6 ms·

Facebook's Culture Problem May Be Fatal

110 points by percept 16y ago

jpdbaugh 16y ago
"A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs." I don't think the problem was with keeping up but rather staying the same service. Facebook needed to not evolve and remain the same way it always was when it was first conceived.
edw519 16y ago
A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs. The classic example of a company intelligently growing up with a generation is McDonald's and baby boomers. First, cheap food at drive-ins where teenagers can hang out, check out cars, and find dates. Then happy meals for their kids, who can stay in their car seats in the drive-thru. Now, healthier choices and high end coffee.
- joezydeco 16y ago
  Intelligently growing up with a generation, or just trying to stay ahead of plain 'ol American competition? McDonalds got it's kickstart because it was cheaper and faster (self-service) than drive-ins. Happy Meals kept parents from choosing other burger chains. Salads and low-carb choices came in response to dieting trends. Coffee was upgraded to avoid losing breakfast business to Starbucks. But I'd wager none of these innovations would have come as quickly if there wasn't a business threat to the company.
  - rick_2047 16y ago
    You make it sound as if it was bad of them to do so. Any financial organization responds to only one stimulus very quickly, that is financial. If they are responding to such stimuli and moulding their services accordingly where is the harm? The customers are at a net gain anyway.
    - joezydeco 16y ago
      No, it's not bad to do at all. Never tried to imply that. But let's not give credit to "vision" and "foresight" when in reality it's just a company trying to keep up with the world as it changes.
      - alttab 16y ago
        The author of the original post was saying that Facebook was failing to do exactly that. Using the McDonald's example, it could be akin to McDonald's making all of their burgers out of ground turkey because they got a huge deal with a turkey meat distributor, the customers saying "no, give us hamburger!" and McDonald's saying "fuck you." What happens to those customers wanting hamburgers? They go to Burger King.
        joe_the_user 16y ago
        Yes, The problem is: suppose they weren't making a profit on the hamburger and so serving the turkey was the only way they knew how to make profits. But also suppose that it would be quite hard for customers to switch to Burger King. Then you have characterized something of the paradoxical condition of the Facebook. Making money while accumulating ill-will.
        whopa 16y ago
        Well, to make the analogy a little more accurate, suppose they weren't making as much profit on the hamburger as they are by serving the turkey... Facebook and Twitter both have the problem that they have to justify the amount of investment they raised, and both are doing things that are unpopular with their community (users for Facebook, developers for Twitter) to make a bigger business than the original things that got them popular can sustain.
        julius_geezer 16y ago
        Thirty-five or forty years ago, McDonalds got caught out serving kangaroo in their hamburgers. Much more recently it was found flavoring the french-fry oil with a bit of tallow, to the great offense of vegetarians and I think a few Hindus. However, it has always been much smoother at the apology business than Facebook now seems to be.
- stanleydrew 16y ago
  But Facebook is really only 6 years old right? That's not really enough time for a generation to grow. I think what we're seeing is that Facebook's user-growth is being driven by older and older people.
  - ajdecon 16y ago
    I think it is, in the specific case of the generation Facebook initially targeted: college students in 2004. It's enough time for most of them to get their first job or two, and for some large fraction of them to start building a life with different requirements than college life. Many of them will have gotten married (median age of first marriage in 2007: 27), and some will have had kids. There's a dramatic shift there: most "family" people I know tend to expect more privacy and control over their lives, and be less focused on expanding their social life and sharing details with their friends. But this is anecdotal, I know: I'd love to see a study on how social networking use patterns change during this age shift.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    There's a big difference between what a 19-year-old wants and what a 25-year-old wants, even if they're the same person separated by 6 years.
  - bradgessler 16y ago
    I'd argue that the HRB article is right in that people who signed up with Facebook in college six years have since moved on to a professional career, got married, and/or had kids. These are pretty big changes in peoples' life and what they demand changes respectively. People that were sharing keg stand pictures 6 years ago today want to share pictures of their baby running around.
    - sophacles 16y ago
      Six years is a lot longer for a 20something than the same six years for a 50something. Both in overall life percentage and in major life changes during that timeframe.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Dealing solely with information, Facebook has a "slightly" larger problem than McDonalds ever did. It's not just that the Facebook needs to offer different fare but that the fare older adults want conflicts with the fare Facebook would like to offer in order to become profitable.
terra_t 16y ago
I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who expect to have a private playhouse online where they can say anything without any consequences, particularly if they want it as a consumer product. If you're going to boast in public that you like to drink a Sparks for lunch, violate the open container law, and walk by the police station, don't be surprised if the cops notice. In fact, if you're going to say something that you don't want to get out, you'd better be really careful of how you protect it. Nixon learned that lesson the hard way.
- CapitalistCartr 16y ago
  That's just the point: when Facebook started, they weren't "boasting in public." It was private to their circle of friends.
- ajju 16y ago
  Are you saying that if I explicitly set my privacy settings on Facebook to be fully private, it is still o.k. for Facebook to make my data public because I should have no expectation of privacy on the Internet?
  - jat850 16y ago
    Doesn't sound at all like that's what the parent poster is trying to say. Sounds more like a caution against posting anything, anywhere, that could be harmful or damaging to oneself, while harbouring the unreasonable expectation that it will remain private for eternity. Whether that privacy breach comes from maliciousness, or negligence, the same cautionary principle applies.
    - raganwald 16y ago
      The challenge is that there are two orthogonal issues here: Sympathy for users and criticism for businesses. If someone spends thousands of dollars on hair implants because they believed an informercial telling them that they will get laid every night of the week, I would sit them down and have a long talk about tooth fairies, santa clause, bridges, and swamp land salesmen. But I would still despise the businesspeople preying on the gullibility or naivité of their customers. So perhaps it is a very good idea not to put anything online that would ruin you if it leaked. But it's still reprehensible to leak things after setting an expectation that they are private.
ccc3 16y ago
Facebook is doing more than just taking away something from their users, they're being downright dishonest. Until recently Facebook's pitch to users was that it was a way to connect with people that you actually know. They were deliberately closer to the closed/private end of the spectrum. And back when they had real competition (myspace), privacy was one of the key differentiators. I still think privacy is one of the big reasons that Facebook's popularity took off like it did. Now they're pulling a giant bait-and-switch. Attract users with privacy, kill competition, then kill privacy to gain easy profitability. This alone is pretty disingenuous, but to make these changes behind users backs (for example, pictures that were once private became publicly viewable) shows a blatant disregard for the trust that users gave Facebook when they signed up.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  I think you've nailed it, bait-and-switch is the frustrating bit. That said though, I wonder if there is a way a big corporation can avoid this path, they'll have to monetize somehow and once they're monetizing they'll have to do better and better every year of they will look like they are stagnant. So the only way to maintain that - and for facebook monetization has always been an issue - was to squeeze the lemons a bit harder. Some of them will squeal, but as long as the majority stays you can't really fault them, no matter how sleazy it is. Network of friends = lock in, lock in => abuse. It's always been like that.
  - tansey 16y ago
    Facebook was monetizing just fine. They had simple ads that were generating millions in revenue and profit. The problem is that they are trying to hyper-monetize. Zuckerberg turned down a $2BN offer from Yahoo, so clearly he believed he could make the company worth more than that.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      On that scale the money they were making was relatively little compared to other sites (for instance google, yahoo) with the same number of pageviews / uniques. Zuckerberg is actually proving that they're worth more, the way in which he goes about it is not the most elegant though. I'm still willing to bet he'll succeed but the image of facebook is tarnished for ever, and it could very well be that if he does manage to sell for a much higher valuation that the buyer will find themselves with another broadcast.com.
silkodyssey 16y ago
I think facebook is a perfect example of what happens when businesses are created "by accident", where a product is created first then a business model is grafted on afterwards. As the article mentions the needs of the users are in conflict with those of advertisers and it's a problem. An increase in value for advertisers means a decrease in value for users. Users want privacy, advertisers want everything in the open. Facebook in an attempt to sustain growth has effectively forced users to accept people within their networks that they aren't really close to and this makes users less comfortable in their own space. Facebook is at a critical juncture and its future depends on how it manages the problems they are facing now because the house of cards can come tumbling down at any moment. What they have going for it though is that there isn't really any clear alternative at the moment that users can turn to. What clear though is that people do want an alternative but till then I suspect most will bear with it till the alternative comes to their rescue.
- maxniederhofer 16y ago
  The same things is happening with Twitter. It was just a cool little thing to do at the beginning, then they had issues scaling, now they're just co-opting whatever worked well in the ecosystem. It's the same bait-and-switch, just with developers around the API as the losers.
garply 16y ago
People keep mentioning alternatives to FB but I feel pretty locked-in. I would be interested in joining a site that was a superset of Facebook... that is, a site where I could control and access my Facebook data but also interact beyond Facebook.
- jasongullickson 16y ago
  I have a friend who's working on something like that. He's not saying much publicly yet but I'll post it once he's ready to share.
- marltod 16y ago
  Someone needs to create a standardized Social Network file. Then users could "download their facebook" then upload it to another social network.
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    I can't see that being easy. Since most of a social network is your relationships with other users, and those users may or may not exist on other sites (or may have duplicate people with the same name, etc), it seems like it would be quite a difficult problem. You'd also have to somehow convince one or more major providers to use it, but I don't see that being easy either. That said, it would be a very useful thing to have if someone could get it right.
  - donaldc 16y ago
    At the rate facebook is currently going, in a couple years all data on facebook will be world-readable. At that point it should be easy for anyone to download their facebook to another site. One could then clone facebook, and at an agreed-upon date, everyone could move over to the new site. I say this only half in jest. One can't get 400 million + people to move, but niche sites could certainly peel off a substantial number of users over time. And facebook itself started out as a niche social netorking site...
- TheBurningOr 16y ago
  Isn't this essentially what Pip.io is trying to do?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
maxniederhofer 16y ago
I wonder if Facebook would have done better if they had started charging power users. If users were the customers Facebook would have avoided this whole mess. Assuming a reasonable $10/month per power user, a conversion rate of 2-3%, at 500 million users they'd be generating $1.2-$1.8 billion in high-margin revenue. Instead, users are the product. Advertisers are the customers. And Facebook is generating maybe $1B in lower-margin revs. Admittedly the growth prospects of being the big display advertising/lead gen platform are better than being the leading social network. On the other hand, isn't this great for HN users? Facebook is screwing up in some core areas. Up and at'em, I say!
- stralep 16y ago
  Interesting... How would you define power user? (In this context)
  - danohuiginn 16y ago
    There are several groups they could go after: a) people, often students who run their entire social lives on facebook, have 1000+ friends, and spend a long time every day on the site. Often students. Probably don't have much money -- but you might be able to get them hooked with small payments. Also, market it as a gift thing. Your uncle doesn't know what to get you for chrismas, but knows you spend a lot of time on facebook and has no problem spending $20 for a present. Also something to buy for the girl you're flirting with (and yes, it likely is that gendered). Livejournal made this work very well. In this situation it doesn't matter _what_ you offer for the paid account, just that it exists as an option. b) anybody using it profesionally: event promoters, venue owners, bands, etc. May not deeply like or understand FB, but getting it right is worth serious money to them. Simplification, information management, statistics, maybe tech support. c) Professionals who know nothing about facebook, but feel they should have a presence there. Sell them a service with lots of hand-holding, maybe integration with tools they already use.
    - stralep 16y ago
      Thank you :) Just here's link for a) http://www.livejournal.com/paidaccounts/ http://www.livejournal.com/paidaccounts/
gruseom 16y ago
This article is one of the more thoughtful ones on this. I think Facebook is running up against human nature. Yes, humans are social, but we are also exclusive. Software that provides an outlet for the former but not the latter is betting against human nature. That's not a strong position to take, particularly when your success was built on both of those factors. Relying on lock-in to support these changes is hoping that the superstructure will compensate for removing a girder. It may work, but the fundamentals are against it. And there's a tinge of recklessness about it.
iamdave 16y ago
This was the technology platform they were born into Erm...no. The technology this generation was born into was the internet, and it wasn't until barely 10 years ago that the social web became what it is. The aspects of social activity is the technology this generation was born into, and the only reason this is relevant for discussion is that just like we evolved out of IRC, ICQ and are moving away from AIM, too they will move away from centralized, top-down hierarchies of managing social interactions.
natrius 16y ago
This article basically says that Facebook is making its product worse for users to make it more valuable to advertisers. I don't think that's the case. A Facebook where users share most of the things they post with everyone but restrict the privacy of the few items that they don't want everyone to see is a more useful and interesting product to use. They just need to make it clear who will be able to see the item you're about to post instead of hiding it behind the lock button. A more open Facebook is more valuable to advertisers and users.
vaksel 16y ago
I think the biggest problem with facebook is that Zuckerberg is jealous of the Google guys and wants it to become a Google size company. This started with the crapton of funding they've taken on. Which led to them hiring hundreds of Google level engineers. Which led them to needing even more funding to stay afloat. And now that they have so many obligations to investors they need to monetize it at any cost to justify the valuation. So they are doing it at the cost of user's privacy, since that's one commodity that most people don't really care about.
- acgourley 16y ago
  Your first sentence, in particular, is a great observation. Although it may not just be Zuckerberg, but the board in general.
blizkreeg 16y ago
On a side note, does anyone think that given all this Facebook backlash, there will be greater user resistance to signing into a website using Facebook Connect? At some point, I was starting to perceive FB connect as this holy grail that would finally bring some convergence and eliminate multiple logins and so forth. Of course, there are alternatives like OpenID, Google Friend Connect but they seem to be on the fringe still in terms of adoption and usage. I run a site where the only way to sign up (as yet) is using FB connect, primarily to improve the authenticity of members (and it also reduces fake profiles by order of magnitude). This backlash is definitely making me question if it's the right thing to do anymore.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- TheBurningOr 16y ago
  I think purely from a strategic perspective you would definitely not want to have FB Connect as your only login. The people quitting FB right now are a tiny percent, but they seem to represent a disproportionate sampling of the early adopters that will drive the growth of your business. By limiting your sign up to FB connect only you have essentially blocked many of your early adopters from signing up.
ashishbharthi 16y ago
You know my take on this whole facebook privacy issue? "Use Twitter Instead!"
donaldc 16y ago
If facebook, with its more than 400 million users, and all the time its users spend on the site, can't figure out a way to make money on that without breaking privacy, then it deserves to fail.
somebear 16y ago
My biggest issue with Facebook is that it is so incredibly buggy. It seems like they don't run any testing before doing changes to the UI or releasing new features. Basic functionality seems to only be working off-and-on, and sometimes you just get periods where Facebook becomes totally unusable, for instance when your news feed (or "News Ahoy!" as it says on mine) is sorted completely randomly and only shows old updates (and no, I'm not talking about the "Shiniest booty" here, but the "Fresh booty"). Yes, I use Pirate as the language on Facebook, can you tell?
barryfandango 16y ago
While we all argue, accuse and bemoan, my parents, grandparents, non-technical friends, and the rest of the world continue logging into facebook every day to post baby pictures and invite people to parties. They care not for any of this.

110 points by percept 16y ago

"A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs." I don't think the problem was with keeping up but rather staying the same service. Facebook needed to not evolve and remain the same way it always was when it was first conceived.

edw519 16y ago

A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs. The classic example of a company intelligently growing up with a generation is McDonald's and baby boomers. First, cheap food at drive-ins where teenagers can hang out, check out cars, and find dates. Then happy meals for their kids, who can stay in their car seats in the drive-thru. Now, healthier choices and high end coffee.

joezydeco 16y ago
Intelligently growing up with a generation, or just trying to stay ahead of plain 'ol American competition? McDonalds got it's kickstart because it was cheaper and faster (self-service) than drive-ins. Happy Meals kept parents from choosing other burger chains. Salads and low-carb choices came in response to dieting trends. Coffee was upgraded to avoid losing breakfast business to Starbucks. But I'd wager none of these innovations would have come as quickly if there wasn't a business threat to the company.
- rick_2047 16y ago
  You make it sound as if it was bad of them to do so. Any financial organization responds to only one stimulus very quickly, that is financial. If they are responding to such stimuli and moulding their services accordingly where is the harm? The customers are at a net gain anyway.
  - joezydeco 16y ago
    No, it's not bad to do at all. Never tried to imply that. But let's not give credit to "vision" and "foresight" when in reality it's just a company trying to keep up with the world as it changes.
    - alttab 16y ago
      The author of the original post was saying that Facebook was failing to do exactly that. Using the McDonald's example, it could be akin to McDonald's making all of their burgers out of ground turkey because they got a huge deal with a turkey meat distributor, the customers saying "no, give us hamburger!" and McDonald's saying "fuck you." What happens to those customers wanting hamburgers? They go to Burger King.
      - joe_the_user 16y ago
        Yes, The problem is: suppose they weren't making a profit on the hamburger and so serving the turkey was the only way they knew how to make profits. But also suppose that it would be quite hard for customers to switch to Burger King. Then you have characterized something of the paradoxical condition of the Facebook. Making money while accumulating ill-will.
        whopa 16y ago
        Well, to make the analogy a little more accurate, suppose they weren't making as much profit on the hamburger as they are by serving the turkey... Facebook and Twitter both have the problem that they have to justify the amount of investment they raised, and both are doing things that are unpopular with their community (users for Facebook, developers for Twitter) to make a bigger business than the original things that got them popular can sustain.
        julius_geezer 16y ago
        Thirty-five or forty years ago, McDonalds got caught out serving kangaroo in their hamburgers. Much more recently it was found flavoring the french-fry oil with a bit of tallow, to the great offense of vegetarians and I think a few Hindus. However, it has always been much smoother at the apology business than Facebook now seems to be.
stanleydrew 16y ago
But Facebook is really only 6 years old right? That's not really enough time for a generation to grow. I think what we're seeing is that Facebook's user-growth is being driven by older and older people.
- ajdecon 16y ago
  I think it is, in the specific case of the generation Facebook initially targeted: college students in 2004. It's enough time for most of them to get their first job or two, and for some large fraction of them to start building a life with different requirements than college life. Many of them will have gotten married (median age of first marriage in 2007: 27), and some will have had kids. There's a dramatic shift there: most "family" people I know tend to expect more privacy and control over their lives, and be less focused on expanding their social life and sharing details with their friends. But this is anecdotal, I know: I'd love to see a study on how social networking use patterns change during this age shift.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  There's a big difference between what a 19-year-old wants and what a 25-year-old wants, even if they're the same person separated by 6 years.
- bradgessler 16y ago
  I'd argue that the HRB article is right in that people who signed up with Facebook in college six years have since moved on to a professional career, got married, and/or had kids. These are pretty big changes in peoples' life and what they demand changes respectively. People that were sharing keg stand pictures 6 years ago today want to share pictures of their baby running around.
  - sophacles 16y ago
    Six years is a lot longer for a 20something than the same six years for a 50something. Both in overall life percentage and in major life changes during that timeframe.
joe_the_user 16y ago
Dealing solely with information, Facebook has a "slightly" larger problem than McDonalds ever did. It's not just that the Facebook needs to offer different fare but that the fare older adults want conflicts with the fare Facebook would like to offer in order to become profitable.

terra_t 16y ago

I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who expect to have a private playhouse online where they can say anything without any consequences, particularly if they want it as a consumer product. If you're going to boast in public that you like to drink a Sparks for lunch, violate the open container law, and walk by the police station, don't be surprised if the cops notice. In fact, if you're going to say something that you don't want to get out, you'd better be really careful of how you protect it. Nixon learned that lesson the hard way.

CapitalistCartr 16y ago
That's just the point: when Facebook started, they weren't "boasting in public." It was private to their circle of friends.
ajju 16y ago
Are you saying that if I explicitly set my privacy settings on Facebook to be fully private, it is still o.k. for Facebook to make my data public because I should have no expectation of privacy on the Internet?
- jat850 16y ago
  Doesn't sound at all like that's what the parent poster is trying to say. Sounds more like a caution against posting anything, anywhere, that could be harmful or damaging to oneself, while harbouring the unreasonable expectation that it will remain private for eternity. Whether that privacy breach comes from maliciousness, or negligence, the same cautionary principle applies.
  - raganwald 16y ago
    The challenge is that there are two orthogonal issues here: Sympathy for users and criticism for businesses. If someone spends thousands of dollars on hair implants because they believed an informercial telling them that they will get laid every night of the week, I would sit them down and have a long talk about tooth fairies, santa clause, bridges, and swamp land salesmen. But I would still despise the businesspeople preying on the gullibility or naivité of their customers. So perhaps it is a very good idea not to put anything online that would ruin you if it leaked. But it's still reprehensible to leak things after setting an expectation that they are private.

ccc3 16y ago

Facebook is doing more than just taking away something from their users, they're being downright dishonest. Until recently Facebook's pitch to users was that it was a way to connect with people that you actually know. They were deliberately closer to the closed/private end of the spectrum. And back when they had real competition (myspace), privacy was one of the key differentiators. I still think privacy is one of the big reasons that Facebook's popularity took off like it did. Now they're pulling a giant bait-and-switch. Attract users with privacy, kill competition, then kill privacy to gain easy profitability. This alone is pretty disingenuous, but to make these changes behind users backs (for example, pictures that were once private became publicly viewable) shows a blatant disregard for the trust that users gave Facebook when they signed up.

jacquesm 16y ago
I think you've nailed it, bait-and-switch is the frustrating bit. That said though, I wonder if there is a way a big corporation can avoid this path, they'll have to monetize somehow and once they're monetizing they'll have to do better and better every year of they will look like they are stagnant. So the only way to maintain that - and for facebook monetization has always been an issue - was to squeeze the lemons a bit harder. Some of them will squeal, but as long as the majority stays you can't really fault them, no matter how sleazy it is. Network of friends = lock in, lock in => abuse. It's always been like that.
- tansey 16y ago
  Facebook was monetizing just fine. They had simple ads that were generating millions in revenue and profit. The problem is that they are trying to hyper-monetize. Zuckerberg turned down a $2BN offer from Yahoo, so clearly he believed he could make the company worth more than that.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    On that scale the money they were making was relatively little compared to other sites (for instance google, yahoo) with the same number of pageviews / uniques. Zuckerberg is actually proving that they're worth more, the way in which he goes about it is not the most elegant though. I'm still willing to bet he'll succeed but the image of facebook is tarnished for ever, and it could very well be that if he does manage to sell for a much higher valuation that the buyer will find themselves with another broadcast.com.

silkodyssey 16y ago

I think facebook is a perfect example of what happens when businesses are created "by accident", where a product is created first then a business model is grafted on afterwards. As the article mentions the needs of the users are in conflict with those of advertisers and it's a problem. An increase in value for advertisers means a decrease in value for users. Users want privacy, advertisers want everything in the open. Facebook in an attempt to sustain growth has effectively forced users to accept people within their networks that they aren't really close to and this makes users less comfortable in their own space. Facebook is at a critical juncture and its future depends on how it manages the problems they are facing now because the house of cards can come tumbling down at any moment. What they have going for it though is that there isn't really any clear alternative at the moment that users can turn to. What clear though is that people do want an alternative but till then I suspect most will bear with it till the alternative comes to their rescue.

maxniederhofer 16y ago
The same things is happening with Twitter. It was just a cool little thing to do at the beginning, then they had issues scaling, now they're just co-opting whatever worked well in the ecosystem. It's the same bait-and-switch, just with developers around the API as the losers.

garply 16y ago

People keep mentioning alternatives to FB but I feel pretty locked-in. I would be interested in joining a site that was a superset of Facebook... that is, a site where I could control and access my Facebook data but also interact beyond Facebook.

jasongullickson 16y ago
I have a friend who's working on something like that. He's not saying much publicly yet but I'll post it once he's ready to share.
marltod 16y ago
Someone needs to create a standardized Social Network file. Then users could "download their facebook" then upload it to another social network.
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  I can't see that being easy. Since most of a social network is your relationships with other users, and those users may or may not exist on other sites (or may have duplicate people with the same name, etc), it seems like it would be quite a difficult problem. You'd also have to somehow convince one or more major providers to use it, but I don't see that being easy either. That said, it would be a very useful thing to have if someone could get it right.
- donaldc 16y ago
  At the rate facebook is currently going, in a couple years all data on facebook will be world-readable. At that point it should be easy for anyone to download their facebook to another site. One could then clone facebook, and at an agreed-upon date, everyone could move over to the new site. I say this only half in jest. One can't get 400 million + people to move, but niche sites could certainly peel off a substantial number of users over time. And facebook itself started out as a niche social netorking site...
TheBurningOr 16y ago
Isn't this essentially what Pip.io is trying to do?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

maxniederhofer 16y ago

I wonder if Facebook would have done better if they had started charging power users. If users were the customers Facebook would have avoided this whole mess. Assuming a reasonable $10/month per power user, a conversion rate of 2-3%, at 500 million users they'd be generating $1.2-$1.8 billion in high-margin revenue. Instead, users are the product. Advertisers are the customers. And Facebook is generating maybe $1B in lower-margin revs. Admittedly the growth prospects of being the big display advertising/lead gen platform are better than being the leading social network. On the other hand, isn't this great for HN users? Facebook is screwing up in some core areas. Up and at'em, I say!

stralep 16y ago
Interesting... How would you define power user? (In this context)
- danohuiginn 16y ago
  There are several groups they could go after: a) people, often students who run their entire social lives on facebook, have 1000+ friends, and spend a long time every day on the site. Often students. Probably don't have much money -- but you might be able to get them hooked with small payments. Also, market it as a gift thing. Your uncle doesn't know what to get you for chrismas, but knows you spend a lot of time on facebook and has no problem spending $20 for a present. Also something to buy for the girl you're flirting with (and yes, it likely is that gendered). Livejournal made this work very well. In this situation it doesn't matter _what_ you offer for the paid account, just that it exists as an option. b) anybody using it profesionally: event promoters, venue owners, bands, etc. May not deeply like or understand FB, but getting it right is worth serious money to them. Simplification, information management, statistics, maybe tech support. c) Professionals who know nothing about facebook, but feel they should have a presence there. Sell them a service with lots of hand-holding, maybe integration with tools they already use.
  - stralep 16y ago
    Thank you :) Just here's link for a) http://www.livejournal.com/paidaccounts/ http://www.livejournal.com/paidaccounts/

gruseom 16y ago

This article is one of the more thoughtful ones on this. I think Facebook is running up against human nature. Yes, humans are social, but we are also exclusive. Software that provides an outlet for the former but not the latter is betting against human nature. That's not a strong position to take, particularly when your success was built on both of those factors. Relying on lock-in to support these changes is hoping that the superstructure will compensate for removing a girder. It may work, but the fundamentals are against it. And there's a tinge of recklessness about it.

iamdave 16y ago

This was the technology platform they were born into Erm...no. The technology this generation was born into was the internet, and it wasn't until barely 10 years ago that the social web became what it is. The aspects of social activity is the technology this generation was born into, and the only reason this is relevant for discussion is that just like we evolved out of IRC, ICQ and are moving away from AIM, too they will move away from centralized, top-down hierarchies of managing social interactions.

natrius 16y ago

This article basically says that Facebook is making its product worse for users to make it more valuable to advertisers. I don't think that's the case. A Facebook where users share most of the things they post with everyone but restrict the privacy of the few items that they don't want everyone to see is a more useful and interesting product to use. They just need to make it clear who will be able to see the item you're about to post instead of hiding it behind the lock button. A more open Facebook is more valuable to advertisers and users.

vaksel 16y ago

I think the biggest problem with facebook is that Zuckerberg is jealous of the Google guys and wants it to become a Google size company. This started with the crapton of funding they've taken on. Which led to them hiring hundreds of Google level engineers. Which led them to needing even more funding to stay afloat. And now that they have so many obligations to investors they need to monetize it at any cost to justify the valuation. So they are doing it at the cost of user's privacy, since that's one commodity that most people don't really care about.

acgourley 16y ago
Your first sentence, in particular, is a great observation. Although it may not just be Zuckerberg, but the board in general.

blizkreeg 16y ago

On a side note, does anyone think that given all this Facebook backlash, there will be greater user resistance to signing into a website using Facebook Connect? At some point, I was starting to perceive FB connect as this holy grail that would finally bring some convergence and eliminate multiple logins and so forth. Of course, there are alternatives like OpenID, Google Friend Connect but they seem to be on the fringe still in terms of adoption and usage. I run a site where the only way to sign up (as yet) is using FB connect, primarily to improve the authenticity of members (and it also reduces fake profiles by order of magnitude). This backlash is definitely making me question if it's the right thing to do anymore.

deleted 16y ago
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TheBurningOr 16y ago
I think purely from a strategic perspective you would definitely not want to have FB Connect as your only login. The people quitting FB right now are a tiny percent, but they seem to represent a disproportionate sampling of the early adopters that will drive the growth of your business. By limiting your sign up to FB connect only you have essentially blocked many of your early adopters from signing up.

ashishbharthi 16y ago

You know my take on this whole facebook privacy issue? "Use Twitter Instead!"

donaldc 16y ago

If facebook, with its more than 400 million users, and all the time its users spend on the site, can't figure out a way to make money on that without breaking privacy, then it deserves to fail.

somebear 16y ago

My biggest issue with Facebook is that it is so incredibly buggy. It seems like they don't run any testing before doing changes to the UI or releasing new features. Basic functionality seems to only be working off-and-on, and sometimes you just get periods where Facebook becomes totally unusable, for instance when your news feed (or "News Ahoy!" as it says on mine) is sorted completely randomly and only shows old updates (and no, I'm not talking about the "Shiniest booty" here, but the "Fresh booty"). Yes, I use Pirate as the language on Facebook, can you tell?

barryfandango 16y ago

While we all argue, accuse and bemoan, my parents, grandparents, non-technical friends, and the rest of the world continue logging into facebook every day to post baby pictures and invite people to parties. They care not for any of this.