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A comment on What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012). Parent comment

Re:What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012) by Broken_Hippo on Thursday May 25, 2017 @06:12AM (#14416347)
Folks have tried starting alternatives to facebook: I think the real problem is that facebook is more similiar to a phone company that only connects its users to others that have the same phone company. It was the only game in town for a while, so this has made it into a near-monopoly.

If facebook was required to have some level of across-platform access, this might level the playing field and give us actual choice. Unfortunatly, I think this will take legislative action to accomplish. Until then, luck and time might change the course of things.

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Re:What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012) by krylon on Thursday May 25, 2017 @07:30AM (#14416645)
> If facebook was required to have some level of across-platform access

That would be very interesting, and I think it would be a good idea. But I imagine it would be rather hard to pull of on the technical side, even if Facebook full-heartedly supported such an effort, and I don't want to begin to think of the kind of pressure we would have to put on our politicians to create such a law without making humongous mess out of it.

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Re:What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012) by davidcbc on Thursday May 25, 2017 @07:43AM (#14416688)
Facebook has never been the only game in town. It has just been and continues to be the best game in town.
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Re:What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012) by leni536 on Thursday May 25, 2017 @08:33AM (#14416871)
And the best by being the largest...
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Re:What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012) by davidcbc on Thursday May 25, 2017 @10:13AM (#14417407)
"People use it" is a pretty important feature for a social network though.

Whatever replaces Facebook will have to be "cool" enough to get people to actually want to use it. "Facebook but with better privacy" just isn't cool, so the average person isn't going to bother.

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Re:What I Learned When Facebook Disabled My Account (2012) by hashhar on Thursday May 25, 2017 @09:08AM (#14417035)
Orkut and MySpace were both a lot larger than when Facebook started. Facebook did some great things and innovated during their early years. But yeah, nowadays they can just coast by being marginally better than any new product.
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