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Oh please - the overreaction from this is ridiculous. I'm buying FB call options. Facebook's network effect is extremely strong - this is also not even includ
by fossuser 9y ago
Oh please - the overreaction from this is ridiculous.
I'm buying FB call options.
Facebook's network effect is extremely strong - this is also not even including their other assets (Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus).
The API access was in violation of terms of service and the ability to access data through friends via the FB graph has already been closed.
- chrischen 9y agoYes, Facebook's current network is fairly strong, but you shouldn't look to where the masses currently are, you should look to where the trendsetters, the young, and the people in the know—where they are. These people are ahead of the curve, and the signs they are emitting is that Facebook is not serving their interests and needs. Young people don't want to use facebook because it forces you to interact with everyone, including parents and people out of your circle. Privacy conscious people and many at the forefront of technology all either personally avoid and limit facebook usage or keep their children away from it (if they aren't already disinterested in the first place). Yes Facebook allows you to "fix" these issues with enough configurations, but then why would a new user go through the hassle of all that when they could just install snapchat or instagram (yes I know facebook owns this, but it's not facebook). So unless there's a fundamental shift in its business model and allure, its trajectory will be doomed. It doesn't mean Facebook the company will fail, but it does mean that the Facebook product—what it is in its current form—has a finite shelf life.
- bad_good_guy 9y agoThose people are on Instagram and WhatsApp...
- chrischen 9y ago> "(yes I know facebook owns this, but it's not facebook)"
- 734786710934 9y agoFacebook has no serious competition at the moment other than Snapchat. Young people are still using Instagram and Messenger. Ironically, the calls for regulation might actually end up helping Facebook in the end as they will make the barriers to entry higher.
- chrischen 9y agoInstagram is a completely different app, usage, and completely different UI/UX from Facebook. Facebook's problems are caused by Facebook (website)'s design, trajectory, and business model. It doesn't have anything to do with inherent evilness in the company itself.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hsljekskfh 9y agoi'm personally interested to hear why you think it's so different. i don't use fb or ig and don't understand how they're different, from my understanding they both seem to be feeds of photos and memes from your friends (minus the new stories feature)
- socialist_coder 9y agoI'm replying to the dead comment. The Facebook site is evil and should be destroyed because of 2 reasons, in my opinion. Firstly, the news feed is solely designed to get you to stay on the site for longer. And what that means is you get an echo chamber. So, idiot people get idiot posts that agree with them. It's not just a problem on one side of the political spectrum, it's a problem for any extreme view. Anti-vaxxers, left wing communists, and right wing fascists all get into their echo chamber and never get out. Secondly, the advertising platform that Facebook has created is too powerful. It lets you micro-target people in a way that is absolutely perfect for political ads. You find people vulnerable to an emotional message and bombard them with your emotionally responsive ads. Facebook ads are good for non-political things as well, but in this case, we'll have to throw the baby out with the bathwater I think.
- fossuser 9y agoAll young people are on FB, they may additionally be on something else (probably Instagram which is also FB and starving out Snap) - the default remains Facebook. I'd bet against you. The trajectory is fine and Zuckerberg is a good CEO. They have nearly a third of the earth as users and a ridiculously high percentage of internet users. Given a long enough time horizon any company is vulnerable, but FB is here to stay for a long while.
- varrock 9y agoI've always attributed Facebook's success with older generations to the feeling you get when somebody you're talking to brings up a name you hadn't heard in numerous years, and here's why. Let's first think about the demographic that has kept Facebook afloat; Baby Boomers and Generation X. When you think about most of these individuals, they graduated high school and college without much there to remind them of individuals they were acquainted with, minus maybe their yearbooks from high school. Sure, most probably wrote or emailed their close friends, but we're talking about those afterthought individuals that they came into contact with under specific circumstances that generated that "acquaintance" classification. Then, all of a sudden, appears Facebook, a platform that allows these individuals to link their name with their school. It's a database at their fingertips with all of their classmates with up-to-date pictures, life stories, and mutual friends to explore. Facebook is that one "person" I referenced earlier; the person that brings up that name you hadn't thought about for years, except now you can actually explore what they are up to, and Facebook continuously reminds people of those afterthought names. The question is, how long is this effect going to sustain Facebook's competitive advantage? Like people have mentioned, there was Whitepages, now there is Facebook, but what's next?
- Retric 9y agoLogging in once a year is meaningless from a network effect standpoint. They might have an account and even use it to talk with grandparents, but without daily use FB has little pull.
- fossuser 9y agoThey have over two billion monthly active users - not sure the DAU stat, but hundreds of millions would not surprise me.
- wizardforhire 9y agoI've been putting off posting this for months because when I write it, it seems grandiose but it's been my life and it's too ridiculous not to share. I was born in 80 so that dates me. I've worked in music for the last 20 years and I've worked with over 60 bands most of whom are very successful now. However that number is misleading because I've toured with hundreds of bands if you count the openers and headliners over the years. It's stupid really when I look back on it. Once when I was 25 I used my network to start a music festival with no money that's been going on for the last 10 years and has never had less than 50k people attend. Anyways long story short most people don't understand marketing. But when you're touring you're living it. I remember when the words taste maker started getting thrown around. I remember when gorilla marketing became a thing... Because the marketing people would all be coming to our shows and our parties and sponsoring us. All of this to say that We were early adopters of Friendster, when they killed the bulletin board my friends and I moved to MySpace, when MySpace got over crowded we moved to Facebook, when our families friends got on Facebook we left for Twitter and reddit, the less public of us left Twitter almost immediately but our pr teams stayed, when Obama won in 08 we left reddit. Many of us went to snapchat and we all use Instagram even though we hate it. There was a minor period when we thought google + was going to serve us but that lasted exactly one day. What we desperately want is a decentralized encrypted locally hosted application that has exactly one killer simple feature. A bulletin board to post events. That's it. A simple way to keep in touch with each other and local ownership of our photos and videos. Sure to reduce bandwidth we'd be fine with our friends or fans hosting encrypted files on their devices but that's as far as they go. Do that, slap an easy to use interface on it, don't have advertising call it something literal like friends torrent or something and we'll never have another Facebook. If you want to monotize it... Give it a market place. But if you take anything from this rant it should be this, your tastemakers aren't faceless nameless statistics they're real people and they're friends with each other. We know who we are and we are and have been paying attention. Also fuck Facebook freedom isn't free
- firmgently 9y agoFacebook's popularity is driven by that tic of just wanting to have a quick look to see what friends/family are up to, then getting stuck there because of addiction/manipulative techniques. I can't see people feeling the same way about a site which is only about events, it's a different impulse... almost like tuning in to an adverts-only station. Nobody is on FB because of bands - although they're happy to find out what bands are up to when they happen to already be on the site (not knocking bands as a thing - the same applies to eg. my art page). Some might say "it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be as popular as FB" but at that point then why not just have a website?
- rurban 9y agoTeenagers already abandoned Facebook long time ago and switched over to Instagram. Same company, but less privacy problems for them.
- DonaldFoss 9y agoDon't discount Warren Buffet's mantra. When people are scared, he buys. When stockholders feel great, he sells. So fear=buy if fundamentals are good, exhuburence = sell and make profit. --Donald
- bitxbit 9y agoI don't know if buying call options makes sense at this IV however.
- AznHisoka 9y agoespecially since its still up a decent amount in the past year.
- gmmeyer 9y agoThey went up on the app stores over the last week
- wyqydsyq 9y ago> Facebook's network effect is extremely strong Yeah people said the same thing about MySpace and look what happened
- mattferderer 9y agoOculus is highly underrated in my opinion. I would bet that the majority of their income is through VR by 2030. Great VR content with the ability to personalize it using AI with tons of personal data will lead to major addictions in my opinion, resulting in a gold mine for many businesses.
- bschwindHN 9y ago> Great VR content with the ability to personalize it using AI with tons of personal data will lead to major addictions in my opinion Do people really want that? Or do they just want good VR games and experiences? I'm not sure what kind of personal data would get added to a VR experience but it sounds...creepier than most people would want.
- rimliu 9y agoAs I am not gamer I see very little appeal in VR. Virtual travel, maybe, but only if I can focus whenever I want not where system forces me to.
- tammer 9y agoLet's not forget that Facebook's network is actually a virtual one. The real social graph is independent of any virtualization provider. Which is why all it will take is a compelling competitor to start the great migration. This is sort of the corollary to the network effect — as soon as there is a better alternative that people really move to, a vast amount of people will move spontaneously. Imagine if Instagram started right now. Do you think they would accept any offer to be bought by Facebook?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- domevent 9y agoThere’s a real disconnect I’m noticing, which comes with a kind of script here. “Nobody cares,” “I’m buying their stock,” “It will all blow over,” “No one outside of our bubble cares.” I suspect the same people will be saying the same thing next week when another $50b have been shed, another scandal or two has come to light, and more users and advertisers flee the platform. I wonder at what point it’s going to sink in that between Trump’s election and a general backlash against tech, this is the tip of a very large iceberg?
- jadedhacker 9y agoI'm sympathetic to wanting to see a shift in the way things have been going, but we shouldn't lose sight of reality. If this is the beginning of something, it's a years long process that has begun. We're not going to see a change overnight.
- gutnor 9y agoYou will always see both side of the coin - after all if your interpretation was any more certain than parent, the stock would be worth 0 today. FB lost a few months of profits and has a set of issues. All the rest are hunches, it could be the beginning of the end, or just shedding a bunch of investors that just want to cash in and have nothing to do with the drama. It could also be the time that the government step in, regulate the shit out of social network, locking anyone but the richest companies from competing and basically cementing Facebook as de-facto standard with a license to print money.
- patentatt 9y agoAgreed that stock_price:weather::company_value:climate But a double-digit drop in a week's span is a pretty strong message
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- redorb 9y agoI agree its a overreaction. I think selling premium is better for the stocks high implied volatility. Something like the 155/150 put spread for $160-ish risking $340 per contract.
- lph 9y agoIt remains to be seen how much impact this will ultimately have on Facebook, but it's not ridiculous to think it could be significant. Trust is important; for a cautionary tale we need look no further than Uber, whose pervasive bad faith approach to basically everything has undoubtedly had a negative imact on hiring talent.
- shrimpx 9y agoI don't believe in facebook because I personally don't depend on it and nobody I know depends on it. It's a waning bubble -- people signed up because it was trendy/they got peer-pressured, and they now hang on to it with a vanishing sense of habit. I also believe that we've barely scratched the surface in terms of insight into their internal surveillance and identity-tokenizing machinery. I believe that if we get to see those details in full glory (e.g. as the result of an investigation) we will be HORRIFIED. This applies to Google as well (or more).
- shamino 9y agoHahaha agreed. I've never stock picked before, and I just loaded up on some nice FB stock at a discount :)
- btilly 9y agoFacebook's network effect is extremely strong... Network effects are not as strong as you might think. Multiple lines of evidence point to it being O(n log(n)) in general. See https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-is-wrong https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-i... for details. The log(n) factor does work in Facebook's favor against newcomers. It is a barrier to entry. However it is a barrier to entry that can be overcome with a better user experience. My desired experience is that I want to see what my friends have to say, and don't want to see random commercial spam. My Facebook feed includes crap from any time I liked a viral link, and DOES NOT include a significant fraction of what my friends had to say. It is very far from my desired experience. I already see people trying out alternatives like Mastadon. Existing chat applications like Slack and Discord could be turned into social networks. And properties like Instagram and Whatsapp stand as demonstrations that social networks are more easily started than you might think. Facebook can only keep buying up its potential competitors for so long until it runs across one that dreams of something bigger than Facebook can offer. Short term I believe that there is an overreaction to news. But long-term, I would not want to bet on Facebook. Not over the next 20 years.
- MarkMc 9y ago> My desired experience is that I want to see what my friends have to say, and don't want to see random commercial spam. Have you tried Facebook recently? These days 90% of my feed is posts from my friends.
- btilly 9y agoNot very much. I thought that my feed is better because I blocked everything, and then have been careful about not liking things. However my other complaint remains. Clicking on my main feed, then clicking on a random friend, I'm not seeing most of what that friend posts in my feed.
- tehlike 9y agoI did buy it. should start paying off soon - fingers crossed.
- bogomipz 9y ago>"I'm buying FB call options." In other words you're anticipating the share price to decline further. This sort of supports the OPs first assertion.
- dwrtz 9y agoYou may be thinking of put options. Buying calls is a bullish position.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bogomipz 9y agoNo I understand how derivatives work. Why bother with options at all if you are so confident it is going back up? Why not pay the spot price if you are that confident it is currently undervalued?
- exelius 9y agoWhatever Facebook once aspired to be? That vision, the “social graph connecting everything and everyone” vision that justifies the $500B valuation, is dead. The social graph will decay without new data, and it quickly loses relevance as the data becomes stale. Is there commercial value in knowing what someone “liked” 15 years ago? Because that’s the future of Facebook. Watch, Facebook will be the new Yahoo! Enough successful products to keep them alive, but with its vision destroyed and it’s mandate revoked, it will be a shadow of its former self. Influencers have already started moving away. That company has a market value somewhere greater than zero but certainly less than even Facebook’s current market cap. The question is not “will it drop?” but “how low will it go?”
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mayankkaizen 9y agoYes network effect is pretty strong. BUT it is not getting stronger anymore, at least in the world I live in. I mean I deactictivated FB long ago. So did most of my friends (from my school, from college, from my past companies etc. ) Even those who still have accounts never post anything. They don't even update their current city/companies etc. Although I also noticed a trend of older people joining FB and being fairly active on it. But overall FB is definitely losing its appeal. Sadly, people have ditched FB in favor of Whatsapp which belongs to FB.
- drukenemo 9y agoSomeone once said something equivalent about the Roman Empire.
- godelmachine 9y agoOculus has a strong network effect? Since when? Here in India its next to zero.
- osrec 9y agoI would be careful with those calls. I mean, they're a decent hedge, but I'm not sure they have as much upside as you think. What we are seeing is the tip of the iceberg. It is not unlikely that even more negativity will come crawling out of the woodwork (not least because the media don't seem to be massive fans of FB).
- soziawa 9y ago> Facebook's network effect is extremely strong But it has to stay stronger than it's bad reputation. If the only thing you have is a network effect you are in a very bad place. Everyone I know used to be on MSN and then within a week everyone had WhatsApp and MSN was practically dead. > this is also not even including their other assets (Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus) True Instagram is strong especially since they can show a shitton of ads there. But Instagram isn't Facebooks vision of what the world should be.
- kromem 9y agoYou're right - it's going to bounce back. But don't hold on to those shares for too long. The mesh/decentralized/p2p networking movement is really interesting, and given the ever increasing power of user devices, the balance for a shift to those models is compelling. There are huge existing challenges, but I'm seeing really smart ideas in the space, and I think it's only a matter of years before we start to see mainstream p2p networks (still over the Internet) replacing a server model for some successful widespread apps or services. Facebook style social networking is the PERFECT use case for such a topology. Facebook's time is coming to an end. Not now (like some are reacting), and not in the next year or so, but soon enough. Their paradigm isn't as good as the alternative. The alternative simply has implementation issues that need to be worked out, but they aren't insurmountable, and different groups of people are solving them in novel ways constantly.
- adventured 9y ago> The mesh/decentralized/p2p networking movement is really interesting There isn't a single lasting mass consumer adoption example of decentralized anything in the modern history of technology (eg post WW2). That's due to a rigid reason: human nature. It's not going to change. The only thing that will change here, is privacy laws will force behavior changes on centralized platforms. I can name dozens of massive technology & platform adoptions by consumers, every single one of them is centralized. Now, name the dozens of vast decentralized examples... crickets. Decentralized as a mass consumer adoption thing will perpetually be fantasy. Only (some) tech people want it.
- odorousrex 9y agoE-mail has been going pretty strong for 20+ years now and it is still very decentralized (Even with big players like Gmail in the game).
- posterboy 9y agoThere are two or three hubs between Europe and America, terminating the big under sea cables and a few internet backbones. It's not as if you had point connections to every IP. Rather, you go through one single IP to your provider in the general case. Somehow "decentral" lacks a proper graph theoretic definition. By the way, the sun is decentralized, its center of gravity does not coincide with the galaxy's center of gravity! Good comment anyway. I didn't even think of e-mail.