[jonahx]

> The social networks are big because they have genuine utility.

I think this is mostly wrong, and that the social networks are big primarily because they spent money at the right time to create entrenched network effects that allow them to rent-seek ever after. The quality and innovation of the services themselves (especially simple sites like twitter/X) is not the moat. At a technical level, most are easily clone-able and dominate not because they offer the best service or have the best features but because "everyone is there." That ubiquity is the only "genuine utilty" they are offering you.

I said "mostly" above because it seems like substack, e.g., as you said, has bundled payment, email, etc in a way that people really like. Even there, though, the network effect is probably the dominating factor.

[jimbokun]

The network effects ARE the genuine utility.

[theturtletalks]

And you can take advantage of their network effects by implementing a POSSE system. Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. That way, your website is the source of truth and the other places are like museums you curate to.

Why should you go thru the trouble? Because these social networks own your content and your audience and won't hesitate a second to drop you if they deem fit.

[biztos]

"Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere"

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

(There were a dozen other, unrelated things ranking higher on Google.)

[cma]

x.com heavily penalizes off-site links.

[uhoh-itsmaciek]

Fair enough, but that move should make you think twice before tying your fate to theirs.

[Groxx]

I'm not sure I'd describe cartel behavior as utility.

[IshKebab]

It is wrong, but so are you. The truth is that social networks are big because they HAD genuine utility. The Facebook was amazing... at least until about 2010. I was at uni when it started and I vividly remember thinking "I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is" (we didn't have physical face books in the UK) and then a year later thefacebook turned up. Amazing for everyone's social lives.

But after 2010 it just gradually got shitter.

WhatsApp replaced it (in most ways; in some ways there is no replacement) and has so far been amazing but it feels like we're about at the "2010" of WhatsApp. Meta is starting to turn the screws. An AI button. Notifications about new features. Integration with Meta accounts. Eventually it will probably merge with Facebook Messaging or some bollocks and then we'll all have to move elsewhere.

Anyway my point is, these things genuinely became big because they were great. They stayed big despite becoming shitter due to network effects.

[noosphr]

>at least until about 2010

A child born when facebook started going to shit is now able to drive.

[eloisant]

Also because they closed all the gates of interoperability once they got big enough.

If they didn't have the incentive to get a monopoly we would have kept a more decentralized web.

[akoboldfrying]

> If they didn't have the incentive to get a monopoly we would have kept a more decentralized web.

And we would have kept a more inconvenient web, since without that incentive, Facebook etc. would never have had reason to pay for an army of software developers to implement and improve the site and servers to host it.

[mastermage]

what improvements? The algorithm that radicalises people and keeps them seperated in bubbles? The Mass Data Harvesting?

[inigyou]

Are you implying something about Facebook is convenient?

[akoboldfrying]

Yes, absolutely. Facebook became successful because at the time it was much more convenient than existing ways of accomplishing the same thing it did (interacting socially with other people, meeting new people), including even existing websites like myspace which were themselves more convenient than trying to create one's own website and grow a community, or traveling to meet people face-to-face.

Why do you think it became successful?

[pessimizer]

> I wish there was a website or something that would help me know who everyone is

Did you miss Myspace and Friendster? Orkut had a market, I think. The reason that Facebook succeeded later is because it had a good API and invited people to write apps for it (mostly surveys and games, remember Zynga?), tracked its users across the internet, and sold them in targeted slices to advertisers. It was Friendster as a commercial platform (like Salesforce was CRM as a commercial platform.) It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.

I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput, being created by very talented people using Erlang. The reason people use it is because they always have and their friends do, and for a lot of countries with expensive SMS it provided messaging (and became so integrated into business that people weren't allowed to live without it.)

This is my argument about why these things were successful; I think that "they were great" isn't a credible one. They simply grabbed a large chunk of already proven markets quickly, but oriented themselves toward corporate needs to leverage that into total control.

[iamacyborg]

> It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.

I might be misremembering a bunch but myspace never had a feed that showed you your friend’s updates.

It also wasn’t able to magically show you the people who were at that random house party you went to the night before that you hit it off with but were too drunk to get their number.

[IshKebab]

Facebook didn't have the feed initially either (and it was really disliked when it was introduced - people thought it was like stalking). But yes to your second point. Real people who you actually wanted to know and had actually met were on Facebook. That wasn't really true of any of the other sites.

[smeej]

Little did we know back then how many people were yearning to have stalkers. "This person wants to be notified every time I put something online" sounded incredibly creepy in the mid-aughts!

[Grombobulous]

Group chats and private Discord servers with IRL friends are the modern version of the Facebook feed.

People love attention when it's people they know and like hanging out with.

The thing that degraded Facebook and Instagram is that they're not like that anymore, they're about maximizing content so that you spend as much time on their apps as possible.

If you just want to view content they are great for that, but I'd almost argue that they're not even social networks anymore. They are much closer to a smartphone version of cable television with mildly interactive elements.

[smelendez]

Yeah, Facebook was primarily a directory when it started, a cross between a college facebook (like a yearbook given at the start of the year instead of the end) and a phone book.

Also, it didn’t allow custom styles or html, which was unusual at the time but ultimately helped it take off to the point that, like Google, it didn’t have allow HTML or JS in ads either.

[IshKebab]

> Did you miss Myspace and Friendster?

MySpace was a) awful, b) only used by a tiny tiny fraction of people (1% maybe), and c) rarely had people's real names & photos on it. Not remotely comparable to Facebook. Even fewer people used Friendster and Orkut, at least in the UK.

> I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput

Free. No ads. Reliable. E2E encryption. Group chats. Cross platform. There's so much that's great about it. It was successful because the alternative was SMS which was shit. I'm guessing you're American.

[drnick1]

> rarely had people's real names & photos on it

This is a feature, not a bug. There is nothing worse for a society's collective privacy than a surveillance machine where people willingly post every detail of their lives. Stalin would have dreamed of today's anti-social media as a surveillance tool.

> There's so much that's great about it.

There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry. And that's assuming messages are truly encrypted and not analyzed behind your back by Meta. E2EE is kind of meaningless when the endpoints cannot be trusted. SMS is insecure in transit but it isn't controlled by a single for-profit company with close ties to government agencies.

[IshKebab]

> This is a feature, not a bug.

Uhm no. I wanted to know who real people were. At the time it was the much more secure and private than anything else because you needed to be at the same university to see anyone's accounts, and the idea of selling user data for profit didn't even exist.

> There is also so much that's truly awful about it, such as Meta vacuuming up your contact list, photos, and recording extensive telemetry

Sure. That doesn't invalidate any of the good stuff, and is minor in comparison (contact lists are not as valuable as you seem to think). If Signal had existed at the time I'm sure it would have been extremely popular too. Also photos are E2E encrypted.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

okay? good for you? you being worked up about privacy doesn’t magically invalidate the experience of others. you not liking something doesn’t mean that it’s objectively bad. you not seeing utility in something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have utility. you not seeing value in something doesn’t mean that a great many people saw value in it, which is exactly what you’re arguing against. It does not surprise me that someone with a worldview so simple and self-centred cannot comprehend of how a great many people saw the juice being worth the squeeze. Facebook had immense utility in the 2000s and even some of the 2010s. Not everyone wants to hang out with you on 4chan dude.

[freehorse]

And a lot of people also didn’t see the utility and the invasion of the privacy. It is not only OP or needs or 4chan, if that’s your only argument.

[simonsarris]

> but because "everyone is there." That ubiquity is the only "genuine utilty" they are offering you.

Sure. So what? You nonetheless cannot deny the utility. The friends that I have made from social networks are no less real. I am very grateful they (the means to discover these people now in my life) exist.

[jonahx]

We are probably coming at this from different angles. I don't deny those things but they're also not a counter-argument to the point I'm intending to make.

As an overly dramatic example, a slave might fall in love with the wife he met on a plantation, and the family he has, and even be grateful for them. Nevertheless, you probably don't want to use those facts to be a booster for slave plantations.

My argument is that all the good things you like about social networks, from a technical pov, could be had quite easily without the ads, political propoganda, and other ill-effects of the current popular social networks. Indeed, there are many open source projects that already provide the features you'd want. It's just that none has achieved the network you want.

This situation is unlike that of a large, complex physical infrastructure project, where you really do need to "put up" with a governement (or something like it) in order to get the thing built and maintained.

[Barbing]

Less dramatic off top of head: proud poverty built your work ethic but no motivation to pull any social safety net ladders.

Or maybe happy punch card programming developed your 1337 skills but glad IDEs are there for the current generation.

[simonsarris]

I think you are missing the point of talking about utility in the first place. I have no interest in lamentations. If you told someone to stay away from social networks because of their flaws, you would be doing them a cultural and professional disservice.

As a more moderate metaphor it's like someone saying they like living in one city, for all its flaws, and someone else comes along and extolls the virtues of several imaginary cities. It's fun to imagine those places, but its silly to mention them when someone is speaking of utility. This rush to examples not beholden to reality seems more common among technical types than any other, and likely prevents you from benefitting from what exists today.

[kelnos]

The hole in that analogy is that in some cases these other platforms aren't imaginary. The open, ad-free, privacy-protecting, you-own-your-data alternative to Twitter actually exists: Mastodon.

The problem, of course, is that the utility of a social network is right in the name: the network of users it connects. If the people you want to interact with aren't on Mastodon, then you have to use Twitter.

But ethically-good (for lack of a better term) Twitter alternatives isn't a list of imaginary cities.

I'm not the others participating in this subthread, so I can't speak to their motivations, but for me, it's possible to recognize that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have utility for many people, but also lament that otherwise-better platforms exist that haven't gained traction.

(And it's funny in this specific case, because often the reason they haven't gained traction is because of actual problems with the product: the UI is unpolished, the UX is bad, important feature XYZ is missing, etc. But in the case of Mastodon it actually is as good [or better] product-wise as Twitter. It just doesn't have the same mass appeal because of existing network effects, marketing, and first/early-mover advantages.)

[globalnode]

choosing utility over ethics is a value judgement, thats all.

[kridsdale1]

Yes the thing is valuable because of the network and the network is there because of the network.

We don’t really rely too much on the navigability of the Hudson River anymore. But being next to it is still the most expensive land in the nation.

[cpill]

the point is that they are not mutually exclusive. you can have both. just don't put all your eggs in the corporate basket