
“Critical mass” vs “network effects” - olivercameron
http://daltoncaldwell.com/critical-mass-vs-network-effects
======
dm8
I do agree that Twitter's asymmetric model works. And Google + also have same
feature. I don't have to be "friend" with someone to follow them.

Having signed up on Orkut in 2004, and used that social n/w quite regularly
for ~ 4 years. People forget the beauty of Orkut. In someways they were ahead
of times -

1\. Privacy: Privacy settings were impeccable. In fact, it would notify you if
someone visited your profile too. So no more "stalking". Believe it or not,
Orkut never allowed search engines to index their pages.

2\. Communities: Facebook groups are quite popular now. But still, Orkut
communities in 2005 were better. They were malleable. You could turn them into
forums/boards for discussion. Group announcements. Group Polls etc. And most
importantly owners/mods had ability to make any content public/private with
simple switch.

3\. Testimonials: LinkedIn started with this "recommendations" feature. But
Orkut had "testimonials" since its beginning. It was fun reading testimonials
once in a while.

4\. Design: Orkut's design during initial years was the best any social
network could have. Simple and clean!

5\. Search: I've used majority of the social networks. Orkut's search engine
was simply the best. It's search engine in 2005 could easily beat FB's search
even today.

What led to Orkut's downfall? I've heard form Googlers that there was no
strong internal support to Orkut. In 2008 they started copying FB and it
became unusable since it had worst UX due to this. And last but not the least,
Facebook's Feed. Feed was game-changer for FB and it's eventual growth.

Edit: Grammar

~~~
dalton
You are correct about many of these points.

The other thing worth mentioning re:Google internal support is that Orkut had
some, um, early controversy:
<http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/06/64046>

------
kingsley_20
I resent the digs at Orkut. It was a great community - if you were Brazilian
or Indian. That Google chose not to run with it says more about their lack of
long term social vision and parochialism than about the health of the
community itself.

~~~
dalton
To be clear, it's not a "dig" at international users.

To speak from personal experience, the site that I was founder/CEO of earlier
in my career, imeem, was wildly popular in the Philippines and Thailand. At
peak, we were a top 20 site in the Philippines, according to Alexa.

We spent a lot of time adding country-specific filters to music charts,
comments, etc once tagalog and thai started seeping into every page of the
site.

We loved our foreign users, but from an advertising business perspective, a
user in southeast asia is worth a small fraction of a US or UK user. The
relative low value of developing country users to brand advertisers is the
primary reason sites like Orkut, Friendster, Hi5, etc ended up in the place
they are.

It's not a question of nationalism, it really does boil down the what the
advertising market is willing to pay. This is one additional factor re:why ad-
supported social platforms end up with mis-aligned incentives w/users...

~~~
kingsley_20
I would invest the same way (focus on users in developed economies) if it were
my startup - but Google isn't a startup. When you have two of the BRIC
economies sewn up in a social network, AND you have cash to stay for the long
game, I think you're doing your shareholders a disservice by not sticking it
out.

------
jfarmer
A slightly better article on the same topic from a few years ago:
[http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/)

It's funny we couch it in such intellectual language. There's an everyday word
for this: Potemkin village.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village>

Or, a thought experiment. What's more valuable? A social network with 10,000
people who are all at most two degrees of separation from everyone else in
real life? Or a social network filled with 10,000 people from around the
world, selected at random?

Could you even call the second thing a "social network?"

~~~
gruseom
"Potemkin Village" isn't about original communities leaving. A Potemkin
Village is a fake facade erected to hide the real thing and fool visitors.

~~~
caseysoftware
"Potemkin Village" is what the Reddit guys started with by making thousands of
accounts and sharing, commenting, etc. In that case, the fiction became
reality which I (assume) is incredibly rare.

~~~
woah
Wait, can we get a link? This sounds pretty epic, I haven't heard about it
before.

~~~
jfarmer
Just Google: "reddit fake accounts"

------
kbenson
In his bid to get more viewers of his blog, and thus more perspective signups
for join.app.net which he links to in every post, Mr. Caldwell has put out
more interesting articles on the social space than I've seen in a long, long
time.

App.net seems like an interesting experiment, and I support it in theory, but
don't really use much of social networks so haven't contributed yet. I think
I'm going to give him $50 just to see if he can sustain the same level of
output on his blog, as my own little experiment.

~~~
breckinloggins
I agree. It just goes to show you that marketing and self-promotion only make
you look like a sleazy used-car salesman when you have nothing interesting to
say.

------
russtrpkovski
The In the Plex book provides some insights into why Orkut failed:

1\. As Orkut increased in popularity, it was flooded with identity thieves and
Viagra ads.

2\. Google focused on rewriting Orkut's Windows-based infrastructure to scale
on Google's platform instead of improving the design and adding features

3\. Users bailed because of poor response time. Brazilians and Indians used to
slow Internet access so they were tolerant of the delays.

4\. While finishing the rewrite of Orkut, Facebook was starting to take off.

------
JVIDEL
I just want to say is funny how some people downplay Orkut for being full of
Brasilians and Indians when those are 2 of the most growing consumer markets
in the world.

You have companies all over the world fighting to get those markets, Apple
went as far as building a factory in Brasil to get a foothold there.

------
mrkrwtsn
It's really exciting to consider how Twitter fundamentally changes how we can
communicate in large groups. Essentially, through the use of hash tags,
Twitter has created a new conversation/comment stream that any one in the
world can be a part of. For example, while watching the Olympics, there are
several hash tags that show up on screen and allow everyone from celebrities
to random people talk about it. It creates a conversation that is not even
possible using other mediums. They're not doing social networking better,
they've created a new way to communicate. This changes mass media from being a
one-way conversation to a place where anyone can participate in the
conversation.

App.net simply can never do this as a result of it costing money. Since it
can't build a large user base of "regular" people, the data on App.net simply
won't be that interesting or very open. Sure it would be a cool service, and
for many people, particularly geeks, it might be nice. It could even be a
great medium to communicate with specific people, but it will never be as
useful as Twitter in the sense that it will never be able to fill the same
space as Twitter.

If there really is a problem with Twitter's business model that's causing cash
problems all they need to do is charge for API access. Twitter's data feeds
provide immensely valuable data about a large variety of issues.

~~~
te_chris
They do charge for api access. You have to pay for the firehose.

------
joe_the_user
I think what the author is talking about is the spamminess/internet-y-ness
that has crept into Facebook in the last few years.

But that is something that I think most Facebook users at least try to ignore.
The goodness and desirableness of Facebook happens despite this stuff rather
than because of this stuff. Facebook has been a place where a lot of people
like to come to chat with their friends (duh!). This kind of virtual tavern is
something that a lot of people enjoy. But the problem is that Facebook has
succeed so well at being that kind of place, that the limitations of being
that kind of place are showing; suddenly realize you just own the nightclub,
you're not the most popular person in the nightclub. And making grandiose
statements on the nightclub loud speaker isn't going to make you more popular.

\- Being the place where people talk to their friends does mean you can sell
people anything (they don't come to buy but to chat).

\- There are plenty of things that it's in people's better interests not to
share and sooner or later they'll figure that out - when they do, they don't
appreciate being previously mislead and get more closed about the entire
medium (it's interesting how the telephone produced a lot of same ).

\- And there are many reasons to step outside your circle of friends. And
completely outside is both easier and safer than any conceivable "multiple
circles" system.

Facebook's stuff lately has been butting-up against these limitation but not
overcoming them. I don't know these can be directly overcome with the "I will
monetize my efforts" approach and if they can't, it might be good.

------
nrmehta
Thought-provoking post. To me, one way to determine whether a system will have
network effects or anti-network effects is to ascertain how much of its usage
is driven by fashion versus utility. Take email as an extreme example of the
latter. It's valuable because it's so universal - but it's not fashionable at
all. It's a pure utility. So no anti-network effects (perhaps beyond spam but
those are less about #s of participants as behavior). I put Facebook in an
intermediate category where it's transitioned reasonably well from fashion to
a utility, though the folks that looked at it as fashion are now getting more
turned off by it. Indeed, the anti-network effect isn't simply about numbers -
it's about who is coming into the network and a lost feeling of exclusivity
(which honestly sometimes picks on very base human emotions) when the network
grows with certain types of people. I think twitter has moved further up the
utility value chain than facebook has so I'd posit it's less vulnerable to
anti-network effects (not to mention the asymmetric follow model that dalton
talks about).

------
Sniffnoy
I feel it is worth pointing out here that asymmetry is not original to
Twitter. Consider e.g. LiveJournal.

------
epaik
This effect seems to happen commonly among news aggregating site communities.

Digg used to be pretty cool when it was used largely by people excited about
the start-up/tech enthusiasts. As it became more popular, the user-base seemed
to devolve as the content started to cater to the LCD.

Reddit has done a good job combating this, with their implementation of
subreddits that focus on specific core user demographics. But most of their
largest subreddits have a dubious quality of users.

Hacker News seems to have the best quality of discourse/users at the moment,
but I attribute this to its relatively small user-base.

~~~
pooriaazimi
> _Hacker News seems to have the best quality of discourse/users at the
> moment, but I attribute this to its relatively small user-base._

50 to 100 thousand daily users ("users", not visitors) is not small by any
means!

~~~
dredmorbius
At Internet scale (~2 billion connected users) it's minuscule.

0.005% of all available users.

Within the United States, it would fall well below the 100th most widely
circulated print magazine, as a _monthly_ circulation statistic. I'll assume
that monthly stats are a few times higher than the daily usage metric, but
you'd still have to hit roughly 1 million to break into the top 100.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_magazines_by_circulati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_magazines_by_circulation)

From an advertising perspective, unless you're extremely focused in your
interest base (and there are markets of interest within the HN readership),
it's tiny.

------
pdog
I think Mr. Caldwell makes a convincing argument that there needs to be a
compelling (not ad-supported) alternative to Twitter. My question is this: Why
can't this alternative have a "free tier" that allows the average user to
access and use the service without paying and have additional features
available to those who pay for them?

In determining a payment model for app.net, it seems he's never addressed why
there isn't a free tier...

------
daemon13
Excellent, very well thought out post.

First time I saw the notion of diminishing effect of adding new users.

Would be great if author elaborated on various "how to" to mitigate this.

~~~
simondlr
I think one of the best ways to do this, is to keep the social system smaller
once it reaches critical mass. It sounds counter-intuitive, but hear me out.

New users that join once critical mass has been reached, will be able to
create their own graph and enjoy the social network in question equally to
when a person joined it 4 years ago (given the site is still the same in terms
of functionality). However, the person that joined 4 years will become bogged
by an ever increasing graph of connections to pages, friends, groups, history
etc that eventually undermine what made the site relevant to them in the first
place (ie Dalton's experience with Orkut).

So, just as in the real life, social relationships come and ago, a natural
decay has to happen that allows a person's graph to remain relavent. Currently
Facebook (and to a certain Google+) are doing it right. They filter. Heavily.
If you don't interact with the people from 4 years ago, you just don't see
them anymore on it.

------
simondlr
App.net's approach won't solve the problems that Dalton here talks about. Does
he have plans that will solve this?

------
NHQ
Social networking services and APIs are not the utility. The Internet is the
utility.

