Firehose #163: 👥 Social recall. 👥

We’re already seeing this unbundling of consumer platforms starting within communities that have a deep affinity and sense of identity, and are not well served by general purpose social networks – for example, gaming communities assembling in virtual worlds such as Minecraft and Roblox and using Discord to communicate, communities that coalesce aro... See more

Rather than having gamers on a platform connect with one another in third-party online channels, many successful games now enable and promote the usage of in-game socialization. Players meet and chat on platforms like Fortnite and Roblox, which both boast hundreds of millions of MAUs spending hours a day in their ecosystems. Fortnite, for example, ... See more

Games also continue to be a de facto social network. They’re the only kinds of social networks that don’t have to overcome strong network effects to challenge incumbent social networks. If you can consider Fortnite a “social network,” Fortnite grew to 100 million MAU faster than any conventional social network because it was bootstrapped by the gam... See more