This is how the gaming space got saturated with battle royales and now extraction shooters.
Remember the time Google tried to create a social media platform.
Circles was a great concept. But not their first. That honor goes to Orkut.
They actually made a very different one, that nobody tried to replace anymore.
They also immediately made the entire world hate it before they even tried it…
You’d think that they’d be better at causing a network effect with all that big dick monopoly/oligopoly over search and email, but it looks like a no.
To start taking users away from Facebook, it needs to be sufficiently better than them to overcome their network effects. Which are substantial. Some of the features that I’d count as “better” would be laughable coming from Google:
- more social, less monetised for ads
- not sending traffic to fascist tech bros
- just show me my friends’ updates, don’t fuck around with them with an algorithm
- I want my “work network”, “social network” and “email” to be from different companies, so none know too much about me
In addition:
-
actually advertise what’s better about them, so people will move. “Circles” was the most confusing shit I’d ever seen
-
some of the prioritisation in FB was exactly backwards for me; I want to see more distant friends’ updates more often, since I see my local friends to keep up with them. I want to see friends that post less often prioritised over attention seekers that post every time they fart. That might be “algorithm” tho; feed you tidbits to keep you scrolling
To start taking users away from VK, only a country-wide ban at ISP level worked. Surprisingly effectively. Few bothered with VPNs. Most switched to Facebook and/or Telegram, depending on who wanted more feed or chat features.
- I want my “work network”, “social network” and “email” to be from different companies, so none know too much about me
I want a publicly maintained social network, designed on similar principles to blockchain somehow. I don’t want any company having control over my social network, nor any tyrannical individual.
I just meant that their executives must be really dumb.
Gestures at Lemmy/piefed 🤭.
Instagram devs when new Snapchat feature drops.
I was going to say that this sounds like Apple but it said “immediately”
you gotta wait a few years for it to count as thinking differently
Then tack on the marketing hype cycle presenting it like it never existed before and it’s some revolutionary technology.
Examples?
Epic Games: “This comic is great. Copy it immediately.”
New Fortnite emote just dropped!
The competitor is Apple
