They're incredibly useful to the state as large monolithic entities. It's much easier to spy on people and exert influence. Imagine the feds chasing dozens of social media platforms to fight election interference.
There is no chance any legislative body will break up tech. They'll more likely go the bank route and make them too big to fail, and regulate them, which amounts to giving the government direct or indirect power in what speech is allowed on the platform.
Come on, can't anyone make a product that connects friends better than FB? I'm sure it's technically amazing, but from a product perspective, my god, look at the thing, it's an absolute garbage fire. You can tell from the notifications it sends that it wants you to watch shitty videos and read shitty news articles alone, not connect you with your friends.
Make a social network that feels like an actual social space and not an ad-infested media shithole, and I'll sign up, my friends will sign up, everyone will sign up, and FB will be toast in a couple months.
My response to that tired theme: you don't need a mega $B valuation to pay for a simple social network for sharing baby pics with friends and family. A non-profit or a benefit corp structure would be just fine.
And people pay $10/mo for Netflix, why wouldn't they pay a few bucks a month for an actually good social network? Heck, make it free for a month or six, no credit card needed, and when people see how good it is they won't leave. I pay for Disney+ just to let my kids watch Disney movies BECAUSE THEY'RE GOOD.
People won't subscribe to a non-free Facebook competitor because Facebook is free and none of their friends are on the non-free competitor... And most of their friends never will be.
Most likely the product will be free for a while and switch to paid. It kind of sucks but for a really good product it could work.
This is almost Reddit's model (with Reddit Gold, and now the various other comment/post awards added recently), except Reddit also sells ads; it'd be interesting to see if the awards alone are enough to keep the lights on absent a need to appease investors.
A) probably never have picked up steam, and
B) had a much steeper uphill battle
Before the plague hit only startups really used Zoom. The corporate video call space was dominated by things like Webex (awful), BlueJeans (awful), whatever MS morphed into current Teams (only slightly less awful), or if you were lucky, Google Hangouts (also just slightly less awful). Skype wasn't even a contender, and even against the kind of all-star field I just listed, it was a shitty experience - which says a lot.
There was a big void for real-time video business conferencing that "just worked", but until early 2020, the space was cornered off by giants who saw it, at best, as barren ground. Enter global, mandatory remote working and all of a sudden the existing players had nothing to offer. The market had stagnated, and beancounters had driven out all expensive innovation. All of a sudden, the space blows up and the neglected main tech in use is no longer fit for the new purpose.
Zoom has a lot of problems, but what they did have was a product that "just worked" in almost any setup, coupled with architecture and infrastructure that at least COULD respond to insane, long-lasting spike in demand.
Skype had become a rotting corpse nobody wanted to look or smell, but that was too heavy to move and too putrid to touch. We needed big enough a fire to burn it to ashes to make space for someone less atrocious. Zoom just happened to catch the tailwind, mostly because all the existing players had also abandoned the space but would not dare to leave it unguarded.
I've used Zoom for online classes (as a student) and don't see any difference or advantage between it and Meets. You still click a link and and a window open ups, your camera turns on, there is a chat box, etc.
Meets craps its UI dimensions when you open chat. Zoom pops the chat window up in the middle of the screen, which is only slightly less bad. Both have problems if you have detachable video camera(s) in addition to laptop's own. And don't get me started on the audio path: even if you do manage to pick the right input and output, there's no guarantee the audio actually gets routed through. Expect to restart the video call software 25% of the time and pray it reconnects the streams all the way through.
Oh, and Zoom's screen sharing experience on multi-monitor OSX setup is unforgivable. When you choose to share a screen, it triggers a sequence where the audience sees your shared view but you do not. The window you chose to share gets hidden locally.
Whoever thought that would be an acceptable user experience needs to have their head examined. Possibly with a trepanner.
I have a couple meetings/day on Meet, some small, some 20+, usually with screensharing by others, with a laptop with two webcams, 3 mics (internal, external webcam and dedicated mic) and 4 audio outputs (internal, each of two monitors (but only one has speakers connected) and Bluetooth headphones). The settings seem to always pick the right choices of inputs and outputs by default but change is easy.
The only thing that sometimes gives me trouble is the Bluetooth headphones connecting to my phone instead, but that's once in a blue moon.
The thing that is somewhat broken is sharing my screen, but sharing an application works so not a big deal.
Not sure about Zoom land though, only watched a couple classes over it.
This means I can circle a word or append a box to a diagram on a pdf my colleague is screensharing with me.
I can have non-technical meetings on whatever.
But annotation over shared screens is 100% the feature that keeps me on Zoom for all tech work
This upsets me greatly. I recall downloading the old versions of Skype a few years ago from http://www.oldversion.com/windows/skype/ and they were actually nice to use, felt responsive and just generally were most of what i'm looking for in a chat application.
At work, we still use the current versions of regular Skype (not Skype for business, which i'm told is a separate product and disgusting) for stand up calls and some meetings, as well as a chat solution for talking with colleagues, since Slack and Teams chats are too fragmented. It would have been nice to centralize everything on a single self-hosted platform, about which i wrote on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/lets-run-our-own-chat-plat... but until something like that would happen, Skype is the closest thing we've got (apart from e-mail, ugh).
I also used Skype throughout my university days to chat with my friends, and even all the way back in school, to keep in touch with people. Now, Skype has largely been displaced by Discord or WhatsApp for those purposes (no one seems to care for Telegram or Signal) and there are very few cases when anyone will turn to using Skype anymore.
And somehow, the product is way worse today than it used to be. The UI feels more "app-like" at the expense of being confusing and slow, there are occasionally bugs with how text shows up, it's spiraled downwards far from where the original native apps were and it seems that Microsoft will continuously throw the whole platform under the bus in favor of Teams.
But neither Teams, nor Zoom are good either! The sharing UI just jumps all over the place and in zoom even forces full screen. Zoom is obnoxious and doesn't let you open the options menu without being signed in, whereas Teams is broken and doesn't let you share files directly (neither does Zoom, to be honest). They just feel like a huge step backwards for general purpose communication, instead being meant just for meetings.
So what's left? Discord, Slack and even Rocket.Chat (which i mentioned in that blog post) all have their idiosyncrasies, for example, you can't really use Discord if all you need is one group or meeting, since it's centered around the concept of servers. I really don't know how we went from something that's good enough to a plethora of mediocre and sub par solutions...
I think though that while Facebook the social network may not last very long, I'm less sure that Facebook as a facilitator of ads will go away. They have a lot of historical data on which to continue determining ad placement on the Internet. Google ads don't just exist on Google sites.
Only because Microsoft probably assigned two interns to maintain Skype in the last 5 (if not more) years. I do agree with your point though.
People should ideally stop using whatsapp and move over to Telegram as it seems to be the only one that has whatsapp UX parity. Thats what I did, and I also have signal, discord etc and I own no shares of Telegram.
UX parity?? Telegram's UX blows WhatsApp out of the water. Stickers, message edits, polls, location sharing, bots for public channels, audio chats, etc etc. It's not even close!
And trying to buy anything that competes. If they'd been blocked from buying Instagram and WhatsApp they'd be in a much weaker position. Antitrust stuff could in principle stop them doing that.
But yeah big tech needs to be massive before it comes under any real antitrust scrutiny.
Question is if road further is a small shift in how services get constructed or complete rewrite in new ecosystem. People betting on web3 are doing wild bets. At the same time people betting on federated are doing very conservative bet on mental shift that is wild(since getting traction on federated is difficult - 98% of people have no real benefit).
Dot com explosion had a long tail. IT was for losers in the 00s and everyone wanted to be a quant and work for GS. The field was very unsexy.
The thing that is amusing is that US/Europe seem to think they will be able to deal with this and effectively regulate them, despite not succeeding at this at all in the past (see China + IP, etc).
One major reason is that China is willing to play "unfairly" to support its companies. US/Europe will be unable to ban these services entirely because their citizens depend on them too much. They will attempt what they do now, which is to regulate them in various ways to "ensure competition"
But when you go to do that to a chinese company, the government will find a way to make it hurt for you. You make it hurt for Chinese Search Engine Company, they will ban the chip companies from making chips for you, etc. They are much better at this game than the other governments.
This is going to be unlikely, when the Chinese government is actively kneecapping its own big techs.
Data is going to be regulated like money, and not everyone is going to have the privilege to operate data on one's soil moving forward. No western companies could do in China, or vice versa.
> US/Europe will be unable to ban these services entirely because their citizens depend on them too much.
They can just ask it to sell, which was happening to TikTok, or setting up joint venture capital. They are many ways to do such things, government can make you bleed if they want to.
Remember that in China, the government is the kingmaker. In the US/EU, the companies are the kingmakers. China is simply reminding some of it's companies that this is the case.
As for the last, good luck. You have a coherent long term strategy that they are willing to sacrifice short term for on one side, and a completely incoherent mess that changes every 4-6 years on the US/EU side.
After they are finished kneecapping the US/EU companies, they will need these chinese companies more than china needs them. Not exactly a great negotiating position - there will come a point where you say "sell", and they say "nah, that's okay, we're good".
Not really, just taming them. Which is pretty much all done at this point.
It's not clear to me that products like Facebook that are primarily driven by cultural rather than technical dominance are something that the Chinese are likely to be able to dominate in. Facebook dominates because your friends and family and hobbies and whatever are on there, doing their thing. When they stop doing that, Facebook won't dominate anymore.
Now if Han culture becomes internationally dominant as the "cool" culture which North Americans Europeans aspire to emulate (like how American culture was internationally in the post WWII era through, say, the early 90s), then all bets are off -- but I think the trend is actually going opposite to that now.
Until then, there will be social networks that dominate in China and there will be social networks that dominate in Europe and North America; because culturally (and politically, obviously) and they will rarely overlap as these are still two very distinct entities.
I think it's likely that the same argument applies to a lesser degree to the ads space, and maybe even to commerce. Something like AliExpress feels worlds apart from Amazon despite the latter become increasingly a wild west of knock-off discount Chinese products anyways.
Much easier said than done. FB is a massive product, I don't think anyone can realistically predict how something that really had all the features of FB would actually fare. Beyond that, we know that new networks are created all the time despite the existence of other big ones. Based on your premise, tiktok shouldn't have existed, nor insta, nor snapchat. Network effects matter but if the product actually does something useful or better and is well designed, people will come.
Those were all facebook's competitors and offered mostly the same features. Facebook succeeded because everyone's friends were there. Facebook was not "integrated", it didnt even have a newsfeed when it started
Things that were different:
- stronger crossover into real life (it wasnt a net persona, LinkedIn was real but it was for jobs, you dont live in it)
- sharing personal Prefs
- games with other members
Maybe I missed these on other websites.
PS: I'm not pro FB, but to my best memory it was clearly different from other websites. Hence my original message.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/10/ubers-david-plouffe-to-join-...
I am pretty sure Facebook got and stays big primarily because of network effects. You could create a website with all the technical features of Facebook, and few would use it because their friends aren't on it.
In my view, it is the pendulum of antitrust law swinging back to stricter enforcement that will end big tech, if at all. The hope that everything will just magically get better now that your local coffee shop can deliver beans to you with off-the-shelf software seems slightly optimistic.
But I hope I'm wrong.