Ask HN: You have $1BN, how do you disrupt Facebook?

Try to build something that you think is useful or entertaining for the users. Don’t obsess with disrupting a specific company or technology. If FB gets disrupted it will be from an angle nobody expected.

This is a provocative question. To make the responses more cohesive, can you define your meaning of "disrupt" for us?

show me the money.

Quick and dirty: you buy a tonload of power to DDOS the he'll out of it (;)).

More serious. I think we are nearing the time this could be done. People are getting fed up by facebook. The complaints you hear frequently all focus on no actual content anymore on timelines but just ads and friends sharing news items, other adds, winner actions, etc. Furthermore, privacy is always said to be a concern (though in truth hardly ever is).

My guess is. Attack those. Get real content on. Get people to actually share again their own content instead of others. An keep an eye on privacy.

Recreate Myspace.

Buy reddit, add a messaging feature and you're on your way.

I have a dynamic graph visualization library. For too long, we've been content with contact lists. I want to create a dynamic visualization, one that journalists can use to point to referenced people in a story. With a billion dollars, I wouldn't have to do all the development myself.

There already is a Facebook, why are you trying to disrupt it?

Because it promotes bite-sized and current content over depth? A website that's just a personal to-read queue with a share button.

Because its one-size-fits-all approach that's only suitable for a narrow band of life events? A toolkit for making small community forums where moderators control what sort of posting model and user profile they have but users control which of their profiles are visible from each other.

An automated reward system that pays people not to use Facebook and charges them when they use it.

Assuming you didn't mean "disrupting" in the sense of creating a product that replaces Facebook, I would spend the money on a relentless negative media campaign.

Buy/cultivate influence with sympathetic publications/journalists or create/acquire your own media presence and just hammer them with every negative thing you can find about the management of the company, the business, the users, the content, anything. Pay moles inside the company to leak sensitive information to you.

Then when/if you manage to bring Facebook's reputation down enough, target advertisers with a coordinated campaign to boycott this "horrible" company.

Focus on making the concept of a "social network" less disruptive from a personal standpoint, and more "complementary." There is a wealth of evidence that Facebook, as it exists today, is toxic to mental health and relationships. If you could create a social network that is seamless and complementary to your existing interactions in the physical world, that would be a compelling product.

How to do it? That's the $1B question.

You spend all that money on lobbying politicians about the evils of Facebook. You launch multiple ad campaigns on Facebook to target politicians which, over time, brainwashes them into thinking that Facebook is evil and ought to be nationalized... Pay an army of hackers to leak articles into their feeds.

Create a lottery where the only way to participate is to give up Facebook and join my social network.

Every once in a while (a few months, sometimes once every day, sometimes almost a whole year), there will be a random selection among those who participate and that person will win $1 million.

If you put the money in an index fund, you could potentially do this for a very long time.

nice try, Mark.

First step: ask HN how to do it Who's your investor?

$1B $2B $10B makes no difference. You can't.

Same as when Microsoft billions to "disrupt" Google in search with Bing. Fail.

If it was simply a matter of money then there are plenty of companies with alot more than $1B to spend on stealing FB's business.

When companies fail, as most do in the end, it is usually because not of external reasons but internal reasons - typically the company has grown too dogmatic in its own beliefs about its plac in the world which makes it ripe for disruption and replacement. This happened alot more in the early days of computing when the platforms were in flux - today the platforms are relatively stable which makes for long term stability of those companies that won the "winner takes all" battles.

There was a time, hard to believe now, where it looked very much like Microsoft woud own all computing for the foreseeable future. That didn't last long, and dogmatism and internal politics are to blame for that future not happening as anticipated.

Can I do something illegal?

Not remotely enough money to take on Facebook. They'd simply squash you. Google couldn't do it and they have far deeper pockets.

Launch a service which takes the best from Fb & Messenger, Instagram & Snapchat (but without a "news" feed), launch a token, reward user activity and new user referals with tokens, generate enough hype and FOMO among key people that enough will start to see a real chance for network effects and thereby for gains in the token value. Sell a narrative of people's right to benefit from their contributions and paint Facebook as greedy beneficiary of 2 billion people's activity for which they don't get anything in return, except a broken democracy.

You need to build a new kind of social network. However, $1B won't help you much with that. You only need to build it and get 100,000 within a couple of months and 10x that number every year by becoming very popular because you have built something that people want. Money can only help you so much, it needs to grow by itself.

Start an exclusive social network at a high-prestige, aspirational, regionaly-centered, vital, active, relations-oriented, demographic: HARVARD.

And magnify all the negatives of Facebook.

Read danah boyd's accounts of how MySpace fell to Facebook in the first place.

Buy shares in Facebook.

Even with $10 billion it would still be nearly impossible. For example, iPhone/ipod vs Zuna and Bing vs. Google

Build something that's got most of the well-known features of Facebook, plus/minus whatever you feel like you need to change with regard to privacy, business model, decentralization, etc. You can do all of this for much, much less than $1B. The only thing you're missing is two billion users.

Use the remaining funds to stir up sensational controversies that make people wary of Facebook, lobby governments around the world to harass Facebook, and offer monetary awards to get influential groups of people (e.g. schools) to switch to your platform. Once you've got a bit of momentum, spend the last few million dollars to hire a bunch of shady guys to take out Facebook's leadership and infrastructure -- either physically, with bombs and guns, or virtually, with very powerful malware. By the time they recover (if ever), you're the one who has two billion users.

This is how you destroy a company when you're actually intending to do so.

For the rest of us who don't want to get our hands dirty with guns and viruses, I suspect that $1B and the lofty goal of disrupting Facebook are actually going to get in the way. Facebook won't be disrupted by something that's trying too hard to disrupt them. Zuckerberg will see the competition coming from a mile away and respond with $2B, $3B, or more.

The key is to come up with something that's so completely different from Facebook that they'll have a hard time even seeing you as legitimate competition. You fly under their radar, make no headlines, and refrain from making ambitious statements like "I want to disrupt Facebook" until you've created a whole new market and they can't pivot to compete with you.

The reason the illegal solution above works is because Zuckerberg doesn't expect to be assassinated on his morning jog. Do something that's just as unexpected, only legally this time.

If possible invest it in an existing company Facebook can't compete with, for example Wechat/QQ. Use the money to strengthen it's position in neighboring countries where it is competing directly with Facebook and to try to enter poor markets where Facebook doesn't yet have complete market domination (think the places where Facebook tried to introduce Free Basics).