
Social Networks That Failed - kjhughes
https://gizmodo.com/why-these-social-networks-failed-so-badly-1836996164
======
egypturnash
Conspicuously missing, as it always is from these sorts of articles:
Livejournal. A quieter, more thoughtful sort of social media, built around
long posts, the occasional essay, threaded comments, and much more
sophisticated privacy management than most modern sites ever touch, which was
happily used by GenX non-techies.

Sold to a succession of owners, it ended up in the hands of Russians after it
established a strong audience there. I still have an account there but it’s
dormant because I never agreed to the new terms and conditions that forbid
discussion of LGBTQ issues.

~~~
wainstead
I'll add sixdegrees.com to the "missing" list, which may have been the first
social media site.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com)

------
iamsb
I think the biggest reason why none of Googles social products worked out is
they did not port data. I was a fairly regular user of orkut. I used buzz for
a little bit of time. I really liked Wave. But every time I had to start at
the beginning. When google launched buzz, then wave, and then Google+ it did
not bother moving my data from orkut to subsequent products. So every time
they launched a new product, I was far less excited about using it. I used
Google+ for just cross promoting my then startup. This is the same reason I
dont use picasa or google photos anymore. It became google photos and all the
old links broke. So photos that were shared with my, I dont have access to
them anymore. Where as facebook, all the content I created on it over the
years was available with out any issues. Though I deleted my account a year
ago for privacy reasons, I admired the fact that facebook understood how to
treat user and their content far better than most companies.

~~~
fredley
Ironic, given that Buzz was essentially killed on day one by the decision to
auto-follow your most frequently emailed contacts, like the person you're
having an affair with, or your ex-wife, or your lawyer.

------
rendall
Tribe was great. Everything was ironic and fun and weird. There was a tribe
for enthusiasts of "brown foods", for "paranoia" (in which we would post the
truly most paranoid thoughts we could muster), for "evil geniuses" (tips on
lairs, knowlege sharing on death rays), a tribe called "silence" wherein
people would just post "ssssh". Another where we planned a dadaist amusement
park. Another called "things on top of things" which were entirely photos of
things that were on top of other things. Another for enthusiasts of
Abercrombie & Fitch. Another called Extreme Honesty for people who wanted
honest advice. Another called Bad Advice where people would out-compete each
other for giving the worst possible advice on any topic. On and on.

There were definitely tribes where people would try to out do each other with
warped and disturbing posts. Digging through tribe.net archives will find
posts bragging about murder, pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia, what-have-
you. In that context they were intended as entertainment, rather like horror
fiction, but in today's social media climate such a free wheeling context is
incomprehensible.

~~~
rejschaap
> enthusiasts of Abercrombie & Fitch

What a bunch of weirdos...

------
nabla9
I think Facebook did something accidentally right at the beginning. Their
first 6 million users, their connections, age and lifestyle was the important
part.

Facebook started as Harvard only, then to all Ivy League and Boston-area
schools, then other colleges and Oxford and Cambridge in UK. The speed of
growth and direction of growth was just right. People wanted to join before
they were able to join.

Other have started with limited invites, but they were more random.

~~~
skewart
100% agree. Facebook's restricted access was a huge driver of their early
success.

> People wanted to join before they were able to join.

I'd argue the more important factor was that because the early audience was so
limited people felt comfortable sharing a lot more personal content than they
would on the open internet - even just simple things like their real name and
photo. That created much more interesting content for other people to look at,
driving engagement. In the early days, when there were maybe two or three
dozen schools on FB, it felt like a like a pretty small high-trust community.
All of your friends from high school were on it, and their college friends,
who maybe you met once or twice, but that was it - no parents, no employers,
no randos. It was a very different vibe than most other social networks. I
also don't think anyone thought it would be around very long. It felt like a
new social network popped up as the cool new thing every few months.

I'm sure there was some aspect of pent up demand due to exclusivity, but I
think the community and openness created by that exclusivity was a much bigger
drover of its success.

~~~
beerandt
Don't forget that during the initial college high growth period they were
completely separate networks per school. This was huge as far as building
trust between users. Even if the per-school limitation was actually a tech
limitation on Facebook's part.

------
goatinaboat
FriendsReunited was big at some time in the UK, it’s schtick was around
reconnecting people who had gone to school together. It died because once
everyone had assured themselves that they were doing better than people they
hated, or the person they used to fancy is fat now, it served no purpose.

~~~
undebuggable
On a serious side though - they had quite solid dataset of the population
across the entire Anglosphere and of their associations with POIs like
schools, universities (early Facebook anyone?), and workplaces (LinkedIn
anyone?). They reached the peak of their popularity while charging 7.5 GBP per
month to use their website (imagine!). The ASP .NET + AJAX Control Toolkit
might had not been the most fortunate tech stack to create engaging and snappy
social network experience. A complex case study, overall.

Disclaimer - I worked there.

~~~
goatinaboat
I don’t remember ever paying for it but that’s quite a lot of money,
comparable to some dating sites. I suppose some people did use it for that.

~~~
mprev
You only paid if you wanted to contact people.

ITV bought it and, even at the time it was obvious, had no idea what to do
with it.

It seemed like a lot of those early 2000s British tech businesses, like
Jungle.com, where there could’ve been something really huge but the lack of
investment culture meant they got outpaced by better funded rivals from
overseas.

~~~
rusk
Remember that one for “uniformed” people (soldiers, police, nurses etc.) or
those that are interested in them? Now that was a chin scratcher

~~~
goatinaboat
That one actually was a dating site wasn’t it? Makes sense I guess, if you
wanted a partner who also worked shifts.

~~~
rusk
Or if you wanted a database of people who wear uniforms ...

~~~
goatinaboat
Indeed. It’s obvious now, of course, but all these companies start from the
database they want to sell and work backwards from there to build a product to
gather it.

~~~
rusk
I think knowing what we know now about various rogue states it’s fair to
imagine this may have been something yet more insidious ... if you had called
it at the time you would have been handed a tinfoil hat!

------
least
Google Reader was a nearly perfect 'social network' for me. It offered an RSS
feed with the ability to share news and articles with friends and a comments
system to discuss the topics with a small group of people. Google killed it
off for what? Google+, presumably. No one in my friend group moved on to
Google+, though.

~~~
neonate
There are so many comments like this about Google Reader that it's hard to
understand why someone hasn't built a replacement. Even just a feature-for-
feature clone. Hasn't anyone tried? If they have, why didn't it work?

~~~
J5892
Feedly is still pretty much a feature-for-feature clone of reader.

After the end of Reader was announced, Feedly allowed you to sign in with
Google and automatically import everything in Reader.

The transition was basically seamless, and I haven't missed Reader since.

------
volkk
I'm still so sad about vine. I really enjoyed the app at the time, and thought
their UI was astounding, especially clicking anywhere on the screen to record
the 6 second video.

I think it also spawned all kinds of comedy and culture and while the meme-
like aspect of most of them could be considered cringy, there's still a lot to
be said of the impact that app had.

~~~
folkhack
Agree on missing Vine - there was a high level of quality there and people did
some amazing things with the constraints.

I don't think there's been something that's really had the same base features
outside of TikTok? (and lord knows I'm not installing a piece of Chinese-based
software =|)

------
Sohcahtoa82
I'm still convinced the failure of Google+ was due to the throttling of
people's ability to join the site.

FFS, it's a SOCIAL NETWORK. A social network is worthless if your friends
can't get on it. There were so many memes at the time of people getting
excited to get an invite to join Google+ only to find that out of there 50+
Facebook friends, only a couple of them were on Google+. And if your friends
aren't on the network you don't get into the habit of checking your feed, and
then eventually you just forget about it entirely.

It'd be nice if Facebook would implement something similar to Google+'s
"Circles" feature. I'd love to be able to post some programming humor and have
it only get displayed to my fellow technical friends and not clog my grandma's
feed. Facebook has a way to do this, but you have to check individual people,
and do it for every post.

~~~
brainpool
Agree. Limiting access to G+ was lethally counterproductive. And why? Afraid
of the traffic?

------
boulos
I had hoped to see Ping from Apple [1] on the list. There’s an interesting
question between having “social features” and being a “social network”. As I
recall though, this was during the MySpace-is-for-music decline and Apple
didn’t want to outsource it to Twitter or Facebook, so I believe Apple felt it
was a real possibility for a niche-community network.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping)

~~~
qubex
Indeed - Apple’s _Ping_ came to my mind right away. It’s right up there with
“slofies” in terms of instant-cringe-factor. They euthanised it pretty
quickly, though I suspect some of its hellspawn lives on in Apple Music’s
recommendation algorithms and curiously all-or-nothing ‘love’ (in lieu of
iTunes’ more nuanced five-star ratings system).

------
jasondc
I don't think any of them failed, they were all relevant for a period of time,
and users moved to a different network. That is happening with Facebook, will
happen with Instagram, and is just part of the cycle.

Bebo founder is selling his house in SF for $39 million [1], that doesn't seem
like a failure to me.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-couple-list-their-
eclectic...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-couple-list-their-eclectic-
mansion-on-san-franciscos-gold-coast-for-39-million-11570717516)

~~~
at-fates-hands
>> That is happening with Facebook, will happen with Instagram

Even if FB loses 200 million users, they still have over 800 active million
users. Same with Insta.

Most of the platforms listed had a few million users when they ran into issues
and collapsed. When you think about all the blatant privacy issues FB has been
caught red handed doing and they still they boast over a billion active users?

At this point, I can't imagine anything sans a government intervention via a
breakup that would put a dent in the FB user base.

~~~
rusk
I’d say the fall of facebook will be like the fall of Rome. It’ll peter along
for a while dysfunctionally and then there will be a rapid decline when
something in the model gives way. There’ll still be vestiges of it across the
Internet for many years to come though.

------
at-fates-hands
I'm surprised Diaspora isn't on this list.

At the time, they were poised to step into the fray when FB was fumbling with
users privacy. Their unabashed attitude of collecting and selling users data
was just starting to leak out into the media and users were not happy.

Diaspora had the opportunity to seize on user dissatisfaction and take a huge
chunk of their user base. They couldn't get their app to market soon enough
and the window closed on them. A co-founder suicide and an ultra quiet release
followed and put the final nails in their coffin.

Interestingly enough, I've gone back to Diaspora and I'm currently in the
process of hosting my own pod. I was also an early adopter of Ello and after a
few years of a dormant account, have started using it again. I now enjoy using
both and have found stable, engaging communities with both.

~~~
pferde
One could argue that Diaspora did not really fail, so it has no place on this
list.

The network is chugging along nicely, albeit outside of any limelight.
Hundreds, if not thousands of people communicate there daily. There are no
real dramas, so it goes unnoticed by the big media.

------
flomo
There was probably about 100 pre-facebook social networking sites not
mentioned in this article. Even Yahoo.com had profiles and was sorta proto-
social networking.

I always thought Friendster was the interesting one, because they had cornered
the SF hipster market at least. Friendster died because it was too popular and
they couldn't get it to scale, so when people couldn't login or get their
profile to load, they stopped using it. I think with competent technology it
could have been Facebook.

~~~
qubex
I had a Malaysian girlfriend at the time and she was “way into” Friendster, as
were all of her friends - and she very much pestered me to ‘participate’.

I remember noticing how her ‘friends’ included non-singular entities... like a
‘friend’ which was actually a proxy for her school’s alumni, which all her
former schoolmates were ‘friends’ of. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it
then, but what it was alluding to was the lack of a notion of communities or
(in _Facebookish_ ) ‘Groups’.

~~~
dwyerm
What you saw as a positive feature, I saw as the death of Friendster. My
friend added "The Burning Man" as her friend, and I suddenly had _thousands_
of friends neither of us had ever actually met. The activity of this pool
completely swamped the output of any of the 'friends' I would actually meet up
with. I had a HUGE network, but no friends on Friendster.

This wasn't entirely bad to meet up with people outside of your circles, but
you needed some way to control the firehose. And, you know, I think that's
still not a solved problem. I think I would be more keen on social networks
filtering me feed if I had more control over those filters.

~~~
qubex
I must’ve been unclear, and so I apologise: I didn’t see it as a positive
feature; I saw it as a shortcoming users had found a hacky workaround for.

------
nicpottier
Friendster is the only platform I can think of that failed primarily due to
scaling problems. They were in the right place at the right time, had a great
set of features and an audience that wanted to use them. Engineering killed
them, pure and simple. I honestly can't think of another case like it.

------
rwmj
They miss out Mixi which for a time (mid 2000s) was huge in Japan. Mixi was
another social network which killed itself - by introducing a very restrictive
registration policy, and then kind of letting the technology stack slide so it
became slower and clunkier in relation to other sites, and missing mobile
altogether.

The real news is that MySpace has 393 employees still. I wonder what they do?

------
oarabbus_
Google+ in particular was a spectacular failure, entering the world stillborn.
At least some of the others on this list had their glory days.

~~~
asdfman123
I feel like Myspace really messed up at some point. Sure, Facebook beat it out
by, in my opinion, just being a better website, but Myspace could have clung
to users in the mid-to-late aughts by remaining a great place to discover
music.

It used to be great for that. You used Facebook to do your normal social
networking, and still had a Myspace account so you could go down the rabbit
hole of discovering bands from the local to the international level.

What happened to it? I don't even remember. They should have shaped it into a
music-oriented social network. If they invested a lot of money into it, maybe
they could draw people back from Facebook and even compete with them.

~~~
RandallBrown
I always thought MySpace ruined itself by allowing so much customization.

Too many people I knew had profiles with white text on a yellow background and
autoplaying music. It was just horrible visiting their profiles.

~~~
justbaker
>I always thought MySpace ruined itself by allowing so much customization.

I've always viewed this as MySpace's top feature and the direction away from
this is why MySpace failed. The name even implied it was a users space of
personal creation. Tumblr sort-of did well with similar ideas, but to a lesser
extent.

~~~
egfx
Absolutely! What this allowed to flourish was also an organic eco-system of
sites dedicated to customization's followed by the great widget movement and
lead to companies like PageFlakes and SplashCast. MySpace was a highly
influential driver to the today's internet.

------
chintan
+FriendFeed

that gave us Tornado -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_(web_server)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_\(web_server\))

~~~
batuhanicoz
I seriously owe most of my life to the community FriendFeed gathered. If
anyone from that team is reading this, thank you.

It was an amazing social network in every way. It had great UX and minimal UI,
it was fast, had power features but was still simple to use and the idea of
lifestream meets social feed still makes perfect sense.

The community it gathered allowed me to jumpstart at my career at the age of
~14. I even discovered HN on FF. It’s been nearly 10 years after I first
signed up and I still meet people IRL that I’ve followed on FF. It’s always
like meeting your countrymen in a foreign country. We talk about the old
country before Zuckerberg bought it.

~~~
ayi
I'm pretty sure i remember your name from Friendfeed era.

------
MivLives
I was in college around when Yikyak came to be. At the time my classes needed
a lot of projects created and specced out. The idea behind Yikyak went from
being used by one group in everyone of those projects to not being used as the
site became popular. It's interesting to me how many people thought of the
very idea of Yikyak over the years.

~~~
newen
Man yikyak was really popular in my university. It was great and people could
express anonymous opinions, have discussions, have in group memes, jokes, etc.
Then they had the genius idea of forcing names on everyone and it literally
died overnight.

------
strenholme
Let’s not forget Tagged, which was a pretty big social network back when I was
in Mexico a decade ago. Tagged was an interesting combination of a traditional
social networking site as well as a Tinder-style dating site: You looked at
someone’s photo. You clicked “Yes” or “No”. If you got a mutual “Yes”, you
could connect and then see the person’s profile, photos, and friends. All of
this half a decade before Tinder existed.

It was a great way to meet people. By the mid-2010s, the place was dead,
infested with fake profile spam bots.

------
mindgam3
Facebook should be on this list. It didn’t fail as a business obviously. But
in terms of delivering on its vision of social networking as a force for good
it‘s a raging dumpster fire.

------
xtracto
The one I find is missing is Multiply.com (
[https://web.archive.org/web/20060615192232/http://multiply.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060615192232/http://multiply.com/)
) . I used it around 2004 to share stuff with friends and family when I left
my home country do to my PhD. I liked that it was more "content" based.

------
drdeadringer
I remember Bolt.com from the late 90s. It was quite literally 10 years ahead
of its time. Think Facebook with a before Facebook. User profiles, chat rooms,
"blog" spaces, friending.

I spent hours late into the early morning on it. I don't do that any more, be
it from age or what online alternatives are currently available, but Bolt has
a place in heart and mind for me.

------
excalibur
> Sixteen years ago, the sun set on Web 1.0, and we embarked by the light of
> our smartphones to 24/7 connectivity...

Our 2003 smartphones? Blackberry actually did have a few models with an
integrated phone at that time, but they stretch the definition of
"smartphone", and most people didn't have them.

~~~
rusk
Yeah it was google that gave birth to web 2.0 with Gmail and liberal use of
the XHttpRequest - the while smartphones thing was another 5 years really

~~~
therealx
Wasn't it Microsoft and Outloook OWA that started XHttpRequest?

~~~
rusk
Yes but utterly failed to capitalise on it

~~~
flomo
Lots of intranet stuff used it, or anywhere they could mandate IE.

~~~
rusk
Look, I was there. In 2003 post dot-com the web was still very static and very
transactional. It had become uncool and was perceived as being quite stale.
Microsoft had implemented this proprietary extension that was mimicked in
other browsers but nobody was using it. Dynamic HTML as it was known back then
wasn’t catching on precisely because there were so many incompatible variants.
Google was the first large company for some years to start pursuing talent
purely on technical merit, they put these in a room together and the
opportunities were recognised. Up to that point XMLHttpRequest was an unknown
proprietary browser extension. Google used it to inject dynamism into gmail in
a way that was never evident in Outlook. This was the genesis of Web 2.0 and
everybody started scrambling to use the browser as a platform again. The web
was cool again.

EDIT - despite what they may have become, and despite the many ways that the
web has been “broken” since, we have so much to thank google for.

EDIT - so hard to believe this all happened 15 years ago. It’s ancient history
at this stage, but seems so recent to me.

~~~
flomo
I like this storyline, because it means myself and some other random webdev
folks were a step ahead of Top Google Geniuses because we asked "is your
intranet IE only? if so, we have some tricks."

Or more likely, AJAX techniques were being widely used to the point where
Mozilla had to violate their whole ethic about not supporting proprietary IE
extensions and even named their shit after an unrelated COM object. Then
Google showed the public what could be done, but the truth was a lot of us
were already doing it.

~~~
rusk
Sorry man its just how I remember things ... I do remember there we’re
talented guys doing things, and I did some DHTML myself but “webmaster” was a
tough niche at the time. Apart from some novel technology demonstrations I
honestly can’t remember any significantly popular dynamic websites before that
time ...

But yeah, Firefox had its big push around that time too so I guess that had a
lot to so with thimgs as well ...

------
bryanmgreen
If you had to make a choice, how many social networks failed because of poor
product versus poor management?

------
Velert
Jaiku was my favourite social network. Google bought them and predictably shut
it down. I meet some great people on there, we all moved to twitter but it
just wasn’t the same

------
trustfundbaby
Did nobody use hi5?

~~~
motohagiography
Someone sent me an invite to HI5 and I assumed it was a way to pointedly tell
people they should get an updated STD test, given many people called HIV
"high-five" at the time.

Didn't want to confirm any personal information, and tested clear anyway, so
never responded.

It was a social network?

~~~
trustfundbaby
yep. Pretty popular one too ... or so I thought

------
egfx
No mention of Piczo? This site was pretty popular and functioned like MySPACE
with WYSIWYG controls.

------
mlthoughts2018
I mean this sincerely: in the sense of not hurting people, wouldn’t Facebook,
Twitter, etc., obviously also be on a list like this? It seems beyond dispute
at this point that these services have failed entirely, except in a very
narrow economic sense that only matters to a very tiny subset of the
population and only when considered independently of harm caused.

~~~
ctdonath
They haven’t failed yet. Yet. At a billion or so users they’re still the go to
venues.

Having watched social media sites fail since BBS days, clearly a critical mass
of users are looking for alternatives, with a mass exodus once enough start
going to the same new place (vs how G+ failed).

------
juanuys
fm.ly (or "family") was also a bit ahead of its time in 2002:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20020815000000*/FM.ly](https://web.archive.org/web/20020815000000*/FM.ly)

------
tarr11
Ryze was a big deal before LinkedIn.

------
leowoo91
Does anyone has a theory why would Google rename its social network after
itself?

------
fsiefken
anyone remember plurk? it was amazing, tweets in a horizontal timeline view
with you peers and click to dropdown comment thread

------
tschellenbach
Friendster, Hyves, Tumblr all struggled with their feed technology. Twitter
and Facebook also struggled but at least managed to fix it. My first startup,
Fashiolista, also struggled with the feed technology as we grew to millions of
users.

On the flip side, it was that experience that prompted me to start Stream. We
power feeds for over 500 million end users these days
([https://getstream.io/](https://getstream.io/)). Kinda cool how nowadays you
can buy a scalable version of pretty much all tech off the shelve. Algolia for
Search, Stripe for payments, Twilio for voice, emails etc.

~~~
ben_jones
This comment is beautiful content marketing.

1) Start with a comment relevant to the actual topic

2) Identify a problem that resonates with the key demographic

3) Betray a personal failing

4) Convert the failing into a point of strength

5) Expand on your newfound strength

6) Compare yourself with larger more well-known and successful companies

7) Include a link to your product

~~~
throwing838383
I don't get why it's been downvoted so much. I'd expect a much warmer
reception from the HN crowd.

~~~
marcosdumay
Well, do you think it adds to the discussion?

I do think it's almost, but not completely off-topic.

~~~
ben_jones
It introduces the feed feature as an integral part of a social network's
success/failure, stemming from real domain experience. If GP included maybe
one more sentence on how/why the feeds mentioned failed I think it would've
been much better received. Sorry GP you didn't deserve it.

