The Neglected Consideration When Planning a Social Network:… Network Effects
Lots of people dream about better social networks that promote higher quality discussions, evenme! Some challenges, like “which logo to pick”, are things that can be solved along the way. Others, like “why would anybody join a social network if almost nobody is there?” are (I claim) a core part of the plan and need to be addressed in advance.
“If you give the same answer 5 times, write a post”
This isn’t meant as discouragement, it is meant as “this is an important thing-not-to-ignore”
For example, if someone wants to open a startup, I first make sure they understand that most startups fail. This is not a knock-down argument to not-open-a-startup, it is just something important to notice and take into account.
This post is a similar thing-to-notice beyond the normal considerations of a startup.
What similar considerations do I think people miss?
A social network has snowball effects. This is nothing new, but I think it’s useful to state them explicitly:
More users lead to more users.
More content means more users reading content means more users writing content.
More money means more comfortable features means more engagement means (in modern social networks) more money.
And so on.
Common suggestions to sacrifice an element of the snowball effect without explaining what would balance it out:
“We won’t optimize for engagement”
Or “By optimizing for engagement plus something else, we will get more engagement than someone optimizing only for engagement”
“We won’t charge money”
“We won’t show ads (and so we’ll make less money)”
“We will charge money from the users directly” (which means more friction for getting users, which means less users)
“We will only allow high quality content”
This probably means less content
TL;DR of my “moderation is expensive” rant [skip if obvious]
If writing a machine learning algorithm that could recognize low-quality or false arguments would be easy: then somebody would have done it and made billions of dollars, which means a lot of people are already working on it. If you solve that: that’s your startup right there.
Similarly true for “hiring and managing 10,000 moderators”
Similarly true for gamification, but that’s a whole other rant
Why would anybody join a social network that hardly has anyone in it?
AKA “initial critical mass”.
Q: Isn’t advertising enough? People will see the vision and high quality content and all join!
A: This is called B2C marketing and we have priors for how well it works. TL;DR: Incredibly expensive.
The standard trick for getting critical mass, btw, is starting with a niche, like Facebook started with a specific university, or Amazon started specifically with books. The reason is that the specific interesting question is not “how many users exist in the platform”, but instead “if I’ll enter the platform, what’s the chance I’ll find something I want?”—so if the social network only has a few people but they’re all my close friends, then that’s probably good enough. [I can elaborate on marketplaces]
Which leads to “do you know your users or are you building something based on your imagination of them?”
The Fediverse (an open source decentralized social network)
The EA Forum / Lesswrong (seem very promising to me due to very high quality discussions and a critical mass of people that resonate with me a lot)
And others
I would really try to avoid planning to do the same thing like one of these platforms, only with less development time, less users, less content, and so on. Imagining you have lots of users and a lot of high quality content is not enough, you’ve got to design some snowball effect to lead there (or at least that’s my claim).
Better answers, I think:
“There is a specific critical feature that I think the other social networks are lacking and [because of reasons] I think will make a big difference”
“Good idea, I want to join them and build my idea as a feature in one of those platforms!”, for example I happen to know that CEA want to build some features for connecting people, maybe that’s your idea?
Great answers!
I hope this was useful!
Please argue with me and help me improve both my opinions and my writing’s usefulness
Thanks for insights. Now I am working a smaller idea—“EA directory of ideas” to address previous flaws from social network idea. It is many times simpler idea (than a social network) and solves many specific problems that exist right now. I am searching for feedback, wrote you a PM.
The Neglected Consideration When Planning a Social Network:… Network Effects
Lots of people dream about better social networks that promote higher quality discussions, even me! Some challenges, like “which logo to pick”, are things that can be solved along the way. Others, like “why would anybody join a social network if almost nobody is there?” are (I claim) a core part of the plan and need to be addressed in advance.
“If you give the same answer 5 times, write a post”
This isn’t meant as discouragement, it is meant as “this is an important thing-not-to-ignore”
For example, if someone wants to open a startup, I first make sure they understand that most startups fail. This is not a knock-down argument to not-open-a-startup, it is just something important to notice and take into account.
This post is a similar thing-to-notice beyond the normal considerations of a startup.
What similar considerations do I think people miss?
A social network has snowball effects. This is nothing new, but I think it’s useful to state them explicitly:
More users lead to more users.
More content means more users reading content means more users writing content.
More money means more comfortable features means more engagement means (in modern social networks) more money.
And so on.
Common suggestions to sacrifice an element of the snowball effect without explaining what would balance it out:
“We won’t optimize for engagement”
Or “By optimizing for engagement plus something else, we will get more engagement than someone optimizing only for engagement”
“We won’t charge money”
“We won’t show ads (and so we’ll make less money)”
“We will charge money from the users directly” (which means more friction for getting users, which means less users)
“We will only allow high quality content”
This probably means less content
TL;DR of my “moderation is expensive” rant [skip if obvious]
If writing a machine learning algorithm that could recognize low-quality or false arguments would be easy: then somebody would have done it and made billions of dollars, which means a lot of people are already working on it. If you solve that: that’s your startup right there.
Similarly true for “hiring and managing 10,000 moderators”
Similarly true for gamification, but that’s a whole other rant
this (Scott Alexander on Moderation)
Why would anybody join a social network that hardly has anyone in it?
AKA “initial critical mass”.
Q: Isn’t advertising enough? People will see the vision and high quality content and all join!
A: This is called B2C marketing and we have priors for how well it works. TL;DR: Incredibly expensive.
The standard trick for getting critical mass, btw, is starting with a niche, like Facebook started with a specific university, or Amazon started specifically with books. The reason is that the specific interesting question is not “how many users exist in the platform”, but instead “if I’ll enter the platform, what’s the chance I’ll find something I want?”—so if the social network only has a few people but they’re all my close friends, then that’s probably good enough. [I can elaborate on marketplaces]
Which leads to “do you know your users or are you building something based on your imagination of them?”
But that is already a typical startup question.
Maybe join others like yourself?
People are already building:
The Fediverse (an open source decentralized social network)
The EA Forum / Lesswrong (seem very promising to me due to very high quality discussions and a critical mass of people that resonate with me a lot)
And others
I would really try to avoid planning to do the same thing like one of these platforms, only with less development time, less users, less content, and so on. Imagining you have lots of users and a lot of high quality content is not enough, you’ve got to design some snowball effect to lead there (or at least that’s my claim).
Better answers, I think:
“There is a specific critical feature that I think the other social networks are lacking and [because of reasons] I think will make a big difference”
“Good idea, I want to join them and build my idea as a feature in one of those platforms!”, for example I happen to know that CEA want to build some features for connecting people, maybe that’s your idea?
Great answers!
I hope this was useful!
Please argue with me and help me improve both my opinions and my writing’s usefulness
<3
Thanks for insights. Now I am working a smaller idea—“EA directory of ideas” to address previous flaws from social network idea. It is many times simpler idea (than a social network) and solves many specific problems that exist right now. I am searching for feedback, wrote you a PM.