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You're right about the basic dynamic -- convenient platforms with network effects are always going to have the bigger draw, probably by orders of magnitude.

At the same time, though, the value proposition of a social networks & media isn't linear with user volume. There's always a floor beneath which the value isn't there, but once you meet that bar there's different kinds of value available depending on who is participating, what kind of effort they're putting into contributions, and maybe even value presented by limitations/exclusivity.

The Reader / Blogger infra could have been an effort to focus on high value networks vs high volume networks. Which, you could argue, is exactly what the value proposition of Google's core product (search) was in the first place.

Blogs still aren't an empty room, so I think the floor would have always been there.




The value vs volume is such an important insight.

Facebook and Instagram know a lot about which cat memes my friends and I send back and forth to each other.

In contrast, my RSS feed knows a lot about what content I think is valuable to consume in my spare cycles. I would never get in ad in Instagram for anything software-related, but that's at least 1/2 of my RSS feed, and something I'm more likely to spend money for than whatever cat toy they think will cause me to pry open my wallet.

I think if somebody could choose the highest-signal metadata to get to know me well, they should choose my browser/search history, my RSS reader, my e-reader, and iMessage or the corporate Slack instance.

Anything else is tangential at best. I have no idea why they shut down Google Reader, it's clearly the best signal:noise product outside of Maps and Search.

Maybe with the prevalence of google analytics and device/id fingerprinting, they thought it was redundant data.




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