logoalt Hacker News

johnnyanmacyesterday at 10:19 PM1 replyview on HN

Network effects disagree, sadly. You don't get market share from the leader by simply "being better". There's way better netowkrs than Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit out there. But some habits are as harder to break than they were to form.


Replies

Etheeyesterday at 10:40 PM

I don't disagree with what you're saying. But for technical platforms it needs to be a combination of both. Discord is the perfect example of this, plenty of people I know of were completely fine with their Mumble/Teamspeak/Ventrilo setups, and in a lot of cases some of those were better than what Discord was offering for individual features, but the overall feature set and platform ease-of-use that Discord was offering drew in a large initial user base which then created the network effect you describe. A lot of my friends feel 'locked in' to Discord now and with their age verification roll out fiasco a lot of people want to leave, but there isn't a single offering that matches Discord's platform features and integrations. There definitely needs to be an incentive to leave sometimes and break away from that network effect, but if there's no actual competition then obviously yeah you're always going to be stuck.