How hard is it to make a social network?

How hard is it to make a social network?

Everyone says facebook sucks now. Why doesn't someone just make a new one?

Other urls found in this thread:

mastodon.social
diasporafoundation.org/
riot.im/
matrix.org/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

We already have too much dataminers why should we create another one?

Because it's fun.

U need seed money until u can sell ads and datamine at large scale.

You need a large amount of users immediately for a social media site to have any value. Getting a large amount of users immediately is not easy.

Let's say you come out with a new social media site with the same restriction the original facebook had: you have to be a college student to use it.

Wouldn't that bring in a good number of users to start with?

>Twitter
mastodon.social
>Facebook
diasporafoundation.org/
>Chat
riot.im/
matrix.org/

The alternatives have already been built, it's just a question of getting people to use them. Contrary to popular belief the problem will not be solved by hacking together yet another one over a weekend.

It's too late. The globalists already have a stake in Facebook and nothing else will ever compete. It will become more and more liberal. The brainwashing has already begun. Get out while you still can.

>Everyone says facebook sucks now. Why doesn't someone just make a new one?
It sucks because the concept of attention whores spewing out their private information online sucks. Why would you make more shit to deal with shit?

What a boring piece of shit website. Good lord. This is not how you take on facebook.

Sucks for you maybe. I'd love to go back to the days of every college sorority slut uploading 50 pictures of themselves drunkenly making with each other in skanky clothing.

I suppose we're getting to a point a lot of guys online were not around for those days and don't know what they missed.

What happened to that minimalist one from a few years ago. I can't remember the name but it was all black and white and minimalist.

and this one is just as bad

>... is a free, open source...
SHUT UP YOU MAKE ME WANT TO FUCKING KILL MYSELF

I honestly liked Myspace much more than Facebook.

Facebook is designed so that you can really only add people who you know in real life. Whereas Myspace was designed better towards making new friends.

On Myspace, I could search for people with the same interests that I had. I met my first girlfriend on it as such. You can't really do that on Facebook. For one, nobody writes as much on their profile as they did on Myspace and secondly, they make it really difficult to search for people in your area. It's largely just "friends through friends" and searching for exact names of people who you discovered, again, in real life.

Just to clarify, Riot and Matrix are the same thing, Riot is a shiny web stack client for Matrix networks.

I agree. All I'm saying is that if you want to make a difference here, it is far more efficient to work with the existing code base than take the typical software approach of "I can do it better in a week". You'd be better off setting up a diaspora node and setting up your own super shiny website to advertise it or maybe contributing to the project to improve their styling (if they're receptive to that...).

I would also like to know this, can't for the life of me remember the name of it.

Yes, facebook obfuscates as much as possible these days. It's hard to go on there and just browse through profiles of random people. Anything you put in the search bar will heavily weight towards people you already know or celebrities.

However, if you know how to work around this stuff it can still be a lot of fun. Finding a public facebook account and looking through the photos is almost like going into someone's house and looking through their photo albums while they're gone.

You're never going to make a social network that isn't cancer if you assume your users are too stupid to understand what differentiates you from Facebook.

Oh I'm sure a good website could utilize the labors of the autists to create some closed source, proprietary version that actually gets popular and makes money. That's generally how it's always gone. I bet Zuckerberg did the same thing.

I don't want users who care about whether or not the site is open-source. You might as well put a dude in a fedora on the front page.

I would rather that social media just go away.

Why? So we can go back to being losers who sit around and watch television all night?

Yeah. Not literally everything you do needs to be on the fucking Internet.

I highly doubt that. For one none of the stuff I linked is centralized, making it difficult (read: pointless) to turn it into a regular social network. Two, both Mastodon and Diaspora are GPL, making that awfully difficult on a legal level and finally, it wouldn't have a selling point. Mastodon without being open or decentralized is just Twitter. Diaspora without being open or decentralized is just Facebook. It's only the openness that makes them worth a shit to begin with.

at least you're doing something on the computer. tv is why boomers are fat and stupid. we're just fat.

Just move to Russia and break the law as you wish.

Vk is already better than facebook anyway tho

I'd be very much into a return of the original Myspace. I think there's some money to be made there to capitalize on millennial nostalgia.

Social media platforms like Myspace and Facebook are either dead or dying. Nobody wants to make a page filled with tl;dr. People would rather make accounts filled with just photos, music, or other media content. Seriously, the teens nowadays think Facebook is for parents and other adults only pretty much. Text is way too formal for them.

>he wrote in his post on Sup Forums

>I suppose we're getting to a point a lot of guys online were not around for those days
More so I don't care. If I wanted porn can get it easier than giving out my personal information. Plus I was too old for this normie trash when it came out.

The problem isn't making one, it's making it catch on and stay big enough to make it viable.

Twitter is mostly text based and teens use it quite a lot. But who says social media is just for teens?

low test faggot

>put in hundreds of hours designing a fully-featured facebook competitor
>nobody uses it because nobody uses it because nobody uses it because...

But let's say you managed to actually get your website to grow to a medium size

>ads wouldn't even be profitable (everyone uses adblock)
>selling data won't be profitable until your userbase is huge
>costs continue to scale as you have to deal with legal bullshit and hire mods to take down illegal stuff
>probably end up wasting a lot of money and time as your website won't be generating enough revenue to cover operating costs

At this point you would need to basically raise millions from venture capitalists and convince them that your idea is profitable

The ebaumsworld days of somebody being able to start up a website in their mom's basement, slap some ads on it and get rich are long gone

I think the best model would be to just straight up charge for access. Dollar a month or something like that.

He's right though. The number of people posting their daily activities on Facebook seems to have declined massively, they still post pictures and really brief reaffirming comments but the era of text on there is ending. Communcation now almost invariably takes place in group or 1:1 chats that may be on Facebook, but increasingly aren't.

There was a novelty to it before that's been lost I think, initially everyone kidded themselves into thinking posting what they were doing or feeling actually mattered. Everyone with a smaller social circle has long since disengaged from that and so have men for the most part, now it's just a subset of women who still post their movements. At least that's what I've witnessed.

Twitter is the opposite of tl;dr though. Problem with Myspace and Facebook is that it allows people to write too much shit and it makes you look like a pleb if you don't write a two pages essay for your profile.

You are absolutely right, but I think there is potential in the idea to bring this illusion of meaning back to a new generation who haven't figured it out yet. The trick is creating an environment where people feel comfortable putting it out there. Sup Forums itself currently serves as the best outlet for anonymous posting about your life, but it could be done much better.

I think you might be on to something there.

Might be hard. I think the next big social media platform will be a better Instagram probably. Something that makes text and photo conversations flow effortlessly. I'd wager it gives up on the conventional post system.

>Why doesn't someone just make a new one
userbase traction
a social network is only as good as its users

>Something that makes text and photo conversations flow effortlessly.
Back in the day they called that a wall.

Nobody posts on anyone else's timeline anymore on facebook. It would seem extremely rude to do so. Most people's timelines are ghost towns.

It needs to more resemble the transient more closed interactions seen on Instagram or Twitter. If I look at somebody's Twitter or Instagram feed I'm not going to see what somebody said at them three days ago, because the content is smaller and faster moving and the comments are hidden away (you need to click on the post to see the comments for it) and I think they're filtered in some way too. That makes people feel more comfortable contacting directly and publicly I think.

You forgot gnu social, the bringer of dead to twitter and facebook, hopefully

I mean something that gets away from that wall crap. The centralization of conversation on a topic is old and repetitive. Plus OPs can just monitor content which is always no fun. People like being in cliques and groups, but I feel that setting up a content system that is authored by the herd/mob is going to be more interesting than everyone replying to a post made by one fag. Think like hashtags but better.

>Plus OPs can just monitor content which is always no fun.
This kills the internet.

No, really. It did. That along with invisibility of admins and mods. You got to have something in between.

Why do you say that?

If anyone can just block or delete comments in a discussion that they don't like that's never going to be any fun.

When the admins and moderators are inscrutable it breeds distrust and shitposting. And most of the time they just don't do their job. The 2010s version of moderation is delete and ban. Nothing is done to guide the conversation or rehabilitate shitposters.

Mods should make threads and participate in the discussion, and the users should see them doing so.

I prefer minds

I've been thinking about giving minds a shot but it seems to be geared to artistic types. How is it for just casually commenting?

I'm not real big into social media but minds seems interesting enough to try.

It's not about artistic types.
Litterally anything works there

It even has a dislike button which is really rare

Ask yourself why did MySpace succeed? Then why did it fail and Facebook take its place? Consider Google+, why didn't it do well?

I don't have the answer to these questions but the "next big thing" is hidden inside of them.

because you gotta get normies onto it
there are a bunch of alternatives to facebook but without normie support people like you will not even know they exist

But it's not

Don't even bother.

Social media as we understand it is just a fad. Facebook's demographic gets older and older every year. I teach in a high school and only Ameriboo students use it.

Even within the United States, a grandma is probably more likely to use Facebook now than a teenage boy.

I haven't heard anyone bring up Facebook in real life in a long time, maybe 2 years now. Maybe I'm getting older(25), or maybe most people just aren't as obsessed about it like in the past.

Money and purpose.
1. Facebook isn't a social network.
2. Facebook is an information broker primarily.

Facebook only became what it is because it had massive investment and marketing support from the whole ad industry and the government.
It had all of that because it was willing, from the get-go, to share all information with everyone.

If you want a social network that isn't evil like Facebook, then you are going to not only start without investment or any support of the whole advertising sector as well as the lobbied government elements,
you will in fact be regarded as competition to be suppressed for the interest of ad companies and the government who find Facebook too valuable to fail.

Ergo kiss the idea goodbye.

>How hard is it to make a social network?
It's not hard at all to make social network software. Actually, you don't even have to, there are quite a few ready-to-install open source solutions.

>Why doesn't someone just make a new one?
Again, someone - quite a few, actually - already have.

>You need a large amount of users immediately
And this is why they have all failed.

You may want to use the social network that all your friends use, just like the message app your friends use is the one you'll probably be using.

Good luck getting everyone you know to switch to a secure message system or another social network.

LMAO trump literally won an election by pushing propaganda through facebook to soccer moms and blue collar idiots. your neckbeard NEET alt right basement dwellers are irrelevant to anything.

>Why doesn't someone just make a new one?
fork is rarely the good solution cf : linux community

>LMAO trump literally won an election by pushing propaganda
No.
He won an election because the people hated Hillary THAT much.
Alt-right has nothing to do with it.
Propaganda has nothing to do with it.
Not even Russia has anything to do with it
since allegedly releasing a few documents to the public
doesn't change the fact that the public has
the free will and choice on how they want to act upon the documents or pay attention to them.

Even the women who voted for Trump had to choose between two things:
1. A man who said he likes to feel pussy and is a court jester, who only has business relations with Saudis.
2. A woman who is STAUNCHLY backed by a regime that still stones and kills women even today and denounces them basic rights, not only in the business aspect but even worse politically.
To weigh which is the lesser evil is not hard at all.

snapchat and instagram already serve the purpose of being a "social network without baby boomers". 90% of normies are content with those apps. making a vanilla facebook for college students will take time, resources, and eventually only nerds with adblock will use it. a guaranteed way to waste your life and money.

>had a bebo account called something like niggerjew666 when bebo was active
Facebook would never allow such creativity

Normalfags finally realised that all their fuck ups can be put in photo and video form by their "friends" on the internet for emberresing results.

I'm sure you haven't even looked at a television in about 20 years but there used to be this show on American TV called America's Funniest Home Videos and it was exactly that, many years before exposing your failure to the entire Internet was even an option.

TV is very strict when it comes to consent because they can be easily sued. You can't sue the internet.

Believe it or not, I haven't seen them on mastodon.

>America's Funniest Home Videos
Nostalgia hit me hard on this one, I haven't heard this name in ages.

On the other hand, around 90% of Mastodon users are fucking tumblrinas.

GNU social and friendica have better communities, but mastodon is just way too comfy so I hang out on fediverse using it.

Cause if you do, Zuckerberg's lawyers will destroy you.

It's very easy to make a new social media website or app. It's very hard to get anyone to use it, and stay with it.

Trump won because of the streisand effect. The fact that facebook didn't completely stop it is because they know how easy it is to lose their userbase by shilling too hard too fast.

>The ebaumsworld days of somebody being able to start up a website in their mom's basement, slap some ads on it and get rich are long gone

This still working, all those fake news of Trump and now Blue Whale thing exist because they get $$$$.