[rickycook]

have you ever tried to start a competitor to facebook? plenty of platforms have, and you haven’t ever heard of them because whilst better, facebook has a monopoly by way of critical mass... it’s almost impossible to pull significant populations away from their platform: not even google could, and google plus was an excellent product; far better than facebook in almost every way

[akersten]

I've heard of plenty of social media platforms (Diaspora, G+, LiveJournal) that have failed to gain traction for various reasons. I'm not convinced that it's because one of their competitors was just too big. The same argument could have been made that MySpace would never be dethroned a decade ago.

And I've also witnessed many successful social media platforms evolve in the post-Facebook era (Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok). There are also a plethora of small communities like DeviantArt, image boards, and specialty forums. My point is, of course cloning an existing platform won't pull populations away from it - users are sticky. That's true with any product. Folks need a reason to move, and once they have that reason, they're happy to do so. The beauty of social media is you don't even have to move, you can just have accounts in both places.

So I don't think the fact that a Facebook clone failed means that Facebook has a monopoly on social media. They might have a strong momentum with users that prefer Facebook-flavored social media, but given the market of all the different available platforms, it doesn't seem like there is a lot of demand for Facebook #2. Having a differentiator is the killer, and that makes the difference between G+ and TikTok.

[spunker540]

What about Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Slack, LinkedIn, Reddit? There’s countless social media/chat/video/news aggregation competitors to FB. In what category of business do you think it has a monopoly?