If anyone reading this undertakes this challenge, it would be a mistake for you to focus on privacy despite the recent headlines. The problem is that privacy, something that few people care about (as evidenced by the lack of impact all of this has had on Facebook usage), is not a selling point. People have something that serves their needs for social networking purposes, and that something is Facebook. The only way to beat them is if you offer features that help serve their social networking needs better than Facebook and in a way that is so compelling that it would be worth it for an average user to make the switch.
Most people don't buy a $100K+ Tesla to save on gas or save the planet. People buy them because they are amazing cars. Similarly, people won't switch social networks because you offer better privacy. They'll switch only if you make an amazing social network.
Also people are already switching, Facebook degraded itself to a event calender and a lot of social activity wandered off to more closed environments like chat groups which get popular again due to media enabled chats (telegram, Wechat or also Slack and Discord)
IMO trying to replace Facebook is the wrong direction. Seems most people totally forgot that we actually should not care what our ex girlfriends neighbour is eating today and can't imagine a world without a central social network.
IMO we already have more than enough badly done MySpace clones. It's time we put our egos aside and move on
Agreed. But at this point there are some relatively easy things to compete with Facebook on - have less advertising, and less crap content (shared things, memories, mentions etc.)
Basically recreate the Facebook experience from around 2008-2010.
Probably still not enough, and people would definitely doubt your motivation ("they're going to sell out like Facebook anyway...").
It's my opinion that we should try to build a social network on e-mail. The social network is just a new e-mail client or a web front-end looking like the social networks we already know today (Reddit, Facebook, etc.). The challenge is to write a new e-mail client / wrap the back-end such that most people don't realise that they use e-mail.
Of course there are technical challenges like that e-mail is a very old protocol and for some use cases quite a bad fit. But we should have created new standards for e-mail2 instead of creating a plethora of incompatible messaging formats.
I hope that the privacy problems of Facebook is a wake-up call for many people and that we can reclaim e-mail as THE standard for messaging.
Are they? An application leveraging email for its transport layer could easily use standard email libraries, and social networks are little more than mailing lists with a different interface.
It's hard to see how email would not be worse, since anything you 'post' could be forwarded without your knowledge to anyone with an email account. You would have to solve that one first.
This is the wrong approach, in my opinion. For a product in a relatively new space, getting a good team together and showing traction makes sense. For something like this, it is putting the cart before the horse. To the extreme.
Beyond anything else, what I'd like to see is a plan. And mostly, a plan for cracking the network monopoly that facebook has. Maybe the new thing will start as a "facebook helper" that allows users to easily scrape and manage facebook data, and allows you to post/contribute to multiple networks at once. Eventually it can allow people to transition away from facebook gradually, but in the meantime, it gives you extra power on facebook and most importantly, doesn't dump you in some isolated network where you suddenly have five friends rather than 500.
I agree. Likewise, the VC model is part of the problem, including the unreasonable returns they expect - because they're making so many bets, so they don't really have to believe or understand why an investment will succeed; one of the most difficult parts will be putting together the initial team, and then growing the team, which in this situation requires a buffer of money - along with a strong vision being honestly lead, without attempting to bank on hype.
I've been evolving a plan and strategy over the years to address these problems, unfortunately it's all mostly on hold while I try to organize more stem cell injections to heal chronic pain I have; our healthcare systems aren't adequate in dealing with uncommon scenarios either.
We don’t want to tell you what to build, we want you to come up with your own ideas. Keep in mind, that while ideas really matter, Zuckerberg has shown us, execution matters more."
I think what Mark taught us is that we need to know the person in control before backing them, and their ability to execute (or fuck over the brothers etc) is probably the worst indicator, although is liked by VCs - as well as the idea of "growth at all costs." That helps reduce their own personal risk, offsetting the real cost to the rest of society.
Admirable enthusiasm, but I beleive this is a legal problem not a software/product one.
The network effect can only be broken by fashion or laws requiring completely free movement of users and all their data among competitors for ALL online services.
I've been thinking through this problem for awhile, 7+ years.
Re: Funding - One I'd add to the list is to lobby government to provide $X annually per citizen that gets allocated to the user's choice to pay for their social network platform of choice; this would have to be tied to specific rules/guidelines. E.g. mandatory tax money that the person distributes how they want. Whether this will lead to the desired outcome, I'm unsure - people might still just want to give their money to Facebook or a platform who takes that money + still does less-than-good or less-than-desired behaviours, requiring regulation and oversight, costing taxpayers anyway. It might also incentivize private dollars to be more willing to invest in platforms if there's that money per-user that would be available.
Another I'd add or that's not explicitly stated is to create enough value that people - or enough people - are willing to pay; this ties into freemium model or subscription model.
I think the solution is, as you list, is a mix of different funding sources.
Investment should likewise not solely come from the VC model, it should come from a combination of sources:
- From government -- if you can't convince a government to invest, then why not?
- From philanthropic -- who will have a longer horizon than traditional VC, and who will hopefully require a higher burden on evidence that the leader(s) are good people.
- From traditional VC -- who can benefit by reducing risk from the other funding sources, and to leverage the experienced VC's network and resources.
Also, brand names.
Facebook is brandable, Diaspora - I'm still not sure I pronounce it properly. App.net was a good attempt, a little more brandable than Diaspora - at least with technologists, however not necessarily consumer-friendly; their mission and fight, similarly to how Evan from Snapchat pushed back against what was essentially Mark bullying (sell to me or we'll copy you); ~7 years ago I wrote a blog post after Fred Wilson suggested I turn a comment into its own post, related to The Independent Web - and the requirement that that will require sharing, which means not being greedy, and not trying to capture 100% of value; http://mattamyers.tumblr.com/post/2903098250/the-independent...
Another competitive advantage: differentiation. Copying Facebook doesn't give anything to people that they don't otherwise have.
Whenever I see discussion about people creating a competitor to Facebook, they miss out on these two staples - differentiation and branding.
I've been evolving my own ideas and plans, multiple platforms to create an ecosystem, however I've been struggling with chronic pain the last few years - and finding doctors locally to do continue the simple stem cell injections I was getting (and that 100% were healing the pain) has proven difficult due to incompetence in the system; I've come to realize that doctors are selected for their memorization skills (via tests), and not for critical thinking skills. The pain primarily disrupts my executive function and decision making, and so this has lead to me almost being paralyzed - but more unfortunately dependant on other people who haven't been competent or available enough to do the work of finding a willing doctor for me. What confuses people is I can reason and storytell still, not really any decision making required when simply stream of consciousness writing, otherwise I find myself stuck in routine I had before I was introduced to the pain in my body. I can ramble on forever, until mentally exhausted anyhow - and then I ground again slightly to feeling the pain more clearly. Actually I wrote about how I reconnected with the pain in an HN comment yesterday, if curious in a simplified version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16894072
The brand name for one of two main platforms I have been evolving my plans for is ENGN, pronounced engine. There's a story of how I evolved to that name, my focus is fading now though, so won't share it now. Randomly writing long comments pretending people will care as a mechanism to give meaning and feel connected to people more than I currently can in real life; I can't really participate in emotional bonds/relationships with emotion as the added stress is another variable to manage with the pressure the pain puts on my system.
I honestly don't know if I will find a doctor to heal the pain within a timely manner - have already been at my wit's end, however I don't want my life's work to disappear, so I have it written to give my domain names, etc to Elon Musk - as he's the only most obvious holistic thinker that wears his heart on his sleeve, and does his best to think through things will affect everyone; the current condition and lack of organization for my plans would likely be describable as a clusterfuck, so the domains and logos may be the only thing really usable for him/the team he'd hopefully put to work if I'm not around to execute on it myself.
Clearly I got a second mental wind, though it's getting cooler outside now and the hunger signal is telling me/directing me to get food now. Thanks for reading, internet stranger, if you got this far.
If I had the focus/concentration and self-direction/executive function ability, I'd go through all of the social network plan repository and comment on it all from my perspective.
This is what I tell people when we get to this topic. I like to ask 'where do you communicate with other people'
And most people agree to spend a lot more time in Telegram or even just Whatsapp. If you ask gamers also add Discord, and Slack for a lot of professionals.
Most people I talk to barely use Facebook but accepted it as defacto standard, which probably explains why they can't think about 'replacing' it when in reality it already happened.
So the user defaults to trusting their email host/server for their privacy, data safety, security, etc? And the users who connect to that user (their data will be sent to the email host as well) will need to put their trust in them as well. Is that the only concern?
Have you thought through what the other positives or potential negatives are of using email?
There's a bunch of existing Facebook Alternatives. How about putting some of this money into one of those? Improve the migration process and the UI and the non-tech-user-friendliness, on the front and back end - can you get setting up a node on one of these to be as easy as, say, installing Wordpress?
(And make it as easy to keep up to date as WordPress, too. My Mastodon instance needs updating but first I have to stare at a Git client and figure out how to merge all my tweaks with the latest version.)
There are already tons of Facebook competitors. But most of them miss the point.
For example, Diaspora really misses the mark. You go to their homepage it emphasizes freedom and controlling your data and doesn't once mention the thing people care about in a social network... people.
Most people don't care about privacy except nerds like me and most of you. They care that they can view the latest adorable photos of people kids and pets and message all their friends.
For that point most tech people care about those things too. Which is why, for example, even though I have been aware of Facebooks issues for years I am still on there. My friends and family are there.
The first thing they ask is "can I connect with the people I care about on this site." If the answer is "not yet" then most people won't join.
There's already a bunch of vigorous FB alternatives. I'm personally familiar with the Fediverse and Secure Scuttlebutt and they both have a growing and active userbase. Be your own entrepreneur, take some social risk, and join these networks. If you want to spend money finding them, then put up feature bounties, or marketing bounties to make marketing campaigns for these networks.
2, 3, and 5 seem to be problems that only occur at scale so it seems odd to focus on solving these in the beginning when the nascent social network wouldn't be big enough to even have a breath of these symptoms.
Nothing. Replacing Facebook is a perpetual tall poppy fantasy; that was the case before the privacy abuses of the last several years.
I watched the exact same thing obsess the tech world and Silicon Valley in particular, for over a decade, regarding Windows. Windows never got replaced, instead the ground changed under it, an inflection opened up new opportunities (which created nothing more than a duopoly in iOS + Android for two other giants). That's exactly what will happen with Facebook. Five or six years from now, they'll be doing a hundred billion dollars in sales, they'll be larger than ever before, and more profitable than ever before. Some day the ground will shift under them, opening up a big opportunity, and it'll require a technology shift. Then we'll probably just get another tech giant or three dominating the new thing, rinse and repeat. This is all extraordinarily predictable. The easiest thing of all to predict? Decentralization will perpetually continue to fail as a mass-consumer premise. Decentralization is the ultimate tech fantasy, and the greatest demonstration that engineers very often have a poor understanding of typical consumers. Nothing has had more thought & effort put into it, with fewer results to show for it, than decentralization for mass consumer products/services, over the last 15-20 years.
Working backwards from social networks that have succeeded back to their origins, I think a common factor is that they really caught an entire community/subset of society and then spread from there.
Facebook took over Harvard, MIT, and then spread uni to uni until people were clamoring to get on. I still remember when I wasn't able to get onto FB. Pinterest's growth was really weak early on when they tried to be all things to all people, but then they doubled down on women, fashion, and crafters. Hacker News started oriented around the Valley and Valley-leaning/Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. Reddit's initial userbase is a bit more complicated to define but was not anywhere as diverse as it is now.
If you look at less successful, but still succeeding, social networks you see a little of this occurring. Orkut was general but quickly became a Brazilian social network. Ello was general but doubled down on designers and is still going. Sticking to your niche works fine if you lack the escape velocity to go general.
Diaspora's problem, to me, is that "people sick of Twitter" is not really a cohesive community. Similarly for app.net and Mastodon. "People sick of Facebook" is likely to be a similarly pointless target market.
There is a group of people in our Open Source community that is getting together to build a Facebook replacement, and mentioned this $100K prize. Open invite to anybody interested in wanting to join their team :) I myself am too busy working on the underlying libraries for it.
I think that approaching this as a technical problem isn't the best approach. Unless the business questions are answered (how does one make a billion user social network that makes enough money to keep the servers running without the mess facebook created), the code doesn't really matter that much. Making a social network is easy. Making one that sticks and satisfies this criteria is much harder.
Very true, and is kinda a sad reflection of us/me/people-in-general. I still use Facebook, because its easy conveniences outweigh my frustration. :/
So what do we do? SSB is pretty good, and I think the Beaker guys are working on one too. They require you to download/install to your desktop though, which I'm fine with, but I don't think consumers will bother with.
They'll probably bother with downloading an app to their phones and tablets, though. Beaker's desktop-only. So's Scuttlebutt. Half the world doesn't even own a desktop.
Get this stuff running on phones. Figure out how to cram a server into a single iOS/Android app along with the client.
The challenge here seems to be making a decentralized social network, where users truly own their data. This is a very hard tech and UX design problem, and hasn't been satisfactorily implemented yet.
lol, try _at least_ $100M spread among 10 promising teams before they start coding. Building a better facebook _with traction_ for free to get $100,000 at 6%... This is completely ridiculous.
i feel like some sort of mass commitment by potential users to actually use a new site would be much more valuable than any monetary investment. obviously that's a lot harder to bring about.
Most people don't buy a $100K+ Tesla to save on gas or save the planet. People buy them because they are amazing cars. Similarly, people won't switch social networks because you offer better privacy. They'll switch only if you make an amazing social network.