fundamentally the question all these people are responding to is "can this website thrive at mass scale or must it remain niche?" i think that virtually all of us — critics and defenders — believe the latter to be self-evidently true; the only difference is whether we see that as a good thing!
I have my doubts about the ability to remain a going concern, because the unit economics are so whack; but at the same time, all these platforms are, fundamentally, ephemera.
the unit economics of *everything on the internet other than e-commerce* are pretty fundamentally awful.
Yep! It’s a big part of why people shouldn’t get emotionally attached to these services.
not me – i'm only getting emotionally attached to the things i liked when i was 12
(the obvious follow-on Q is, "how can this place possibly sustain itself once its VC backers realize the obvious truth that it will never make money?" would it be possible to sustain it through App.Net-style subscriptions? i'm generally skeptical about subscription-based social media—but we'll see!)