While Friend.tech booms, decentralized social has a retention problem — Execs - Decentralized social network Friend.tech may be booming right now... - https://cointelegraph.com/news/friend-tech-decentralized-social-media-onboarding-problem #decentalizedsocialmedia #networkeffects #userinterface #desoprotocol #suhailkakar #friendtech #onboard #edmoss

any video conferencing system that needs a "system requirements" page is doomed

(even if 99% of users are on the supported client platforms, a much larger % of meeting organizers will have a broken meeting + wasted time because of a few attendees on unsupported client systems #networkEffects)

why an ad-supported, for-profit social network might want to support federation: they can choose to offer it only in countries or regions where ad revenue/user is greater than moderation cost. Users in countries where ad revenue < moderation costs can use a separate service that federates with the ad-supported one, so those users count for purposes of #networkEffects but not financials

#ActivityPub #winning

For most of the history of consumer tech and digital networks, fire was the norm. New platforms - PC companies, operating systems, online services - would spring up and grow with incredible speed, only to collapse, seemingly without warning.

To get to the bottom of this phenomenon, you need to understand two concepts: #NetworkEffects and #SwitchingCosts.

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#SocialMedia #NetworkEffects #BigTech #Oligopolies: "Social media needs to burn.

From its first days, the consumer computing and networking sector was synonymous with explosive growth.

Companies would spring up out of nowhere and grow to impossible scale overnight. The source of this rapid corporate gigantism was no mystery: it came from network effects.

A business, product or service enjoys “network effects” when adding more customers increases in value. Every Apple ][+ sold increased the number of people you could exchange data on floppies with; it increased the number of dealers who’d sell you accessories for your new home computer; and it increased the number of software authors and hardware companies who’d fill those dealers’ showrooms with new applications and peripherals for you to use.

Network effects are how Amazon got so big. They’re why platforms with App Stores — from games to mobile OSes — are so exciting for investors. And, of course, they’re why social media platforms exploded onto the scene in the 2000s and took over the world."

https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980

@cstross

Frankly, I can't see a whole lot of the private instance admins wanting to #federate with #Facebook. Maybe whats-his-name's big one (mastodon.social?).

So I'm guessing Meta would start offering to #pay instances to federate with them, at least at first, until they can get the network effects going.

It'll be interesting to see if it happens, and which admins are susceptible to the #bribe.

#NetworkEffects

#BigTech #Capitalism #NetworKEffects #SwitchingCosts #Economics: "While it’s possible in theory for competition to work well even when network effects and switching costs exist, it’s probably best to assume that they are gumming up the works. Paul Klemperer, one of the pioneers of switching-cost models, has argued that antitrust authorities should try to ensure compatibility between rival platforms, reducing switching costs and pushing against the ability of any one company to monopolise a network.

That means maximising interoperability: the ability to send posts to your Facebook friends, and read their posts, even if you’ve decided to leave Facebook and use a different social network; the ability to take your eBooks and audiobooks out of Amazon’s ecosystem (you paid for them, after all); the ability to put any kind of ink in your printer, any kind of razor blade on your handle and any kind of bread in your toaster.

Interoperability cannot be guaranteed by law. There are too many hard cases, too many grey areas, too many legitimate technical obstacles. But regulators can operate with a presumption in favour of interoperability, as they do for switching phone providers or making transfers between banks."

https://www.ft.com/content/acaf3fb1-d971-48ad-8efb-c82787cdd2fc

"… #antitrust authorities should try to ensure #compatibility between rival platforms, reducing #SwitchingCosts and pushing against the ability of any one company to monopolise a network. …regulators can operate with a presumption in favour of #interoperability, as they do for switching phone providers or making transfers between banks."
https://www.ft.com/content/acaf3fb1-d971-48ad-8efb-c82787cdd2fc?sharetype=blocked
#enshittification #NetworkEffects

FB experienced explosive growth, thanks to two factors: #NetworkEffects (every new user was a draw for other users who wanted to converse with them), and #SwitchingCosts (it was practically impossible to convince all the people you wanted to hear from to leave FB, much less agree on what platform to go to next). In other words, every new user who joined FB both attracted more users, and made it harder for those users to leave.

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Speech by Agustín Carstens, General Manager, Bank for International Settlements, BIS conference “Big techs in finance – implications for public policy” Basel, Switzerland, February 8, 2023

— Available here: https://www.bis.org/speeches/sp230208.pdf

#bigtech #finance #networkeffects #regulation #activitybasedregulation #entitybasedregulation #banking #financialservices #creditscoring #financialinclusion #privacy #financialstability #operationalrisk #resilience #corporategovernance #BIS

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic wrote: The EU's top privacy regulator may declare Facebook's business model illegal, banning surveillance-based ads: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge
⸺
#JCPA #surveillance #adModel #networkEffects #Meta #Facebook #Instagram #WhatsApp #cookieWall #business #commercial surveillance #consent theater #contextualAdvertising #corruption #dma #dsa #eu #gdpr #ireland #link tax #Schrems #noyb #private #surveillance #advertising @dataGovernance

@supernovae

I’ve been wrestling with the “are #quoteposts bad?” question, in relation to this. It’s a bit of a side-topic, but I’m thinking about in-system #marketing - a more engaged user-base feels more investment in the system’s continued success.

We don’t want, “Ha! Look how wrong this person is!” But we do want, “Wow! Look how interesting this post is!” A naked re-post has some value, but it comes out of the blue, lacking #context. A comment for your own network, explaining where a post came from, and/or why your folks might be intrigued, is not an appropriate reply-post, which is currently the only way to link something to a discussion. 🤔

To get the strong #NetworkEffects that make people feel more engaged, #Mastodon needs some way to link added context. I hope someone comes up with an “add context” feature that gives the original poster good visibility, and dissuades misuse. Maybe just a special type of reply, that sorts and is labeled differently? 🙂 #Thoughts

When a company is neither disciplined by #competition nor by #regulation, enshittification inevitably ensues. If a user or business customer can't jump ship - because of #LockIn, high #SwitchingCosts or #NetworkEffects - then companies are powerfully tempted to mistreat them - not out of sadism, but instead to harvest their surplus and goose the company's profits.

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via Andreas Ortmann:
Interesting new working paper. AER and JEEA bad, EE good.
https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/en/publications/editorial-favoritism-in-the-field-of-laboratory-experimental-econ
#ExperimentalEcon #favoritism #NetworkEffects

This is where #NetworkEffects and #SwitchingCosts come into play. A service has "network effects" if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.

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@jbminn @anildash The dominance of #Mastadon in reporting is in part both a result and a cause of #NetworkEffects. To counter this somewhat unhealthy development it probably would help to promote #ActivityPub

Remember when Microsoft tried, over and over again, to enclose the internet, first as a dial-up service, then as a series of garbage Windows-based Flash-alikes. Remember #Blackbird?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)

But standard protocols exert powerful #NetworkEffects on corporations. When everyone is adhering to a standard, when everything can talk to everything else, then it's hard to lure users into a walled garden.

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Now, personally and politically, I'm committed to non-commercial and non-corporate social networks displacing the corporate titans.

Ethically, the #Fediverse is my jam: https://anarchistnews.org/content/fedizine

And I was an early adopter of #Ello for the same reasons. That experience made me hyperaware of #NetworkEffects on #SocialNetworks

I'm not looking for a minimum number of new people to interact with. I want to interact with *my* personal and professional network online.

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@atomicpoet Any idea when Twitter reached 10M accounts? I wonder if Mastodon is growing faster or slower than Twitter was at a comparable size.

#NetworkEffects #MetcalfesLaw

Of course, commercial social media sites don't want to be *good*, they want to be *profitable*. The unique dynamics of social media allow the companies to uncouple quality from profit, and more's the pity.

Social media grows thanks to #NetworkEffects - you join Twitter to hang out with the people who are there, and then other people join to hang out with you. The more users Twitter accumulates, the more users it *can* accumulate.

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