Posit: there hasn’t been a sustained break out social app not funded by a big tech company since Snap?
What candidates come to mind from each of the following buckets? 1. Funded by big tech and sustained 2. Not big tech funded, fizzled out
Probably depends on definitions of sustained and breakout, but my friends and I still use BeReal daily
Some consider Discord social. How about Gas? Waiting for Vision Pro
Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and others are big hangout places for many teens and kids. They're not "social apps" but a lot of socializing happens on those platforms. Probably also on Fortnite, FFXIV and others.
So many reasons. Mindshare being one (hard to steal). Network effects are the strongest in existing networks already and hard to disrupt. And finally, social fatigue. Crypto wallet signup guarantees me people here at least aren’t dismissive about web3 tech, which defacto makes Farcaster a college-fb for web3 folks…
Are.na is crowdfunded, not sure if it qualifies for sustained breakout. Reminds me of tumblr days
clubhouse caught fire before a16, Calacanis was solo lead investor at the time iirc
Vine, but was not sustained. I guess tiktok was able to take their position after figuring out monetization.
Did Twitch come out later in the same year? Also kind of hard to judge apples to apples when you think of how many promising apps were purchased in early days. (Vine, Periscope, musical.ly Etc.) then pillaged and sunset.
Did Twitch come out later in the same year? Also kind of hard to judge apples to apples when you think of how many promising apps were purchased in early days. (Vine, Periscope, musically Etc.) then pillaged and sunset.
Would you consider a telegram group chat to be a social app?
Signal is another one. Within this constrain probably the most were created in gaming (axie, pokémon go, clash royale, garena etc - not all sustained though ).
Airchat https://www.getairchat.com/ I’d be honored to send you an invite :)
You would be surprised how many of my friends (18 y/o) still use BeReal
Counterargument: Discord exploded after 2020 and now has hundreds of millions of users. It’s a stealth hit. People use it but somehow don’t think of it as a social network, because faces on profiles aren’t as big a part of it. But it might have as many as 500M users.
BeReal seems to be persisting, most folks thought the DAU would drop off after a month or two but it seems like they are growing still. Young demo of users, kind of reminds me of like musical. ly before tiktok
I have a ton of respect for anyone trying to build a breakout social app these days. Three of us gave it a shot with our privacy-first social app Pen Pals.