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When Facebook first went public, an older relative asked me if he should invest in Facebook. My only insight was being an internet user at the time and I said n
by lbsnake7 6y ago
When Facebook first went public, an older relative asked me if he should invest in Facebook. My only insight was being an internet user at the time and I said no, there was no reason that Facebook wouldn’t be another MySpace. Facebook's only value was their users and users were historically very finicky and moved around platforms at will. I argued that Facebook would make no money and wouldn’t be around in a couple of years. This obviously turned out wildly wrong but I always thought the user moat was always an issue and Facebook’s downfall would be related to it. I guess what this lawsuit says is that they essentially just bought their way out of people platform jumping.
- Grazester 6y agoOn the same note, a relative asked me the same thing when they IPO.I thought if Google could make money selling ads why couldn't Facebook. I bought in at IPO price for them. I sold for them about 2 years ago when the price was dropping due to privacy scandals.
- annadane 6y agoWhy the hell is HN so downvote happy?
- easytiger 6y agoReddit is here. It has been a swift decline notable in the last year or so. Sadly. Even fairly uncontroversial assertions of fact are downvoted frequently
- kache_ 6y agoyou know you are on orange reddit right?
- folkrav 6y agoWhat a pretentious (and wildly indemonstrable) take.
- packthetop 6y agoWhat a pretentious (and wildly indemonstrable) comment
- easytiger 6y agoIt is based on my experience of using this site for 12 years. You can huff about it all you please.
- folkrav 6y agoNot huffing at all, you basically just confirmed yourself my very affirmation: you pulled that out of thin air. Feel free to think it, still doesn't make it neither neither true, false nor demonstrable. As to the pretentiousness of the thing, that's usually my take on people who feel fine talking about 330mil+ MAUs as a single person.
- easytiger 6y ago> you pulled that out of thin air As opposed to your opinion that is empirically flawless and unquestionable?
- folkrav 6y agoOpinion is opinion, thus me explicitly calling it opinion. My take is honestly supported by the very concept of faulty generalization fallacy - given that you did confirm you based this claim on anecdotal evidence - if you ask me, but maybe that's just me.
- Shared404 6y ago> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Exmoor 6y ago> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- annadane 6y agoYes, but it's also clear that there's something very funny going on here, rules be damned
- packthetop 6y agoCopy+pasting the rules is even more boring, just move on
- raunakdag 6y agoI feel like there's a relevant XKCD here about the irrelevance of commenting on irrelevance but I'm struggling to remember which.
- hyperdimension 6y agoWell, it's not all that relevant to the conversation at hand, anyway... :)
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI actually think it's good to have the community enforce/explain our standards from time to time, within reason. Dang can't see everything, and where he does it takes time to respond. Downvoting/flagging works too, but some may legitimately not know that they've broken a guideline.
- UhDev 6y agoWhy can't I downvote?
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoYou need 501 karma.
- UhDev 6y agoThanks for answering my question instead of downvoting it!
- Shared404 6y agoYou may find this page helpful, I know I did (In the sense that it let me better understand what all was going on). https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
- tacocataco 6y agoThat 1 is triggering my OCD.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoWell, you could also phrase it as “You need more than 500 karma.” :)
- fortran77 6y ago/r/LOLHackerNews
- CobrastanJorji 6y agoI've been giving the wrong answer to "Should I buy Bitcoin" since 2011 or so. I was bearish on Amazon when its stock was at 60 because its P/E ratio was ridiculous. I've learned to just be comfortable with the fact that I'm wrong a lot.
- TylerE 6y agoYou're not necessarily wrong. It's a long held truism that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
- dllthomas 6y agoIf you're right about what the market should, rationally do, and it does something else, you were still wrong.
- dllthomas 6y agoI think I successfully communicated, and I'm getting upvoted, but my wording was imprecise. Would that I could edit to add: "[...] if you thought that is what it would do."
- chillacy 6y agoEither one is right or the market is irrational? Seems like by that logic one can never really be proven wrong.
- TylerE 6y agoYou can be right, the market can be wrong, and then the market can crash before you can exit the position. Imagine, for instance, trying to get actual USD (NOT USDT!) for BTC when that fever dream ends.
- ric2b 6y agoYou can get USD for BTC right now, you've been able to get if for nearly a decade and there have never been as many reputable exchanges as there are now.
- paulpauper 6y agolol should have consulted me. been bullish on long on FB since the $30s . Facebook was greatly profitable from the start. Fakebook's ad platform is a money-printing machine, similar to that of Google. Buying Instagram sealed the deal, killing its potentially biggest competitor.
- echelon 6y agoThat's good for you, but your tone is a little self-congratulatory here. Not everybody's mental model of the world matches how events play out. It's a hard problem and a lot of folks conflate ideals with reality. It's also hard to see the big picture if you focus on certain aspects. It also doesn't help that not everyone plays with the same rule set. Sometimes the more you know the harder it becomes. It's hard.
- jnordonez 6y ago>lol should have consulted me. been bullish on long on FB since the $30s . Yeah that means absolutely nothing, you could have made 10x more bad trades in the same time. I'll "ask you" as you say when you have a proven strategy, not a simple lucky call.
- whoknew1122 6y agoCool, random internet person.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- easytiger 6y agoI first bought after the clearly emotionally driven price dip at just under $20. It was obvious no one looked at the amount of hard cash they pulled in, and thought using their emotions.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wlesieutre 6y agoBought all the platforms people were going to jump to. The "Onvao Protect" traffic snooping VPN to identify what up and coming products people were using was one particularly shady part of this strategy.
- mrkramer 6y agoYou didn't need any traffic snooping to notice millions of Instagram and WhatsApp users. Acquisitions were no brainer for Facebook.
- Shared404 6y ago> Acquisitions were no brainer for Facebook. And hindsight is 20/20.
- dopamean 6y agoAt least in the case of instagram you didnt need hindsight to know it was a good deal. Lots of people thought they price they paid was incredible value on the day it was announced. Plenty of ink has been spilled that year about facebook potentially being in trouble with mobile and instagram seemed at the time to be an obvious solution to the problem.
- romanhn 6y agoThat is not my recollection whatsoever. A quick read through the HN reactions that day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840) shows a mix of bewilderment and belief that this is a defensive play. Very few people actually opined that Instagram represented much actual value.
- jyrkesh 6y agoYeah, I admit completely that I thought they were massively overpaying for Instagram at the time. I also shared the highest OP's sentiment that I didn't think FB was a good investment for the same reason (that people would migrate from FB to the next thing as fast as folks moved off of MySpace). I was absolutely and utterly wrong on both accounts. Part of it was definitely wishful thinking, though, as I dislike FB by one or two orders of magnitude more than any other software company. But yes, I'd say their acquisitions were not completely obvious slam dunks. They also tried to be Snap, ofc, but my recollection is that Snap refused. Interestingly, folks have probably flip-flopped over the last few years in wondering whether that would've been good or bad for FB.
- CabSauce 6y agoWrong? No, just early. Yahoo and AOL were really big and growing... until they weren't.
- dntrkv 6y agoGiven enough time, you can say that about any company.
- bawolff 6y agoIn hindsight, i think a big part is that myspace's reach extended mostly to early adopter internet users. Early adopters jump on ships early, but also jump off easily too. Once everyone's parents and grandparents jumped on to facebook, that's a much better moat. FB buying up the competition probably helped too.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago> FB buying up the competition probably helped too. Which the FTC could have stopped at any time.
- nr2x 6y agoThe prior administration was very cosy with Google and Facebook, which helped even more.
- uoaei 6y agoAnd the next one will be too. Harris is a darling of SV giants.
- nr2x 6y agoYes, I'm curious as to why DOJ announced Google and FTC announced Facebook actions right before the same group of people who nurtured their rise to monopoly status retake power.
- bawolff 6y agoHonest question: how so? I don't follow usa politics all that closely, so i'm honestly curious how specificly were they cozy?
- nr2x 6y agohttps://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/ https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
- nr2x 6y agoOne big difference between FB/MySpace is OAuth - you can dump FB the social network, but much harder to dump FB the identity verification service. OAuth in theory is great, in practice it has been an anti-competitive/anti-privacy Trojan Horse.
- pembrook 6y agoI still think you were correct, you just underestimated how long it would take for this to happen if the company was actually competent (unlike MySpace), and all the money that could be made in the meantime. Facebook The Platform's userbase keeps getting older and less engaged, millennials and younger have largely shifted to instagram. Taken by itself, Facebook the platform doesn't have great looking prospects. Instagram is the current hot thing, and is keeping Facebook The Company on the growth trajectory, but it too will suffer the same problem eventually. Now that Zuck is under so much scrutiny, he won't be allowed to acquire the next hot social platform. When instagram isn't the "it" platform anymore, Facebook is doomed. My prediction: if the US government does nothing, Facebook the company will slowly peak and then start shrinking over the next 5-10 years and the problem will start solving itself. Their data moat becomes infinitely less valuable if the graph of users and engagement is a downward slope instead of an upward one.
- quantummkv 6y ago> Now that Zuck is under so much scrutiny, he won't be allowed to acquire the next hot social platform. When instagram isn't the "it" platform anymore, Facebook is doomed. Zuck got around that problem copying competitors lock, stock and barrel and using his monopoly to attempt drive out that competition. Instagram was under threat by two "It" networks. Both of them ended up being copied in Instagram Facebook needs to be broken up into three companies to fix it all.
- skewart 6y agoHow would breaking up Facebook into three companies fix this though? Suppose Instagram is a separate company and a new competitor starts getting popular. Why wouldn’t Instagram still just copy the competitor’s features? It’s hard to compete with Instagram because everyone is already on Instagram, not because everyone is also on Facebook. (A lot of IG users don’t use FB much, and vice versa.) A freestanding Instagram could still easily copy and crush competitors.
- quickresponse 6y ago
- phendrenad2 6y agoFacebook was smart, it wasn't just a social network, it also was an apps and games platform. Remember Farmville? And also many bands ended up putting their merch and tour dates up on FB because it was just so easy. Then recently it grew a marketplace to take on craigslist and ebay, and added videos (making it a mini youtube or tiktok). And let's not forget that FB groups are the go-to place for many hobbies. Into old cars? Or old sewing machines? You won't find an active forum for those things, or if you do, they're 1000x more hostile and trollish than FB's groups. So my question is, where do you draw the line? Was FB marketplace anticompetitive because it pushed out craigslist? I guess this whole thing is a fishing expedition to see if the justice department can find a smoking gun email where someone says, like, "Let's be anticompetitive with snapchat" or something...
- bredren 6y agoCraigslist has had it coming for a long time. There are other marketplaces that proved the value of identity and reputation like Mercari and offerup in p2p before fb marketplace launched its own. I do think FB would stomp or buy other marketplaces, but that there is even a smidgen of opportunity in this space in the US is due to the neglect of buckmaster and newmark. They went from benevolent dictators to doggedly avoiding any increase in value to users. This has happened at great detriment to Craigslist users who have been scammed, dealt with well-known but terrible landlords and wasted countless lifetimes due to the shoddy communication features of the site. I am no fan of Facebook, but have only crocodile tears for Craigslist.
- Tijdreiziger 6y agoDon't forget FB Dating!
- quickthrower2 6y agoThe lesson is never to answer the question with yes/no. Get them to come up with their own opinion, do their own research, and decide how much to invest in Facebook, if anything at all (it's not really a YES/NO but how much, and for how long...). If they don't want to do all this work... recommend SPY.
- jonplackett 6y agoThe way facebook is different is that it isn't just a social network, it IS your online identity. The fact that they make you use your real name rather than just some username is what made it work. And what continues to make it a more permanent part of who you are digitally. Facebook login makes it even more intertwined and hard to remove.
- mikro2nd 6y agoThe fact that there are a great number of people not on Facebook whose online identity is just fine is ample refutation of this absurd claim. And Facebook login being "necessary"?... Never used it. Never will.
- jonplackett 6y agoI'm not saying that. Just that this is why it's been so successful - so far...
- patorjk 6y agoMy mom asked me the same thing back in 2014 and I essentially felt the same way as you so I said the same thing. She bought some anyway though, and later sold when it hit $200. Glad she didn't listen to me.