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What are required to make a sucessful social platform?

1 points by Teeorb ↗ HN
Besides the technological and financial resources, what are the key qualities of a successful social platform (firm)? The question may sound a bit vague as it is hard to propose a rather complete question on this matter, please feel free to answer as broadly as possible.

10 comments

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yawpitch
Hmm… well, based on a quick examination of those social platforms that both exist and are successful, it appears that list would have to include:

1. Willingness to exploit human psychology for financial gain. 2. Complete disinterest in the political and social consequences of your acts. 3. A strong commitment to giving something people like to them for free, then slowly evolving that into something they hate and pay for with their attention. 4. A CEO with an impressively negative score for charisma, and, ideally, a fatalistic commitment to the worst forms of libertarianism.

But seriously they all have carcinised into essentially the same product… the main thing you’d need to do to succeed right now is differentiate.

Teeorb
Are you referring specifically to Musk? Apart from that, 1 is mostly right. 2 I do not really get I think whatever platform owe responsibility to the political and social consequences of their acts (or whose acts you referring to?). 3 is about influencers or how monetization of attention works as well as most media-based production. Not sure about 4...

In terms of differentiation can you please elaborate more on that?

Teeorb
Is it the way of "socialization" to take place? A new way of communicating or discovering information?
yawpitch
Regarding 2, take a look at Facebook/Meta’s involvement in and profiting from a genocide in Myanmar. Regarding 3, not influencers, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, what have you, they all started as something useful and focused and slowly but surely became something that cloned the features of everything else in a race-to-the-middle for advertising revenue. Regarding 4, specifically Musk and Zuckerberg, but see also pretty much any famous tech bro billionaire.

Most of that was just a critical observation of the platforms out there, just like with disrupting the political duopoly the only way you become successful in a world in which Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / YouTube / XTwitter exist is by being something markedly new and different, not so much in business model or in protocols and tech but in keeping the product focused exclusively on the end user and what they want (as opposed to what your actual customers want to sell them). If I knew precisely what that differentiation looked like, I’d build it myself, but what it definitely doesn’t look like is what the big platforms are convergently evolving towards.

Personally I think if you went back and did a real post-mortem on what got people to join and enjoy existing social media apps (when practically speaking not one of us enjoys them anymore, addicted as we may be) and just did that, without aiming at getting acquihired, you’d go a long way.

incomingpain
1. No censorship beyond the absolute minimum necessary. Free speech absolutism.

1.1. Everyone now knows Nick Fuentes is a nazi rat. Flipside, r/ontario mods straight up admit they ban viewpoints because 'conservatives are all homophobic racists' defeating the entire community.

2. No abusable voting system that enables non-contributors to curate content. X or Facebook are positivity systems. Soon as you allow downvoting that matters, you create an echo chamber.

3. No echo chambers allowed. Inclusivity does include opposing viewpoints.

4. No socio-technical debt allowed.

5. Key figures cannot filter away or block anyone.

6. All niches allowed.

Teeorb
I think maybe what most concern the most is censorship, and the direct by-product like echo chambers. Echo chambers are kind of inevitable in the way people with the same type of ideas gather and sort of enhance the ideology as a whole... This kind of naturally occur in any social platform.
Teeorb
I mean as a platform what it wants the most is the amount of attention (or time spent on it including fights), the more the better. Most platforms run ads they kind of need the toxicity.
Teeorb
Is there anyone else having ideas?