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Facebook Hits 2 Billion Users
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- koolba 9y agoWhat percent of those are bots and what percent haven't logged on in years? I'd imagine both are pretty large groups.
- onlinemantas 9y agoAFAIK, this is the amount of daily & active users.
- onlinemantas 9y ago2 billion daily, active users. Insane.
- city41 9y agoHow did you conclude it's active daily users?
- dredmorbius 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648251
- frenchie4111 9y agoI am not sure it's daily active users, it just says "2 billion people"
- teuobk 9y agoI think it's more like 2 billion monthly active users, based on this projection from earlier this year: https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/1/14474534/facebook-earnings-q4-fourth-quarter-2016 https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/1/14474534/facebook-earnings... Still impressive, regardless.
- throwaway91111 9y agoActive is really stretching the term there.
- dingdongding 9y agoThat's MAU not DAU
- virtuexru 9y agoI wonder how many of those users are legitimate real people?
- jasode 9y agoThe stories in 2015 about Facebook fake profiles estimated it to be ~11%. As comparison, estimates for Twitter was ~15% fake users. 89% of 2 billion is still a mind-boggling ~1.7 billion.
- muhblah 9y ago....and thank god, I'm NOT one of them!
- uhhfcuvv 9y agoHow's life with no friends? You must be a blast at parties.
- coinjobber 9y agoWait, you need facebook to have friends? Huh
- uhhfcuvv 9y agoNo, but you don't want to make it more difficult for them to reach you. Nobody is willing to do the extra work for that. Friction. You're not special enough.
- coinjobber 9y agoYou're either trolling or have a deep misunderstanding of what a friend is.
- function_seven 9y agoI know you’re trolling, but in case you’re not… I’ve never had meaningful interactions over FB. It’s just recipes in GIF form, distant relatives Liking product pages in exchange for discounts or sweepstakes entries, and political bullshit. My friends and I keep in touch like we always have. We call and visit and do things together. SMS works just fine for group communication.
- jjeaff 9y agoWow, then I guess I'm pretty special. Friends seem to reach out and contact me directly even though I don't use Facebook. I will admit though, I'm very sad that I have never been invited to a lularoe party.
- 9y ago
- manigandham 9y agoConsensus is monthly active users: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/ Remains to be seen how many are real humans though.
- falkenb0t 9y agoThat is mind-blowing. 2 billion total users an immense volume in and of itself but 2 billion even semi active users is incredible
- dredmorbius 9y agoGoogle's profile counts -- Android, Gmail, Youtube, and G+, mostly, in about that order, topped 3 billion a while ago. http://archive.is/zi4Uw http://archive.is/zi4Uw (Origin site appears down.)
- majewsky 9y agoI have at least two Google accounts and a very old never-really-used Youtube account (from the days before it was a Google account), so it's very appropriate that you say "profile count" rather than "user count".
- dredmorbius 9y agoI'm quite aware of that, but yes, that's a crucial distinction. Point being that very large user account collections do exist.
- majani 9y agoOnly active users should be counted.
- dredmorbius 9y agoAn upstream comment menttioned total accounts. I've some awareness of G+ active users. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq There may also be other concerns or interests. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
- avaer 9y agoYou know the old joke where the mentor says "pay me 100 dollars and I'll show you how to make a million dollars"? I laughed a little because reading the post about facebook's user growth immediately nags me to sign up for facebook. Nothing against facebook; the irony just got a chuckle out of me.
- PureSin 9y agoBy MAU according to https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/ https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/ (first point)
- SurrealSoul 9y agohttps://www.facebook.com/logout https://www.facebook.com/logout Good thing that you can't leave
- jjeaff 9y agoMaybe you are implying this. But even logging out of Facebook, they will continue to track you and gather information about you through every site that has a Facebook like button on it.
- falkenb0t 9y agoThat's mind-blowing to me. Is that correct that roughly 26% of the world population is on Facebook? Or are these numbers representative of total users since the beginning of the site? If it's the latter, then I'd be curious as to how many users actively use the site today.
- jamesjyu 9y agoIt's monthly active. Also, this isn't surprising given the trend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
- creaghpatr 9y agoAlso factor in that 13% of Americans don't use the internet as of Sept 2016. I'd expect that average global percentage to be even higher. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/07/some-americans-dont-use-the-internet-who-are-they/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/07/some-america...
- startupdiscuss 9y agoMonthly, active according to this source: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15880494/facebook-2-billion-monthly-users-announced https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15880494/facebook-2-billi... And if you look at these stats from March 2017: https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ It could be either one. Daily active were 1.28 B and monthly active were 1.9 B so either way it is likely they have both crossed, or are about to cross the 2B mark.
- bllguo 9y agowhy would it be likely that daily active users ballooned 56% to surpass 2B? Seems like it must be monthly active in the discussion. Did FB do something recently that leads to your remark
- startupdiscuss 9y agoThis is from March 2017. I just thought that if the Monthly users were going to go over, they would have done so a while ago. Another reply, from @jackmodern, indicates that they may have done that, so now I am less confident that it is the daily actives.
- matt4077 9y agoI checked the date, slightly confused. Just to make sure: could you send me the lottery numbers for the last two years? Anyway, that Facebook about-us page also has an article from summer 2015 about hitting 1 Billion daily active users for the first time. Their growth really isn't that impressive any more (+280Million in two years), mostly because they've run out of people.
- jackmodern 9y agothey crossed 3 months ago when I still worked there but didn't want to share it broadly because they thought it was a temporary spike due to some political unrest in SE Asia. Safe to assume they are over the hump by now.
- pferde 9y agoCan they hit back? Or at least protect themselves from being hit? It's domestic violence, people!
- coinjobber 9y agoSerious question, is a social network like Facebook a public good, in the economic sense? Should it be a publicly regulated utility?
- ShannonAlther 9y agoFacebook is non-rivalrous but is is excludable (that is, one user of Facebook does not 'take up a slot' preventing any other users from using it, but you can be prevented from using it if you don't 'pay', i.e. follow the TOS). In general, public goods are things like air, languages, street lights, and national defense. Facebook (as far as I know) is not critical to your safety or survival, so you'd have a devil of a time trying to convince anyone that it's a public good. As a litmus, I would wager that the odds of Facebook or any other website becoming a public good before the internet are nearly zero, so once it happens to the internet, we'll come back to it.
- thinkloop 9y agoMicrosoft at it's peak was more powerful and monopolistic than Facebook, with the same public good questions popping up. Now few would feel that way. It's pretty amazing how technology can disrupt seemingly invincible entities. Facebook's dominance is quite precarious over a multi-decade timeline.
- NipunSingh 9y agoAmazing! For perspective, there are ~2.5B smartphone users in the world.
- agumonkey 9y agoI recently created a dedicated fb account to connect with some people, and I was very very surprised how dull fb is. I tried it back in the days and felt it had some value, in terms of UX and "connection" but now it's all foobar and gimmicky. Very odd. I would never had expected it to reach 2B so fast. I wonder if it's mostly because of mass + [o]auth capabilities so ubiquitous now.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoIt's a social network. If a lot of your friends are not on it (or are not active on it), expect it to be dull. Most people use it as a clubhouse not a personal journal. If you friends don't post, then your feed will largely consist of advertisements or pointless posts from pages.
- ProfessorLayton 9y agoIt is both amazing and deeply concerning that one corporation has influence over 1/4 of the world's population. It is even more concerning when you consider the outsized voting power of 1 person at that company.
- jgalt212 9y agodo they though? I consume Coca Cola, and so do approx 2B other earthing. Does Coca Cola have influence over me?
- sidlls 9y agoWhat makes you think the comparison is valid?
- pageandrew 9y agoDo you share your life, connect with your friends, and get your news from Coca Cola?
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoIsn't that what ShareACoke.com is about?
- pageandrew 9y ago
- wellsjohnston 9y agoAnd my pet snake is one of them, so I'm not sure what that really means.
- glhaynes 9y agoSo if 10% of their users are pet snakes (a really generous estimate imo), they've got a mere 1.8 billion monthly active users.
- masterj 9y agoIs your pet snake a monthly active user?
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoWell, Zuck's dog Beast has a profile with a million likes and since a human is actually operating it, it is as legitimate a profile as yours or your pet snake's (assuming you keep it active)
- Shish2k 9y agoBeast has a Page, not a Profile. Pages don't count as people :)
- 9y ago
- tanilama 9y agoThat is excluding China...So it is more impressive if we do the calculation, 2B out of 6B population if we assume the current world population is 7.5B.
- thinkloop 9y agoFB is blocked in China?
- maskedinvader 9y agoyes, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Snapchat, Picasa, WordPress.com, Blogspot, Blogger, Flickr, SoundCloud, Google+, Google Hangouts, Hootsuite are all blocked according to [1] 1. http://www.saporedicina.com/english/list-of-blocked-websites-in-china/ http://www.saporedicina.com/english/list-of-blocked-websites...
- kefka 9y agoOk. So, how many of these are Facebook Ghost profile users? https://spideroak.com/articles/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-profile-of-you-that-you-never-created https://spideroak.com/articles/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-pr... Oh yeah, you think you're safe because you don't have a Fb account, or closed it when it was popular to do so. Guess again... Your "friends" will keep posting you and they keep building a profile. Better yet, I suggest people keep their Fb account, and pollute it and lock it down. Don't install the phone apps. Ban their emails with @facebook.com and @fbcdn.com . The long and short; ghost them and don't be the product.
- openmosix 9y agoThese are (monthly/daily) active users, not total number of profiles.
- jjeaff 9y agoOne of the most frustrating (and shady) things I have seen Facebook do is ask your friends personal information about you. I have very little personal info on my profile, but I know that Facebook has all of it. Because I have seen little popups saying things like "Where did your friend so and so go to highschool?" Then later, you will see a question on your profile like, "Did you go to ... High?" So you know they are storing it whether you confirm or not. They will also ask "security" questions to people trying to reset their password. They seem to include a few things that are in Facebook and then a few items that are not. This gathering even more details about my personal life that I did not choose to share with Facebook. I try to frequently seed it with false information. But I know plenty of people are out there just merrily giving up all my personal information to this beast.
- sergiotapia 9y agoIs it showing signs of peaking? Remember that for some third-world countries facebook IS the internet. This really bums me out.
- jayflux 9y agoAnd for some western countries Google IS the Internet.
- athesyn 9y agoHows it being old? Nearly no one in my age range uses FB, just snapchat + ig.
- mouldysammich 9y agodoes instagram not constitue facebook though?
- athesyn 9y agono, you don't need an fb account to use ig.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dang 9y ago> Hows it being old? If you want to comment here you need to be nice, regardless of how someone else behaved or how old you think they might be. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648376 and marked it off-topic.
- darkmarmot 9y agoSo, ummm, you use Instagram? -- the company owned by Facebook to provide an alternate brand to appeal to those tech savvy kids? Same database, different name.
- EA 9y agoAre businesses people?
- joeblau 9y agoI think Facebook counts you as active even if you're logged in, never go to the site, but see any site with a like button. I've blocked Facebook using both Safari Content blockers and my `/etc/hosts` file, but I wonder if they have other ways of attempting to count me in.
- samstave 9y agoPlease share all your FB entries to block
- avianbc 9y agoI use FanBoy's filters w/uBlock origin. Check them here: https://www.fanboy.co.nz https://www.fanboy.co.nz
- joeblau 9y agoThe reason I go with Safari Content blockers and /etc/hosts is because both of those solutions stop network requests before they even attempt to make a network request. uBlock is a good backup solution, but I want my computer to think Facebook doesn't even exist as a url, regardless of context. For example uBlock won't stop iMessage from trying to load Facebook's inline media content when someone messages me a Facebook link.
- omnifischer 9y agofor OSX blocking at DNS level: Posted a year ago in hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11793855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11793855 for linux use: https://github.com/tbds/FreeContributor/tree/master/data https://github.com/tbds/FreeContributor/tree/master/data https://www.perpetual-beta.org/weblog/blocking-facebook-on-os-x.html https://www.perpetual-beta.org/weblog/blocking-facebook-on-o...
- joeblau 9y agoThis is also a great solution.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lgl 9y agoSomeday, the first general AI will make good use of all that neatly organized, easily searchable and voluntarily supplied information and behavior patterns when it's plotting how to turn us into batteries or paper clips.
- Red_Tarsius 9y agoOur bodies are not good batteries. The original Matrix plot "had the brains of the humans being used as part of a neural network for additional computing power." https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executive-meddling-the-cause-of-humans-as-batteries-in-the-matrix https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...
- NOSHSHNACKERS 9y agoFacebook is best at f*cking people over - that is what it is best at.. Best at.. not worst at best at.. other things its good at like haveing pictures and the color blue - harvard kids - Hillary Clinton - some lady giving birth- about several susisides a day now and Facebook is there with the big blue dildo of data
- hhh000 9y ago2 billion in, 5 billion to enter the botnet
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rdiddly 9y agoIt's hard not to barf at all the "community" and "progress" and "connecting" and (worst of all) "journey" going on. (One of these days, can everything stop being a "journey" please?) You know who talks like that? The inexperienced earnest, the zen master, and the liar. The ones who can say life truly is just a profound journey of progress and connecting with the community, are those who have never messed up, or had their lives ruined, or truly lived, on the one hand, or those who have worked for a lifetime to master a spiritual outlook on the other hand. And then throw in the liars - the people camouflaging themselves behind all that, to conceal something else they're doing. If I had to guess I would say Mark Zuckerberg might be some weird mix of "inexperienced earnest" and "liar" (including self-liar). But it's only a guess.
- SKYRHO_ 9y agoAnti-Facebookers, stay strong my friends
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- losteverything 9y agoI need perspective At peak, how many landline phones (residential) were there? Peak: printed newspaper readership worldwide? Peak: tv viewership (like july 20, '69) How many people have electricity? Water? How many active smartphones in use today? How many machines run any MS OS? How many worldwide automobiles? At first it seems like Gomer "Gol-ly" but not really.
- diabeetusman 9y agoWorld Cup 2014 probably beats July 20, 1969 as far as pure viewership numbers go Edit: 600 million watched the moon landing [1], 3.2 billion watched the World Cup [2] [1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/5852237/Apollo-11-Moon-landing-ten-facts-about-Armstrong-Aldrin-and-Collins-mission.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/5852237/Apollo... [2]: http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/news/y=2015/m=12/news=2014-fifa-world-cuptm-reached-3-2-billion-viewers-one-billion-watched--2745519.html http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/news/y=2015/m=12/news=2014-fifa...
- 1812Overture 9y agoAmazing to me that 3.2 billion people could be watching the same thing at once while I have no awareness at all that it's happening.
- rdslw 9y agoLet me rephrase it: amazingly there is (at least) 3.2 billion people having no awareness of you ;)
- losteverything 9y agoAfter your links id ask another way: how many FB ers are on at the same time?
- adventured 9y ago1.16 billion landline phones in 2013 per Wikipedia (CIA world factbook reported 1.26b in 2003; either is likely a roughly good peak global number, a solid mix between high globalization development (eg China & India had started to get large enough economically to install plenty of landlines) and pre high-level cellphone dominance in the developing world): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landline
- twsted 9y agoTragic. Every new user is a potential loss for the open web.
- Theodores 9y agoPrecisely. Facebook is a black hole, nothing comes out of it and onto the wider web. We are all familiar with people moaning about articles being posted on HN from paywalled sites, but when was the last time you saw an article on HN that originated on Facebook? (With people moaning about it). Sometimes you will get a Facebook 'tech' story posted, e.g. that compiled PHP thing they did or how 'fake news' is to be dealt with, but these stories - if they make it to HN - will be Facebook's own pages, not Facebook user 'pages'. I don't know why this is, Twitter stories make it into 'journalism' all the time, Facebook? Never!
- philippnagel 9y agoSo, how would one grow a competitor at this point? Appeal to underserved users?
- ben_jones 9y agoFacebook is too broad a platform to compete with generally. You can however compete and win against individual facebook products. I.E. Instagram for pictures, Whatsapp for messaging, etc. Oh wait. Shit.
- drusepth 9y agoThe general rule of thumb of competing with any juggernaut is to identify some subset of their users that you can create a specialized product for (that meets their needs better) and then expanding your reach outward after gaining a strong foothold.
- adventured 9y agoYou have to target a niche where you can build a product that is 5x-10x better, to convince users to spend their time on your superior product instead of Facebook. If you wanted to substantially undercut Facebook, there are only three possibilities. 1) Facebook drops the ball. Basically they screw-up their platform big time, in any number of ways, and make the product so incredibly bad people are desperate to leave. Then you have to have the right product at the right time to catch that exodus, vs other competitors like Google etc. 2) Technology inflection erodes Facebook. For example, had they continued to ignore mobile, they would have died like MySpace. Zuckerberg's move to heavy-mobile was equivalent to Bill Gates's call to arms regarding the Internet tidal wave memo in 1995 [1]. Zuckerberg is young enough and still at peak motivation (seemingly), it'll be very hard to catch him fully off guard on a major inflection. 3) Take a category of audience away and expand it. ie knock down the first bowling pin, one that you can hold and grow outward from. It's key that you be able to hold the ground you take. College students are the obvious target still and always will be. Facebook is very much not cool at this point, but Instagram still is (mostly), that enabled Facebook to kill Snapchat and retake the ground they lost. This third one is always viable and very hard sustain, there will always be a strong/tempting argument for selling at a high price after achieving success in taking ground (eg if Snapchat had sold for $10b or $20b to Facebook instead of going public). The monopoly will almost always pay up to continue their dominance, in the Standard Oil model, so far as they can and avoid anti-trust problems. [1] https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/ https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/
- 45h34jh53k4j 9y agoLets watch as this goes down to 0. DELETE YOUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT TODAY
- kin 9y agoSay what you will about Facebook but I can't deny that I use their products to connect with others. Facebook messenger and groups along with Facebook events has been a part of my life in better ways than AIM, Hangouts, or BBM ever was. Congratulations to them for hitting 2 billion.
- amelius 9y agoMainly because everybody else is using it.
- flipp3r 9y ago"We're making progress connecting the world, and now let's bring the world closer together." .. Making the world, a better place!
- RRRA 9y agoMost depressing news I've read today...
- nblavoie 9y agoI tried to quit Facebook (for the 3rd time this year) the last week but it keeps remind me of the people that will miss me by email. I guess this is one of their mental tricks to make users feel that they did the wrong choice by leaving Facebook. Any ideas, tricks on how to solve this problem ?
- bussierem 9y agoI promised myself I wouldn't be one of those people talking about how they quit, but here we are. I haven't used it in well over a decade (I quit back when it was much easier to do). The snarky answer to your question is quite frankly, ignore them. Your friends will still be your friends without Facebook. I have personally NEVER been inconvenienced by not having an account, and the sheer abundance of communication mediums on the web today makes it so easy to stay in touch. Between just Email, Hangouts, and Texting, I am still in touch with everyone that matters to me, and they know how to reach me. It can't possibly be an inconvenience to text me since they're already almost certainly on their phones too. You already hit step one of this - you KNOW Facebook is manipulating you. Step two is just to stop letting them.
- jogjayr 9y ago1. Make a list of the people that you actually care to stay in touch with for social reasons (for professional connections you already have LinkedIn). Ensure you have other lines of communication open with them (email, IM, text, phone, Skype etc). If possible, and if necessary, inform them you're leaving FB and how you intend to stay in touch with them 2. Delete your FB account. Delete the app from your phone (if you have it) 3. Mark any email from FB as spam 4. Block all FB domains at the router level
- haterswillhate 9y agoWhy to brag with account or users count, when users cannot even delete they accounts ? Many people have multiple accounts due forgetting credientials or simple facebook message "thank you for sending your paperwork.." when you just want to login .. Hard to believe facebook, corporations lie so so much and twist word to fit marketing agenda. Sorry fb, I have very hard to believe your agenda.
- robsun 9y agoDamn it, I have about 40 users playing my game and I'm supper happy.
- makecheck 9y agoFor daily active use, I wonder, are they tracking "people explicitly logging in each day" and using facebook.com? Or, just people browsing the web while still logged in to Facebook from weeks ago?
- 2close4comfort 9y ago1.99 million bots can't be wrong!
- axaxs 9y agoSo, not to discredit this number, but here are some things to consider - 1 - Bots. Lots of bots. 2 - Multiple accounts. I've seen people with as many as 4 accounts, used for different purposes(friend groups). 3 - 'Facebook is the internet'. Facebook is free(ie not charged as data usage), and therefore, 'the internet', in many poor nations. I'm not actually sure if this is Facebook's doing, a carrier agreement, etc, but it exists. This accounts for what I assume are the bulk of the 'real' users.
- eon1 9y agoYeah, bots were my first thought. Run any decent sized fb group and you'll realise just how many there are, then realise you're probably only seeing a small cross section. I would say thousands new every day. I saw a friend having some fun a while back posting public statuses to bait spambots with keywords like "tupac movie" and "watch online" - they get flooded within minutes. Also, I have at least 3-4 accounts and know plenty of people who have as many, too. Can't imagine how they'd differentiate that from say, my housemate or partner logging in from the same IP address.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago> I'm not actually sure if this is Facebook's doing, a carrier agreement, etc This is absolutely in part Facebook's doing. They've struck numerous deals.
- axaxs 9y agoDoesn't surprise me. I don't want to make too harsh of accusations, but in my head, it feels just short of fraud. Not growing fast enough? Shrinking? Give a third world nation free internet to become users and pad the numbers. Tell advertisers and investors you're growing, but not precisely how and where. Again, that's just my first instinct, not an accusation.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yoran 9y agoDangerously approaching 2,147,483,647. Let's hope their user ID's are not 32-bit integers :-)
- amelius 9y agoSign shouldn't matter for an ID; it works as long as the ID is unique. So I think the real limit would be a factor of 2 higher.
- lucb1e 9y agoPHP uses 64-bit integers on 64-bit systems. Of course they have some compiled variant of PHP which might do anything...
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoThey scrapped the compiling to C++ part long ago, HipHop is now HHVM.
- lucb1e 9y ago/me duckduckgo's that Hmm, JIT but only to bytecode it seems, not to machine code. Interesting!
- mcast 9y agoI'm fairly certain they would have designed and kept the Earth's actual and expected population in mind with their scaling.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoIf they're using auto-incrementing IDs, they will have broke past that number some time ago. 2bn is monthly active users, which implies there's many dead or inactive accounts.
- adventured 9y agoFor comparison, it was August 2008 when they hit 100 million users: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/our-first-100-million/28111272130/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/our-first-100-millio... It was October 2012 when they hit 1 billion (active) users: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2012/10/one-billion-people-on-facebook/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2012/10/one-billion-people-on-f...
- simonswords82 9y agoAs insane as this number is, and it really is an incredible achievement, I'm left feeling Facebook hasn't delivered much real net positive value to the world just yet. Politics are in disarray. More people are "connected" online but more people than ever feel isolated in some way and mental health issues are on the rise. Highlight reels of your friends living a seemingly amazing life leave people feeling like they've underperformed. Shoddy advertising practices and questionable news are splattered around the platform. Obviously as a communication platform it works, but so what? There are a million ways to stay in touch with people. I applaud Facebook, and Mark, for what they have achieved in terms of raw numbers and the ubiquity of the platform. But what's the point of having 2 billion users if ultimately this platform doesn't genuinely improve society for the better as a result?
- hire_charts 9y agoReminds me of this other thread from a post about a CRM for keeping track of personal associations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14498633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14498633 Facebook has a huge opportunity to help people stay connected with those closest to them -- and keep track of a wider circle of friends and family members -- in ways that actually evoke empathy and care, rather than jealousy and attention-seeking. But I suppose that would run counter to their advertising funnels...
- s73ver 9y agoHow would they make money doing that?
- TheRealDunkirk 9y agoLegitimate problem, and legitimate question. This is the kind of thing I come to HN to see asked and answered. Too bad no one's taken a stab at it. Maybe that's what the "Facebook killer" will get right. Or Facebook themselves, to prevent being "killed."
- labster 9y agoI assume the point is Mark Zuckerburg's three cubic acres of money.
- lechiffre10 9y agoHave a hard time believing these numbers are correct. I keep getting fake profile friend requests. Seems incredibly inflated but I mean who will look into that.
- setq 9y agoI get shamed occasionally for never having a Facebook account. It's amazing how mindshare drives market share really and gets people to react like this. Genuinely I couldn't work out how it improved my life in any way. Everyone I know who uses it shows signs of addiction. It's like a cigarette. Perhaps that's it!
- haterswillhate 9y agoWhy is that when you inform your customers in facebook, they block you.. but why facebook can inform 2 billion people without any blocking ? Why is that suckerberg calls users fucking idiots, they only get more users ? Why is that we support these multinational corporations, who cheat and lie as they please.. but we do not support local business owners? Why is that facebook is doing psychology tests in they "platform" ? Why these all corporations violate my privacy by spying and they all "google, facebook, twitter" are more or less CIA agents ?
- nly 9y agoI log in to mine about once a month, spend about 5 minutes getting frustrated with their horrific timeline that shows me nothing of people I care about by default, dismiss a few messages that I missed, and sign out. I just signed in and the "news feed" shows 1 post from a friend 4 days ago. Everything else (I have a few hundred friends) is hidden. As a social platform it just baffles me these days.
- smithsmith 9y agoDo they still use mysql for storing the usernames. What is their software stack as of now ?