Anytime large numbers of people flock to some platform is because they made it easy and attractive to use.
Is this really the case? There are many reasons why people flock to things, but those things being the “best” or “easiest” are not necessarily chief among them. People left friendster because it couldn’t handle the traffic and it was annoying. People left myspace for various reasons, some political (it was acquired by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Sky/FOX), and many simply because college kids were using this newer thing called Facebook.
Why were they using it? It wasn’t because it was the easiest, or best, it was because their parents weren’t using it and they could be themselves without being snooped (a similar force has driven Twitter and Tiktok success). Youth culture tends to attract more users, another reason that doesn’t involve making something the easiest or best; add this good fortune and Zuck’s shameless profiteering by selling user data in order to cover the growing pains of their servers, and Facebook became a thing.
Like, couldn’t I just ask, why didn’t you create this Usenet based reddit killer yourself?
The short answer is that I’m not a developer. Another short answer is that even if I were a developer, convincing habitual users to do other things is a different planet of annoying. I hope that not developing reddit-killing software does not prohibit me from having criticisms of reddit and other corporate social plats?
GaMEChld@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I still kinda feel like every one of those examples was success based on accessibility and ease of use. Connectivity issues? Inaccessible. Facebook was cleaner and more user friendly. I never had a MySpace because it just seemed more daunting to me for whatever reason. Facebook seemed cleaner and standardized in ways, so to me, it felt more accessible.
Steam and Newell comes to mind, about how piracy is an accessibility and distribution problem.
And no, I didn’t mean to invalidate your stance because you didn’t develop something, more that I too am not a developer so I couldn’t speak to your point about how easy it would be to have Reddit be Usenet based and still have the same level of proliferation. My apologies for being unclear.
enthusiasm_headquarters@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How about instead of reddit being the example, we use craigslist? A mostly innocuous non-profit with wide usage, founded by a person who could have easily “gone reddit.” It isn’t so hard to imagine the same ethos and technology being applied to fundamental “social protocols” like reddit, facebook and others. My objection is that there seems to be an assumption (in American culture at least) that the way things are are the only way they could have turned out or the end result of making the best thing.
A widely cited example: Microsoft did not make the best operating system. There’s many reasons why they too over the world.
A lot depends on what one considers the best, too. Your points about the examples I gave are valid, we just had very different experiences of those platforms.