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HN's algorithm has a sense of humor: this pairs nicely with the other front-page story about the 2014 prediction that Facebook would be dead by 2017.
by Analemma_ 10y ago
HN's algorithm has a sense of humor: this pairs nicely with the other front-page story about the 2014 prediction that Facebook would be dead by 2017.
- lowglow 10y agoFacebook does feel like it is dying though. 1. A lot of my friends are leaving facebook 2. A lot of my dev friends no longer build on facebook's platform 3. Most of the young kids I know have moved to Snapchat. 4. Most of the older kids I know hang out on Instagram. 5. All the friends that worked at facebook have left to go work elsewhere.
- sna1l 10y agoWhile true, this is anecdotal data. Are their overall engagement numbers down that much?
- monkmartinez 10y agoThe problem is those numbers are easily faked|manipulated. I agree with OP in the same way that I believe the story about the shoe shine boy and the stock market. It may not happen tomorrow, but facebook is not cool anymore.
- saycheese 10y agoJust to be clear, are you saying it is easy to "fake" Facebook's numbers below, and if so, how? Revenue - 7.01B (up 59% YoY) Net Income - 1.38B (up 166% YoY)
- ebbv 10y agoThey can choose to count those in various ways. See the stories about Facebook exaggerating video engagement. Additionally Facebook has gladly allowed obviously fake and spammy accounts on the site for ages. Note also that nobody is claiming Facebook is a ghost town. Clearly a lot of people still use it. But it's not remotely cool any more. Most people I know who still have accounts think of it as a burden.
- Retric 10y agoLook into pump and dump, there are a lot of ways to make a company look better in the short term at the cost of long term net profits.
- lotso 10y ago> A damning report published by The Information on Thursday revealed that Facebook has been struggling to reverse a 21% decline in “original sharing,” or personal updates, from its 1.6 billion monthly active users. http://fortune.com/2016/04/07/facebook-sharing-decline/ http://fortune.com/2016/04/07/facebook-sharing-decline/
- polishTar 10y agoThat's anecdotal evidence that isn't at all reflective of reality. Some stats about Facebook for Q3 2016: MAU (monthly active users) - 1.79B (up 16% YoY) DAU (daily active users) - 1.18B (up 17% YoY) Revenue - 7.01B (up 59% YoY) Net Income - 1.38B (up 166% YoY)
- omginternets 10y agoYou seem to be talking about Facebook the company, whereas the parent comment is talking about the social media platform. I'm not sure this rebuttal is relevant since the original claim is that the flight of users is a leading indicator of the platform's demise. Facebook owns Instagram, so maybe it's ad revenues are coming from places other than facebook.com?
- gogopuppygogo 10y agoFacebook seems to have determined it is a more mature network where kids graduate into it once they are ready for it. Seems like they are making money with this model.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bartozone 10y agoAlso ... Facebook owns Instagram
- bkjelden 10y agoI don't notice my friends leaving and I feel like it's dying too. The content just feels so manufactured and empty. About 80% of my news feed is: 1) Friend X liked a photo of someone I've never met and likely never will meet 2) A recipe video that I would never make, or some household 'lifehack' I would never use. 3) Meaningless images - 'Happy Friday', 'Share if you hate winter', 'Like if you love Christmas', etc. Their engagement numbers may still be rising, but it feels like they've favored pushing up that metric at the cost of having actual quality engagements. It's all been hollowed out.
- losteric 10y agoI'm very curious what their engagement numbers look like when broken down by region. It feels like FB is drying up in the west, and they're propping up their numbers by expanding in the east (especially their initiatives in India).
- rblatz 10y agoI've long wished for a way to filter out all the "viral" share junk people post. I am on Facebook to stay connected to friends not to get a terrible version of Reddit.
- supernovae 10y agoyoung tweens are flocking to facebook.. Instagram/facebook is the place to stay up 24x7 and do absolutely nothing but post stupid crap
- rhizome 10y ago2. Is there even anything left to develop against in the FB ecosystem anymore? Besides some external thing with FB logins (OAuth), that is.
- 0xffff2 10y agoAnd on that note, Facebook PAuth seems near universally supported, whereas Google OAuth support is spotty at best. Facebook OAuth support is a nontrivial factor in keeping my Facebook account alive.
- jimmaswell 10y agoI've been seeing comments like this for years
- gorkemyurt 10y agoRecent graduate here. Facebook still rules college campuses.. Facebook events are incredibly useful.
- Bahamut 10y agoI have friends who moved to snapchat for a bit, then moved back to FB after frustrations with Snapchat like the poor UI - it looks cheap, for a lack of a better description. I think it's going to take a lot to bring down FB, if it's even doable - it has become the dominant platform by far for most of my friends (musicians). Fortunately for Snapchat, it doesn't need to do that - it just needs to become a viable option.
- hansen 10y agoDon't forget about the grandmas and pas who are still on IRC and usenet ;P
- angryasian 10y agoehh.. FB wasn't even monetizing their mobile products when they went public. There was huge growth potential there. Snap will have a much harder time. Showing ads between stories, is a tough sell. They aren't contextual and are poorly targeted ( no real known interest graph ). They could possibly determine some sort of interests from people you follow, but all they really have is location and device information. With device information you could possibly correlate PII, but even bluekai's information from device is pretty horrible. Most people don't use their real names and I know for a lot of people its similar to myspace where they just give out snapchat names to random people.
- neximo64 10y ago> FB wasn't even monetizing their mobile products when they went public Back then they were saying FB couldn't do it and there wasn't enough screen real estate on a phone to make it meaningful. Google had the previous years good but it was about to end. Their ad platform at the time was also a failure and they were bleeding money. Lots of it rhymes with Snap, there are lots of parallels.
- angryasian 10y agoagree but layout and design can be fixed. when the core of your product is ephemerality you have a much harder problem to solve.
- yueq 10y agoit's already dead to many asian/chinese users. they moved to line and wechat.
- dmoy 10y agoHow does wechat monetize, or does Tencent just eat the cost?
- angryasian 10y agoI don't know how wechat monetizes but Line has been fairly successful with sticker sales and pushing apps. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LN https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LN
- wapz 10y agoLine makes TONS of money from their apps. I'm not sure how much their stickers make. I read a story about the average user spending $12 for line run/jump (not sure what the name was, but some infinite runner or jumping game).
- yueq 10y agowechat monetization is mobile gaming. A single game can generate $20M+ per month and wechat have many of them.
- automatwon 10y agoDid they 'move' to Wechat? I went to school and made friends with chinese students. They were already on WeChat, and made a Facebook account after coming to the U.S. I agree, though, that they seem to have left Facebook.
- acchow 10y agoI see everyone using FB in southeast Asia. As for China, I don't think most people can access FB? Don't you need a VPN?