7 ms·

I do not think that investors are concern about net loss - at least I'm not. I'm disappointed by anemic growth: Facebook has 18 percent increase year over year

by tlogan 9y ago

I do not think that investors are concern about net loss - at least I'm not. I'm disappointed by anemic growth: Facebook has 18 percent increase year over year. They have ~2B users [1] This q Snapchat had growth of ~5% which will be about ~20% per year. But they are 10x smaller than Facebook. [1] Facebook 5/3/17 earning report

monkmartinez 9y ago
I saw Scott Hanselman spin up 1000 Azure instances in a demo today; How many bots can each instance support? Instant growth. How much social media activity/growth is not human?
- zeusk 9y ago
  > How much social media activity/growth is not human? As much as I agree with you, that kind of activity especially by first party or those related is called market manipulation. SEC and investors won't take lightly to it.
  - monkmartinez 9y ago
    And who will blow the whistle? One person could deploy a bot army to juice numbers. On a related note, the market itself is controlled by HFT bots. Don't rock the boat too much and no one is the wiser. Edit: Would love to some actual debate on this rather than downvotes with no context. I have deployed many bots for fun to twitter and reddit. I could easily do the same on Instagram, Snap or Facebook. I could even make them look "Kinda real" with markov chain driven text input. Super, duper easy.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - asdfasdf32r3 9y ago
      I suspect people are downvoting because it's easier than getting into a discussion with someone whose tone doesn't convey a willingness to have a constructive conversation. Your blithe comment has some merit on its surface -- I also "think" it seems trivial to do account fraud at a large scale -- but it pattern matches against the "I can build Stack Overflow in a weekend" mode. I can only guess, but I imagine the difficulty factor going from 500 to 1 million bots is much greater than 200x higher. (As in, if there are 1,000,000 people right now on Earth who could do the former, I suspect there are way fewer than 1mm/500 for the latter.) There are undoubtedly bot networks that operate (although we have no idea for how long), at a scale that would likely surprise me. However, even that doesn't make the data useless (especially when frequently cited against a previous measurement). Finally, your non-sequitur about markets being controlled by HFT bots hit a number of negative heuristics in my brain.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
ac29 9y ago
>Facebook has 18 percent increase year over year. They have ~2B users. That's nearly 2/3 of people on the planet with Internet connections, according to estimates by the ITU (approx 3B internet users by the end of 2016) [0]. Even if I believed that user figure, which I dont, there is no way Facebook can grow at the same rate for much longer. [0] http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2016.pdf http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFa...
- monkmartinez 9y ago
  You and I both. Facebook numbers have been a scam for a long time. I look at most social media as I look at multilevel marketing... it's all sunshine and rainbows until it simply collapses. There are no 100 year businesses in social.
  - askafriend 9y ago
    I think you're severely underestimating the scale and reach of Facebook. There's a reason it's a ~450B company. It really does have that many users. Even if a solid 20% of them are all fake accounts (which I don't think the percentage is that high), it's still a large part of the connected world. There's a reason Facebook is developing technology to bring the rest of the unconnected world online. It's because they know they'll reach a point where they'll have the whole connected market, and the only way forward is to grow the market to it's full potential. Don't let your hatred of the product or company blind your understanding of its scale and influence on the world (both positive and negative).
    - monkmartinez 9y ago
      It is not hate and you may well be right about the scale and reach of facebook right now. However, I think many people over-estimate the real utility of Facebook. That is, lives would not materially change for the better or worse if facebook fell off the face of the internet tomorrow, imo. Emotional reactions aside, Gajendra from Nepal and Tom from California would continue with life as they did before Facebook was available. The Yellow pages had a similar story not too long ago...
nihonde 9y ago
I keep trying to tell people that Snap can't grow to targets unless it opens Asia, and no one in Japan (at least in my first hand anecdotal experience) uses it or even knows what it is.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Isn't Snow being used in Asia? Might Snapchat be too late for Asia?

by tlogan 9y ago

monkmartinez 9y ago

I saw Scott Hanselman spin up 1000 Azure instances in a demo today; How many bots can each instance support? Instant growth. How much social media activity/growth is not human?

zeusk 9y ago
> How much social media activity/growth is not human? As much as I agree with you, that kind of activity especially by first party or those related is called market manipulation. SEC and investors won't take lightly to it.
- monkmartinez 9y ago
  And who will blow the whistle? One person could deploy a bot army to juice numbers. On a related note, the market itself is controlled by HFT bots. Don't rock the boat too much and no one is the wiser. Edit: Would love to some actual debate on this rather than downvotes with no context. I have deployed many bots for fun to twitter and reddit. I could easily do the same on Instagram, Snap or Facebook. I could even make them look "Kinda real" with markov chain driven text input. Super, duper easy.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - asdfasdf32r3 9y ago
    I suspect people are downvoting because it's easier than getting into a discussion with someone whose tone doesn't convey a willingness to have a constructive conversation. Your blithe comment has some merit on its surface -- I also "think" it seems trivial to do account fraud at a large scale -- but it pattern matches against the "I can build Stack Overflow in a weekend" mode. I can only guess, but I imagine the difficulty factor going from 500 to 1 million bots is much greater than 200x higher. (As in, if there are 1,000,000 people right now on Earth who could do the former, I suspect there are way fewer than 1mm/500 for the latter.) There are undoubtedly bot networks that operate (although we have no idea for how long), at a scale that would likely surprise me. However, even that doesn't make the data useless (especially when frequently cited against a previous measurement). Finally, your non-sequitur about markets being controlled by HFT bots hit a number of negative heuristics in my brain.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

ac29 9y ago

>Facebook has 18 percent increase year over year. They have ~2B users. That's nearly 2/3 of people on the planet with Internet connections, according to estimates by the ITU (approx 3B internet users by the end of 2016) [0]. Even if I believed that user figure, which I dont, there is no way Facebook can grow at the same rate for much longer. [0] http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2016.pdf http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFa...

monkmartinez 9y ago
You and I both. Facebook numbers have been a scam for a long time. I look at most social media as I look at multilevel marketing... it's all sunshine and rainbows until it simply collapses. There are no 100 year businesses in social.
- askafriend 9y ago
  I think you're severely underestimating the scale and reach of Facebook. There's a reason it's a ~450B company. It really does have that many users. Even if a solid 20% of them are all fake accounts (which I don't think the percentage is that high), it's still a large part of the connected world. There's a reason Facebook is developing technology to bring the rest of the unconnected world online. It's because they know they'll reach a point where they'll have the whole connected market, and the only way forward is to grow the market to it's full potential. Don't let your hatred of the product or company blind your understanding of its scale and influence on the world (both positive and negative).
  - monkmartinez 9y ago
    It is not hate and you may well be right about the scale and reach of facebook right now. However, I think many people over-estimate the real utility of Facebook. That is, lives would not materially change for the better or worse if facebook fell off the face of the internet tomorrow, imo. Emotional reactions aside, Gajendra from Nepal and Tom from California would continue with life as they did before Facebook was available. The Yellow pages had a similar story not too long ago...

nihonde 9y ago

I keep trying to tell people that Snap can't grow to targets unless it opens Asia, and no one in Japan (at least in my first hand anecdotal experience) uses it or even knows what it is.

skinnymuch 9y ago
Isn't Snow being used in Asia? Might Snapchat be too late for Asia?