[wpietri]

Absolutely. I think your last point is especially good. Facebook consumes a ton of cash for what many people feel are disappointing results. Are they vulnerable to a competitor who is less about what users want than what they need? A competitor who can do that for 1/10th or 1/100th as much money? That could be very hard for the me-me-me companies to keep up with.

[hinkley]

The thing with fads, and adoption cycles in general, is that what people 'want' can be figured out pretty quickly, but as far as I'm concerned, The Trough of Disillusionment is what happens when people figure out that what they need is something else.

So what you're asking is can someone come into the ToD and introduce a new product that steals people away? It's plausible and if I were in a better headspace I could probably name you a bunch of examples. But does it always happen? I don't think so. There are plenty of incumbents who manage to coast through and come out the other side having demonstrated a dilute form of change of heart - just enough to convince the customers that 'something was done' even if they can't quite put a finger on what exactly is better and how much.

[wpietri]

Sorry, I shouldn't have phrased that as a direct question. I meant it in a more rhetorical sense.

Oh, sure. It's a very tough field, and would be even if the incumbents didn't have billions to throw at the problem. I definitely don't believe that the better product wins; I only need Microsoft as a counter-example.

But it does strike me as a zone of opportunity. Maybe Substack is a good partial example here. Before the web, we had magazines. Then we basically had magazines on the web, preserving much of the old structure in the new medium. With lots of flailing as people tried to find sustainable business models.

And then Substack came along with an extremely bare-bones implementation mostly using 1980s technology and a lot of writers and readers are very happy with it.

So it's more that I'm asking myself. What are the products that cost 1/100th as much that might be as satisfying for my Facebook-ish needs?

[hinkley]

Way back in the long dark ago I ran into some abandonware for incorporating third party data onto web pages via a shared server. Nobody I knew understood how it was meant to work, but I got the impression it was meant to be a tool where a group of people could host commentary about a website that was not their own.

I keep wondering why nobody has really tried that again. Slashdot sort of filled in that space, and then Digg and now Reddit. Or Facebook for the 'all-in' solution. I keep thinking there was something I was missing about why that would be difficult to pull off.

Today I have a different answer for that - that ship has sailed. We are multi-device and it would be much more difficult for me to have a consistent experience across phone and personal (and sometimes work) machines.

But at the time perhaps it as an adoption thing. Just visiting a website is a cheap interaction that can lead to a habit. Having to do something special doesn't work the same way.