Sure. So what? You nonetheless cannot deny the utility. The friends that I have made from social networks are no less real. I am very grateful they (the means to discover these people now in my life) exist.
As an overly dramatic example, a slave might fall in love with the wife he met on a plantation, and the family he has, and even be grateful for them. Nevertheless, you probably don't want to use those facts to be a booster for slave plantations.
My argument is that all the good things you like about social networks, from a technical pov, could be had quite easily without the ads, political propoganda, and other ill-effects of the current popular social networks. Indeed, there are many open source projects that already provide the features you'd want. It's just that none has achieved the network you want.
This situation is unlike that of a large, complex physical infrastructure project, where you really do need to "put up" with a governement (or something like it) in order to get the thing built and maintained.
Or maybe happy punch card programming developed your 1337 skills but glad IDEs are there for the current generation.
We don’t really rely too much on the navigability of the Hudson River anymore. But being next to it is still the most expensive land in the nation.
But after 2010 it just gradually got shitter.
WhatsApp replaced it (in most ways; in some ways there is no replacement) and has so far been amazing but it feels like we're about at the "2010" of WhatsApp. Meta is starting to turn the screws. An AI button. Notifications about new features. Integration with Meta accounts. Eventually it will probably merge with Facebook Messaging or some bollocks and then we'll all have to move elsewhere.
Anyway my point is, these things genuinely became big because they were great. They stayed big despite becoming shitter due to network effects.
If they didn't have the incentive to get a monopoly we would have kept a more decentralized web.
Did you miss Myspace and Friendster? Orkut had a market, I think. The reason that Facebook succeeded later is because it had a good API and invited people to write apps for it (mostly surveys and games, remember Zynga?), tracked its users across the internet, and sold them in targeted slices to advertisers. It was Friendster as a commercial platform (like Salesforce was CRM as a commercial platform.) It was never any better than Myspace, and gradually got much worse.
I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput, being created by very talented people using Erlang. The reason people use it is because they always have and their friends do, and for a lot of countries with expensive SMS it provided messaging (and became so integrated into business that people weren't allowed to live without it.)
This is my argument about why these things were successful; I think that "they were great" isn't a credible one. They simply grabbed a large chunk of already proven markets quickly, but oriented themselves toward corporate needs to leverage that into total control.
I might be misremembering a bunch but myspace never had a feed that showed you your friend’s updates.
It also wasn’t able to magically show you the people who were at that random house party you went to the night before that you hit it off with but were too drunk to get their number.
MySpace was a) awful, b) only used by a tiny tiny fraction of people (1% maybe), and c) rarely had people's real names & photos on it. Not remotely comparable to Facebook. Even fewer people used Friendster and Orkut, at least in the UK.
> I have no idea what you think is or was so great about WhatsApp. It was successful largely because it had no overhead and infinite throughput
Free. No ads. Reliable. E2E encryption. Group chats. Cross platform. There's so much that's great about it. It was successful because the alternative was SMS which was shit. I'm guessing you're American.