Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dragonwriter 393 days ago
Social media has extremely high network externalities. People who are information consumers want to go where the people who are active posters are, and people who are active posters want to go where the audience is.

The actual qualities of the product are almost irrelevant if you have the current user base; it takes very a lot to get even a sizable minority of people to actively use social media that doesn't have that kind of established dominance in the face of social media that does, and it has to be sustained.

That's why most new successful social media sites (even though over time they may converge on feature sets) become successful by dominating some particular new media or interaction style not supported well on existing social media—it effectively lets them operate as if there was no dominant competitor, as an add-on rather than replacement for existing dominant social media. But Bluesky doesn't have that.