Social media is different because of the network effects. Taking hold requires being there to catch refugees when something else collapses, and being sensitive to the fact of that collapse. It seems like quite a bit of luck is often required.
But you could also, you know, actually try to differentiate yourself. Figure out actual things that you'd want those sites to do differently, and have an opinion on which different approach to take.
And I especially wouldn't try with Twitter, because there are already at least two major competitors, and the people who have fled to them, in broad terms, seem to have done so based more on internal social strife than on any technical dissatisfaction. (Despite all the seemingly obvious technical issues to complain about!)
Some of them will. And I suspect the set of markets in which they do will only increase—traditional SWE is probably dying, hard as that is to accept. But the fundamentals of engineering and business are nowhere close to going away. And those are the actually-hard parts of business.
No, you couldn’t. At best you’d turn out a video game simulating Uber. The idea that all of the business is in its software seems to be one Silicon Valley perennially unlearns.
I've noticed a significant tone and demographic shift on the site over the past 2-3 years with more Western Europeans and Midwesterners and fewer Bay Area+NYC users, and fewer decisionmakers or decisionmaking adjacent people using the site.
And the deeply technical types who used HN largely shifted to lobste.rs.
Karrot_Kream (another longtime HN user) identified this shift as well [0]
There's also a tension between the increasing "community building" happening on HN and the Bay Area/NYC crowd. A lot of them have an extant community largely based on in-person relationships. The more HN builds its own community, the more you alienate this set of people. In other words, Slashdotification is happening more and more to HN where a set of very online tech people who don't really make decisions generate most of the chatter on this site.
The reality is, most people are in-person now and conversations that were happening on HN because of the pandemic are now being done offline.
Blind is toxic, but at least the users are cynically realistic.
The New Coke brand failed because people didn't like the taste, not the other way around.
I drink Diet Coke, which is basically the same formula that became New Coke with chemical sludge instead of sugar, and it tastes pretty good to my tongue to the point where I drink it over Coke Zero, the one closer to "the real thing".