And some are old enough to have read millions of predictions of death of IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and FB.

and Sun, Netscape, etc. Just because some of these predictions didn't happen doesn't mean a lot of them did.

Sun Microsystems appeared solid. Apple _did_ almost die. IBM is only a shadow of their former self (IMO, the original IBM _did_ die). FB and Google are still young in comparison.

I have no stake in either, but IMO Google is more likely to survive than FB. FWIW, both have high quality staff that will bail if the growth stalls.

The old IBM really just sold itself off in little pieces.

What's left is a few pieces that have no idea what they want to be but they just keep doing what they do because the brand name assures them customers.

Some of which we were actually right about.

By the way, Apple only survived thanks to Microsoft money and being reverse acquired by NeXT.

True, but despite MySpace once being dominant, it’s peak scale was a tiny fraction of where Facebook is now.

MySpace was popular for some specific English speaking age groups mainly. Facebook is basically everywhere but China.

My parents who still refer to Google Maps as Mapquest are even on Facebook. It will take a pretty big screwup to flush out those types of users (not early adopters).

Your parents are the only ones left on Facebook. As long as that demographic can sustain it, so be it. But nobody under 70 is going to be on there much longer.

Actually, red-state cousin-humpers might still be on there a while longer. They have no place else to go, after Trump's predictably shambolic attempt at creating a competitor.

FB is still a thing among the late-30s - early 40s and older than that in some countries in Europe (I'm from Romania myself, in my early 40s), but younger than that there's almost no-one active on FB.

Anyway, good riddance, it pained me to see how most of the national politics was being carried out at a certain moment in time (~2014 - ~2019) almost exclusively on FB, a private network. That wasn't right.

Amen.

It still surprises me how perpetuating this stereotype of rural poor conservatives is A-OK.

"This" stereotype?

People who use the phrase “red-state cousin-humpers” are generally pretty stupid, but I’ll go ahead and try to explain it.

The context of this discussion was large populations that might sustain a social network. Implying that people who engage in incest in states that have a majority of Republican voters in recent elections would be a large enough population to sustain a social network is obviously laughable in the literal sense (incest rates are minuscule). So that leaves the implication that a much larger population of “cousin-humpers” does exist and the association with “red-state” implies that cousin humping correlates with political views.

Your comments reveal that YOU'RE a bigot, in addition to not even being the initial bigot.

However, when it comes to cousin-humping, I'm going to double down on the assertion that red states win the contest. And hey, it turns out that I'm not the only one: https://www.thefreemanonline.org/what-state-has-the-most-inc...

In case you're too lazy to click, here are the top 20: Kentucky, Maine, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, Washington, Georgia, Oregon, Indiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, West Virginia, Montana, Alabama, and South Dakota.

OWNED.

You’re still too confused to understand why that doesn’t imply anything about red states as a general statement and wouldn’t be relevant for keeping a social network alive (what this thread is about).

Here is an exercise for you. New Mexico is not a red state. What generalization do think was being made about “red-state cousin-humpers” that wouldn’t apply to the New Mexico cousin-humpers?

Yeah. I'm "remembers netgoth.org.uk IRC regularly having to add 'yes, livejournal is down' to /topic" years old.

Myspace was never a ~trillion dollar company.

A matter of how long it managed to stay around.

I don't know that that is a relevant rebuttal to the argument that "lots of money means more likely to survive (even thrive)".

More money means more degrees of freedom to experiment, the acquire others, etc.