Towards a world without Facebook
The quintessential moat Facebook has is its strong network effect facilitated by ease of use. Facebook is simple. To the point where my elder relatives refer to Facebook as &quot;the Internet&quot;: the place where they can see funny clips, talk to friends and share their photos and thoughts.<p>For every person bemoaning how Facebook extended and proceeded to take a dump into her favorite aspect of the Internet - be it online publishing, email and chat, news feeds etc. - turning it into a restricted, ad-infested, bastardized version of itself, I have only one answer: Facebook could only do that because there was a margin for simplification that attracted the average users.<p>If you want to move to a world without Facebook, you need to make it <i>simpler yet</i>, and even more compelling for average users. The margin for simplification Facebook operated in circa 2004 is long since gone and a perfect Facebook clone will not break it&#x27;s strong incumbent advantage.<p>So when I hear things like token operated blockchain based distributed social networks I really have a hard time understanding how does it simplify things. Yes, it might get a niche following inside crypto circles, but it has nothing to do with &quot;a world without Facebook&quot;.