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I wonder when Facebook is going to get disrupted. It seems to me their key feature is having everyone connected, and while anecdotal, my friends list sure hasn’

I wonder when Facebook is going to get disrupted. It seems to me their key feature is having everyone connected, and while anecdotal, my friends list sure hasn’t been affected by these scandals. What has been affected is the perception. It’s no longer considered cool to have a Facebook account. Meet-ups and interest groups are still heavily used in my social circles, but it’s almost always with an apology for being on Facebook. Instagram has suffered less, but instagram isn’t really useful for anything but wasting time. Facebook on the other hand serves as a modern day yellowpages and meetup combined, but with its popularity dropping and people slowly adopting privacy concerns, it seems like the right company with the right business model could displace Facebook. Of course you could say something similar about google and how it’s search engine is so terrible at finding anything interesting. Maybe it’s my little anecdotal world playing tricks on my perception, but to me, the whole web seems ripe for another revolution.

martinald 8y ago
Agreed - though at least in my contacts in the UK, everyone uses WhatsApp (and whatsapp groups) instead of FB. People used to make a FB event for a party now make a WhatsApp group which everyone gets invited into. I think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors and buying them up. My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp. The problems I now see for them is they are really starting to piss off regulators, who will probably not look kindly to future acquisitions, especially larger ones. They also have a problem that WhatsApp is IMO cannibalising their core 'social media' offerings and I can't see how they can commercialise that product without eroding the privacy and/or simplicity aspects which make it so popular. In hindsight I think Apple locking iMessage to iPhone was a mistake. If they'd released an Android version Apple would have surpassed WhatsApp in non-US markets where iPhone penetration is lower, and would have dominated the messaging space like it does in the US, as they'd be preinstalled on every iPhone to seed the market.
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  iMessage arguably serves as lock-in for the iPhone user base. If it were supported on android, many people would switch to the less expensive Android + iMessage ecosystem, likely enough to really make a dent in their cash cow
  - isostatic 8y ago
    There are many reasons to move off iphone (not least the lack of earphones), but imessage is so integrated with SMS that I don't know anyone who considers it different on any level other than geeks knowing it intellectually. On the other hand there are benefits to the ecosystem - find my iphone for example. Personally I, and wife, and motherinlaw, are on SEs because my mother's android phone is crap. It's just stopped ringing again -- last time required a software update. iphones still Just Work. In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit. People buy them because they are cheap, not because they are good. People buy iphones because they are good, not because of messaging lockin. However that aside, across android and iphone, people constantly use whatsapp though because of groups and simplicity.
    - lol768 8y ago
      >In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit. As some of the other commenters alluded to, there really are a huge variety of different devices. I'd be curious as to whether the folks you knew were buying e.g. Google's Nexus or Pixel devices which IME have generally felt higher quality to use, or whether they were Samsung/HTC/Huwaei-branded devices.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Are there any devices that have five years worth of OS upgrades?
        davrosthedalek 8y ago
        While I agree that this is nice, many people upgrade their phones every 2-3 years anyway, just because of the hardware/battery. For them, this is not a selling point.
- gaius 8y ago
  think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors Well, they did that with Onavo didn’t they? Snooping VPN traffic to see who else their users were using. It remains to be seen if they can be as astute without that backdoor.
- dade_ 8y ago
  They just need a leader with ethical qualities. They have always been lacking there, and birds of a feather...
- samat 8y ago
  iMessage (and more importantly, FaceTime) is the single most important reason why I buy apple devices for my whole extended family, so that we can communicate without ads, with privacy and with proper security in place. So that's pretty decent market strategy on Apple's end, i'd say.
  - rhexs 8y ago
    I'd kill for a way to use iMessage on my Windows desktop, so Apple is doing a great, albeit frustrating, job selling the Apple ecosystem. Wish I could at least use icloud.com. Even went as far as to look into how hard it would be to use VMWare to get a OS X desktop going. 4 GB and a processor core would be worth it, but unfortunately it looks difficult.
    - stevewodil 8y ago
      You can do it in virtual box but there's no graphics drivers, so it's not the most pleasant user experience. You wanna buy my MacBook pro from me? Lol
      - firmgently 8y ago
        I feel like this makes it sound worse than it is. I run El Capitan in a VM on a 6 year old ThinkPad with a 3rd-gen i5 and it's fine. I use Safari with developer tools to debug web stuff and I've not noticed any unpleasantness. I don't use iMessage so maybe it's particularly graphics-intensive or depends on a lot of GPU acceleration (would seem strange in a chat app). Video chat might be affected I suppose? Anyway it may well be worth trying so I didn't want people to be unduly put off.
        stevewodil 8y ago
        What resolution do you run the VM at? Also it's possible that El Capitan has graphics acceleration in VM's, whereas the later versions of macOS definitely do not
    - singularity2001 8y ago
- ams6110 8y ago
  It seems to me that Apple could deploy iMessage and FaceTime versions for Android whenever they wanted to. The only reason they aren't is probably that they don't want to cannibalize sales of their own hardware.
  - zimpenfish 8y ago
    That would surely have to imply they trusted the creators of the Android OS to be as security- and privacy-concerned as the iOS creators, no?
    - krageon 8y ago
      This is a company, and as such their core driving force is money. If you are framing them as having different driving forces that will make their behavior on occasion seem really weird.
- onyva 8y ago
  Agreed about iMessage. Didn’t mind deleteting my Facebook and Instagram accounts (with couple of hundreds of followers) but WhatsApp is almost a requirement in some respects (work, school, family over seas). Would love to get rid of it ASAP for a product from a source I can trust... wish Mozilla were in the messaging business...
  - FabHK 8y ago
    What's wrong with Wire or Signal?
    - dimillian 8y ago
      People. Nobody using it. My mom is not on it. What the point?
      - cft 8y ago
        All my programmer / enterpreneural friends are on Signal / Telegram. All business communication is there.
        parliament32 8y ago
        Ditto, I was pleasantly surprised to see a huge number of people at work / industry acquaintances already on it when I switched it to my default SMS app. I love how SMS/Signal are seamlessly together in one app if you choose to combine them.
    - pseudalopex 8y ago
      Signal requires a mobile phone number. The iPhone app isn't bad, but it's buggier than Messages and doesn't rotate. The desktop app has the usual Electron problems.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  iMessage on Android would be huge. Do that, then introduce a meetup feature and I swear half the people I know who "have to use Facebook" would delete their account. FB would shrivel up in five years.
  - parliament32 8y ago
    I feel like this would go about as well as BBM's Android release a few years back. Non-iphone users would use it for a bit then switch back off as the novelty of "yet another ecosystem messaging app" wears off. The proper way to do this is to convince people to switch to an app that integrates other messaging platforms as well: people switch to Signal and stay on it because they send all their normal SMSes run though the app as well. Then as their friends switch to Signal their conversations are painlessly migrated, everything looks the same, you just get a bonus "lock" icon.
- fosco 8y ago
  isn't whatsapp owned by facebook? and instagram (in parent comment) why do people differentiate them from facebook? to me you are still using facebook just an 'app' under facebook. I feel this is akin to saying I use gmail but not google. am I wrong here?
  - distances 8y ago
    The difference is in encryption. WhatsApp has end-to-end, while other FB products obviously do not. Also, the current lack of ads. It's an improvement even if not a perfect solution.
    - fosco 8y ago
      I think what I'm saying is specifically it is facebook whatsapp like it is google gmail or apple messaging. it appears that people often refer to this as different companies and they are not. it being e2e encrypted does not change who owns, makes decisions on where the future of it goes, and if it will continue to exist in 5 years. it is still facebook and not 'whatsapp' by itself above and in many areas people refer to whatsapp and instagram as different entities and they are not, I'm concerned with people acting like it is.
- basch 8y ago
  >My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp. Facebook should become a compute platform like AWS/Azure that specalizes in compute services for social services, including but not limited to authentication, spam detection, censorship/moderation tools, social graph, storage, bandwidth, localization, learning, ranking.
johannes1234321 8y ago
Well, Facebook has full pockets and a working cash machine. And at least until now the managed to identify threats. For example WhatsApp and Instagram were acquired. When G+ came they copied G+'s circle feature close enough with their contact grouping feature, when Snap didn't want to be acquired they added stories everywhere (WhatsApp, messenger, Facebook) Yesterday's news tells us that competing with Facebook in the messenger field isn't easy (Google cancelling Allo) For a long-term strategy we have to see how there diversification (facebook@work, Oculus, ...) works out and how long they can keep printing money.
subw00f 8y ago
I don't think you can say that about google. Care to elaborate?
- eksemplar 8y ago
  When I google things the top results are a mix of advertising, advertising pretending to be content, the Danish wiki article and maybe a link to some short no-content post on Quora, medium, reddit or similar. None of which is interesting. Google is still good at finding specific things. Like when you commit an act of google programming or want to buy a book. But it’s really terrible and finding interesting content. You could say that the web is flooded with shit, and be right, but HN is evidence that not everything on the internet is terrible, google just isn’t your portal to it anymore. So we visit HN, but that means google has become yahoo, aol search and all those other search engines it replaced by being a combination of relevant, interesting and exploratively fresh. I mean, 2018 was the year I adopted DuckDuckGo as my standard search engine, and it wasn’t because of privacy. Sure privacy helps, but to be honest, it was because it gives more interesting results. I’ll still use !g when I’m searching for something I know google will find, but if I’m just exploring a topic I’ll almost never use google.
  - rapnie 8y ago
    Yesterday there was the HN thread on DDG's filter bubble study of Google search. Quite interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18608306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18608306
  - jasode 8y ago
    >When I google things the top results are a mix of advertising, advertising pretending to be content, the Danish wiki article and maybe a link to some short no-content post on Quora, medium, reddit or similar. None of which is interesting. Can you be more specific and give examples of "things" you're searching for and what you mean by "uninteresting"? For me, I have been issuing 50+ random searches on Google every single day for years. I've been using Google since 2000 and it almost always finds what I'm looking for. Yesterday, I searched for "replace Moen faucet cartridge" and it returned plenty of pages showing exactly how to do it. A week ago I searched for "install Windows 10 from USB drive" and again, it found plenty of helpful pages that answered that question. And recently, I ran across a cook I never heard of before named "Alice Waters". A Google search told me she owned a restaurant and what her specialty was. In my experience, the topic has to be obscure or brand new for Google searches to be useless. For some trivia, I did find a weird effect of the search algorithm for a person named "Bettina Warburg". She's a young woman who's given several presentations on blockchains[1]. However, for some reason, the Google, Bing, and DDG search results have a side box citing someone else that was born in 1900 and died in 1990[2][3][4]. Something about her is tripping up the search engines. Bing in particular has the odd logic of placing the photos of the still-living BW above the text of the BW who died. [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bettina+warburg https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bettina+warburg [2] http://google.com/search?q=bettina+warburg http://google.com/search?q=bettina+warburg [3] https://www.bing.com/search?q=bettina+warburg https://www.bing.com/search?q=bettina+warburg [4] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bettina+warburg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bettina+warburg
theklub 8y ago
I believe discord is replacing it. At least in my circles.
- kiriakasis 8y ago
  Anecdotically my experience in Italy is that everyone and their dog have WhatsApp, if you go into the over 50 many have WhatsApp and not an email (or at least never check it)
  - sotojuan 8y ago
    Good thing Facebook purchased it.
  - pnongrata 8y ago
    Same here in Brazil. WhatsApp is the main communication platform by far.
- leetbulb 8y ago
  Discord definitely seems to be the preferred platform for the younger generation in my area. It just sucks that they have zero plans for text E2EE, at least the last I checked.
notahacker 8y ago
To be honest I think the average person outside of tech isn't bothered enough by data misuse stories to lose access to their friends' list and shared photos. I think Facebook's more likely to lose out because apart from messaging, its organization and events and business finding tools simply aren't that good or well-surfaced within the app because Facebook has prioritised the world of feed clickbait. Don't think it's security concerns that have my friends doing event invites via Whatsapp group threads as often as via Facebook's dedicated event invitation service. But the average person having a number of old friends whose only reliable contact information is their Facebook is a pretty big moat.
- Jedd 8y ago
  > To be honest I think the average person outside of tech isn't bothered enough by data misuse stories to lose access to their friends' list and shared photos. If you were being dishonest, what would you think differently. I think most people are vaguely aware their data on Facebook is being misappropriated, but they don't understand the implications of that, especially in the long term. The challenge, and it seems most of the informed are stuck on how to resolve this, is explaining why this is a horrendously bad situation. Just today at lunch with a phd mathematician (ie someone way smarter than me), I was struggling to get past his 'I've nothing to hide, why does it matter' attitude about fb and messenger android apps.
  - jcbrand 8y ago
    Someone with a phd in math have shown themselves to be a smart in a particular way. That doesn't mean that they have good judgement, wisdom, empathy or all kinds of other traits which might be considered "smart".
    - Jedd 8y ago
      Undeniably, and as per my observation. The challenge for us is how to engage people who are clearly smart, but lack the same concerns that many of us have developed.
  - 8y ago
Beltiras 8y ago
There are a lot of startups trying. Hopefully one of them will reach critical mass. I would be happy to leave Facebook but being involved in politics makes it a prerequisite to reach my audience.
- hazz99 8y ago
  What startups? I've seen a lot of messaging solutions, but not too many full competitors. Maybe I've been a bit blind
  - Beltiras 8y ago
    Just look up distributed social networks. There are multiple ones with up to 10^7 users.
- squish78 8y ago
  I remember back when Facebook was only available to college students. I wonder if any startup would create another 'exclusive' network to increase it's perceived social value
jbreckmckye 8y ago
Contrary data point: over the past month three of my friends have closed their Facebook accounts - and they are not technical people. So it's not only a matter of reputation.
- merpnderp 8y ago
  I bet I’ve lost 5% of my friends list to people sick of Facebook’s constant bickering over politics and social posturing.
Puer 8y ago
> Instagram has suffered less, but instagram isn’t really useful for anything but wasting time. Is Instagram useless, or just useless to you? I understand that HN isn't Facebook's target market, but it's disappointing to read comments that dismiss its services and anyone who does find utility in them.
bwindels 8y ago
Whether it happens or not, if the disruptor doesn't have a business model not based on targeted advertisement, I don't see how it will be different once it becomes large enough. My hope would be a decentralized service, where everyone hosting an instance determines their own business model, or a paid service. None of which will be as fast to iterate, and be able to crank out features as fast as Facebook can ...
- chrisweekly 8y ago
  > "Whether it happens or not, if the disruptor doesn't have a business model not based on targeted advertisement, I don't see how it will be different..." This is such a convoluted way to phrase things! Two hypotheticals and five negatives make your first sentence very difficult to parse... which dilutes the power of your comment. Not nit-picking, rather aiming to help for the sake of your future comments' readability.
elorant 8y ago
It will get disrupted when people realize the cost of putting their personal life online. The Cambridge Analytica incident was a good start but we need many more cases like it to start making a trend.
cribbles 8y ago
A few years ago I would have made the semi-contrarian point that Facebook[1] was here to stay, for the long-foreseeable future. I say "semi-contrarian" because remember, even 4 or 5 years ago Facebook seemed to be the latest corporate iteration in an ever-flipping lineage from AIM lists to Friendster to MySpace.[2] So the common gospel was: "Facebook" - such as it was understood - could be toppled any day now. Remember MySpace? The counterargument was that the market capture was incomparable and the network effect was insurmountable. And that's still true, kind of. But the way we use Facebook has changed. In short, it's gone from being a single service with a bunch of features to being an SSO gateway for a bunch of federated platforms. And that's not just a change in user perception, it's reflective of a completely different product strategy. That strategy seems to have worked out pretty well for Facebook so far, and I'm not sure what they could have done differently. But I think it leaves them vulnerable to any one of those platforms, or all of them, being usurped by new kids on the block. Part of the problem is that none of Facebook's platforms are all that great in their own right.[3] But that alone doesn't make them vulnerable. MySpace proved you can have a terrible product and coast off network effect alone, while Google+ proved that without a network, you have nothing. But wait a minute. Does any one of these platforms on their own have the network effect that "Facebook" itself once had? I mean, yeah, they've absorbed a greater user share than the 2012 webapp ever had. But that's not what I'm talking about. Is connectivity to "Facebook," and hence its network, a killer feature at this point? To give one example: I have zero confidence anyone on Groups is a "real person," it doesn't offer any unique features, it's painful to use for anything other than reading a general quasi-chronological survey of recent posts, and it means nothing to me that 17 or 18 "real friends" happen to be a member of the group (how does that help me find a sublet?). Right now I'm one of millions of people who "just use Facebook for Events and Messenger." Except I don't _just_ message people through Messenger, and I don't _just_ learn about events through Events, and the fact that "my friends" are "on" these platforms seems to mean less and less every day. But I'm still on them... for now... with gradually diminishing frequency... basically out of ambivalence. Is this product direction sustainable? [1] Any references I make to Facebook in this post refer to the core service - the website, the app, whatever you want to call it. Not the company, which I'm aware owns WhatsApp, Instagram, etc, and could potentially continue to coast off acquisitions alone. [2] This is a myopically North American view: in Brazil it would have started with Orkut, in Southeast Aria Friendster held steady market share for quite a while, etc. The point is that we used to consider portal-like predecessors as a litmus of comparison for Facebook’s health, and now that doesn’t seem as salient. [3] I mean, Groups _barely_ serves its job of being the sort of Craigslist-with-authentication into which it's evolved, in part _because_ it evolved into that role over time. The Events interface is totally cluttered and incoherent, and despite its ubiquity, it seems to get the lowest social engagement of any of Facebook's core products. Messenger is... fine I guess, but I have no strong preference for it over WhatsApp or iMessage, and having hypothetical connection to hundreds of "friends" I haven't spoken to in years isn't exactly a value-add.
Finnucane 8y ago
I still have a facebook account, I just use it less and less. And while I don't think many of my friends have dropped it either, it seems they are also using it less and less. Most of my feed now comes from a fairly small group of people.
Taylor_OD 8y ago
The thing to keep in mind about facebook is that the average user isnt a tech person. My parents use facebook nearly constantly. That wont change anytime soon. I don't know if they could list a single facebook, "scandal" that happened this year. It's not that they are dumb people they just don't care. Their friends use it so they use it.
wdr1 8y ago
I think Facebook is benefiting from everyone having learned their lesson. The saw their trust woefully violated by Facebook, and they'll never give another network the same access to their data again. And, thus, stay on Facebook.
sjg007 8y ago
It'll be something you don't expect. Maybe an iMessage plugin.
rapind 8y ago
I think the problem is the business model, not specifically Facebook. Are any of their competitors following and succeeding at a different model at scale?
thrwyahk11111 8y ago
For sure Facebook main quality is being place where every one is. But I believe you’re wrong about instagram. Living in Brazil, I feel that Facebook and Instagram are two sides of the same coin. It keeps people interested and “connected” when Facebook is going down. From Orkut to Facebook, it was the same. The difference is that Facebook bought its potential competitors before they were cool

martinald 8y ago

Agreed - though at least in my contacts in the UK, everyone uses WhatsApp (and whatsapp groups) instead of FB. People used to make a FB event for a party now make a WhatsApp group which everyone gets invited into. I think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors and buying them up. My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp. The problems I now see for them is they are really starting to piss off regulators, who will probably not look kindly to future acquisitions, especially larger ones. They also have a problem that WhatsApp is IMO cannibalising their core 'social media' offerings and I can't see how they can commercialise that product without eroding the privacy and/or simplicity aspects which make it so popular. In hindsight I think Apple locking iMessage to iPhone was a mistake. If they'd released an Android version Apple would have surpassed WhatsApp in non-US markets where iPhone penetration is lower, and would have dominated the messaging space like it does in the US, as they'd be preinstalled on every iPhone to seed the market.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago
iMessage arguably serves as lock-in for the iPhone user base. If it were supported on android, many people would switch to the less expensive Android + iMessage ecosystem, likely enough to really make a dent in their cash cow
- isostatic 8y ago
  There are many reasons to move off iphone (not least the lack of earphones), but imessage is so integrated with SMS that I don't know anyone who considers it different on any level other than geeks knowing it intellectually. On the other hand there are benefits to the ecosystem - find my iphone for example. Personally I, and wife, and motherinlaw, are on SEs because my mother's android phone is crap. It's just stopped ringing again -- last time required a software update. iphones still Just Work. In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit. People buy them because they are cheap, not because they are good. People buy iphones because they are good, not because of messaging lockin. However that aside, across android and iphone, people constantly use whatsapp though because of groups and simplicity.
  - lol768 8y ago
    >In my experience of people with half a dozen Androids over the last 6 years, they are Just Shit. As some of the other commenters alluded to, there really are a huge variety of different devices. I'd be curious as to whether the folks you knew were buying e.g. Google's Nexus or Pixel devices which IME have generally felt higher quality to use, or whether they were Samsung/HTC/Huwaei-branded devices.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Are there any devices that have five years worth of OS upgrades?
      - davrosthedalek 8y ago
        While I agree that this is nice, many people upgrade their phones every 2-3 years anyway, just because of the hardware/battery. For them, this is not a selling point.
gaius 8y ago
think what Facebook is very very good at is tracking the market and identifying potential competitors Well, they did that with Onavo didn’t they? Snooping VPN traffic to see who else their users were using. It remains to be seen if they can be as astute without that backdoor.
dade_ 8y ago
They just need a leader with ethical qualities. They have always been lacking there, and birds of a feather...
samat 8y ago
iMessage (and more importantly, FaceTime) is the single most important reason why I buy apple devices for my whole extended family, so that we can communicate without ads, with privacy and with proper security in place. So that's pretty decent market strategy on Apple's end, i'd say.
- rhexs 8y ago
  I'd kill for a way to use iMessage on my Windows desktop, so Apple is doing a great, albeit frustrating, job selling the Apple ecosystem. Wish I could at least use icloud.com. Even went as far as to look into how hard it would be to use VMWare to get a OS X desktop going. 4 GB and a processor core would be worth it, but unfortunately it looks difficult.
  - stevewodil 8y ago
    You can do it in virtual box but there's no graphics drivers, so it's not the most pleasant user experience. You wanna buy my MacBook pro from me? Lol
    - firmgently 8y ago
      I feel like this makes it sound worse than it is. I run El Capitan in a VM on a 6 year old ThinkPad with a 3rd-gen i5 and it's fine. I use Safari with developer tools to debug web stuff and I've not noticed any unpleasantness. I don't use iMessage so maybe it's particularly graphics-intensive or depends on a lot of GPU acceleration (would seem strange in a chat app). Video chat might be affected I suppose? Anyway it may well be worth trying so I didn't want people to be unduly put off.
      - stevewodil 8y ago
        What resolution do you run the VM at? Also it's possible that El Capitan has graphics acceleration in VM's, whereas the later versions of macOS definitely do not
  - singularity2001 8y ago
ams6110 8y ago
It seems to me that Apple could deploy iMessage and FaceTime versions for Android whenever they wanted to. The only reason they aren't is probably that they don't want to cannibalize sales of their own hardware.
- zimpenfish 8y ago
  That would surely have to imply they trusted the creators of the Android OS to be as security- and privacy-concerned as the iOS creators, no?
  - krageon 8y ago
    This is a company, and as such their core driving force is money. If you are framing them as having different driving forces that will make their behavior on occasion seem really weird.
onyva 8y ago
Agreed about iMessage. Didn’t mind deleteting my Facebook and Instagram accounts (with couple of hundreds of followers) but WhatsApp is almost a requirement in some respects (work, school, family over seas). Would love to get rid of it ASAP for a product from a source I can trust... wish Mozilla were in the messaging business...
- FabHK 8y ago
  What's wrong with Wire or Signal?
  - dimillian 8y ago
    People. Nobody using it. My mom is not on it. What the point?
    - cft 8y ago
      All my programmer / enterpreneural friends are on Signal / Telegram. All business communication is there.
      - parliament32 8y ago
        Ditto, I was pleasantly surprised to see a huge number of people at work / industry acquaintances already on it when I switched it to my default SMS app. I love how SMS/Signal are seamlessly together in one app if you choose to combine them.
  - pseudalopex 8y ago
    Signal requires a mobile phone number. The iPhone app isn't bad, but it's buggier than Messages and doesn't rotate. The desktop app has the usual Electron problems.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
iMessage on Android would be huge. Do that, then introduce a meetup feature and I swear half the people I know who "have to use Facebook" would delete their account. FB would shrivel up in five years.
- parliament32 8y ago
  I feel like this would go about as well as BBM's Android release a few years back. Non-iphone users would use it for a bit then switch back off as the novelty of "yet another ecosystem messaging app" wears off. The proper way to do this is to convince people to switch to an app that integrates other messaging platforms as well: people switch to Signal and stay on it because they send all their normal SMSes run though the app as well. Then as their friends switch to Signal their conversations are painlessly migrated, everything looks the same, you just get a bonus "lock" icon.
fosco 8y ago
isn't whatsapp owned by facebook? and instagram (in parent comment) why do people differentiate them from facebook? to me you are still using facebook just an 'app' under facebook. I feel this is akin to saying I use gmail but not google. am I wrong here?
- distances 8y ago
  The difference is in encryption. WhatsApp has end-to-end, while other FB products obviously do not. Also, the current lack of ads. It's an improvement even if not a perfect solution.
  - fosco 8y ago
    I think what I'm saying is specifically it is facebook whatsapp like it is google gmail or apple messaging. it appears that people often refer to this as different companies and they are not. it being e2e encrypted does not change who owns, makes decisions on where the future of it goes, and if it will continue to exist in 5 years. it is still facebook and not 'whatsapp' by itself above and in many areas people refer to whatsapp and instagram as different entities and they are not, I'm concerned with people acting like it is.
basch 8y ago
>My previous thoughts (and still are) was that FB would become a media holding company, similar to Comcast or Fox/News Corp. Facebook should become a compute platform like AWS/Azure that specalizes in compute services for social services, including but not limited to authentication, spam detection, censorship/moderation tools, social graph, storage, bandwidth, localization, learning, ranking.

johannes1234321 8y ago

Well, Facebook has full pockets and a working cash machine. And at least until now the managed to identify threats. For example WhatsApp and Instagram were acquired. When G+ came they copied G+'s circle feature close enough with their contact grouping feature, when Snap didn't want to be acquired they added stories everywhere (WhatsApp, messenger, Facebook) Yesterday's news tells us that competing with Facebook in the messenger field isn't easy (Google cancelling Allo) For a long-term strategy we have to see how there diversification (facebook@work, Oculus, ...) works out and how long they can keep printing money.

subw00f 8y ago

I don't think you can say that about google. Care to elaborate?

eksemplar 8y ago
When I google things the top results are a mix of advertising, advertising pretending to be content, the Danish wiki article and maybe a link to some short no-content post on Quora, medium, reddit or similar. None of which is interesting. Google is still good at finding specific things. Like when you commit an act of google programming or want to buy a book. But it’s really terrible and finding interesting content. You could say that the web is flooded with shit, and be right, but HN is evidence that not everything on the internet is terrible, google just isn’t your portal to it anymore. So we visit HN, but that means google has become yahoo, aol search and all those other search engines it replaced by being a combination of relevant, interesting and exploratively fresh. I mean, 2018 was the year I adopted DuckDuckGo as my standard search engine, and it wasn’t because of privacy. Sure privacy helps, but to be honest, it was because it gives more interesting results. I’ll still use !g when I’m searching for something I know google will find, but if I’m just exploring a topic I’ll almost never use google.
- rapnie 8y ago
  Yesterday there was the HN thread on DDG's filter bubble study of Google search. Quite interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18608306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18608306
- jasode 8y ago
  >When I google things the top results are a mix of advertising, advertising pretending to be content, the Danish wiki article and maybe a link to some short no-content post on Quora, medium, reddit or similar. None of which is interesting. Can you be more specific and give examples of "things" you're searching for and what you mean by "uninteresting"? For me, I have been issuing 50+ random searches on Google every single day for years. I've been using Google since 2000 and it almost always finds what I'm looking for. Yesterday, I searched for "replace Moen faucet cartridge" and it returned plenty of pages showing exactly how to do it. A week ago I searched for "install Windows 10 from USB drive" and again, it found plenty of helpful pages that answered that question. And recently, I ran across a cook I never heard of before named "Alice Waters". A Google search told me she owned a restaurant and what her specialty was. In my experience, the topic has to be obscure or brand new for Google searches to be useless. For some trivia, I did find a weird effect of the search algorithm for a person named "Bettina Warburg". She's a young woman who's given several presentations on blockchains[1]. However, for some reason, the Google, Bing, and DDG search results have a side box citing someone else that was born in 1900 and died in 1990[2][3][4]. Something about her is tripping up the search engines. Bing in particular has the odd logic of placing the photos of the still-living BW above the text of the BW who died. [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bettina+warburg https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bettina+warburg [2] http://google.com/search?q=bettina+warburg http://google.com/search?q=bettina+warburg [3] https://www.bing.com/search?q=bettina+warburg https://www.bing.com/search?q=bettina+warburg [4] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bettina+warburg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bettina+warburg

theklub 8y ago

I believe discord is replacing it. At least in my circles.

kiriakasis 8y ago
Anecdotically my experience in Italy is that everyone and their dog have WhatsApp, if you go into the over 50 many have WhatsApp and not an email (or at least never check it)
- sotojuan 8y ago
  Good thing Facebook purchased it.
- pnongrata 8y ago
  Same here in Brazil. WhatsApp is the main communication platform by far.
leetbulb 8y ago
Discord definitely seems to be the preferred platform for the younger generation in my area. It just sucks that they have zero plans for text E2EE, at least the last I checked.

notahacker 8y ago

To be honest I think the average person outside of tech isn't bothered enough by data misuse stories to lose access to their friends' list and shared photos. I think Facebook's more likely to lose out because apart from messaging, its organization and events and business finding tools simply aren't that good or well-surfaced within the app because Facebook has prioritised the world of feed clickbait. Don't think it's security concerns that have my friends doing event invites via Whatsapp group threads as often as via Facebook's dedicated event invitation service. But the average person having a number of old friends whose only reliable contact information is their Facebook is a pretty big moat.

Jedd 8y ago
> To be honest I think the average person outside of tech isn't bothered enough by data misuse stories to lose access to their friends' list and shared photos. If you were being dishonest, what would you think differently. I think most people are vaguely aware their data on Facebook is being misappropriated, but they don't understand the implications of that, especially in the long term. The challenge, and it seems most of the informed are stuck on how to resolve this, is explaining why this is a horrendously bad situation. Just today at lunch with a phd mathematician (ie someone way smarter than me), I was struggling to get past his 'I've nothing to hide, why does it matter' attitude about fb and messenger android apps.
- jcbrand 8y ago
  Someone with a phd in math have shown themselves to be a smart in a particular way. That doesn't mean that they have good judgement, wisdom, empathy or all kinds of other traits which might be considered "smart".
  - Jedd 8y ago
    Undeniably, and as per my observation. The challenge for us is how to engage people who are clearly smart, but lack the same concerns that many of us have developed.
- 8y ago

Beltiras 8y ago

There are a lot of startups trying. Hopefully one of them will reach critical mass. I would be happy to leave Facebook but being involved in politics makes it a prerequisite to reach my audience.

hazz99 8y ago
What startups? I've seen a lot of messaging solutions, but not too many full competitors. Maybe I've been a bit blind
- Beltiras 8y ago
  Just look up distributed social networks. There are multiple ones with up to 10^7 users.
squish78 8y ago
I remember back when Facebook was only available to college students. I wonder if any startup would create another 'exclusive' network to increase it's perceived social value

jbreckmckye 8y ago

Contrary data point: over the past month three of my friends have closed their Facebook accounts - and they are not technical people. So it's not only a matter of reputation.

merpnderp 8y ago
I bet I’ve lost 5% of my friends list to people sick of Facebook’s constant bickering over politics and social posturing.

Puer 8y ago

> Instagram has suffered less, but instagram isn’t really useful for anything but wasting time. Is Instagram useless, or just useless to you? I understand that HN isn't Facebook's target market, but it's disappointing to read comments that dismiss its services and anyone who does find utility in them.

bwindels 8y ago

Whether it happens or not, if the disruptor doesn't have a business model not based on targeted advertisement, I don't see how it will be different once it becomes large enough. My hope would be a decentralized service, where everyone hosting an instance determines their own business model, or a paid service. None of which will be as fast to iterate, and be able to crank out features as fast as Facebook can ...

chrisweekly 8y ago
> "Whether it happens or not, if the disruptor doesn't have a business model not based on targeted advertisement, I don't see how it will be different..." This is such a convoluted way to phrase things! Two hypotheticals and five negatives make your first sentence very difficult to parse... which dilutes the power of your comment. Not nit-picking, rather aiming to help for the sake of your future comments' readability.

elorant 8y ago

It will get disrupted when people realize the cost of putting their personal life online. The Cambridge Analytica incident was a good start but we need many more cases like it to start making a trend.

cribbles 8y ago

A few years ago I would have made the semi-contrarian point that Facebook[1] was here to stay, for the long-foreseeable future. I say "semi-contrarian" because remember, even 4 or 5 years ago Facebook seemed to be the latest corporate iteration in an ever-flipping lineage from AIM lists to Friendster to MySpace.[2] So the common gospel was: "Facebook" - such as it was understood - could be toppled any day now. Remember MySpace? The counterargument was that the market capture was incomparable and the network effect was insurmountable. And that's still true, kind of. But the way we use Facebook has changed. In short, it's gone from being a single service with a bunch of features to being an SSO gateway for a bunch of federated platforms. And that's not just a change in user perception, it's reflective of a completely different product strategy. That strategy seems to have worked out pretty well for Facebook so far, and I'm not sure what they could have done differently. But I think it leaves them vulnerable to any one of those platforms, or all of them, being usurped by new kids on the block. Part of the problem is that none of Facebook's platforms are all that great in their own right.[3] But that alone doesn't make them vulnerable. MySpace proved you can have a terrible product and coast off network effect alone, while Google+ proved that without a network, you have nothing. But wait a minute. Does any one of these platforms on their own have the network effect that "Facebook" itself once had? I mean, yeah, they've absorbed a greater user share than the 2012 webapp ever had. But that's not what I'm talking about. Is connectivity to "Facebook," and hence its network, a killer feature at this point? To give one example: I have zero confidence anyone on Groups is a "real person," it doesn't offer any unique features, it's painful to use for anything other than reading a general quasi-chronological survey of recent posts, and it means nothing to me that 17 or 18 "real friends" happen to be a member of the group (how does that help me find a sublet?). Right now I'm one of millions of people who "just use Facebook for Events and Messenger." Except I don't _just_ message people through Messenger, and I don't _just_ learn about events through Events, and the fact that "my friends" are "on" these platforms seems to mean less and less every day. But I'm still on them... for now... with gradually diminishing frequency... basically out of ambivalence. Is this product direction sustainable? [1] Any references I make to Facebook in this post refer to the core service - the website, the app, whatever you want to call it. Not the company, which I'm aware owns WhatsApp, Instagram, etc, and could potentially continue to coast off acquisitions alone. [2] This is a myopically North American view: in Brazil it would have started with Orkut, in Southeast Aria Friendster held steady market share for quite a while, etc. The point is that we used to consider portal-like predecessors as a litmus of comparison for Facebook’s health, and now that doesn’t seem as salient. [3] I mean, Groups _barely_ serves its job of being the sort of Craigslist-with-authentication into which it's evolved, in part _because_ it evolved into that role over time. The Events interface is totally cluttered and incoherent, and despite its ubiquity, it seems to get the lowest social engagement of any of Facebook's core products. Messenger is... fine I guess, but I have no strong preference for it over WhatsApp or iMessage, and having hypothetical connection to hundreds of "friends" I haven't spoken to in years isn't exactly a value-add.

Finnucane 8y ago

I still have a facebook account, I just use it less and less. And while I don't think many of my friends have dropped it either, it seems they are also using it less and less. Most of my feed now comes from a fairly small group of people.

Taylor_OD 8y ago

The thing to keep in mind about facebook is that the average user isnt a tech person. My parents use facebook nearly constantly. That wont change anytime soon. I don't know if they could list a single facebook, "scandal" that happened this year. It's not that they are dumb people they just don't care. Their friends use it so they use it.

wdr1 8y ago

I think Facebook is benefiting from everyone having learned their lesson. The saw their trust woefully violated by Facebook, and they'll never give another network the same access to their data again. And, thus, stay on Facebook.

sjg007 8y ago

It'll be something you don't expect. Maybe an iMessage plugin.

rapind 8y ago

I think the problem is the business model, not specifically Facebook. Are any of their competitors following and succeeding at a different model at scale?

thrwyahk11111 8y ago

For sure Facebook main quality is being place where every one is. But I believe you’re wrong about instagram. Living in Brazil, I feel that Facebook and Instagram are two sides of the same coin. It keeps people interested and “connected” when Facebook is going down. From Orkut to Facebook, it was the same. The difference is that Facebook bought its potential competitors before they were cool