Why is no one making a new version of old Facebook?

12 Challenges readers Thandeka Xaba and Toby Mather raised some great points in the comments for yesterday’s Typology piece (thanks so much!).

I want to pick up on something Toby said in particular, because I’m also puzzled by it:

• If Facebook, along with all social networks, is moving away from the ‘social’ in social network — why is no one making a new version of old Facebook?

• To put it another way:

  • Either: billions of people who used to find old Facebook useful have changed their preferences in the last few years, and no longer need something like that

  • Or: a huge unmet demand currently exists for a social network which is based on the social graph, instead of the content graph, and which is pre-enshittification*

Yes, the social graph has moved elsewhere, mostly to messaging platforms. But as Toby points out, these lack many of the features that we used to take for granted on Facebook — for instance, creating events, inviting friends, setting up groups (non-messaging ones, which were more like forums), and the serendipity/utility of a high-quality feed which included people you cared about.

To paraphrase Toby a little more: there should be money in making old Facebook even just for cross-promotion. For instance, you could imagine providing the good parts of old Facebook as a draw into an everything app like WeChat. Then, you have plenty of routes to monetization — you can do the ad thing, or make money through transaction fees on other products and services accessed in the same convenient one-stop shop.

Here are some thoughts I had about why the new version of old Facebook doesn’t exist:

• Preferences changed? Maybe billions of people (or at least hundreds of millions) have changed their preferences. Possible that the world has collectively wised up to enshittification and no longer trusts social networks to be a good place for your social graph, but is fine with social networks using the (lower stakes) content graph.

  • That would explain why messaging, which is mostly based on phone contacts and therefore more in the user’s control, would be the place people now trust for their social graph. I’m not sure anyone thinks about this though, to be honest.

• No more attention left? Maybe the rise of the content graph, and its exceptional ability to grab attention (think about how addictive TikTok is), crowds out any new social network competitor. You can’t launch old Facebook because it won’t be as exciting, as compelling, as shareable as TikTok — so it won’t grow fast enough and will fail to become relevant. The reds in my draft typology are where it’s at. You won’t be able to claim even 5 minutes a day away from people’s TikTok usage.

• Antitrust has been weak? Up until recent moves by antitrust bodies in the US and EU, Facebook could simply buy out any threat to them, including any new version of old Facebook.

• Social graph burnout? Maybe there’s a limit to how many times people want to (re)make their social graph — people who invested in making their Facebook social graph can’t be bothered to do it again. I don’t think so though. Plenty of other apps create social graphs, e.g. Strava, and usually it’s by stealth, in a way that doesn’t feel like effort. Also, in this version of the world we’d expect that the younger generation, who never did the whole Facebook thing, would still be open to a new version of old Facebook.

Please drop suggestions in the comments. This is a question I’m very interested in, and I’m going to dig deeper in future articles as I explore the typology of social media.

*Or ‘e14n’ as Toby put it — a tongue-in-cheek contraction which got a nice boost on Mastodon from Cory Doctorow, creator of the original term.