Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

> Meta could have chosen to compete with then-upstart photo sharing app Instagram in 2012, a senior FTC official said on a call with reporters ahead of the trial, but instead it bought it, and did the same with WhatsApp.

This has a potentially very-chilling effect on acquisitions, which are a major source of liquidity for lots of secondary companies.

Maybe these companies should be built to last not be acquired into monolithic borgs

But then they'd have to compete and not just shovel more money into the pockets of major individual shareholders, along with the retirement and pension funds of a generation that needs to drastically scale back its post-career ambitions.

The large tech firms get a surprisingly large amount of hate on antitrust issues on this website for startups so I appreciate your point bc I think it’s often missed.

Creating a chilling effect on acquisitions is the whole point of antitrust law.

I'd kill for a chilling effect on acquisitions. Every single fucking time something I like gets acquired, it takes anywhere between a few months to a couple years before it is completely ruined. Maybe if we're lucky, Microsoft will acquire Discord and run it into the ground the way they did with Skype. (Then, we can all go back to IRC, right? ... Right, guys?)

If that were true then acquisitions would be great for competition.

When you build a company, if you're looking to cash out and work on something else, it's either going to be by selling shares or getting acquired. Getting acquired can certainly be much less of a headache and risk vs going public or finding private investors to buy out a portion of your shares.

Its more likely we like the things we like because they're still in their "Acquire users" phase, and haven't run out of VC funding yet. Once they they get acquired, they quickly transition to the "squeeze every penny out of those users" phase we all know and love.

TBF Skype wasn't profitable when MS bought it, it every much was in the line of make something everyone wants to use and figure out how to make money later. Skype was more or less free to use and it didn't make enough from paid services to cover its operating costs if I remember correctly. So it was always someone buys it or it dies.

The point of many of those companies is to get bought out and then get enshitified or stripped for its IP and integrated into for profit products.

Discord is very much in the same boat of build user base, then either sell or lock people in and charge a lot. It's current model is unsustainable. It will get bought out or enshitify eventually, there's no other sustainable model unless every user starts handing them money every month like its Netflix.

People here used to know this, are we getting an eternal September? Comments are getting more and more "reddit" like.

Well in most cases you just ate your competition, so there's not a whole lot to care about.

The hardest part of competing with encumbants, especially when it comes to stuff like social media and IM, is acquiring users, due to those coveted network effects. When you look at what happened with Discord, it was able to swoop in when there was somewhat of a vacuum building with Microsoft-owned Skype being completely shit, MSN and AIM falling way out of fashion, and IRC... continuing to be IRC. Then they took advantage of something relatively new; they could lower the barrier to entry. Most existing IM networks required you to download a client to really use it, but Discord, just being a web app, you could log in from a browser and get the full experience. And if you needed to jump in quickly, you could literally just enter a name and start using it immediately, at least in the early days.

That doesn't happen often. What usually happens is the company that acquires the software makes use of the asset they actually care about (the users they just paid for) and now they don't have to do all of that hard work of actually acquiring the users by making a better product and marketing it. (Nevermind that they're almost certainly better-resourced to do that than the company that they are acquiring.) A large minority of users are very unhappy with the enshittification of the service, but most users don't really care much since they are pretty casual and a lot of them may not have even known things to be much better anyways. Microsoft squandering Skype seems to be the result of a lot of things at once, ranging from incompetence to the complexity that the P2P nature of Skype brought with it (at least early on.)

For example, look at Twitter. Elon Musk could do basically anything wrong but it has such a long history and so many users that it really is hard to squander it entirely, even after making many grossly unpopular moves. Don't get me wrong, Mastodon and Bluesky are doing fine, and it's also fine that neither of them are likely to ever really take over the number one spot in their niche; they still function just fine. But Twitter will always be the place where basically everything happens among them, even if the people who care the most absolutely hate the shit out of it.

I wish more acquisitions did go like Skype, only much faster.

Personally, I always liked things that never had an "acquire users" phase, or VC funding, but those things are less shiny (and frankly, less user-friendly.)

Post-acquisition products can still dominate their market even if they have declining quality. E.g. they can be bundled with other offerings from the parent company. This is exactly the point of anti-trust.

> People here used to know this, are we getting an eternal September? Comments are getting more and more "reddit" like.

What?! I do know this, and take great offense to the insinuation that my comment is "reddit"-like. I didn't feel it necessary to iterate over how VCware works since, as you said, everyone already gets that part.

Anyway, the "this place is getting more like Reddit by the day" thing has been a Hacker News staple for (well) over a decade too. Check the end of the HN guidelines, you'll have a chuckle.

I don’t think we can go back to some things like ircd or mud talkers because they are too “chatty” to users. People like simplified centralized services with on screen discovery in the form of popups. The small internet will have to stay small

That'd be more than fine with me, except the small internet competes for attention with the rest of the internet and gets slaughtered by their attention-sucking applications with shiny animations, spammy push notifications, gamification and manipulative FOMO-inducing tricks. This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet.

User retention aside... Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore. (I can tell from search analytics!) So aside from a struggle to keep users engaged in small communities, there's also not very many users entering smaller communities either, certainly not enough to counteract the bleed.

Sorry, just I thought anyone lurking here for a while was pretty familiar with the whole model of "offer service for free to gain user adoption, then sell out or pivot". Most of these services that we enjoy simply aren't sustainable and are running on borrowed time (or VC money).

> has a potentially very-chilling effect on acquisitions

I don’t buy it. An independent Instagram would have both been another potential acquirer and a pocketful of cash for investors who might fund another round.

> Once they they get acquired, they quickly transition to the "squeeze every penny out of those users" phase

Instagram had less than a tenth of its current user base when it was bought [1].

[1] https://time.com/4299297/instagram-facebook-revenue/

It's actually worse that that. Making acquisitions hard is one thing; changing the rules post hoc is another.

I'm confused, is familiarity with it somehow an argument for it?

As I understand, the complaint was that things get ruined once acquired. Great, we all know that it's in part because of unsustainable business models in the hope of getting acquired*. Does that mean we have to like it? Wouldn't it be nice to encourage companies to have sustainable business models?

*But also not entirely. Even if you build a sustainable business model, for you it's throwing off profit and that's gravy for you. But once someone buys it from you, suddenly they are in the hole and have an investment to recoup, especially if they overpaid. And so the temptation arises to goose things to pay back that investment more quickly

Good. We need companies that produce economic value, not landlords seeking rent.

Antitrust law explicitly allows the government to unwind acquisitions if they are later determined to be anticompetitive. How else would you deal with a company like Meta who has done exactly that?

Sounds like someone just hasn't come up with the right app to act as an abstraction layer over the protocol.

> Discord is very much in the same boat of build user base, then either sell or lock people in and charge a lot. It's current model is unsustainable. It will get bought out or enshitify eventually, there's no other sustainable model unless every user starts handing them money every month like its Netflix.

I haven't looked at their financials, but I wouldn't be surprised if their current subscription offerings targeting power users were enough to support the service.

What makes you think the products you like will even be launched, if the acquisition pathway to success is not available?

The other big problem with IRC is that if you have a connection interruption you miss messages.

It's almost as if people want to create companies that satisfy somebody's need, instead of pretending to be large so it gets brought...

>This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet.

This has been my lived experience with a few places the past couple of years, and I love it. It's a completely different experience from the "pop web" that most people use and it's amazing.

>Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore.

I know that my example can't speak for most/many other places, but the regional hiking forums I frequent (same places I alluded to above) come up a lot on search engines. Whether you're looking for "[region] hiking", or looking up "[name of] trail", or anything related to it, the pages pop up towards the top quite frequently. It's how I found them, and there does seem to be a steady number of new users joining.

We don't always need to know everything that happened all the time, whether it's online or meatspace happenings. If my IRC connection dropped back in the day, and there was something that happened in that timeframe that was truly worth hearing about, I'd find out eventually.

There's something to be said, at least in my opinion, about keeping a healthy dose of ephemerality in our lives.

Maybe it actually can be alright for a niche as relatively large as hiking, but I think it has done some real damage to smaller niches, which seem to struggle to maintain active forums.

Objection: relevance

Capitalism doesn’t tend toward “enough”, it tends towards maximizing profits.

(Saying this without judging it as bad or good, simply how it is)

Phones interrupt the connection every time you close the app, and if there's even a way to avoid this (yes on Android, no on iPhone) the user sees a notification that something is running in the background (fine) and their battery life is 80% less (not fine). The way IRC works is just inherently incompatible with the way mobile devices work, since IRC assumes stable endpoints. And because it's a protocol not a product, this can't be fixed.

Even if a new protocol was created which fixed this, the necessary design change would bring so much baggage that it would become Matrix. To solve the unstable endpoint problem, servers need to store messages until all endpoints retrieve them (which is never, for channels of non-trivial size, since at least one client isn't coming back) or time out (how long do you set that? a week? If you're holding all messages permanently, you might as well never time out clients).

The obvious storage design will hold each channel's messages once, not once per client connection buffer. Which means a lot of things: you might as well send it to new clients when they join; each message will have an ID so you might as well support replies and emoji reactions; you have to moderate it for illegal content; since messages have IDs, you might as well retract moderated messages on clients. At the end of the design process, what you have is nothing like IRC any more.

That's a fair point. WATMM, for instance, is finally calling it quits.

https://forum.watmm.com/

Regarding my comment, IRC was just a quick little example - to focus on that is to miss the forest for the trees.

The lack of connection is the point.

IRC means relay, so it makes sense to drop messages unless the service runs a pop mail server for out of band messages. Protocol means little to the user

If that's true then the downside to chilling acquisitions becomes... fewer "nice" things destined to rug-pull their users? Still not seeing the problem.

... I know this. Again[1], not the point of my comment.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687028

Discord's recent UI updates (updated skins, or whatever it's called) show they can do a great job of running their own product into the ground just fine.

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/users-call-for-discord...

I take one thing out of the Musk acquisition that goes beyond just being buying a product, which is that there was a real problem under Jack Dorsey that they were banning people for explicitly ideological reasons, significantly for covid "misinformation", that wasn't. Including doctors/researchers, and qualified people to speak who went away from the mainstream narrative. Like, one of the first things he did was take Jay Bhattacharya (coauthor of Great Barrington Declaration) and show him he had been put under a blacklist by the old regime of Twitter

I think the reason this gets ignored is because there's too many people on a certain part of the political spectrum where they see covid censorship as a nothingburger when actually it was a massive problem and whatever else people think of Elon I don't think you can take away from him that the situation was intolerable

Shoutout Mullvad VPN, honorable mention to Tailscale (they had an acquire users phase and VC funding but a rug pull does not seem likely for the time being).

I hated Twitter before and after the acquisition, for a number of reasons. The last time I really liked Twitter was probably 2015. It's hard to qualify everything that was wrong with Twitter, but it'll probably be somewhat overshadowed by the Musk era because Musk is such a big dumbass. He also didn't really resolve a lot of Twitter's old issues with ideological bias, he just replaced it with less popular ideological bias. Twitter doesn't really feel like it is any less of a hellscape where people get banned for wrongthink, it just leans differently in high profile decisions...

> Most of these services that we enjoy simply aren't sustainable and are running on borrowed time (or VC money).

That's also what HN said about Uber and many other services still running today, including old Twitter.

Gee if only there was a middle ground between these two extremes and the market somehow sought to achieve that state. Perhaps some simple market regulations might achieve this? And some enforcement of those regulations fairly and reasonably? Maybe a specific agency tasked with this?

While that might be true on a systems level, individual companies can choose their own destiny and many companies have chosen to operate over long time periods while making less than maximum potential revenue.

Most of my favorite services are either foss based or owned privately with minimal VC.

I think maybe everyone should adjust their definition of success to include treating users fairly long term instead of milking them over prolonged enshittification periods.

HN might want to be a website for VC startups, but I don't think the community here has been about that for a very long time now.

Traditionally, on a desktop computer, you'd only appear on IRC when you were logged into your computer. With phones, this doesn't make sense any more.

I know - I was a longtime IRC user way back when. You're still not quite groking my point. Lemme try and make it a bit more clear:

OP lamented that things like IRC meant that if you weren't always connected, you'd miss messages.

I simply posited, from a philosophical perspective rather than the technical perspective you are focused on, that it's OK for us to not be connected all the time. That not everything we miss is as important as we feel it might be when we think about missing out. That the truly important details will make their way to us one way or another.

No, OP lamented that a "connection interruption" means you miss messages. You were participating in a conversation, but you don't receive the whole conversation because your connection was interrupted. It's much worse on phones, because your connection is interrupted every time you look something up on the web, check the weather, send a message on another app, or anything else.

>No, OP lamented that a "connection interruption" means you "lose" messages. You were participating in a conversation, but you don't receive the whole conversation because your connection was interrupted.

Again, I know this. And please don't mis-quote OP, they clearly said "miss", just like I said.

I've told you twice, now, that you're focusing so much on the technical aspect of a connection that you are completely missing the philosophical idea I have very clearly, also twice, suggested. How IRC works, on mobile and on desktop, is not the point. I don't know how else to explain myself, so I'm gonna move on. Hope you have a pleasant day.

Edit: For posterity's sake, OP's quote at the time of this this post is...

>... if you have a connection interruption you miss messages.

How is that any different than when you actually use an IRC client? You leave the chat, you leave the chat. If you're at a social gather or kick back or whatevs, if you leave the convo, the rest of the people in the group do not enter a freeze state until your return. The conversation keeps going. There's no history or log for you to scroll to catch up. You just re-enter the conversation. How you handle yourself at that point easily shows if you're nice or an asshole. Just like in IRC.