Item — HN Reader

What's interesting for me is that I finally deleted my account. I never used it anyway but now I feel empowered to say "I don't have an FB account" and that's ok.

I think this is a sea change - there will never again be this dominant of a social network imho. From now on the space will be fractured into niches (AngelList, LinkedIn, NextDoor, etc...).

3 comments

I did the same. While I used to use my account regularly 5+ years ago, my feed was just full of stupid updates. People posting food pics, family commenting on news, and old viral videos, and lots and lots of ads. So, hey, I deleted my account. While Facebook isn't loosing any revenue from me, it certainly didn't ever attract me back into the active user status. Good riddance.

A few months back I had tried doing the "Hide this Page" game hoping to reclaim my feed. This turned into a Sisyphean task that makes Inbox Zero look fun. As it turns out, there are also a number of pages[0] that you simply cannot hide or otherwise unfollow.

I happened to "delete" my profile a week before this shit storm blew up and thankfully someone pointed out the Deactivate vs. Delete dark pattern and I quickly fixed that situation.

It's a weird world when the Smut Peddlers have some sound advice on living.

[0] - I didn't keep a list, but I recall one called "Wittitudes" or something along those lines simply lacked the "Hide" option, and all attempts at blocking it failed.

We shall see. Media lends itself to being highly concentrated. Social media, because of network effects, even more so.

Only up to a point. In the real world, people move in multiple social spheres, and usually like to keep them separate. I think the same is true online. For example, some kids see Facebook as "the place their parents are," a place to act polite and keep things to themselves. After all, why are we "toasterlovin" and "username223" here?

Good points. I think there's a good chance that there will be a changing of the guard at some point.

But social media within a given sphere is a winner take all game. Then the winner in the biggest sphere will try and buy all adjacent social media companies (see Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). The only hope I see is either 1) somebody has a large enough ego to think they can take on the dominant player (Snapchat/Evan Spiegel), or 2) the government gets some sense and decides that it's not a good idea to let the dominant player buy adjacent companies. So maybe Snapchat wins eventually as their demographic grows older. But then we're in the same position we're in now, just with a different company on top.

At least, that's how things seem like they will play out to me.

Agreed. Our weak antitrust rules are causing problems in all sorts of areas, and this is just one of them. The world would have been a better place if Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp had remained separate, each pursuing its own version of a "social network." WhatsApp even had a subscription model that people accepted.

The profiles can be fractured but combined conceptually with Keybase for the best of both worlds.