Path in its day was way ahead in ux and detail compared to other social networks. Stickers and reactions on facebook came later and even then/now never were as 'finished' compared to what Path had.
A great example of how the better product doesn't always win. There are just too many factors (like timing and network effects in this case).
Path was not better. They got busted repeatedly playing fast and loose with user privacy, and iirc their bad behavior was the proximate cause of Apple adding contacts permissions to iOS. Good riddance to these jerks.
Yeah, my memory of Path is that they spammed all my contacts in the first week of having it installed and then I uninstalled it and never went near it again.
Hard to find a mobile app these days that doesn't demand contact access, try using WhatsApp without providing it and it's a rough ride, I'm super reluctant to upload mine but that one was basically unusable without doing so.
That’s very true. Though it wasn’t the contacts upload on its own so much. It was that they were uploaded in the background without permission or notification and your contacts were spammed without your permission.
With social the product is always the network. If nobody uses it, the product is not better at all. It just has some nice features that would be good if a real product was there (the people).
I know it seems pedantic, but you cannot grow a social network with just a platform, despite how amazing it is. This fails time and time and time again.
You need a story that sets it apart from existing stuff that brings in people. Whether it's some disruption narrative, paying shills (a.k.a influencers), or whatever, that's what's required.
This feels like a deliberate misinterpretation of the parent comment and therefore, yep, pedantic. It's obvious from context that they're talking about the product qua UX and features, not about the product as a whole including its user base.
Sure, but FB had a smaller network than Myspace. Instagram once had a smaller network than Flickr. They grew the network through better UX (ok it's hard to say now with their MS-Word style shotgun blast of icons, but FB was once miles ahead of MySpace).
No, FB initially grew because of exclusivity of the network. I only signed up because it was for college people only at the time. I didn't care about the interface at all, just the content and who was posting that content. It was absolutely not "myspace with an improved interface".
Path was very popular in Indonesia when I visited a few years ago. I guess people just switched to other social networks like Instagram. I wonder whether people will have moved on from Instagram in 10 years.
I heavily believe social networks will always be cyclical, as people always want excitement. A new social network launches, everyone gets excited for something new and different, it grows to the point where your grandma and your teachers or kids are on it too, you lose the excitement and start looking for the next "entertainment".
The world is moving faster than ever with entertainment and attention spans. Facebook is already showing signs of fizzling out. I don't believe it will die, just like MySpace and Digg are still going, they're just not the hot shit they once were. I think we're pretty much hitting the point now where Snapchat and Instagram are "hotter" than Facebook, and Facebook is running on momentum for a fair while longer before being "just another social network".
Instagram and Snapchat are in their peak right now. Everyone under 30 has both, and most over 30 at least have an account to follow their kids, friends, whatever. I think 10 years is even optimistic, I wouldn't be surprised if another transition happened within 5.
When Instagram and Snapchat lose their excitement, the next thing will come along. There's hundreds of startups already working on trying to be the next big social network. It's a given it'll happen eventually.
(I'm not in the industry and don't know stats, I don't use social networks other than following people on Twitter for updates, this is just the ramblings of someone watching it all for 20+ years)
- the difficulty of changing services for the technically challenged.
- Facebook's technical prowess (much different than MySpace was)
- Facebook's variety outside of a pure social network (they are a news app, craiglist/classifieds, meetup/events, Picasa 10.0/photo app, messenger, and a myspace clone, all rolled into one, with new services added all of the time). Probably missed something else.
Facebook stayed ahead in many ways by buying out it's future competition i.e Instagram and WhatsApp and tried very hard for snapchat without success so copied it with instagram. Most people in my extended family no longer post much on Facebook but are regular and heavy users of WhatsApp groups and instagram.
You make it sound as if instagram is unrelated to facebook. Facebook owns them and they have so much money that they will buy the next thing and the one after that as well. Facebook, the company, will do just fine.
Yes, that's my point. Facebook (the company) knows that Facebook (the social network) won't be the king forever, so buys up the competition like Instagram to make sure they (the company) are still around.
I was purely referring to the social networks. Who owns them is irrelevant for this point.
Social Media has seen ascendancy because it taps into a primal need of humans for connection and approval. Up to now, that's come with a price as the business needs of companies providing platforms have come first, leading people to think quantity of connections is desirable and to be endlessly pulled in with feeds and other media that aren't "connecting" at all, but stave off feelings in general. Perhaps we're coming closer to a crossroads where meaningful connections and actual communication will override the Facebook/Instagram model of dopamine triggers and passive connections.
I agree with your general thesis. We approach these things as if we're building to last forever, but, particularly in consumer markets, it might be better to view them as more akin to disposable pop culture. The cycles may be longer than say, a restaurant---maybe closer to the life time of a band, or a fashion trend. Each generation has it's own style and possibly wants its own communication platform to go with it.
Cant imagine why not. People moved on from Foursquare, Koprol, Path & BBM. And Instagram and whats-app themselves are basically eating the original facebooks time-in-app for breakfast.
Social networks just don't seem to be as sticky as you would imagine them to be. The network effect sure helps your grow fast - but it isn't a very powerful moat, especially when platforms tend to decrease in quality with increase in users.
(It was only a $10mil buyout offer of a startup I owned 5% of at the time, but we believed we'd be worth 10 times that in a year's time and turned it down. ~8 years later I spent everything I got from the acquisition we got taking a few friends to dinner. (well, "they" by that time - I'd been out for a couple of years but still had my shareholding. Wrong decision in hindsight, but no regrets. I'd make the same choice given the info we had at the time...)
Is his life that much better than if he had taken the money and run? I am a big believer that the best life is found at the upper, upper middle class level where you have enough money to do almost everything you want, but where you can walk down the street without bodyguards.
If someone offers you personally $1B, you take it, and go live the rest of your life comfortably without any worry of ever having to work a day ever again. Do you really think having $3B vs having "only" $1B matters in the grand scheme? I surely would prefer a billion over a potential xBillion. There is more to life than working your ass off. Zuckerberg wanted power, not more money.
That's basically what Notch did with Minecraft, and frankly he seems to have been bored since. You should never underestimate how important wanting to do something interesting and worthwhile can be.
Path has been used by my girlfriends family for the past six years as their familial social network. They all just follow each other and because they don't use it for anything else it's a perfect little community for sharing memories. It was hard for them to cope with the fact that it's all getting shut down after six years using it.
Makes you wonder why smaller family or close-friends type social networks don't work. I guess the value isn't there to build it because it can't sprawl in the same way as other social networks.
Our family just uses a Google Photos album where we put pictures of ourselves and our son. We send the link to people who might be interested, and then they get notifications when we put in more pictures. The rest of our family often posts things to their own albums and we get notifications of that. And anybody can comment on any of the pictures. It's not perfect, but it's a reasonably good experience. I can only imagine it would be even better if there were a single album shared by the whole extended family.
Makes you wonder why smaller family or close-friends type social networks don't work.
Because they are run by for profit companies, operating in a capitalistic framework.
That is one of the core pillars of free software as envisioned by Stallman - software that can truly serve the needs of the people, because it is not subject to those pressures.
A world where your girlfriend’s family could painlessly deploy their own such service for just a few users and not have to worry about a company shutting it down whenever they feel like it would be wonderful.
Yeah, I'm sure they would be able to deploy the service, have it secure and updated, having apps up to date on their new devices. Or maybe that takes time and effort, and people need to pay their bills.
I think for people don’t mind paying for things they actualy own.
For instance grand-parents don’t want to pay for instagram but will pay premium to have great pictures printed and framed.
Or pay to have their own ___domain name.
People pay for Dropbox or Squarespace.
I’d totally see my parents paying for a Synology if someone could install it and maintain it for around 10$/€ a month.
Currently they pay for one time install fees + maintenance hours for their windows machine for instance, it’s not a big stretch.
Synology is heavily business focused, but I do feel they're making steps towards competing with the bigger companies by offering smaller scale options. They now have Chat, Drive, and Moments which all do things like Slack, GDrive, and Timehop and with apps. Obviously the main caveat is they're not as refined/full featured.
Ello is still operating, though its social aspect is fading.
The founders' initial plan was to create an artists' and designers' platform, and they've pivoted hard back in that direction over the past couple of years.
Not really. I'd have to dig for references (one of the site's failings is terminally flawed search), but it really was an artists' & designers' space.
That orientation allowed them to make additional pledges, including ad-free and no tracking, and yes, they did pledge that. But the SNpivot came after the initial interest boom in September, 2014.
From Crunchbase: "Ello was originally built as a private social network. Over time, so many people wanted to join Ello that we built a public version of Ello for everyone to use."
It started as a good idea while social networks hadn't yet reached the level of adoption and engagement that they would later, but getting users to start using anything new is very difficult. The limit on the number of contacts (that one could have) may have further impacted the network effect.
It's a bit unfortunate that the first thing that comes to my mind when Path is mentioned is the address book upload by the app without asking users.
I don't think there's no space for such an app now, since more people (relatively speaking) are aware of and are concerned about large networks like Facebook and their impact on privacy and society. Coming back with a privacy focused offering that targets those who want more meaningful interactions with a limited number of people might get some traction, even if it remains niche.
There's Diaspora, since 2010 no less, but it's hard for it to really take off when most people would rather use a centralized service, and centralized services would rather lock people in.
- 9.17.2018 : Notice on Path service discontinuation
- 10.1.2018: Unable to download/update the app in iTunes and Google Play
- 10.18.2018: Termination of the Service (Unable to access to Path)
- 11.15.2018: Path related customer service will be closed
Seems like a fairly abrupt wrap-up of the service?
I remember a friend used it years ago with her partner as a private social network of sorts which I thought was interesting. Then that was the last I ever heard of Path until now.
I’m sure they did lots wrong, including being deceitful with peoples private address books.. but also, wasn’t one of the novelties of Pty that you could only have 20 “friends” or something like that? That seems like a huge gamble and makes it that much harder to build, grow and sustain a network doesn’t it! ;-)
I remember Path back in college. It was not that popular but its mobile app was beautiful, top-notch in terms of UI design and animations back then.
Sadly it did not take off, which on the other hand is comprehensible, having other options such as Facebook and Instagram where most of the friends and connections are.
I think this was for the web version. They were mobile first for a long time, and a lot of the core team left years ago before the web version was complete.
Bahhahaha! I'm so glad someone posted this! I had been trying to find my way back to this link ever since the first time I saw it!
This was part of one of the first threads I had ever read on HN, on or around the day it appeared: 3/23/2013. Actually, I think I discovered HN in late April or early May, but anyway, the user that shared it then, as much as now, also quickly got flagged and hellbanned.
For a brief moment I felt like I was reading a site that had some truths to speak to, but that illusion was dispelled as soon as it was [censored] and the flames were stamped out. Ah well...
Five years later, and I know better. This site is a tightly controlled mouthpiece, and an echochamber in service to microcorporations in search of early retirement paydays and acquisition cashouts, but hey, work-safe reading material, am I right?
It's a shame it was flagged, but that's the way of this site. Everybody pretends to be a goody two-shoes. For those who can't see it, go to your profiles and switch "showdead" to on.
To HN's credit, though, the Juicero-riffic aspects of SV are understood for what they are: the greasy, obsequious total fucking bullshit that produces nothing, or worse, wastes everyone's time, aching beneath a cloud of impostor syndrome that isn't entirely incorrect. Either that or peacocking the pick-up artistry of engraved, wooden iPhone cases, and popped collar headshots in douchey Vanity Fair biopics.
YC has its own stinky investments that one can rationalize as "teaching experiences" and "lessons learned" and maybe that's a cop out for not being diligent enough, but press too hard and the subculture gets stifled by the Steve Ballmers with a Trump-like attitude. Stack ranking kills the crab, and you get Windows Vista and "Scroogled" ad campaigns at the other end of the pole. A company of paranoid drone wonks, who wear the soulless dork uniform and drive the speed limit, to get to the morning traffic jam on time.
So leaving room for the dumber shit, the flights of fancy, gets you more of the most interesting things that can be had (the dropboxes, the reddits, the dockers, the gitlabs). For all the effort to produce one solid, tangible, self-sustaining utility though, there's definitely 9 or 99 like the link you posted, which, five years later, results in the thread we now read.
Had path.com been destroyed in that moment, instead of wasting another fruitless five years, would the world be a better place? Eh, there's plenty of insufferable nonsense going around. I'm probably as insufferable, when push comes to shove.
Should HN crush all the criticism thereof. Well, at least HN isn't a place where enemies are made, so there's that.
A great example of how the better product doesn't always win. There are just too many factors (like timing and network effects in this case).