to be honest). They just feel like a huge step backwards for general purpose communication, instead being meant just for meetings.

So what's left? Discord, Slack and even Rocket.Chat (which i mentioned in that blog post) all have their idiosyncrasies, for example, you can't really use Discord if all you need is one group or meeting, since it's centered around the concept of servers. I really don't know how we went from something that's good enough to a plethora of mediocre and sub par solutions...

[orlovs]

Did not thread fully, but I get your point. I know large portion hacker news audience dont like Sowell (and other Chicago school econs). In Basic Economy he defines that monopoly cant be defined “market share”, but how hard is to migrate off/open new competitors. Seing how tiktok eating userbase for fb. Its hardly defined as monopoly in social media angle. There should be more

[bobthepanda]

If you want to time when people will completely leave Facebook forever, timing markets is basically a fools' errand.

I think though that while Facebook the social network may not last very long, I'm less sure that Facebook as a facilitator of ads will go away. They have a lot of historical data on which to continue determining ad placement on the Internet. Google ads don't just exist on Google sites.

[pdimitar]

> it was pretty easy for people to ditch Skype and move to Zoom

Only because Microsoft probably assigned two interns to maintain Skype in the last 5 (if not more) years. I do agree with your point though.

[izelnakri]

However there is no good alternative for Meta’s Facebook, despite its degrading web UI over the years. I dont think its that much of a problem growing at 1-2% per month instead of 20-25% for any new social network.

People should ideally stop using whatsapp and move over to Telegram as it seems to be the only one that has whatsapp UX parity. Thats what I did, and I also have signal, discord etc and I own no shares of Telegram.

[sofixa]

> People should ideally stop using whatsapp and move over to Telegram as it seems to be the only one that has whatsapp UX parity.

UX parity?? Telegram's UX blows WhatsApp out of the water. Stickers, message edits, polls, location sharing, bots for public channels, audio chats, etc etc. It's not even close!

[Ekaros]

And I don't really want any of that. I want just send textual message to group of people for free. Maybe add an image, but that is it. I don't really care about anything extra.

[sofixa]

But even that Telegram does better, because you can edit messages you've sent to correct typos, you can pin them in channels, and there are extra nice things which might come in handy ( when do you want to meet? A pinned poll and it's easy).

[LinuxBender]

I use Zoom and Skype but Zoom has not come close to replacing Skype for me. I have skype-in with multiple landline phone numbers in multiple states. Zoom does not offer this yet.

[MertsA]

Curious what you think Telegram has over Signal. If your motivation for leaving WhatsApp is because of privacy concerns both WhatsApp, Signal, and even iMessage for that matter are technically superior to Telegram. Was it personal preference between the two or network effects of the larger user base on Telegram?

[tim333]

>Facebook ... stays big primarily because of network effects

And trying to buy anything that competes. If they'd been blocked from buying Instagram and WhatsApp they'd be in a much weaker position. Antitrust stuff could in principle stop them doing that.

[robryan]

It is kind of working now, I doubt they would be able to buy TikTok. I don’t recall them being involved at all when Trump was trying to force its sale.

But yeah big tech needs to be massive before it comes under any real antitrust scrutiny.

[michaelbrave]

I personally think web 3.0 is overhyped and almost anything involving NFTs are basically ponzi schemes. But the premise is decentralizing the web, which if it even partially delivers could in theory chip away a lot of most tech giants. Combined with regulation things could change.

[roguas]

Right now, I see there a 2 approaches. 1. crypto/blockchain - redo everything literally 2. federated services - such as mastodon, discord?... for the most part you have some identity within larger ecosystem, but you can easily run your private community

Question is if road further is a small shift in how services get constructed or complete rewrite in new ecosystem. People betting on web3 are doing wild bets. At the same time people betting on federated are doing very conservative bet on mental shift that is wild(since getting traction on federated is difficult - 98% of people have no real benefit).

[nus07]

A lot of these things run on sentiment . About 15 years ago the supposedly smartest people and greed was on Wall Street . Talking derivatives and investment banking was where all my college friends with the best grades went .They were the bad ones and we were the cool good ones. Fast forward to today and big tech is where those same college friends are now, the greed is still there , the gentrification of the west coast and a whole host of things means we are the bad guys now. Enter the FTC and new anti- trust and anti- monopoly laws. It’s been a great ride for the last decade but I agree that big tech needs to be reined in .

[pram]

Agreed, I’ve been saying this for years now to friends lol. There was a big culture shift but no one remembers how it was before.

Dot com explosion had a long tail. IT was for losers in the 00s and everyone wanted to be a quant and work for GS. The field was very unsexy.

[DannyBee]

Antitrust won't end big tech. It will just kneecap the US and Europe. They will take the only part of the new economy they have a foothold in and hand it to someone else. China's tech companies, supported and subsidized by the government, will take over. This is blindingly obvious.

The thing that is amusing is that US/Europe seem to think they will be able to deal with this and effectively regulate them, despite not succeeding at this at all in the past (see China + IP, etc).

One major reason is that China is willing to play "unfairly" to support its companies. US/Europe will be unable to ban these services entirely because their citizens depend on them too much. They will attempt what they do now, which is to regulate them in various ways to "ensure competition"

But when you go to do that to a chinese company, the government will find a way to make it hurt for you. You make it hurt for Chinese Search Engine Company, they will ban the chip companies from making chips for you, etc. They are much better at this game than the other governments.

[karmasimida]

> China's tech companies, supported and subsidized by the government, will take over.

This is going to be unlikely, when the Chinese government is actively kneecapping its own big techs.

Data is going to be regulated like money, and not everyone is going to have the privilege to operate data on one's soil moving forward. No western companies could do in China, or vice versa.

> US/Europe will be unable to ban these services entirely because their citizens depend on them too much.

They can just ask it to sell, which was happening to TikTok, or setting up joint venture capital. They are many ways to do such things, government can make you bleed if they want to.

[DannyBee]

The chinese government is not kneecapping them, it's carefully forcing them to fall in line, and doing so in a way that won't hurt its own interests.

Remember that in China, the government is the kingmaker. In the US/EU, the companies are the kingmakers. China is simply reminding some of it's companies that this is the case.

As for the last, good luck. You have a coherent long term strategy that they are willing to sacrifice short term for on one side, and a completely incoherent mess that changes every 4-6 years on the US/EU side.

After they are finished kneecapping the US/EU companies, they will need these chinese companies more than china needs them. Not exactly a great negotiating position - there will come a point where you say "sell", and they say "nah, that's okay, we're good".

[Nasrudith]

No it is beyond just compliance - Xi is outright starting to Mao it up and dusting off the communist claptrap when it is useful to him, and spouting crap about China's future being in physical good manufacturing. He is doing the narcicistic dictator trick of fucking over nice things as potential remote threats to his power.

[ksec]

>This is going to be unlikely, when the Chinese government is actively kneecapping its own big techs.

Not really, just taming them. Which is pretty much all done at this point.

[cmrdporcupine]

It depends on what we are talking about in regards to "big tech".

It's not clear to me that products like Facebook that are primarily driven by cultural rather than technical dominance are something that the Chinese are likely to be able to dominate in. Facebook dominates because your friends and family and hobbies and whatever are on there, doing their thing. When they stop doing that, Facebook won't dominate anymore.

Now if Han culture becomes internationally dominant as the "cool" culture which North Americans Europeans aspire to emulate (like how American culture was internationally in the post WWII era through, say, the early 90s), then all bets are off -- but I think the trend is actually going opposite to that now.

Until then, there will be social networks that dominate in China and there will be social networks that dominate in Europe and North America; because culturally (and politically, obviously) and they will rarely overlap as these are still two very distinct entities.

I think it's likely that the same argument applies to a lesser degree to the ads space, and maybe even to commerce. Something like AliExpress feels worlds apart from Amazon despite the latter become increasingly a wild west of knock-off discount Chinese products anyways.

[leadingthenet]

Counterpoint: TikTok.

[ipaddr]

All big movies have random Chinese culture or star included. Han culture may become part of hollywood's core which will spread the culture

[cma]

The US funded EUV technology (the tech behind 7nm and below), and have used that DARPA funding to prevent Europe's ASML from selling to China. It seems to be almost exactly what you are warning about in reverse.

[root_axis]

> You could create a website with all the technical features of Facebook, and few would use it because their friends aren't on it.

Much easier said than done. FB is a massive product, I don't think anyone can realistically predict how something that really had all the features of FB would actually fare. Beyond that, we know that new networks are created all the time despite the existence of other big ones. Based on your premise, tiktok shouldn't have existed, nor insta, nor snapchat. Network effects matter but if the product actually does something useful or better and is well designed, people will come.

[cblconfederate]

The best thing that regulators can do is to enforce common protocols. The only things that have survived becoming a walled garden by big tech are big protocols that existed before them (e.g. email)

[agumonkey]

facebook also caught the social internet first wave.. humanity never had a global website to 'exist' .. facebook came, everybody thought it would be teh future and wanted to try.

[cblconfederate]

that s not true. many different social networks existed, and many were very close to facebook. there were even blogs etc. Facebook was the only one willing to ruthlessly go after people's contacts lists, and get them to use their real names so even non-internet users would undestand it. After it had picked up exponentially more users it was basically impossible to match for others.

[agumonkey]

Afaik there was nothing like Facebook. Blogs and even MySpace don't count. They weren't integrated like Facebook (you could interact with people in a lot of ways).

[cblconfederate]

Friendster, Hi5, Xing, Linkedin, Myspace, Orkut, Bebo, VK

Those were all facebook's competitors and offered mostly the same features. Facebook succeeded because everyone's friends were there. Facebook was not "integrated", it didnt even have a newsfeed when it started

[agumonkey]

You could add asianavenue who had millions of users. Except friendster and VK I think I toyed with all the others and none felt like Facebook. MySpace was just a blog + ad-hoc musician, LinkedIn was too narrow.

Things that were different:

- stronger crossover into real life (it wasnt a net persona, LinkedIn was real but it was for jobs, you dont live in it)

- sharing personal Prefs

- games with other members

Maybe I missed these on other websites.

PS: I'm not pro FB, but to my best memory it was clearly different from other websites. Hence my original message.

[cblconfederate]

all of them had those, to different degrees. Bebo even had a copy of the facebook platform for games. Arguably myspace, bebo , orkut etc had more customization and the feeling of subcultures. Facebook was a flat big mass. Their success relied on sucking up every possible contact list faster than the rest.

[qwertyuiop_]

Wait Big Tech hired most of Washington political hacks as VPs & SVPs. Thats regulatory capture.[0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/10/ubers-david-plouffe-to-join-...

[1]https://www.apple.com/leadership/lisa-jackson/