> If o go to a restaurant and they let me waiting standing up more than 20 minutes, I'll just go somewhere else. Why do people treat internet websites any different?
What if that restaurant is the one where all your friends and family are waiting for you? Somehow over the last couple of years, your friends and family just gave up on all the other restaurants and only gather in this restaurant, even though everyone agrees that the food isn't very good, but out of convenience everyone settled for this one (and for the promotions that they had in earlier days). Actually many of the other restaurants closed because of these network effects and the owner of the famous restaurant got rich and arrogant, but now that everyone goes to this restaurant, it is hard to convince people to try something else.
>What if that restaurant is the one where all your friends and family are waiting for you?
If friends/family are already there, and as I said the restaurant is keeping me waiting at the door for more than 20 minutes? I'll freaking leave and SMS my friends to see them somewhere else.
Shit, if I HAD a job interview in said restaurant, the interviewer was waiting for me there and the restaurant blocked me from entering , I'll just call the interviewer to tell them the fact, and maybe even recommend the taco stand in the corner.
No freaking service is worth it. Not even Google, and I have all my emails since 2004 and docs in gdrive there. I'm a heavy FB user, but the moment they font want my data/usage to show me ads, I wont shed a tear.
> If friends/family are already there, and as I said the restaurant is keeping me waiting at the door for more than 20 minutes? I'll freaking leave and SMS my friends to see them somewhere else.
That's what I do with people on FB. Only a tiny fraction of people is willing to try alternatives, no matter how much they learn about FB. The consequence is missed interactions, because I will not use FB in this life.
It is a weak argument imo. If you’re important to them they will follow. If not, there’s no point to keep in touch. I understand that there’s edge cases when it’s really difficult to switch or use an alternative platform (i.e. because of age), but overall it’s not that hard. At least it wasn’t in my case.
And yeah, it is possible to eat in multiple restaurants at the same time, when it comes to social platforms.
It is not hard to install a new messenger. It is extremely hard to rebuild your (compatible) contact list on a new platform. The EU seems to be introducing laws for enabling cross-platform messaging on large platforms, which is desperately needed in order to combat walled gardens and weaponized network effects, I think.
In this analogy; it's JUST a restaurant it's not that important that you be there with your friends and family. There's plenty of other ways you can see and interact with them, the restaurant isn't important or necessary.
> it's JUST a restaurant it's not that important that you be there with your friends and family.
Not if that restaurant is THE place where all your friends hang out. Sure, probably you can convince your best friends to go to another place in order to meet you, but that inroduces friction if they actually prefer to go to the hip place.
I understand that very well. But let's stretch the analogy more:
There's this restaurant (Facebook) where all the cool people go to meet every night. Those meetings are so cool that, you know you just cannot miss them, otherwise you'll get out of touch.
You arrive to the reception, and the receptionist tells you that yep, the meeting you are looking for is going on, everybody is there. They even let you take a peek from outside and you see everyone is there.
But you just cannot participate now. You must provide the receptionist all your personal data, including a picture of you, your telephone number and a lot of other quite personal info... Oh, and you cannot lie because they will check everything with online databases.
You are annoyed, but you think it is worth it, at the end of the day John Carmack and other really amazing figures are sitting dinning there. So you give your information relucantly.
Then they let you in and, as you approach the dining area you realize that there's a VERY LOUD SOUND coming from a sound system. You pay attention to the sound and realize that it is basically a bunch of advertisements blasting one after another. The main problem is that the sound is so loud that you know it will interfere with your talk with other people in the table.
You sit down and start interacting with the party. You spend some time, talking loudly so that your stories can get through the advertisment noise. You share some pictures and anecdotes, and even find out that the person in front of you may want to buy the used bycicle you want to get rid of.
Suddenly as you are enjoying your steak and chatting about your home state with a random person, a waiter comes in along with a security guard and grab you by the arm. They won't tell you what happend, but they pull you out of the table and take you to the restaurant door. Once there (after the noise of the ads has diminished) you ask them what is going on, why did they take you out? They just say "sorry, you violated our terms and conditions, you have been banned" and close the restaurant door behind you.
So you are left outside lookig at the dinner. You either fight to get in again, or just go your home, fix some dinner and watch a movie. Is it worth it to knock on the door and try to argue your way to the restaurant? Where you know they will treat you really bad and the noise of advertisement is terrible?
This is where I argue that for me, it is not worth it at all. But for some reason we have been "desensitized" to lower our bar for online services. I don't think I would even stay in a restaurant that was blasting advertisements that interferred with my communication. Maybe I'm just grumpy and getting old.
What if that restaurant is the one where all your friends and family are waiting for you? Somehow over the last couple of years, your friends and family just gave up on all the other restaurants and only gather in this restaurant, even though everyone agrees that the food isn't very good, but out of convenience everyone settled for this one (and for the promotions that they had in earlier days). Actually many of the other restaurants closed because of these network effects and the owner of the famous restaurant got rich and arrogant, but now that everyone goes to this restaurant, it is hard to convince people to try something else.