[mullingitover]

I'd contrast this with Flickr. Flickr was the original social network. They have a modest loss leader, a reasonable free tier, but nothing like the permanent money bonfire that the big tech firms operate.

They were kinda the first real Web 2.0 social media site, with a social graph, privacy controls, a developer API, tagging, RSS feeds.

I feel that they never really got to their full potential exactly because these big VC-backed dumping operations in social media (like Facebook) were able to kill them in the crib.

If we're going to accept that social media is a natural monopoly: great. Regulate them strictly, as you should with any monopoly.

[nl]

Flickr failed because they sold to Yahoo which was bad place to end up. But a successful Flickr would look a lot like Instagram

Del.icio.us is the same story. Good product ahead of its time, bought by Yahoo and died. Could have been Pinterest.

[mullingitover]

Fair point, there's a good chance we'd be living in a techno utopia right now if someone was able to go back in time and prevent Yahoo from murdering so many promising startups. Conversely, if Yahoo had just spent the relative pocket change that Google was asking for back in the day perhaps we'd be living under the oppressive thumb of a trillion dollar market cap Alta Vista.

[alex1138]

> VC-backed dumping operations

Which is very reassuring considering some of them are fairly obviously on the wrong side of history with very naive viewpoints https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7852246