Folding Ideas
8 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2017–2023
15:47 · 1M views · Jun 15, 2017
Folding Ideas uses the rise and fall of the YouTube competitor VidMe to examine why platforms are not friends to creators. It argues that alternatives to big platforms tend to attract the users banned from the original and lack a core vision.
HN commenters cite it whenever a thread asks why clones of or alternatives to YouTube, Reddit or Twitter fail or turn toxic.
12 comments from Hacker News
Any "Reddit alternative" will have a hard time gathering users as long as Reddit exists (and doesn't alienate a critical mass of their users ala Digg). Dan Olson of the YouTube channel Folding Ideas made a very insightful video about the problem of setting up "alternatives" to popular social media platforms (having lived through several painful platform transitions himself): this video The tl;dw is that if your "alternative" platform doesn't launch with unique and valuable features of its own to attract users away from the original platform then you will only attract toxic people who get kicked off the original platform as the first users of your "alternative" platform (because they are the only ones really in need of an "alternative"). This creates a self-reinforcing pattern where non-toxic users are repulsed from your alternative platform by the toxic users so growth only comes from more toxic users. You can clearly see this in the dynamic between Reddit and Voat.
> Vid.me Unfortunately, simply cloning youtube isn't a competitor without also cloning youtube's bankroll. For a very good explanation of why, see Folding Ideas video essay "VidMe or Why Platforms Aren't Your Friends"[1]. [1] this video
That's true, but its a deeper problem with that. The moderation is a sort of "in protest" form, with lots of deliberate "blind eyes" and slow action so they don't get deplatformed by the app stores etc. Beyond the moderation, these sites have the problem that they are inherently set up as a sort of opposition haven -- "we're twitter for people banned from twitter!" This results in a phenomenon Hank Green calls the "worst people problem"[0]. I'm not a huge fan of the judgemental term, but the core idea is similar to pointing out the inherent contradiction of, say, an anarchists' society. You end up with a userbase that is defined by its desire to flaunt rules and reject any normative standards. [0]: [LINK] (somewhat related and worth a watch: Folding Ideas' 2017 video essay about YT alternatives. Alt platforms have had inherent problems even before the more recent political bent: this video )
I mean, not just perception issues, but also the fact that you're inherently setting yourself up to build a platform with a core userbase of "People banned from [the more popular version of the platform they're cloning]." You build VidMe and the first people interested in VidMe are people that got kicked off of YouTube, which it turns out are rarely oppressed free speech advocates and much more often trolls and similarly unwanted individuals. If your userbase is entirely toxic, nobody wants to stay there, and your platform never really succeeds because of that. It's worth noting that I'm loosely parroting the content of a Folding Ideas video[1] that covers the discussion of the creator vs platform relationship overall. [1] this video
Folding ideas has a video on vidme that goes into this. A competitor that can't sell itself on features will inevitably gain traction most with those banned from the original platform. Currently that means a new platform will have very angry, very extreme voices. That is a terrible way to start a platform. Here is the video: this video