Facebook's mission is conservative: keep market share.
It's dangerous to change anything because it risks driving people away.
For that reason, social platforms inevitably "rot" and get overtaken by competitors.
Consider MySpace, which really looked like crap because people could personalize pages the way they liked. Facebook had more general appeal because it looked "cleaner". Had MySpace tried to clean up it would have driven away existing users who had a strong attachment to the way their pages were personalized.
Zuckerberg understands this cycle and wants more than anything else to keep ahead of it. Copying competitors, buying competitors and such is the safe path forward for him. Two big advantages Facebook has are: (1) a large existing user base and (2) a developer productivity-first culture that can "move fast" (contrasted to Google, Amazon and you)
(The only thing that gets broken is competitor's heads)
> And if we think about what has been going on over the platform lately, the features Instagram introduced are literally a copycat of biggest competitors: Stories from Snapchat, Reels from TikTok and the social audio rooms from Clubhouse.
It’s a tough world for innovative startups if giants can just steal their innovations with no repercussions. We need updated laws to prevent this.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 15.7 ms ] threadIt's dangerous to change anything because it risks driving people away.
For that reason, social platforms inevitably "rot" and get overtaken by competitors.
Consider MySpace, which really looked like crap because people could personalize pages the way they liked. Facebook had more general appeal because it looked "cleaner". Had MySpace tried to clean up it would have driven away existing users who had a strong attachment to the way their pages were personalized.
Zuckerberg understands this cycle and wants more than anything else to keep ahead of it. Copying competitors, buying competitors and such is the safe path forward for him. Two big advantages Facebook has are: (1) a large existing user base and (2) a developer productivity-first culture that can "move fast" (contrasted to Google, Amazon and you)
(The only thing that gets broken is competitor's heads)
It’s a tough world for innovative startups if giants can just steal their innovations with no repercussions. We need updated laws to prevent this.